The Development of Japan
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II From The Earliest Times To The Introduction Of Buddhism Of the early history of the Japanese we know but imperfectly. Traditions, myths, and fragments of poetry and religious ritual have told us something. Ethnology and archeology are telling us a little more. The most ancient written records now in existence did not take their present form until the eighth century A. D. The oldest of these, the Kojiki ("Records of Ancient Doings") was finished in 712 and was a written transcript of the ancient traditions and records from the memory of one man who had made a business of collecting them. The next, the Nihongi, (" Chronicles of Japan"), was completed in 714 1 and was the work of a number of officially appointed scholars who carefully examined existing records and traditions. It was more profoundly
...influenced by Chinese thought and language than was the Kojiki, but in both works the original stories were made to conform to the ideas and surroundings of their compilers.2 THE TRADITIONAL ACCOUNT OF JAPANESE ORIGINS The myths and traditions as they have come down to us give a most naive account of the origin of the land, the 1 An emended edition, called the Nihonshoji, was completed in 720. 2 Another record, the Fudoki, made in 713, was a statement by the provinces of their natural features and traditions. Only fragments of it have survived. people, and the state. Curious and numerous gods and goddesses are seen. After the birth of a series of divinities whom we need not notice, the islands themselves and various gods representing the forces of nature come into existence as offspring of a divine pair, Izanagi and his wife Izanami. Izanami dies and Izanagi goes to the underworld to seek her. He finds her, but angers her, and returns without her to the u...
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