ing Kyoto; the several Zen movements were an intersection between Mount
Hiei and Chinese lineages contacted by Japanese sojourners. The creative
moments happened when former Mount Hiei pupils established their new
bases during the initial process of splitting from the center. As Zen and Pure
Land temples proliferated and dispersed, the focus of intellectual life was lost.
The elite Zen temples of Kyoto became centers for new movements in the arts;
but aesthetics replaced religious doctrine and its associated philosophies. In
this situation the expansion of formal education did not help. A single “uni-
versity” under the Ashikaga shoguns had thousands of students, but the
curriculum, Neo-Confucian philosophy and other classic texts imported from
China, stagnated. The Soto temples spread elementary schooling in the coun-
tryside. Although their founder, Dogen, was the greatest of the Zen philoso-
phers, after his death advanced studies turned into formalistic summaries and
commentaries. The Rinzai temples maintained the tradition of Chinese koan
collections. These too turned to scholasticism, most elaborately in the early
Tokugawa, when the temples were absorbed under government bureaucratic
regulation; solving a lengthy sequence of koan became the requirement for
gaining enlightenment certificates, a pursuit of credentials entitling their hold-
ers to office as abbots.
Buddhist intellectual and spiritual life was demoralized through its own
careerism and material success. Under the Tokugawa regime, philosophy took
off again in new culture-producing institutions: the private proprietary schools
for samurai, most of them at Kyoto, with a few at Edo. The division of cultural
life between the old and the new de facto capitals fostered a salutary compe-
tition, while the number of schools remained relatively low. Helping focus the
competition of intersecting circles were the two great patronage centers spon-
sored by the shogun’s relatives, the lords of Mito and Aizu. Cross-breeding of
networks led to a series of vigorous new schools, including a merchant acad-
emy at Osaka, which went on to produce the most radical secularists and
naturalists. Creativity was limited to the non-official marketplace of private
schools; the training schools established by the daimyo for the higher officials
in their feudal domains were no more than a formalistic drill. From the late
1700s onward many new schools were founded at all levels; but the growth
of mass education went along with intellectual stagnation. The attempt in the
1790s to establish a Chinese-style examination system did little more than add
to the formalization of rote learning.
In general, it was those types of schools which were newest, and still
confined to a small number of places, which were intellectually creative. The
movement of National Learning in the mid- and late 1700s, and the Osaka
merchant academy with its few spin-offs into schools of Dutch Learning, were
a limited set of institutions but with much more intellectual action than the
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^509