ened the split between worldly Confucianism and the sage religion of Ansai,
rejecting both puritanism and otherworldliness.^28 The Yomei school became a
favorite ideology of administrative reformers—a case of metaphysical idealism
being used for practical activism, outflanking the dualist-materialist doctrines
of the conservatives. Yet this is not so much an anomaly when we compare
the similar use of idealist justification in Fichte’s reform policies.
The significance of these new schools was also organizational. Hayashi
Razan, and a fellow student of Fujiwara Seika, Matsunaga Sekigo, had both
sought official sponsorship for their schools. Razan’s support at Edo was rather
meager and offhand at first (Ooms, 1985); Sekigo did better at Kyoto, under
the patronage of both the bakufu representative and the emperor. Nakae Toju
was the first to establish a school of higher studies without official support. It
was not particularly successful, in part because it was located away from the
cultural centers of the main cities. The model was soon picked up at Kyoto,
where fully independent schools were established by Yamazaki Ansai and Ito
Jinsai. Banzan promoted his position in the burgeoning market for education,
organizing a clan school for a daimyo (feudal lord) and attempting a Kyoto
school in the formative period of the 1650s.
The competitive educational market hit full stride with the generation of
- Two more splits in the Confucian camp quickly appeared. Yamazaki
Ansai’s school at Kyoto became the greatest success of all, attracting 6,000
disciples. Ansai attacked the Hayashi scholars as mere drudges, failing to
practice what they preached. Ansai claimed to offer the pure Chu Hsi tradition,
shorn of compromises and accretions. In this direction Ansai was primarily a
textual scholar, editing the Confucian classics with their approved commentar-
ies and limiting his pupils to a narrow set of works stressing morality and
decorum. Ansai’s forcefulness made Chu Hsi Neo-Confucianism into a full-
fledged religious movement. He revived and stressed the “sage religion,” which
the original Sung Neo-Confucians had borrowed from Ch’an; the move was a
natural one for Ansai as a former Zen monk.^29
Ansai’s stance becomes clearer when we note his relations within the
network (Figure 7.4). Unlike most of the other Confucian branches of these
generations, he did not derive from the Seika-Hayashi line. Instead he had
an independent Confucian lineage, in the somewhat out-of-the-way Shikoku
school of Tani Jichu.^30 Ansai crossed this line with his Zen heritage; in addi-
tion, he collaborated with the domain school of the Lord of Aizu, Hoshino
Masayuki, an active promoter of scholarship at Edo. Masayuki represents the
emergence of yet another institutional form of intellectual promotion, some-
thing like an academy of noble patronage; in addition to Ansai, he collected
under his wing Yoshikawa Koretaru, the first important reformer of Shinto
ideology along modern metaphysical lines, and also sponsored the Hayashi
school to produce a chronology of the imperial family.
356 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths