Untangling Six Centuries in One Decree

For most of Japanese history, Buddhism and the native kami cults had operated as intertwined institutions rather than separate religions, sharing precincts, priesthoods and the honji suijaku theology that treated kami as local manifestations of Buddhist deities. The new Meiji government dismantled that arrangement almost immediately after the 1868 restoration of imperial rule, issuing the shinbutsu bunri edicts ordering the separation of kami worship from Buddhist practice at shrines across the country, part of a broader project of building State Shinto as an ideology of imperial loyalty distinct from, and officially superior to, Buddhism.

A study of the religious persecution that followed the edicts describes the government's aims as much political as theological: an emperor whose authority was to be grounded in unbroken descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu needed a Shinto establishment untangled from centuries of Buddhist interpretation and institutional entanglement, and the shinbutsu bunri decree was the legal instrument that began that untangling. Shrine priests were ordered to remove Buddhist images, texts and ritual implements from shrine precincts, and Buddhist clergy who had for centuries also served shrine functions were forced to choose one institutional identity or the other, a bureaucratic separation that, once set loose in the countryside, quickly outran the government's own stated intentions.