tors of China. Most sharply, Soko was a direct counter to Ansai’s sage religion,
rejecting meditation and seriousness as the basic moral principle.^33
Soko’s new position called forth a new metaphysic. Soko gave primacy to
materialist monism and eliminated Neo-Confucian quiescence, holding that it
is merely the motions of nature that produce good and evil. Soko wielded as
his main resource an increasing depth of scholarship. He undercut Neo-Con-
fucian claims of antiquity by noting that “the teaching of the sages consists
only in rites and music.” Soko did not, however, dispense entirely with his
Confucian cultural capital; he found a new space within Confucianism by
separating the classics from their Sung accretions. From Soko came the Edo
school of kogaku, Ancient Learning. This represented simultaneously a move
toward traditionalism and antiquity, and a shift toward naturalism.
By the end of the century, Neo-Confucianism was becoming old hat. The
older networks continued, but their new offshoots were twisting the lineage of
cultural capital into new channels. Ansai’s acquaintance Kaibara Ekken pushed
the naturalist aspects of Chu Hsi virtually into empiricist materialism. Mat-
ter/energy (ch’i) was seen as fundamental, principle (li) merely derivative; the
important thing was the accumulation of knowledge through research, which
Kaibara carried out in the realm of medical botany. With Kaibara we meet a
new phenomenon, a Japanese intellectual who is detached from any school,
merely an outstanding individual with a unique position. The marketplace now
was offering recognition for such individuals; rivals such as Dazai called him
the most learned man in Japan (Sansom, 1963: 87).
The more influential, however, succeeded by establishing proprietary
schools. Of these the new leader was the Kyoto school, the Kogido, founded
around 1662 by Ito Jinsai.^34 Adopting the stance of Ancient Learning, Ito took
a crucial step: he separated values from cosmological principles. In Chu Hsi,
li is simultaneously moral law and physical law. Although they are identical,
the former aspect takes priority; the universe is regulated by sincerity. There
is nothing like this in Western idealism; it would be equivalent to holding that
Christianity’s “God is love” provides a way of ordering and controlling the
physical cosmos by religious action. Chu Hsi’s cosmic anthropomorphism was
grounded in the practice of the sage religion. Impurities and turbidity of the
ch’i are the source of human desire and hence of evil on the lower plane; this
is repaired by meditation on li, whereby the sage restores human and cosmic
purity. The Sung Neo-Confucians had adopted the technique and part of the
doctrine from Zen by identifying li with the Buddhist Original Nature; the
chief difference was that instead of ultimate emptiness, the Supreme Ultimate
is the world-logos, and this in turn is equated with moral sincerity.
Ito Jinsai now broke the link. He attacked the practice of sitting in quies-
cence (meditation) on the principle (li) underlying all things: “In things, there358 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths