COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE SUCCESSIVE KAKURENENBUTSU BELIEF AT THE FOOT OF MT.KIRISHIMA

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In KOZENJI and NAKAHO only a pair of a married couple from the main branch of a family can be SHIN TO, believers of KAKURENENBUTSU which has been succeeded by the family as a unit of belief. The belief must be kept from not only the BUDDHISTS but also the SHINTOES. The SHINTOES is composed of several groups, NAGAREs in which each SHINTO should pledge secrecy, There have been 3 NAGAREs in KOZENJI and NAKAHO respectively but there is hardly any mutual communication or co-operation among them. NAGARE is a hierarchical system in which TERAMOTO, religious leader, is the head. When a person applies to a NAGARE, he must go through a initiation ceremony, OGANTATE, and set up a ritual kinship with a SHINTO. All the SHINTOES are the members of a shrine, JINSHA, not of a temple, TERA, Each NAGARE has followed fixed religious practices in which many variants have existed, but the belief in AMITABHA and the Pure Land, pantheistic mentality, ancester worship are firmly shared among them.The most crucial factor that discriminates the SHINTOES from the BUDDHISTS in OZA, religious assembly, where shamanistic possession is the theme. Inner-adjustment of anxiety, curing, selection of TERAMOTO, and firm belief in the other world are fortified there in OZA. KO, social organizations of small size are the associations where the SHINTOES do not exclude themselves from others. Some 74 gravesones with posthumous Buddhist name have been discovered which shows that the ones with "shinnyo" and "shinshi) center around the last part of the Edo period, while the ones with "homyo shaku" around the modern times