Learning Is Awakening｜How Xu Shen's Gloss and Zhu Xi's Imitation Split Confucianism in Two

Learning, gaku [学]. What was this single word originally meant to say?

I always find it interesting that the words we think we know are often the ones we know least. This one word seems to sum that up better than any other.

Ask people today what the word means, and most will answer that it is the acquisition of knowledge and skills, which is to say, being taught. That way of thinking is certainly not wrong. Yet there is a current of thought that has wrestled fiercely for some thousands of years with the question of what learning is.

That current is Confucianism.

Why did Confucianism keep searching so intently into “learning”? Behind it stands Confucius (551–479 BC), the sage of Confucianism. Of the twenty books of the Analects, which are said to preserve his words, the very first word is “learning.” The Analects hands down several hundred of Confucius’s sayings, but why was this one placed first? No reason has come down to us, and the intentions of the school that compiled the Analects do not survive.

Confucianism later came to be called by many names, the Ru learning, the learning of the Way, the learning of the sages, the Cheng-Zhu learning (known in Japan as Shushigaku), the Wang learning (known in Japan as Yomeigaku). Yet in every one of them, at the end or at the core, the word “learning” is inscribed. This is where the fascination of Confucianism begins. It is often called a religion, Jukyo, the Confucian teaching, but it is Jugaku, a learning, not a teaching. This is not mere wordplay. That it is “learning” and not “teaching” is the spiritual legacy that Confucianism has built since Confucius.

That is why we cannot see its true intent unless we ask about “learning.” The first line of the first chapter of the Analects begins with “xue er shi xi zhi” [学而時習之], “to learn and at due times to practice what one has learned,” and the book takes its title, “Xue Er,” from these opening words. The whole problem of Confucianism is that what the single word “learning” referred to was never fixed from the very beginning. In the Shuowen Jiezi, the oldest dictionary of Chinese characters, compiled around the year 100, its author Xu Shen (58–147) explains the original form of the character for learning, xiao [斅], in this way.

Xiao is kakugo, awakening.

Kakugo did not originally mean steeling oneself. It meant waking up, becoming aware of what one had not known. To wake and become aware of what one had not known, and then to live in accordance with it. I believe it is this frame of mind for living that has come down to us today as kakugo in the sense of firm resolve. The Baihu tong, also from the Later Han, says almost the same thing, that “learning means awakening, for it is to awaken to what one has not yet known.”

In the glosses of the Han dynasty, learning was awakening, and to learn was understood as to wake up.

More than a thousand years later, however, as China passed into the great cultural ages of the Tang and the Song, this interpretation changed profoundly with the arrival of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who would have an immense influence on the shogunate and domain system of Edo Japan. At the very opening of his Collected Commentaries on the Analects, in his note on “learning” itself, Zhu Xi assigned it not awakening but a different character.

Learning means xiao [效], to emulate. Human nature is wholly good, but in awakening, some come first and others after.

Let me unpack this. The character xiao [效] means to copy, to follow the example of. Zhu Xi interpreted learning not as waking up oneself but as “imitating the conduct of those who have awakened first.” Of course, Zhu Xi did not throw awakening away. But as his words “in awakening, some come first and others after” show, he introduced an order into awakening. And because of Zhu Xi’s thought, which held immense sway in its day and even became the philosophy of the state, those who awaken later came to be understood as able to reach awakening only by imitating those who had awakened first.

What did this single move shift? The place where the sage stands, the highest attainment in Confucianism. Let me sum up the two currents into which it split.

◯ If learning is awakening, what one must wake to lies within oneself
◯ If learning is emulation, what one must imitate stands outside oneself

It is a difference of a single gloss on a single word. Yet this one-word difference later became the core of the great disputes of Confucianism. In the very midst of that confusion appeared Wang Shouren, known as Wang Yangming (1472–1529), of the Ming dynasty. He rendered Zhu Xi’s argument void and reached back all at once to Confucius. This movement on the continent would later, in compressed form, exert a powerful influence on Edo Japan and on Japan before the war.

There is, however, a decisive passage. It is Confucius’s answer when Duke Ai, the ruler of Lu, asked him, “Which of your disciples loves learning?” Confucius replied that there was one named Yan Hui (521–481 BC) who loved learning. He did not shift his anger onto others, and he did not repeat a mistake. Unfortunately, his life was short, and he died. Now there is no one like him.

Of the disciples said to have numbered three thousand, only one was recognized as truly understanding learning. And that one had already died.

But that is not what we should be looking at. What we should look at is what Confucius offered as proof of a love of learning. He said that Yan Hui “did not shift his anger and did not repeat a mistake.” In other words, he did not vent on someone else the anger that should be turned toward its proper object, himself, and he did not make the same mistake twice. Confucius did not say a single word about his being well read in books, or reciting poems from memory, or having a wealth of knowledge, or many talents, or eloquence, or a rise in the world. Here lies the essence of Confucianism.

A love of learning is not a matter of the “quantity” of knowledge, nor of rank. It is a matter of the movements of the heart. And Confucius himself, the founder of Confucianism, said so.

To ask about this one word is the same as to tell the history of a few thousand years of Confucianism. So let me leave the premise here and bring us back to where we can feel it more closely. The question is what we now call “learning.”

It goes without saying that it is neither awakening nor emulation. Yet at least throughout the Edo period, many Japanese understood learning firmly in this context. That is why people of fine character appeared all over the country and why the age was so deep and rich in spirit. Everything changed after the Westernization of the Meiji era, the so-called civilization and enlightenment.

After the Education System Order of the fifth year of Meiji (1872), the word for learning was reused as a vessel to hold the Western word “education.” School, academic background, degree, going on to higher schooling, levels of attainment. At that moment, every yardstick became quantity. How many hours one studied, what one mastered, what degrees one holds, where one was placed in the ranking, how many books one read, how far one rose in the world. None of this meets a single one of the conditions Confucius named for a love of learning.

Of course, it is true that the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi mentioned above became a learning for getting ahead, and that it took on that character strongly after Ieyasu Tokugawa adopted it in the Edo period. But once the so-called civilization and enlightenment began, learning was clearly estranged from the Japanese. At that moment, the cultivation of the Japanese began to decline rapidly.

Many people have forgotten it, but after the war the occupation forces banned shushin, the moral training drawn from the teachings of Confucianism. With that, the East Asian original meaning of learning was decisively cut off from us. In fact, almost none of us can read kanbun, the classical Chinese that formed the cultivation of the Edo, Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods. Being unable to read it means being unable to read the spirit that the Japanese nurtured over more than a thousand years.

It is a break with the history handed down to us, generation after generation, by those who came before.

A single word, “learning.” Even without opening the Confucian classics, it is enough to think this one word through to the end. When we do, the true nature of the unease we feel but cannot put into words will become clear.