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This book charts the history of Confucianism in Japan to offer new perspectives on the sociology of Confucianiam across East Asia.
How has Confucius, quintessentially and symbolically Chinese, been received throughout Japanese history? The Worship of Confucius in Japan provides the first overview of the richly documented and colorful Japanese version of the East Asian ritual to venerate Confucius, known in Japan as the sekiten. The original Chinese political liturgy embodied assumptions about sociopolitical order different from those of Japan. Over more than thirteen centuries, Japanese in power expressed a persistently ambivalent response to the ritual’s challenges and often tended to interpret the ceremony in cultural rather than political terms. Like many rituals, the sekiten self-referentially reinterpreted earlier versions of itself. James McMullen adopts a diachronic and comparative perspective. Focusing on the relationship of the ritual to political authority in the premodern period, McMullen sheds fresh light on Sino–Japanese cultural relations and on the distinctive political, cultural, and social history of Confucianism in Japan. Successive sections of The Worship of Confucius in Japan trace the vicissitudes of the ceremony through two major cycles of adoption, modification, and decline, first in ancient and medieval Japan, then in the late feudal period culminating in its rejection at the Meiji Restoration. An epilogue sketches the history of the ceremony in the altered conditions of post-Restoration Japan and up to the present.
Although East Asian religion is commonly characterized as "syncretic," the historical interaction of Buddhist, Confucian, and other traditions is often neglected by scholars of mainstream religious thought. In this thought-provoking study, Janine Sawada moves beyond conventional approaches to the history of Japanese religion by analyzing the ways in which Neo-Confucianism and Zen formed a popular synthesis in early modern Japan. She shows how Shingaku, a teaching founded by merchant Ishida Baigan, blossomed after his death into a widespread religious movement that selectively combined ideas and practices from these traditions. Drawing on new research into original Shingaku sources, Sawada challenges the view that the teaching was a facile "merchant ethic" by illuminating the importance of Shingaku mystical experience and its intimate relation to moral cultivation in the program developed by Baigan's successor, Teshima Toan. This book also suggests the need for an approach to the history of Japanese education that accounts for the informal transmission of ideas as well as institutional schooling. Shingaku contributed to the development of Japanese education by effectively disseminating moral and religious knowledge on a large scale to the less-educated sectors of Tokugawa society. Sawada interprets the popularity of the movement as part of a general trend in early modern Japan in which ordinary people sought forms of learning that could be pursued in the context of daily life.
Kaibara Ekken (1630--1714) was the focal Neo-Confucian thinker of the early Tokagawa period. He established the importance of Neo-Confucianism in Japan at a time when Buddhism had long been the dominant religious philosophy. This is the first book-length presentation of his thought. It contains a lengthy introduction to Ekken's life, time, and thought, and a careful translation into readable English of Ekken's book, Precepts for Daily Life in Japan (Yamanto Zokkun).
The Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy will be part of the handbook series Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy, published by Springer. This series is being edited by Professor Huang Yong, Professor of Philosophy at Kutztown University and Editor of Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. This volume includes original essays by scholars from the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China, discussing important philosophical writings by Japanese Confucian philosophers. The main focus, historically, will be the early-modern period (1600-1868), when much original Confucian philosophizing occurred, and Confucianism in modern Japan. The Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy makes a significant contribution to the Dao handbook series, and equally to the field of Japanese philosophy. This new volume including original philosophical studies will be a major contribution to the study of Confucianism generally and Japanese philosophy in particular.
This book rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between "Confucianisms" and "women."
Seventeen scholars from varying fields here consider the implications of Confucian concerns--self-cultivation, regulation of the family, social civility, moral education, well-being of the people, governance of the state, and universal peace--in industrial East Asia.
Japanese Philosophy is the first book to assert the existence of a Japanese philosophy prior to Nishida Kitaro in the early twentieth century. Because of Western military and economic dominance since the seventeenth century, the cross-cultural comparison of non-Western philosophy has generally gone in one direction—comparing Chinese, Indian, and other thought systems with Western philosophy. For various reasons, Japanese scholars did not follow the Chinese lead after 1920 in acknowledging that some of their own literary tradition should be classified as "philosophy." In spite of this, the authors argue that it is useful to compare cultures, and that one way of comparing cultures is to compare their philosophies—and therefore that it is worth treating certain parts of Japanese literature as philosophy, especially those parts that are similar to what has long been classified and treated as philosophy in India and China. By doing so, and by providing an overview of Japanese philosophy from the seventh century to the present, the authors contribute to a greater cross-cultural understanding between East and West.
From the FOREWORD: BEFORE the introduction of Confucianism and Buddhism there was almost no philosophy in Japan, although the peculiar teaching of the Japanese spirit which was already in process of development cannot be entirely overlooked. What Confucianism taught was already in practice in Japan, but it was thenceforth authorized and corroborated by the precepts of the great Chinese sage. The influence of Confucianism which has been eagerly studied by the Japanese scholars for more than a thousand years since its first introduction is really immense and incalculable, especially in the sphere of moral culture. But before the Tokugawa age the influence of Buddhism was very great, spiritually far greater than that of Confucianism, producing several illustrious reformers and religious thinkers. From the beginning of the Tokugawa age, however, Confucianism took a more prominent position than Buddhism. Since the education of all the provinces at that time was based on Confucian principles, its teaching was more widely propagated than ever. Several eminent philosophers arose among the Confucian scholars who contributed a great deal to intellectual development as well as moral culture before the Reformation. For those foreigners who do not understand the gradual preparation made by Confucianism and Buddhism, the sudden uprise of Japan since the Restoration will appear to be but a miracle or at least an inexplicable wonder. But if they understand thoroughly well what Confucianism has taught, then the sudden uprise of Japan will be held no more as a miracle but as a natural and necessary transition. Since the Restoration Confucianism seems to be almost extinguished, but it is only apparently so. The teaching of the great Chinese sage is so widely diffused and deeply rooted in Japan that it must be considered to be part and parcel of Japanese culture itself. Besides that, we must not forget that the Japanese spirit began from earlier times to assimilate Confucianism to itself, that is to say, to Japanize it. As a consequence of that process Confucianism was, during the Tokugawa age, almost entirely Japanized, and in that way it was made far more vigorous and efficacious than in China and elsewhere. To understand well Confucianism of the Tokugawa age is, therefore, at the same time to understand partly Japanese culture itself. So I think that the publication of "Light from the East" which contains largely the Confucian philosophy of the Tokugawa age, written by Mr. R. C. Armstrong, who has devoted many years to the study of intellectual development in Japan, will serve for the promotion of the knowledge of Japanese culture, and disperse also, I hope, the doubt about the miraculous uprise of the Japanese nation. TETSUJIRO INOUYE, Professor of Philosophy in the Imperial University.