Razan Hayashi's Zhu Xi Learning and the Kogaku Reaction｜Every Rise of Culture Begins with a Rise of Thought

For many years I have been on a journey of exploring Japan. It has taken me through myth and ancient history, along the footprints of those whom history leaves unspoken, and into spirituality, always in search of things that had never quite taken shape. Now, in that soil, an important new shoot has begun to break through, and I find myself setting out on a new journey.

That shoot is Yangmingism, a school of Confucianism. Its lineage begins with Wang Yangming (1472–1529) of the Ming dynasty, although the name Yomeigaku, “the learning of Yangming,” is a Japanese one, and in China the school is known as Wangxue, among other names. Wang Yangming lived a turbulent life. He stood squarely against Zhu Xi learning, which was then extolled as the philosophy of the established order, and through the way he lived he broke open new ground.

Confucianism itself began with the words of Confucius (551–479 BCE), which his disciples carried down through many generations before they were finally set in writing. In the same way, Wang Yangming’s way of life was later written down by his disciples, and in time it crossed the sea and came to dwell in Japan.

In Japanese terms, 1529, the year Wang Yangming died, fell on the eve of the fiercest struggle for supremacy in the Sengoku period, the age of warring states, just before the births of Nobunaga Oda, Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and Ieyasu Tokugawa. Ieyasu would go on to win the Battle of Sekigahara, become shogun, and open the Edo shogunate in 1603, and with that a new age began.

By then Ieyasu was already old. Knowing that his death was near, he wished for the house of Tokugawa to prosper forever, and he kept turning over in his mind how its rule might extend far into the future. He resolved to adopt a philosophy of state unlike anything before it and to build the bakuhan system, the order of shogunate and domains, upon it, and he brought the idea to a certain man.

That man was Seika Fujiwara, a Confucian known as one of the foremost scholars of his day. Seika, who was by then in his forties, declined the offer, partly because he did not regard Ieyasu as a worthy lord. He settled the matter instead by recommending the most vigorous of his own disciples, someone of brilliant intellect who was suited to the new age. The one he chose was a young man.

His name was Razan Hayashi. In 1605, at the age of twenty-three by the traditional count, Razan was received by the shogun Ieyasu through Seika’s mediation. Without the least sign of fear, he laid out with full composure a vision fit for the new age, and Ieyasu, seeing what he was made of, decided on the spot to give him an important place. So it was that Razan, barely into his twenties, was raised at a single stroke to become the main wing that would build and sustain the philosophy of the new regime. In today’s Japan, that would be unthinkable.

The school to which Razan devoted himself was Zhu Xi learning, founded by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) of the Southern Song. The name Shushigaku is also a Japanese one, and in China it is called Cheng-Zhu learning, joining Zhu Xi with the Northern Song brothers Cheng Hao (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi (1033–1107). Zhu Xi learning was the governing principle of the Song, and its influence remained immense right through the Ming, the age in which Wang Yangming lived. By then the Chinese imperial court had long since recognized it as the philosophy best suited to rule.

That is precisely why it caught the eye of Ieyasu, who had come out on top after the struggle for hegemony in the plural world of the Sengoku period. He chose the young Razan, who had already made Zhu Xi learning his own, and gave him a free hand, and so began the 265 years that we now call the Edo period.

Digested by Razan, Zhu Xi learning was handed down through the Hayashi family from one generation to the next. It started with the private academy he opened in 1630 on land in Shinobugaoka, Ueno, which he had been granted by the third shogun, Iemitsu. Two years later, with funds from Yoshinao Tokugawa, lord of the Owari domain, a hall for Confucius called the Senseiden was built. At this point the academy and the hall were nothing more than the private property of the Hayashi family, and late in Razan’s life, from March 2 to 4, 1657, they burned down together with his library in the Great Fire of Meireki. Shaken by the loss of everything, Razan fell ill and died only a few days later, on the 7th. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, this private academy was reorganized as an official school under the direct control of the shogunate, the Shoheizaka Gakumonjo.

In 1690, the fifth shogun, Tsunayoshi, moved this legacy to Yushima in Kanda and renamed the Senseiden the Taiseiden. This is the Yushima Seido that still stands in Ochanomizu today. The following year, Razan’s grandson Hoko Hayashi was appointed Daigaku-no-kami, head of the shogunate’s Confucian learning, and from then on the post was hereditary in the Hayashi family. At the same time, Tsunayoshi had Confucian scholars stop living in the guise of Buddhist monks, and their social standing rose at a stroke.

In other words, in less than a century the school that Razan founded spread with astonishing speed, and from the first shogun Ieyasu onward it was prized, generation after generation, as the principle that sustained the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns.

Yet this is exactly where the fascination of the Edo period lies, because both the shogunate and the domains allowed freedom of learning. Certainly, a custom gradually took hold that the sons of families holding high office in the shogunate and the domains would study Zhu Xi learning. For everyone else, though, nothing compelled them to study it. Of course, Confucianism in those days meant Zhu Xi learning, and for most people studying it was part of a basic education. But there was no compulsion. Into that margin poured the passion of one Japanese Confucian after another, and it became the life force from which new schools arose.

What we cannot overlook is that this is what gave birth to the golden age of Edo culture. At the source of every rise of culture, there is always a rise of thought. That, at least, is my own reading. Even though Razan had built Zhu Xi learning into the philosophy of the regime, the early Edo period still had plenty of margin, and nothing like the finished governing power of a Chinese imperial court. The current that appeared in that margin rose up as the Kogaku school, the school of Ancient Learning, which took its stand in reaction against Zhu Xi learning.

Its three leading figures were Soko Yamaga, Jinsai Ito, and Sorai Ogyu. Soko, a Confucian and a scholar of military science, founded the Kogaku school along with the Yamaga school of military science, a line that would reach all the way to Shoin Yoshida. Jinsai advocated Kogigaku, the study of ancient meanings, and Sorai advocated Kobunjigaku, the study of ancient words and phrases. They criticized Zhu Xi learning, criticized the other branches of Kogaku as well, and grew rapidly. A current of thought that already had room to breathe opened up still more space out of its reaction against Zhu Xi learning, and from that space culture was born, one form after another.

The fruit of all this was Genroku culture (1688–1704). The fiction of Saikaku Ihara, the haikai poetry of Basho Matsuo, and the joruri puppet plays of Monzaemon Chikamatsu flowered far from Edo, in Kyoto and Osaka, the Kamigata region, and they were created by townspeople.

Zhu Xi learning, a philosophy well suited to serve as a principle of governance, did form the foundation of the bakuhan system, but at the same time it produced a rich margin and a spirit of defiance, and the classes outside the samurai rose up in high spirits. Baptized by the fierce thought of the Kogaku school and its attack on Zhu Xi learning, the townspeople of the west began to resist the regime through culture. To feel how charged this current was, a single anecdote is enough. Chikamatsu was born into a samurai family, and when he moved as a young man from his home in Hokuriku to Kyoto, he was so stirred by the fervor of the townspeople that he threw away his sword, left home, took up the brush, and flung himself into the world of kabuki and joruri. From the sword to the brush. That was the emblem of the new age.

What, then, did that age possess? It possessed something precious that we have since lost.

I call it a primal experience. A sense of being moved beyond words becomes a powerful primal experience and drives the whole course of a life. Ieyasu who opened the shogunate, Razan who fell in love with Zhu Xi learning, the Kogaku Confucians who rebelled against it, and Chikamatsu all lived in the same age, and each of them had a primal experience of being deeply moved. Those experiences cut open new paths one after another, sometimes clashed fiercely, and kept generating more and more margin. In this age Korin Ogata, later counted as part of the Rimpa school, also appeared, and a culture took shape that would be passed on to Jakuchu Ito.

And so the cities of the Edo period were swept up in a whirlpool of fierce enthusiasm. Yet in a place set slightly apart from that whirlpool, another current that cannot be overlooked had already been born. A school that arose not at the center but at that exquisite distance would later renew the Edo period itself and eventually become the driving force that brought down the bakuhan system.

The name of that current was Yangmingism, and the founder of Japanese Yangmingism was Toju Nakae. Born in Takashima, in present-day Shiga Prefecture, at a fine distance from both Edo and the Kamigata, Toju Nakae would quite literally go on to transform the Japan that came after him.

Toju Nakae is revered to this day as the Sage of Omi, and it is with him that my own journey through Yangmingism begins.