Japan and the Japanese

62 JAPAN. A. D. 1550.
religious merit arc, casting a contribution into the alms-chest, and
avoiding or expiating the impurities supposed to be the consequence
of being touched by blood, of eating of the flesh of any quadruped
except the deer, and to a less extent even that of any bird, of kill-
ing any animal, of coining
in contact with a dead person, or even,
among the more scrupulous, of seeing, hearing of, or speaking of
any such impurities. To these may be added, as works of religious
merit, the celebration of festivals, of which there are two principal
ones in each month, being the first and fifteenth day of it, besides
five greater ones distributed through the year, and lasting some of
them for several days, in which concerts, s'peotacles and theatrical
exhibitions, form a leading part. We must add the going on
pilgrimages, to which, indeed, all the religious of Japan are greatly
addicted. The pilgrimage esteemed by the adherents of Sinto as
the most meritorious, and which all are bound to make once a
year, or, at least, once in their life, is that of Lye, or Leo, the name
of a central province on the south coast of Nipon, in which Tcnsio
Dai-Dsin was reported to have been born and to have died, and
which contains a Mia exceedingly venerated, and already mentioned
as the model after which all the others are built.
Though it is not at all easy -to distinguish what, either of ceremony
or doctrine, was peculiar or original in the system of Sinto,*-
* The following system of Japanese cosmogony is given by Klaproth ; as
contained in an imperfect volume of Chinese and Japanese chronology,
printed in Japan, in Chinese characters, without date, but which for more
than a hundred years past has been in the Royal Library of Paris : "At
first the heaven and the earth were not separated, the perfect principle and
the imperfect principle were not disjoined ;
chaos, under the form of an egg,
contained the breatli [of life], self-produced, including the germs of all
things. Then what was pure and perfect ascended upwards, and formed
the heavens (or sky), while what was dense and impure coagulated, was
precipitated, and produced the earth. The pure and excellent principles
formed whatever is light, whilst whatever was dense and impure descended
by its own gravity ; consequently the sky was formed prior
to the earth.
After their completion, a divine being (Kami) was born in the midst of
them. Hence,
it has been said, that at the reduction of chaos, nn island
of soft earth emerged, as a fish swims upon the water. At this period
a thing re-'embling a shoot of the plant assi \_Eryanlhvs Japonicus'] was
produced between the heavens and the earth. This shoot was metamorphosed