sonalized manifestations of the universal metaphysical principle (Kitagawa,
1987: 164). Formerly dispersed and localized, Shinto was now becoming
centrally organized for a fight. Sensing the opportunity, in this generation too
Ansai proposed his own version of Shinto from the Neo-Confucian side.
The situation did not remain static. The Neo-Confucian school came under
attack from the secularists, and its influence collapsed. Now Sorai’s contem-
porary Kada no Azumamaro removed Shinto from under the wing of Confu-
cianism, and his pupil Mabuchi legitimated the separation intellectually with
a full-scale ideology of the superiority of Japanese studies.^43 In the next gen-
eration, National Learning (kokugaku) was elevated by Motoori Norinaga
(another pupil, along with Kamo Mabuchi, of Hori Keizan) into a doctrine
claiming to replace Confucianism of every variety. Norinaga’s school happened
to be near the Ise shrine; in this way he met Mabuchi on his pious travels,
enrolled as his pupil, and sustained correspondence with him. Since Ise was
becoming the center for pilgrimages organized by a national network, Nori-
naga acquired a large number of pupils at his private school.
Norinaga turned National Learning into a philosophically sophisticated
defense of particularism. He rejected all metaphysics as foreign intrusions.
Buddhist and Confucian doctrines alike, he declared, are full of logical contra-
dictions; because they are formulated as universalistic philosophies, they are
open to refutation. By the same token, the syncretism of Shinto with Neo-Con-
fucian categories is unwarranted.^44 Nor is Confucianism morally superior; its
doctrines, in Norinaga’s eyes, reduce to Machiavellian amoralism and are
inferior to Japanese practices. Norinaga elevated the historical viewpoint into
a criterion by which all rationalisms, both neo-Confucian and post-Confucian,
can be rejected. His own textual specialty was the Kojiki (Records of Ancient
Matters, compiled from ancient annals and myths in 712), shifting from the
literary texts of Mabuchi and his predecessors to a religious text which Nori-
naga now endowed with scriptural authority. There is no way to rationalize
the age of the gods; one can only start with revelation as a miraculous intrusion
into the mundane world. Heaven, nature, and human affairs are all due to the
kami; but these are particularistic and ineffable, not principles accessible to
reason.
Norinaga’s position is a combination of positivist historical scholarship and
theism. The kami can only be defined as “anything which was outside the
ordinary, which possessed superior power or which was awe-inspiring” (Kita-
gawa, 1987: 165). Here we have an explicit parallel to Rudolf Otto’s definition
of the holy. Norinaga is like the Christian neo-orthodox theologians at the turn
of the 1900s, in the fashion of Schweitzer and Barth, using careful textual
scholarship to show that the original faith was not the ethical principles and
Idealist metaphysics beloved of liberal Protestants. There is no naturalistic
366 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths