was not officially required until the 1790s (and then only in the bakufu’s own
schools, a small portion of the whole), by which time it had long since gone
out of style with the leading intellectuals. The only thing that can be called a
genuine religious reformation was the promulgation of State Shinto during
1868–1882; but after an initial struggle to confiscate Buddhist property and
return monks to secular life, religious tolerance was quickly adopted (Kita-
gawa, 1990: 164, 201–214; Collcutt, 1986). State Shinto turned out to be a
minimalist version of the Shinto cult, and coincided with the full-scale secu-
larization and de-clericalization of the school system. What we see is a series
of attempts by the government to prop up religious orthodoxy, but inconsis-
tently, and with enforcement only at a pro forma level, while both the means
of intellectual production and the ideas receiving attention in most intellectual
circles drifted continuously away from organized religion.
The key should be seen as the gradual secularization of the educational
base. The earlier phases embody the same kind of process in which university-
trained intellectuals during the European Renaissance, with the aid of new
sources of political patronage, broke free from the clergy-dominated base and
established their own secular schools. By the 1700s, leading Japanese intellec-
tuals were promoting the independence of worldly secular studies in a fashion
paralleling that of the philosophes of the European Enlightenment; still later,
when the Meiji government took full control of public education, there was a
phase of full-scale anti-clericalism when priests were displaced from the lower
reaches of teaching.
When creativity came alive in Japanese philosophy after centuries of stag-
nation, it happened as a breakout from within Zen. That is to say, there was
a revolt within the religiously dominated educational establishment, and there-
fore a critique of the dominant religious ideology. The leading thinkers of these
early generations—Fujiwara Seika, Hayashi Razan, and Yamazaki Ansai—all
began their careers as monks, and the anti-Buddhist militancy of the latter two
was that of apostates breaking free. Seika was still a transitional figure, a Rinzai
monk who shifted emphasis to the Neo-Confucian part of the curriculum, but
without disparaging rival emphases. Seika laid down the basis for the new
network trajectory when he became adviser to Tokugawa Ieyasu; his pupil
Hayashi after 1608 performed Ieyasu’s secretarial work, along with chief
Buddhist officials including the Tendai abbot Tenkai, and Suden, the supervi-
sor of the Zen hierarchy. So far this was the traditional ministry of religious
affairs, pressed into bureaucratic service for the now powerful shogunate; and
it was this secretariat, under Suden, which drafted the 1614 order for all
households to register under a branch of Buddhism. Hayashi broke only
gradually, establishing his independent Neo-Confucian school at Edo in 1630,
three years after his fight with Takuan over the regulation of koan teaching.
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 349