Japanese philosophy in the centuries up through about 1300 directly con-
tinued Chinese networks; all the major Chinese Buddhist schools were im-
ported, with a bias toward those dating from the end of the creative period of
Chinese Buddhism. Hence the predominance in Japan of Zen, since the most
intense flow of Japanese sojourners and Chinese missionaries coincided with
the late Sung and early Yuan, when active Buddhism had winnowed down to
the Lin-chi (Rinzai) and Ts’ao-Tung (Soto) lineages. These dynasties too were
the time of the Neo-Confucian movement, and the moment when it was
keeping up contacts with the Ch’an lineages; thus the most philosophically
abstract of Confucian metaphysics was carried into Japan and taught in the
Zen-based education which proliferated from the Muromachi period onward.
In several respects the Japanese were Chinese-style intellectuals. Lay con-
cerns penetrated the intellectual sphere, keeping thought more concrete and at
a lower level of philosophical abstraction. During the phase when the monas-
teries dominated culture production, Buddhist leaders were political monks,
consorting with political-military factions and intervening weightily in their
struggles with monastic armies. Zen set itself off as the most conservative wing
of Buddhism, in opposition to the radicalism of the Pure Land movements
among the commoners. But Zen too underwent its own accommodation with
the upper strata, resulting in the style-conscious gentry Buddhism developed
in the most elite Zen monasteries, where religious practice turned into a refined
aesthetics which became the mark of highest secular prestige. The backlash
against monastic political power, when the era of feudalism was finally over-
come by the absolutist Tokugawa state, was a secularizing reformation. Now
the politicization of the intellectuals shifted in a new direction. Beneath the
veneer of Confucian and Shinto revivalism, Tokugawa intellectuals resembled
their contemporaries, the anti-clerical activists of the French Enlightenment.
Burgeoning market competition both in education and in mass culture pro-
duced intellectuals oriented toward secular topics of history, philology, and
economics, while despising metaphysical speculation. Despite the reactionary
and authoritarian tone which made up the surface ideology of Tokugawa
discourse, Japanese intellectuals became modernists on their own path; both
their secularist wing and their neo-traditionalist opponents sound like quarrel-
ing European intellectuals after the downfall of the state church and religious
control over education.
The organizational bases of intellectual production became similar in Japan
and Europe, insofar as both went through a long transition to religious secu-
larization and the corresponding loss of religious control over the educa-
tional system. It is no coincidence that Japanese Buddhism became the more
“Protestant,” breaking with monasticism to allow married priests, and encour-
aging lay participation within the remaining celibate orders. Both places went
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 323