these had been the Doctrine of the Mean and the Great Learning, hitherto
obscure ancillaries to the old Book of Rites; for Jinsai the favorite vehicle was
the Analects; for Sorai it was the Six Classics made canonical by Confucius.
In the hands of older scholars, mere verbal similarity and the obscurity of
meaning in ancient texts were used to justify the desired new readings. By the
early 1700s, three generations of Japanese schools had built up a critical
standard of textual scholarship, motivated by open competition among classi-
cal and Sung Confucian factions. Sorai simultaneously invoked respect for the
sages while distancing them from modern conditions. Since the world and
languages had changed, the only way to recover the ancient Way was to master
ancient language and adhere to the old rites and music. China had obviously
changed, and therefore deteriorated, over time. But one cannot simply imitate
the past; what is recorded in texts is to be treated as history.^37 Wielding this
weapon, Sorai recognized that Sung Confucian teachings stemmed from Bud-
dhism. Similarly, the Shinto put forward by its modern advocates did not exist
historically, as shown in ancient texts. Sorai declared that Shintoism had been
invented by Yoshida Kanetomo in the 1480s. Sorai drew a policy consequence
favorable to his bakufu connections, rejecting even nominal sovereignty of the
emperor. Dazai was even more dismissive: “Shinto is no more than the Way
of the sorcerers. It is not a matter to be studied by a gentleman” (Maruyama,
1974: 154).
In their utilitarian emphasis on worldly practicality and rejection of meta-
physical speculation about heaven’s law, Sorai and his school resemble Euro-
pean intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Sorai is often compared to Machiavelli
or Hobbes; one might also say that he is something like a mixture of Voltaire,
with his anti-clericalism and his appeals to the rational absolutist despot, and
Rousseau, with his reasoned rejection of the evils of market civilization. This
is so not because the European and Japanese thinkers are interchangeable as
individuals, but because their respective situations contained similar sets of
ingredients. Defining what these were must be deferred until we have further
pieces of the puzzle in hand.
The Divergence of Secularist Naturalism and Neoconservatism
Sorai’s success signaled a near-revolutionary collapse in the popularity of
Neo-Confucianism. The Hayashi school was almost deserted until the period
of enforced orthodoxy at the end of the century. Ansai’s sage religion fell to a
minor conservative sect. In the 1730s and 1740s, Sorai’s disciples dominated
discourse. The price of becoming a scholarly hegemon was paid; creativity
dropped, and scholarly specialization and routine set in. After 1750 the Sorai
school became embroiled in minor disputes with the Ito school; many thinkers
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 361