The political and religious reforms associated with the Meiji Restoration brought about a decisive rupture in the world that had sustained Ryōbu Shintō. Central to this shift was the policy of *shinbutsu bunri*, the enforced separation of kami and buddhas, which targeted precisely the syncretic space in which Ryōbu Shintō had flourished. Shrine-temple complexes that had long embodied the union of Shintō and Esoteric Buddhism were forcibly divided, Buddhist icons and ritual objects were removed from shrines, and Buddhist priests who had served as custodians of these combined traditions were expelled. In this climate, the doctrinal core of Ryōbu Shintō—its reading of kami through esoteric Buddhist cosmology and its equivalences between deities—lost its institutional home and public legitimacy.

As the new state promoted a “pure” Shintō as the authentic national tradition, Ryōbu Shintō came to be treated as a heterodox or obsolete amalgam rather than a living orthodoxy. Honji-suijaku style interpretations that had once framed kami as manifestations of buddhas were now rejected in favor of a nationalist Shintō theology that insisted on clear boundaries between the two religious spheres. This ideological reorientation meant that Ryōbu Shintō scriptures, commentaries, and ritual manuals were removed from ordinary shrine use, and the lineages that had transmitted esoteric combinatory teachings were disrupted or broken. What had been a shared symbolic universe was reconfigured into separate, and often competing, domains.

The impact on study and practice was therefore profound. Public, self-conscious cultivation of Ryōbu Shintō as a unified system of doctrine and ritual largely disappeared, and many of its texts ceased to be copied or taught in a systematic manner. Some materials and practices survived in more discreet or localized forms—preserved in temple or shrine archives, maintained within certain Buddhist contexts, or lingering in local customs shaped by earlier syncretism. Over time, these scriptures and traditions came to be approached less as living guides for devotion and more as historical or scholarly objects, examined from a distance rather than inhabited as a comprehensive path. The Meiji reforms thus transformed Ryōbu Shintō from a widely embedded religious synthesis into a largely marginalized and fragmented legacy.