Shinbutsu-shūgō: several ways to connect kami and buddhas

A Buddhist temple associated with a shrine, a guardian shrine inside a temple precinct and Buddhist personnel managing shrine affairs show different forms of combination. These arrangements joined institutions and their personnel, as well as places of worship.

Nara-period relationships

Nara-period shrine-temples accompanied accounts of kami seeking Buddhist salvation, while other interpretations presented kami as protectors of the Buddhist teaching. Kami could thus be recipients of Buddhist aid or guardians of the teaching.

Hachiman and Buddhist institutions

In 749 the deity of Usa was brought to Nara in connection with support for Tōdaiji’s Great Buddha and became a temple protector. The cult later reached Iwashimizu south of Kyoto in the ninth century. At the resulting Iwashimizu Hachimangūji, monks occupied offices such as kengyō and bettō and led many rites.

Varieties of honji suijaku

Honji suijaku developed through the Heian and medieval periods: a buddha or bodhisattva was understood as the underlying identity, with a kami as a local manifestation. Pairings differed by site and tradition. Other explanations gave greater priority to kami; esoteric and mountain traditions developed further combinations. Practices separating kami and Buddhist contexts also coexisted with combination. In the esoteric tradition of Ryōbu Shintō, Ise’s Inner Shrine was associated with Dainichi of the Womb Realm, and the Outer Shrine with Dainichi of the Vajra Realm.

Kumano pilgrimage networks

Pilgrimage spread Kumano worship beyond its shrine precincts. By the late Heian period its three sacred centres were grouped as the Three Gongen and understood as a land inhabited by kami and buddhas. After repeated visits by retired emperors, warriors and commoners became important pilgrims. Regional guides led them to Kumano; resident oshi provided lodging and mediated worship. As elite support weakened from the Muromachi period, fundraisers used images such as Nachi pilgrimage mandalas to attract devotees and maintain the sacred sites.

Early modern Japan sustained both combinations and criticism. Ishida Baigan’s Shingaku joined Shinto, Confucian and Buddhist teaching in a merchant ethic centred on devotion to Amaterasu. In the late Edo period, Hirata Atsutane’s Revival Shinto instead sought what its followers understood as an ancient way free of Buddhist and Confucian influence. From 1868, government separation policies affected religious personnel, names, images and buildings. Objects were moved, preserved or destroyed in different places. Haibutsu kishaku names the associated anti-Buddhist destruction, rather than the separation policy itself.

Sōgū Shrine was founded inside Kōfukuji’s grounds in the early Heian period, according to Kasuga Taisha’s history. After the Meiji period began, it moved to Kasuga’s precincts.

Kokugakuin University Museum holds an image of Hachiman in a Buddhist monk’s form. It dates the work to the Edo period and records a repair in 1718. Kasuga Taisha’s museum holds a seventeenth-century deer-shaped reliquary offered to Wakamiya in 1652 by a Kōfukuji monk. A circular container for Buddhist relics sits within the sacred sakaki tree carried by the deer. A Buddhist monk offered the reliquary to a shrine deity.