Buddhas. At this point, the term Shinto increasingly referred to "the authority, power, or activity of a , being a , or, in short, the state or attributes of a ." It appears in this form in texts such as and Shintōshū tales. In the Japanese Portuguese Dictionary of 1603, Shinto is defined as referring to " or matters pertaining to ." The term Shinto became common in the 15th century. During the late Edo period, the scholars began using the term Shinto to describe what they believed was an ancient, enduring and indigenous Japanese tradition that predated Buddhism; they argued that Shinto should be used to distinguish worship from traditions like Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. This use of the term Shinto became increasingly popular from the 18th century. The term Shinto has been commonly used only since the early 20th century, when it superseded the term ('great religion') as the name for the Japanese state religion. Beliefs Shinto is polytheistic, involving the veneration of many deities known as , or sometimes as . In Japanese, no distinction is made here between singular and plural, and hence the term refers both to individual and the collective group of . Although lacking a direct English translation, the term has sometimes been rendered as "god" or "spirit". The historian of religion Joseph Kitagawa deemed these English translations "quite unsatisfactory and misleading", and various scholars urge against translating into English. In Japanese, it is often said that there are eight million , a term which connotes an infinite number, and Shinto practitioners believe that they are present everywhere. They are not regarded as omnipotent, omniscient, or necessarily immortal. The term is "conceptually fluid", being "vague and imprecise". In Japanese it is often applied to the power of phenomena that inspire a sense of wonder and awe in the beholder. Kitagawa referred to this as "the nature", stating that he thought it "somewhat analogous" to the Western ideas of the numinous and the sacred. are seen to inhabit both the living and the dead, organic and inorganic matter, and natural disasters like earthquakes, droughts, and plagues; their presence is seen in natural forces such as the wind, rain, fire, and sunshine. Accordingly, Nelson commented that Shinto regards "the actual phenomena of the world itself" as being "divine". This perspective has been characterised as being animistic. In Japan, have been venerated since prehistory. During the