Shinto And Buddhism Influence On Japanese Religion

Japan has a religious tradition with the central being the canon Japanese religion Shinto and the greatly flourished imported religion Buddhism. These two main religions are further influenced be ideas and values from Confucianism. This incorporation between multiple concepts allows Japanese people to be more acceptances toward the approach of multiple religious beliefs.

Japanese in general, see many religious principles as traditional ways, and participate in religious events and practices as cultural routines without distinguishing which events or practices belong to which religions. Furthermore, within Shinto and Buddhist principles themselves, there is no demand in absolute dedication to single or limited deities. In fact both of these backbone religions give room for innovation, which resulted in the growth of many ‘new religion’ from the fundamental traditional values.

Therefore, the system of multiple religious beliefs can be argued as the system of absorbing and interpreting values from the long history as well as modern globalization world.

Contemporary Japan is influenced by many traditions and practices that can be well considered as religions. Furthermore
They emphasized on aspects such as family, duty, loyalty… and extending those concepts society. However, Confucianism has no organization and a religious body, there for might influenced Japanese to focus less on specific teachings and faiths but rather, on a stronger view in the stressing of values such as loyalty, sincerity, gratitude, correctness of behavior, brightness of attitude and so on. In other word, instead of choosing a religion, Japanese people feel more comfortable in choosing concepts within religions that suit them best. Therefore, by not rejecting a religion as a whole, they also resulted in believing in more than one