adopted an eclectic path amidst the issues, further muddying the sharp edges
of doctrine which had once characterized the systems in their creative periods.
In these two generations the naturalistic line of thought inspired more
radical innovations. The most extreme of these, isolated in the network of
Figure 7.4, did not rise to more than secondary eminence in the attention space.
Ando Shoeki, a medical scholar living in the isolation of northern Honshu,
pushed the Neo-Confucian kigaku (doctrine of material force, ch’i) to virtual
materialism. He was the only Tokugawa scholar to criticize explicitly the feudal
order; his stance was a Rousseau-like condemnation of samurai, priests, and
merchants alike as socially useless. At the other end of Japan, Miura Baiyen
at Nagasaki promoted a dialectical logic of things, advocating experimental
methods and investigating economics.
Closer to the center, naturalism invaded the Kaitokudo, the Osaka acad-
emy established in the 1720s for merchant families, explicitly breaking the
samurai monopoly on officially sanctioned education. Its founders were pupils
of both Ito Jinsai and the Ansai lineage of neo-Confucianism, and the Kai-
tokudo in its early years was timidly eclectic (Najita, 1987; Najita and Scheiner,
1978: 23–43; Ketelaar, 1990: 19). In the next generation a pupil, Tominaga
Nakamoto (son of one of the wealthy merchant patrons of the academy),
rebelled against this eclecticism, criticizing Confucianism along with all other
religions in favor of a “religion of the facts.” He was expelled, but by midcen-
tury the naturalist attitude had become dominant at the Kaitokudo. The chief
teacher, Goi Ranju (a grandpupil of Ito Jinsai), launched an empiricist attack
on Buddhist doctrines, using knowledge of science and astronomy against the
cosmology of the world-centering Mount Sumeru and the layers of hells and
paradises. The next leader of the Kaitokudo, Nakai Chikuzan, combined attack
on Buddhist irrationality with the study of economics and advocacy of the
virtue of the merchants’ profession. Here we see the European Enlightenment-
style intellectual movement in full force, attacking religion as outmoded. That
the merchant academy chose Buddhism to attack, one hundred years after the
Confucian scholars had already dispensed with it, probably had to do with the
differences in social milieux. Confucian schools were above all identified with
the samurai, while Buddhism still remained the belief of the common people;
and it was also no doubt safer to attack popular Buddhism than to take on
Confucian sage religion.
A connection was now established with Miura Baien, who sent his pupils
to study at the Kaitokudo; several became teachers there, shifting the empha-
sis to empirical science, especially astronomy. The outstanding pupil produced
by the Baien-Kaitokudo connections was Yamagata Banto; in 1804 he pro-
pounded heliocentric astronomy as a touchstone, an epistemological image of
objective science decentered from merely human biases. Yamagata’s division
362 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths