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Miura Baien and Andō Shōeki

Two eighteenth-century physicians, working far from the academies, turned against the learning of books. Miura Baien (1723–1789), mostly self-taught, lived in Kunisaki in Bungo, left it for one pilgrimage and two journeys to Nagasaki, and declined every offer of service with a domain. Andō Shōeki (1703–1762; his birth year is uncertain) practised in Hachinohe in the north; the manuscript of his main work, Shizen shin’eidō, a hundred and one fascicles, lay unknown until about 1899.

Baien named his learning after what it sought: jōrigaku, the learning of jōri, the pattern that runs through heaven and earth. In a letter to Taga Bokkyō summing up his work, he makes doubt the start: “once one puts doubt into things, not only the coming and going of sun and moon and the changes of creation, but the eyes’ seeing and the ears’ hearing that one claims as one’s own, the hands and feet that do things, the very heart that thinks: not one of them will be understood”. People settle the matter by a “should”: “the eye should see, the ear should hear, heavy things should sink, light things should float … By the same token they would settle that thunder rumbles because it should, the earth shakes because it should, a dead tree that flowers flowers because it should”. Book-learning is no better: “those who have read a few books explain to people that thunder is the battle of yin and yang; ask them what yin and yang are, and they do not know”. So “if you would carry knowing through to heaven and earth, take as your handhold the heart that wonders at thunder and questions the earthquake, and make the whole of heaven and earth one great mass of doubt”.

His method has three parts: “look by reversing, and unite” (hankan gōitsu), since “because they oppose, they unite in one: that is how heaven and earth come about”; “let go of what the heart clings to”, one’s habitual bent; and “rely on correct evidence”, for “there are signs that look like evidence and are not. The sun and moon plainly show signs of going west, but in fact they go east.” The fault of the learned is “the harm of taking people, not heaven and earth, as teacher”: they set up the first maker of words as a divine sage. “When heaven and earth is the teacher, the words of the ancient sages and worthies, the hundred schools, down to today’s grass-cutters and madmen, differ in rank, yet all stand as friends met through writing, each to be taken or left.” And since “heaven and earth do not speak”, argument has no end; “nothing is better than getting it oneself”.

Shōeki turned against letters themselves. In his account the sages made up writing to suit themselves, “turned it into book-learning; with it they stood above and taught those below, set up private laws, ate greedily without cultivating, stole the heaven-earth Way of direct cultivation … So letters and learning are tools for stealing the Way … This is why I do not take up letters and book-learning” (as quoted). Confucian and Buddhist books alike bury “the wondrous order of direct cultivation, the body of the true Way of nature”, and set up twofold divisions, heaven and earth, lord and people, high and low, good and evil, where the true Way is “two and yet one”. His terms are his own: direct cultivation (chokkō), the work of nature and of the farmer at once; eating without cultivating (fukō tanshoku), his charge against sages, lords and scholars; and the world of nature (shizen no yo) against the world of made laws (hōsei).