It is not an ancient term; and it was first adopted only to
distinguish the native religion, or "Way" from the foreign religion
of Buddhism called "Butsudo," or "The Way of the Buddha." The three
forms of the Shinto worship of ancestors are the Domestic Cult, the
Communal Cult, and the State Cult;--or, in other words, the worship
of family ancestors, the worship of clan or tribal ancestors, [22]
and the worship of imperial ancestors. The first is the religion of
the home; the second is the religion of the local divinity, or
tutelar god; the third is the national religion. There are various
other forms of Shinto worship; but they need not be considered for
the present.

Of the three forms of ancestor-worship above mentioned, the
family-cult is the first in evolutional order,--the others being
later developments. But, in speaking of the family-cult as the
oldest, I do not mean the home-religion as it exists to-day;--neither
do I mean by "family" anything corresponding to the term "household."
The Japanese family in early times meant very much more than
"household": it might include a hundred or a thousand households: it
was something like the Greek (Greek genos); or the Roman gens,--the
patriarchal family in the largest sense of the term. In prehistoric
Japan the domestic cult of the house-ancestor probably did not
exist;--the family-rites would appear to have been performed only at
the burial-place. But the later domestic cult, having been developed
out of the primal family-rite, indirectly represents the most ancient
form of the religion, and should therefore be considered first in any
study of Japanese social evolution.

The evolutional history of ancestor-worship has been very much the
same in all countries; and that [23] of the Japanese cult offers