Saints as Sinners: Andō Shōeki’s Back-to-Nature Critiques of the Saints, Confucian and Otherwise

Abstract

Despite the scarcity of reliable information about his life (a fact we will first recall), Andō Shōeki (1703–1762) has been the target of an intense appropriation process from the very beginning of his discovery by Kanō Kōkichi in 1899 until the present days. After surveying such a process, by which Shōeki was successively recognized as the Japanese pioneer of anarchism, socialism, communism, ecology, woman’s liberation and the lot, we found that, inside Shōeki’s system of thought itself, the most relevant element for explaining such a course lies in the omnipresence and harshness of its critique of the Confucian sages or saints, as we call them. Thus, this paper will focus on this latter aspect – the most celebrated and misunderstood one – of his thought. We will mainly examine what Shōeki exactly reproach the Saints in the Tōdō shinden chapter, “A Discussion of How the Saints Have Robbed Nature throughout the Ages” (Yoyo no seijin mina shizen wo nusumu no ron), which is the most elaborate on that subject. This will lead us to underpin the role played by the notion of shizen within our author’s system of thought and consequently to consider more closely the implications of such a concept, such as enabling a tautological discourse centered on the notions of a spontaneous totality. Thus, we notice that Shōeki, for ideological purposes, is forced to bring to light a kind of ultimate notion which puts a closure to every discourse. A comparison with Ogyū Sorai’s stance on the same problem helps us to understand by contrast why Shōeki, far from preparing any kind of social revolution, cannot but utter an outdated discourse longing on authenticity and the quest of origins.