Shint[=o]ism furnishes the object, Confucianism offers the rules
of life, while Buddhism supplies the way of salvation; so you
see we Japanese are eclectic in everything, even in religion.

These three religious systems as at present constituted, are "book
religions." They rest, respectively, upon the Kojiki and other ancient
Japanese literature and the modern commentators; upon the Chinese
classics edited and commented on by Confucius and upon Chu Hi and other
mediaeval scholastics who commented upon Confucius; and upon the
shastras and sutras with which Gautama, the Buddha, had something to do.
Yet in primeval and prehistoric Nippon neither these books nor the
religions growing out of the books were extant. Furthermore, strictly
speaking, it is not with any or all of these three religions that the
Christian missionary comes first, oftenest or longest in contact. In
ancient, in mediaeval, and in modern times the student notices a great
undergrowth of superstition clinging parasitically to all religions,
though formally recognized by none. Whether we call it fetichism,
shamanism, nature worship or heathenism in its myriad forms, it is there
in awful reality. It is as omnipresent, as persistent, as hard to kill
as the scrub bamboo which both efficiently and sufficiently takes the
place of thorns and thistles as the curse of Japanese ground.

The book-religions can be more or less apprehended by those alien to
them, but to fully appreciate the depth, extent, influence and tenacity
of these archaic, unwritten and unformulated beliefs requires residence
upon the soil and life among the devotees. Disowned it may be by the
priests and sages, indignantly disclaimed or secretly approved in part
by the organized religions, this great undergrowth of superstition is as
apparent as the silicious bamboo grass which everywhere conditions and
modifies Japanese agriculture. Such prevalence of mental and spiritual