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The Confucians

In the Edo period (1600–1868) learning moved from the Buddhist temples to private academies in the cities, kept by teachers and paid for by their students’ fees, and the schools competed for them. Their texts were the Chinese classics, read in the line of Zhu Xi or against it.

How the classics were to be read was the first question. Hayashi Razan taught absorption: “Read them horizontally! Read them vertically! … When you realize a mystical unity with the sages’ writings, one in which the self and those texts are non-dual, you will have read them well!” Itō Jinsai (1627–1705) taught philology. He went back past the Song commentaries to the Analects and the Mencius, which he held sufficient: “I teach students to scrutinize the Analects and Mencius thoroughly … Detailed philological studies of the Analects and Mencius facilitate understanding of those sagely texts and keep students from erratically manipulating them by imposing their subjective thoughts on them” (Gomō jigi, preface). The Great Learning he argued was not a Confucian text at all.

Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) went further back, to the ancient phrasing (kobunji) itself. Distinguishing the Way (Bendō, 1717) opens: “The Way is hard to know and hard to speak of, because it is great.” It is not a natural order waiting to be found: “the Way of the former kings was made by the former kings; it is not the natural Way of heaven and earth”. Its point is to bring peace to the realm. It is learned by practice, not by principle: “the kings taught by things, not by principle; things gather many principles, and only after long practice does the mind truly know them, with no need of words”.

Kaibara Ekken made doubt the start. His Record of Great Doubts (Taigiroku) opens with Lu Xiangshan, “In learning, a person should be worried when he has no doubts”, and Zhu Xi, “Those without doubts make no progress.”

Ishida Baigan (1685–1744), born to farmers and in service for years in Kyoto merchant houses, opened lectures at his home in 1729, free to anyone who came. His school, Sekimon Shingaku, the learning of the heart, named with an older word for Confucian learning, took Zhu Xi as its base and drew on Shinto and Buddhism as well. In Dialogues between City and Country (Tohi mondō, 1739) he states the aim in Mencius’s words: “the utmost of learning is to exhaust the heart and know one’s nature; knowing one’s nature one knows Heaven”. Knowing the heart is “like a dark night suddenly dawning and the whole sky shining clear”. Letters alone are not learning: “knowing only letters is a single art, so we call such a one a performer of letters”, whereas “virtue means getting it in the heart and doing it with the body”. One section answers “a scholar who mocks the learning of a merchant”: the merchant’s way, too, is a way.