Abstract
This study examines two major works by one of Edo Japan’s great educators, Kaibara Ekken—Precepts for Children’s Education in Japan and Precepts on Nourishing Life—both written for a popular audience in a period when interest in Confucian learning was spreading beyond the samurai class to the general population. Structured in terms of the basic polarity in the Cheng-Zhu school between principle (li/ri) and material force (qi/ki), the study first makes clear the degree to which Chinese Zhu Xi learning emphasized grasping the abstract principles (li) of objective reality and morality, reflecting the intellectual character of the Zhu Xi school in China. Then, through a close study of Ekken’s writings, Tsujimoto shows that Ekken rejected the dualism of li and qi and put his emphasis strongly on the physical dimensions of learning and practice, exhorting his readers to pay careful attention to every detail of everyday life—including reading and calligraphy practice—as well as all the minute details of the etiquette governing everyday social life. While popular Confucian teachings in China tended similarly to emphasize the physical and practical levels of reality, there is a definite Japanese character in Ekken’s teachings related to the tendency of Japanese society to subordinate the individual completely to group-oriented rules of ritual and etiquette.
The Japanese original of the present study was published in Edo no shisō (Edo thought), No. 6 (Perikansha, 1997) under the title “Kyōiku shisutemu no naka no shintai—Kaibara Ekiken ni okeru gakushū—(The body in the system of education: Learning in Kaibara Ekken).” It was republished in Tsujimoto Masashi, Shisō to kyōiku no media-shi—Kinsei Nihon no chi no dentatsu—(The history of the media of thought and education: The transmission of knowledge in early modern Japan), Perikansha, 2011.
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Notes
- 1.
Translator’s note: “Material force” is by far the most common translation of qi/ki as a cosmological principle, and “vital force” is also common for the less cosmological senses of the word. The latter is particularly appropriate when, as in the Mencius, it refers to the qi/ki (breath, prāṇa, energy) within the human psycho-physical system. In the cosmological sense, “generative force” has also been suggested in certain contexts. In the context of the argument of the present essay, “material force” is an extremely apt translation.
- 2.
Translator’s note: From the identification of qing with sagacity and thought it is apparent that the word “feelings,” based on the clear distinction in Western thought between rational thought and emotions, between mind and heart, is not a totally appropriate translation. But the only other alternatives are “sentiment,” “affections,” and “emotions” which seem to share the same problem. Qing is simply the manifest aspect of the heart-mind that arises in reaction to external things. The Classic of Ritual (Liji 禮記) gives a classic definition: “What does qing refer to? Joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, hatred, and desire.” However, Xunzi’s statement that “Qing means the manifest qualities (zhi 质) of the nature” is obviously more closely related to Zhu Xi’s usage. Qing is a complicated word with as many as twenty distinct meanings, one of which is a person’s innate (heaven-endowed) nature. As we have seen, in Zhu Xi learning the two are fundamentally different.
- 3.
The foregoing explanation is based on the statements by Zhu Xi in his commentary on the Mean and in Zhuzi yulei 62, statements in which he is explaining the Mean’s dictum that, “When [feelings of] joy, anger, sadness and happiness have not yet arisen, this is called ‘centrality’.”
- 4.
Translator’s note: The word that I have translated twice as “disembodied” means literally “transformed into consciousness,” referring to lucid intellectual awareness or the state of alert awareness to be achieved through reverent seriousness. “Disembodied” seems to capture most of the meaning and is the only way to express it in adjectival form. The following quotation from Francis Bacon (describing two complementary types of intellects) gives a good description of the kind of intellectual mind that Tsujimoto is referring to here: “The steady and acute mind can fix its contemplations and dwell and fasten on the subtlest distinctions: the lofty and discursive mind recognises and puts together the finest and most general resemblances” (Novum Organum, Aphorism LV).
- 5.
Translator’s note: In a personal communication about this passage, Tsujimoto noted that in the Edo period children were weaned very late (which has implications for Japanese social psychology), and also that this passage is just emphasizing that education began at a very early age, not necessarily implying that weaning and the beginning of speech occur around the same time.
- 6.
Translator’s note: A more literal translation of the part where the word yo appears is, “In the [teaching] method of the Great College, prohibiting [undesirable actions] before they had occurred was called ‘in advance’.” Legge’s text is also available with the original text on the Chinese Text Project web site (see http://ctext.org/liji/xue-ji).
- 7.
In the Thousand Character Classic (Qianziwen 千字文), there is a story called Mo bei si ran 墨悲絲染 (Mozi grieves for the dyed silk). What Mozi noticed was that once the young silk threads were dyed, they permanently took on the color of the dye and could never regain their original pristine whiteness.
- 8.
Translator’s note: The statement attributed to Confucius is found in the Family Sayings of Confucius 孔子家語 (Kongzi jiayu), Qishier dizi jie 七十二弟子解: 40, and in the History of the [Former] Han Dynasty (漢書 Hanshu), Biography of Jia Yi: 26, where it is also attributed to Confucius.
- 9.
Translator’s note: The classical native Japanese word for “to recite from memory” consists of a stem of two syllables, sora, plus two elements used to form verbs out of nouns (n plus zuru or jiru). The two syllables sora by themselves happen to mean “sky,” a native Japanese noun. When the verb soranzuru/soranjiru is written with a Chinese character, however, the character for “to memorize” is used for the stem, not the character for “sky.” Yet since the literal meaning of the word means to recite a text without looking at the text, and since the phrase quoted here from Ekken uses not the classical verb soranzuru, but two noun + particle + verb compounds (sora ni yomu and sora ni kaku) that can be taken to mean literally “read into the sky, write into the sky” (though without the kanji for “sky”), it seems reasonable to infer that the sora in the verb for “to recite from memory” was derived from the word for “sky.” Of course Ekken’s term still really means “recite from memory,” but he may be trying deliberately to avoid using a classical literary word because of the nature of his intended audience. “To recite into the sky” immediately conveys the intended meaning to a child.
- 10.
Translator’s note: Here Ekken has listed five of the famous “eight great writers of the Tang and Song” dynasties traditionally studied by students in China as models for writing. Here, Ekken (and Tsujimoto) uses kanbun not in the sense of writing in classical Chinese done in Japan, but in the sense of classical Chinese itself, showing that there was not necessarily a clear line between the two.
- 11.
The conception of penetrating from the skin to the flesh to the bones to the marrow appears in the biography of Bodhidharma found in the Song dynasty Zen classic The Transmission of the Lamp (Jingde chuandeng lu 景德傳燈錄), fascicle 3.
- 12.
Translator’s note: It is interesting that the native Japanese word shitsuke, meaning “good upbringing,” “home discipline” and “training in manners” is written with one of the very few “Chinese characters” (kanji) completely invented in Japan. The character is formed by placing the character for “beautiful” to the right of the character for “body” or “person,” where the character on the right (written second) carries an obviously causative connotation. Shitsuke can even refer by extension to manners and etiquette themselves. It is clear that Japanese society, in which inculcation in social ritual has traditionally been the essence of education, impelled the creation of this kanji.
- 13.
Regarding the fact that this lack of confidence in the mind was the obverse side of his idea of “serving heaven and earth,” see Tsujimoto 1995.
- 14.
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Tsujimoto 辻本雅史, M., Steben, B.D. (2014). The Somaticization of Learning in Edo Confucianism: The Rejection of Body-Mind Dualism in the Thought of Kaibara Ekken. In: Huang, Cc., Tucker, J. (eds) Dao Companion to Japanese Confucian Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2921-8_5
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