ABSTRACT
The chief agents in sustaining these questionable religions were the Yama-bushi, the mountaineer priests, of whom the authors have spoken before. Moreover, their indifference to creed enabled the Zennists to stand aloof from the religious strife raging around them, and to carry on their work, religious, literary, and educational. They have seen an upheaval of Shinto ideas in the fourteenth century; now in the fifteenth, an age of confusion and combat, further progress was made in the systematization of Shinto theology. Thus Kanera was a syncretic theorist who tried to show the philosophical foundation of the Shinto religion by the help of Buddhism and Confucianism. In addition to these public manifestations of Shinto revival, Shinto methods of purification and exorcism were practised by many eclectics who belonged both to Shinto and Buddhism and worked to disseminate superstition-a trait of the Shinto religion still playing a part in the social life of the present-day Japan.
