Japan's Yangmingists: Toju Nakae, Shissai Miwa, Issai Sato, Chusai Oshio

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

Toju's way of teaching was to do everything for the sake of a single person. He wrote books for a single person, wrote commentaries for a single person, taught single-mindedly for a single person, and wrote letters, and he kept generously providing the ground on which they could continue learning even after they had left.

But one must be careful here. Toju Nakae himself was not a Yangmingist. Toju obtained the Complete Works of Wang Yangming (王陽明全書) only about three years before he died. It is true that he was deeply moved, but he actually used Wang Yangming's famous phrase "the unity of knowledge and action" (知行合一) only once.

This is because he was keenly aware of the danger that if the unity of knowledge and action is taught to learners who do not yet understand it, it can become the motive for a radical activism that holds that one need only act. In fact, quite a few of those in Japan who advocated Yangmingism had this tendency, and it is undeniable that at the end of the shogunate, for example, it turned into a typically action-first, violent logic.

Fortunately, both precious books had been translated and published, before Chusai was born, by one man. His name was Shissai Miwa. Miwa (1669–1744) was born into a family of doctors in Kyoto and became one of the leading Confucians of the middle Edo period. It was through his appearance, in fact, that Japanese Yangmingism was kept from dying out and has come down to us today.

Later, after Toju had died, the situation changed completely in the time of the fifth lord of the domain, Yasuatsu Kato, in the first half of the eighteenth century. This lord, who loved learning, invited Shissai Miwa, then known as a scholar of Yangmingism, to the domain's Edo residence to hear him lecture, was deeply moved, and asked him to come to Ozu. But since Shissai was already elderly, they agreed that he would send an outstanding person from among his disciples to the Ozu Domain. The person sent to Ozu in this way was a born-and-bred Edo man named Yukin Kawada (川田雄琴).

Publicly he was a great master of Zhu Xi learning, which had been the official learning since the founding of the shogunate. Privately he was a heterodox Confucian who transmitted Yangmingism in secret, only to the few disciples whose gifts he had recognized.

Why did he transmit it this way? Because, unlike Zhu Xi learning, which anyone can understand through general-purpose logic, Yangmingism without the right disposition and ground can never be fully understood, and it ends in mistaken action. Zhu Xi learning separates subject from object, and it is easy to teach. Nothing is harder to teach than Yangmingism.

Moved by this, Chusai stopped lamenting his own circumstances and, as he wrote, "came to make it my aim to carry out my present duties thoroughly." Having cultivated Yangmingism by himself, he became convinced that the spirit of Wang Yangming could save people from spiritual desolation. At thirty-one he opened a private academy in his own house and began to teach Yangmingism there. He named it Senshindo (洗心洞), "the cave that washes the heart."

Chusai, trained in Wang Yangming's teaching and never missing a day of practice, was exactly so. He immediately sold the fifty thousand books in the library of his private academy, Senshindo, and his household goods. He raised the large sum of 620 ryo himself and gave it to ten thousand people.

Chusai escaped for forty days. When his hiding place was surrounded, he blew himself up with gunpowder, hut and all. It was May 1, 1837. He was forty-four.