Focusing on the fundamental role played by Buddhism in shaping general ideas about and attitudes toward the Japanese gods (kami), this book presents a new revisionist history of Shinto.

Based on in-depth historical and cultural analysis and presenting numerous pre-modern sources in English translation, Before Shinto goes against received assumptions that something called "Shinto" has always existed in Japan as a foundation upon which religions and philosophies of foreign origin were first accepted and then developed. Rather, it demonstrates that Buddhism, in a complex process of assimilation of pre-existing forms of the sacred combined with Indian divinities, created narratives and representations of the kami, which were until then mostly anonymous and invisible, before adding them to its vast cosmology of gods and meta-human beings.

Shinto emerged as a separate tradition around the sixteenth century as part of a conscious movement away from Buddhism; within this newly emerged framework to envision the gods, different interventions, by Confucian and by Nativist authors, in particular, became possible. Fabio Rambelli details how in the modern period, Shinto, now definitely separate and distinct from Buddhism, has turned into a central element of Japanese nationalism first and cultural identity later.