Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/272

To a pro-Buddhist prejudice in the matter, the first of these must prove a revelation second only in surprise to the last. It is this: the very gods the gohei-wand summons turn in its hands state's evidence against it. For it is the Shintō gods that descend. Not only is it its own gods alone that Shintō summons, but the Buddhists also call Shintō deities, and of their own pantheon only the lower, never the higher, members. To explain this unusual fancy for their neighbors' gods, combined with a relative disregard for the company of their own, the Buddhists allege the, to them, comparative unimportance of the cult. Such indifferentism is perilously near abandonment of their previous claims. People are not given to detecting flatness of flavor in their own fruit. If the practice be to them so unimportant an affair, why indulge in it at all? Besides, even this lame admission halts at summoning the Shintō gods. Doubtless it is most flattering to the Shintō deities thus to be called on for their opinion by professing outsiders, but it would seem quite an inexplicable credulity on the part of the Buddhists to do so, even among the politest people in the world.