Buddhism

Gautama was an Indian prince who lived over a millennium before the Shogunate era in Japan. He was brought up sheltered from all unhappiness, and was deeply shaken when he found out that all mortals are subject to sickness, old age, and death. He left his palace to go find a way out from the world in which such things could happen, so that people could be free from having to reincarnate again and again. His disciples said that he reached Enlightenment and taught them how to do so too. They hailed him as the Buddha, the awakened one. Eventually his philosophy became a religion.
Buddhism views the life of each individual as entangled in the five egocentric passions of Anger, Joy, Hatred, Desire and Grief. The aim of the religion is to extinguish the ego and enlighten the spirit, freeing it from the passions, and enabling it to enter into Nirvana, a state of freedom from egocentric illusion. Until that is accomplished, the spirit cannot escape the life-death cycle and achieve rest. Priests preached that sexual passion and love for a child were merely two chains that bound the sufferer to the material world, with the sweetness of desire or joy inevitably yielding in time to the bitterness of grief.
Followers of Amida Buddha believe that in the modern era people cannot pass directly from Earth to Nirvana. Instead, people who have called upon Amida Buddha sincerely will go after death to the Pure Western Paradise where they will sit on a lotus leaf and meditate until they reach the spiritual strength necessary to achieve Nirvana itself. Sometimes lovers run away from their parents or spouses and commit suicide, praying that Amida will let them be born on the same lotus leaf so they will not be separated.
The Sutras are the Buddhist scriptures; they are written in Chinese, a language that most Buddhist priests don't know. Many priests "read" the scriptures by chanting the ideographs with the pronunciation they have in Japanese. Priests kept track of how many prayers they have said by using a rosary with 108 prayer beads. Rubbing the rosary beads between the hands was believed to drive away evil spirits.
Monks and Clerics in Kiga will worship at the local temple on the major Buddhist holidays. They will have a small Buddhist shelf on a wall of their home with pictures or miniature statues of one or more Buddhas or Bosatsu, and will make offerings of incense and money along with prayers on the 8th, 18th and 28th days of each month. Monks and Clerics in Kiga will also take the Seven Vows to help them disentangle their lives from the Passions and achieve Enlightenment. Laymen will vow to tithe to a Buddhist temple. They will also vow not to drink to the point of intoxication, not to eat animal meat, not to commit rape, adultery, treacherous murder or theft, and not to tell lies.
Priests will vow to give up their worldly possessions and luxuries. They will also vow not to drink intoxicants, not to eat the meat of animals or even fish, not to commit theft, not to commit treacherous murder, not to have sexual relations, and not to lie.

Ascetic Buddhist Priests

Ascetic Buddhist priests are similar to the (Christian) Clergyman. They honour and worship the Buddha for his wisdom that let him achieve enlightenment and for his goodness in teaching his followers the path by which they themselves might become enlightened. Their heads are shaved. They have taken the Seven Vows and renounced their worldly property, which goes to their heirs as if they were dead.

Temple Priests

Temple Priests ran schools for commoner children and for priests who had recently joined the order. The temple's chores were done by novice priests and by pages, commoner school children chosen for their beautiful appearance and voices. Each temple had a high priest; some temples belonged to an order led by the head temple's high priest. Unlike European Christianity, Buddhism had no religious head or ranks besides that of priest and head priest: no equivalent of bishops, archbishops or Pope.
Wandering Buddhist Priests begged for food and other necessities, sometimes singing the Buddha's praises. (Some wandering courtesans adopted the clothing of Buddhist priests but sang less pious songs.) 
Hermit Buddhist priests foraged off the countryside.

Buddhist Exorcists

Oriental medicine began as battlefield surgery; the ideograph for doctor shows someone extracting an arrow from a victim. Contagious diseases, heart conditions, and other such problems were usually diagnosed as being due to possession of the victim by a malevolent spirit and treated by an exorcist, not a physician. No Shinto Priest could be a physician or exorcist, since they would be rendered impure by the presence of blood, disease, death or mourning.
The Exorcist worked with a Medium into whom they invoked the spirit possessing their patient. They chanted Buddhist prayers for hours and hours, often beating a gong or a drum while they did so, until the possessing spirit was driven out of the victim and fled into the body of the medium, where it could be interrogated.
Some Exorcists (especially women) specialized in assisting at childbirth, driving off evil spirits that might affect the health of the mother or child. A woman who died in childbirth was too attached to the soul of her unborn child to reincarnate.

Type

Religious, Monastic Order