From prehistoric times the Japanese have revered animistic spirits and deities called kami. Eventually the worship of kami developed into a religious system known as Shinto or “the kami way.” The two Chinese characters used in Japan for writing “Shinto” had been used for centuries in China to refer to the supernatural or the mysterious. Adopted in Japan at the end of the sixth century A.D., these characters were employed to distinguish native kami worship from Buddhism (the Buddha way), recently imported from the Asian continent. Early sources suggest that Shinto was then synonomous with the old word kamunagara, which denoted a “way” handed down by the kami themselves without human revision.

By the time that Japan's native religion was identified as Shinto, kami worship had moved beyond awe of natural forces to institutionalized rituals believed to ensure protection and prosperity for the clans (uji), and to provide religious sanction for the clan chieftains and territorial rulers. This chapter will therefore be devoted mainly to showing how kami beliefs and practices, while retaining their animistic core, moved from simple to complex forms.

This chapter deals with the literature and music of Japan during the two centuries between the acceptance of Buddhism in 587 and the abandonment of the Nara capital in 784. These were years of vast and fundamental change in the island kingdom, of cultural forced feeding and vigorous new growth. In particular, they were the years when Japan became fully and for all time a participant in the high civilization of East Asia. Participation meant religious and philosophical orientations, an ideal of imperial rule, legal and administrative structures, techniques and styles of architecture, city planning, sculpture, painting, and music – all derived directly or indirectly from China and shared in one degree or another by the peoples on its periphery. Above all, it meant literacy: the mastery of the Chinese language and the eventual adaptation of its script to the writing of Japanese. From literacy came ventures in historiography – at once a definition and a redefinition of the Japanese state – and in poetry. Emulation of China led the newly literate Japanese to compose verses in Chinese modeled on the ones they found in Chinese anthologies, and it also led them to write down their own songs and to turn the native prosody into high poetic art. The myths, legends, folk and hero tales of the oral tradition were also written down in the first histories and local gazetteers, to form the beginnings of a prose literature.

Japan's oldest extant chronicles, the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, describe the trek of Kamu-yamato-ihare-biko no Mikoto from south Kyushu to the Yamato plain accompanied by hand-chosen clan (uji) heads. He is referred to by later historians as the first emperor, posthumously called Jimmu. At every step he was opposed by well-entrenched people whose conquest often required ingenuity and guile. The degree of their decimation seems to have been determined by the degree of their physical abnormality. For the bulk of his adversaries, the killing of their chiefs was all that was needed to bring them into line. But in extreme cases, such as the Tsuchigumo (earth spiders) who were people too primitive even to have responsible chiefs, pockets had to be eliminated by a process that was not completed until at least the time of the ruler Keikō, sometime in the fourth century A.D. When the physical and social differences were too great, it seems that assimilation was inconceivable and neighborly relations impossible.

These stories may look at first like an unnecessarily candid admission of the presence of other peoples, as the Eight Island Country of Japan was implicitly created for the enjoyment of the descendants of the Sun Goddess (Amaterasu). But by stressing the existence of others, the chosen were sharply distinguished from the undeserving, and the Yamato people could legitimately place themselves at the top of a scaled social ladder. The right to rule was therefore not predicated on prior occupation or existing status but on the act of divine creation.

This chapter will be devoted to the remarkable century that began with the civil war of 672 (jinshin no ran) and ended with the removal of the capital from Nara in 784. In these years the occupants of the throne, while attempting to rule directly in the Chinese manner, gradually shifted their attention from military preparation to (1) the development of religious rites and institutions, both Shinto and Buddhist, that would enhance the sacral side of their authority; (2) the building of T'ang-style capitals that would sanctify and legitimize their rule over the emerging Japanese state; and (3) the establishment of a bureaucratic system (like the one in T'ang China) that would increase state control over all lands and peoples. The Ise Grand Shrine where the ancestral kami of the Imperial clan is worshiped, as well as the Tōdai-ji where the universal Buddha continues to be honored as the central object of worship, stand as lasting monuments to the religious activity of emperors and empresses who ruled first from Fujiwara and then Nara. The remains of political centers throughout the country have come down to us as concrete evidence of ambitious capital-building projects centered on Nara, thereby justifying the practice of referring to the years between 710 and 784 as the Nara period. Finally, what we know of the Taihō administrative code (modeled after Chinese codes) indicates that the formulation and implementation of law were basic to the rise of Nara's bureaucratic state, leading a number of scholars to characterize the period as the time of a “penal and administrative legal” (ritsuryō) order.

Japan's history has been deeply marked by reforms adopted during two long but widely separated periods of contact with expansive foreign cultures. The first began around A.D. 587 when Soga no Umako seized control of Japan's central government, made an extensive use of Chinese techniques for expanding state power, and supported the introduction and spread of Chinese learning. The second came after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 when new leaders moved the country toward industrialization and Western ways.

Japanese life was greatly altered by Chinese culture long before the Soga seizure of power in 587 and long after the closing years of the ninth century when a decision was made to stop sending official missions to China. But during the intervening three centuries Japanese aristocrats were understandably fascinated by the power and achievements of China under the great Sui (589 to 618) and T'ang (618 to 907) dynasties, giving rise to action and thought that gave Japanese life of those days a strongly Chinese tone, especially at the upper reaches of society. The first of the three centuries of remarkable Chinese influence – roughly the seventh century and the subject of this chapter – was a time of reform along Chinese lines. The second – the eighth century, which is covered in Chapter 4 – is known as the Nara period, when Japan was ruled from a capital patterned after the Chinese capital at Ch'ang-an. And the third was a time when almost every aristocrat was immersed in one aspect of Chinese learning or another.

Much of the momentum for the spread of Buddhism from India to distant regions of Asia was generated by the patronage of expanding empires. After the historic Buddha's (Śākyamuni's) teachings were embraced by India's first empire builder, the religion began to assume the character of a “world religion” as emperors of the Mauryan empire became believers and practitioners. Then when Buddhism moved, in the first century A.D., across central Asia to China, Chinese emperors of the Han dynasty welcomed Indian monks bearing Buddhist scriptures, patronized ambitious translation projects that produced a great corpus of sacred literature, and took an active interest in Buddhist statues made in a Greek or northwest Indian style.

Following the demise of the Later Han empire early in the third century, China was torn by internal strife for more than three centuries. A new empire was not formed until the rise of the Sui dynasty in 589. Meanwhile, Buddhism continued to prosper as Chinese kings vied with one another in supporting Buddhist monks. They even sponsored contests in the translation of Buddhist sutras. Two especially famous monks enjoyed royal patronage during these years of disunity: Kumārajīva (350–414), an eminent translator of Buddhist texts, and Tao-an (312–85), known as the earliest Chinese systematizer. Tao-an was the compiler of China's first comprehensive catalogue of Buddhist texts (Tsung-li-chung-ching-mu-lu) that reportedly contained 639 titles in 886 volumes. A second catalogue containing 2,211 titles in 4,251 volumes was compiled by Seng-yu (445–518) a century later.

Japanese historical accounts written during the last twelve hundred years have been consistently narrowed and influenced by three preoccupations: first, by an age old absorption in an ‘unbroken’ line of sovereigns descended from the Sun Goddess (Amaterasu), leading historians to concern themselves largely with imperial history and to overlook changes in other areas; second, by a continuing concern with Japan's cultural uniqueness, causing many intellectuals, especially those from the eighteenth century to the close of World War II, to be intensely interested in purely Japanese ways and to miss the significance of Chinese and Korean influences; and third, by the modern tendency of scholars to specialize in studies of economic productivity, political control, and social integration and thus to avoid holistic investigations of interaction between secular and religious thought and action.

But in recent years historians have extended their studies to questions that lie well beyond the boundaries set by these enduring preoccupations. This Introduction will attempt to outline the nature of this shift and to point out how research in new areas – and from new points of view – has broadened and deepened out understanding of Japan's ancient age.

Japan's earliest extant historical accounts were not written until the first decades of the eighth century A.D., but people living on the Japanese islands were surely conscious, long before that, of change in the world around them, especially of the regular rising and setting of the sun and of the inevitable approach of death in the lives of plants, animals, and human beings. Archaeological investigations suggest that even before the introduction of wet-rice agriculture around 200 b.c., hunters and nut gatherers were making a wide range of adjustments to cold and hot seasons of the year, as well as to light and dark segments of the day. Then with the emergence of agricultural life in the later Yayoi period, the realization that rice grows only in one part of the year certainly deepened their awareness of the seasonal cycle, as we know from the early appearance of festivals held at the start and end of the growing season.

But by the following Burial Mound period, roughly from A.D. 250 to 600, leaders of emerging states seem gradually to have become preoccupied with a fundamentally different kind of temporal progression: the replacement of one hereditary ruler by the next. They were henceforth concerned not only with the cyclical activity of natural phenomona but also with a succession of reigns moving in a linear fashion from distant points in the past to an indeterminate future. Tracing the pre-800 stages in the rise of this new type of historical consciousness is complicated by a paucity of Japanese chronicles and documents written during that early period, but we now have enough historical, archaeological, and ethnological evidence to be quite certain that the three characteristics of historical expression found in early accounts of Japan's past, and discussed in this chapter, were grounded in beliefs of “prehistorical” times.

Japan's prehistory was marked by the gradual transmission of techniques and artifacts from the continental civilizations of Asia, especially China and Korea. Imported technology – the cultivation of rice in paddy fields, and bronze and iron metallurgy – enabled the Japanese to create a settled and stratified society, and diplomatic contact with foreign governments contributed to the formation of the Japanese state. Thus continental influence in prehistoric times prepared the way for the conscious adoption of sophisticated Chinese political and cultural patterns in the sixth and seventh centuries. This chapter will use archaeological findings and Chinese records to examine relations between Japan and the continent, beginning with Japan's transition to an agrarian society and ending with the dawn of the historical age.

Long before any other East Asian people, the Chinese developed the building blocks of advanced civilization: agriculture, metal technology, and a writing system. Archaeological findings in China suggest that settled farming communities (such as the Yang-shao in the Yellow River basin and the Ta-p'en-k'eng of the southeastern coast) can be dated as early as the fifth millennium b.c. The Shang state, which rose in the Yellow River valley around 1750 b.c., was based on a writing system and advanced bronze technology. About a thousand years later, the Chinese began to make tools out of iron. Their iron-tipped plows enhanced agricultural productivity, and iron weapons contributed to victory in war, most notably in the case of the Ch'in, the state that formed China's first empire in 221 b.c.

During the fifty years that followed the Great Reforms of 645, Japan's central government enacted laws and established bureaucratic procedures (strongly Chinese in character) that were meant to strengthen its control over, and increase its revenue from, the country's land and people. Scholars agree that these arrangements, commonly referred to as the ritsuryō (penal and administrative law) system, were closely intertwined with economic and social change in the Nara period (710 to 784). At the base of the ritsuryō order, periodic reallocations of rice land (handen shūju) were linked with an enforced registration of individuals in every household: Laws stipulated that every registered householder be allotted rice land in accordance with his or her age, sex, and social position.

The Taihō penal and administrative codes of 701 seem to have been quite well enforced during the first half of the eighth century. But then violations became more numerous and allocations more sporadic as the state's control over land and people weakened. Ostensibly the ritsuryō system continued to function as intended, but an increasingly large number of conditions and practices were beginning to subvert its effectiveness. Historians generally agree, nevertheless, that Japan's ritsuryō state structure reached its apogee during the Nara period and that only in the last half of the period, particularly after 740, were its foundations undermined by changing social and economic conditions.

The Yamato kingdom appeared on the Nara plain of central Japan between about A.D. 250 and 300 and, during the next three centuries, passed through successive stages of vigor, expansion, and disruption. Because its “great kings” (ōkimi) were buried in large mounds, these years are commonly designated the Burial Mound (kofun) period. That was when farmers converted vast tracts of virgin land into rice fields; immigrants from northeast Asia introduced advanced techniques of production from the continent; soldiers rode horses and fought with iron weapons; armies subjugated most of Japan and extended their control to neighboring regions on the Korean peninsula; and kings dispatched diplomatic missions to distant courts of Korea and China. But because no written Japanese records of that day have been preserved, and Korean and Chinese accounts do not tell us much about contemporary life on the Japanese islands, the Yamato period has long been considered a dark and puzzling stretch of prehistory.

Until the close of World War II, Japanese historians tended to think of this period as a time when the “unbroken” imperial line was mysteriously and wondrously formed. But postwar scholars have discovered new written evidence, seen historical significance in massive archaeological finds, and viewed the whole of ancient Japanese life from different angles. Egami Namio, for example, used Korean sources and the findings of archaeologists to develop the thesis that in this period Japan came to be ruled by horse-riding warriors who had invaded the islands from north Asia, and Ishimoda Shō reexamined ancient sources and found a heroic age.

This chapter is concerned first with Aquinas's account of what the mind is and how it relates to the body and then with his account of what the mind does and how it does it - the metaphysical and the psychological sides of his philosophy of mind.

SOUL AS THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF LIFE

The central subject of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is what he calls rational soul [anima rationalis) far more often than he calls it mind (mens). This apparently trivial fact about his terminology has theoretical implications.2 Aquinas's philosophy of mind can be understood only in the context of his more general theory of soul, which naturally makes use of many features of his metaphysics.

Obviously, Aquinas is not a materialist. God – subsistent being itself, the absolutely fundamental element of Aquinas’s metaphysics. – is, of course, in no way material. But even some creatures are entirely independent of matter, which Aquinas thinks of as exclusively corporeal. The fundamental division in his broad classification of created things is between the corporeal – such as stars, trees, and cats - and the incorporeal (or spiritual) – for example, angels. (Aquinas sometimes calls spiritual creatures “separated substances” because of their incorporeality.) But this exhaustive division seems to be not perfectly exclusive, because human beings must be classified as not only corporeal but also spiritual in a certain respect. They have this uniquely problematic status among creatures in virtue of the peculiar character of the human soul.

Aquinas does not build his philosophical system around a theory of knowledge. In fact the reverse is true: he builds his epistemology on the basis provided by other parts of his system, in particular, his metaphysics and psychology. To examine what we can recognize as a distinct and systematic theory of knowledge, then, we need to extract his strictly epistemological claims from the metaphysical and psychological discussions in which they are embedded.

COGNITION

Cognition is Aquinas’s fundamental epistemic category. He endorses the Aristotelian view that the soul is potentially all things, and he holds that cognition involves its actually becoming a given thing or, as he sometimes puts it, its being assimilated to that thing in a certain way. As Aquinas sees it, the development of this notion of cognition as the soul’s assimilation to the objects cognized requires him to deal with two sorts of issues. First, he needs a metaphysical account of the two relata: the human soul and the object of human cognition. Here he draws primarily on his Artistotelian hylomorphism.

Aquinas's political and legal theory is important for three reasons. First, it reasserts the value of politics by drawing on Aristotle to argue that politics and political life are morally positive activities that are in accordance with the intention of God for man. Second, it combines traditional hierarchical and feudal views of the structure of society and politics with emerging community-oriented and incipiently egalitarian views of the proper ordering of society. Third, it develops an integrated and logically coherent theory of natural law that continues to be an important source of legal, political, and moral norms. These accomplishments have become part of the intellectual patrimony of the West, and have inspired political and legal philosophers and religious and social movements down to the present day.