Introduction

Abstract

This volume, part of the Dao Companion to Chinese Philosophy Series edited by Huang Yong 黃勇, seeks to advance the study of Japanese Confucian philosophy for English language readers. It also advances a tradition in scholarship traceable through at least three previous anthologies: (i) Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period 1600–1868: Methods and Metaphors, edited by Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner (Najita and Scheiner 1978); (ii) Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (de Bary and Bloom 1979), and (iii) Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture, edited by Peter Nosco (Nosco 1984). These previous volumes are not exclusively devoted to Confucianism in Japan, although most of their essays deal largely with it in one way or another. The present work boasts essays that invariably focus on Japanese Confucianism, while including themes and topics related to Buddhism, Shintō, Nativism, and even Andō Shōeki 安藤昌益 (1703–1762), one of the most vehement critics of Confucianism in all of East Asia. The earlier anthologies do not describe their contents as philosophy, nor do they necessarily pertain to philosophical thought in every case, but arguably each of them furthers our understandings of Japanese Confucianism and its relevance to philosophy where the latter is understood broadly as an ongoing search for critical insight and self-reflective knowledge, even wisdom (sophia), about the nature of the self, society, culture, the polity, spiritual matters, and the cosmos. Methodologically, the earlier anthologies are hybrids combining studies in intellectual history informed by Western theoretical literature along with other studies analyzing philosophically significant writings by Japanese Confucian scholars and their critics. The present volume is also eclectic in methodology.