Kaibara Ekken Biography

KAIBARA EKKEN (1630–1714) was a Japanese Neo-Confucian scholar. Ekken was born in Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan. Although he was the son of a samurai family, he had early contacts with townspeople and farmers of the province. This no doubt influenced his later decision to write in simplified Japanese in order to make Confucian teachings available to a wide audience. His father taught him medicine and nutrition, awakening a lifelong interest in matters of health that would culminate in the composition of his well-known book Yōjōkun (Precepts for Health Care), completed in 1713. It was his older brother Sonzai, however, who urged Ekken to abandon his early interest in Buddhism and to immerse himself in the Confucian classics. Under Sonzai's tutelage, Ekken became well versed in the classics and in the Neo-Confucian writings of Zhu Xi. During a seven-year stay in Kyoto under the patronage of the lord of the Kuroda domain, he came into contact with the leading Confucian scholars of his time, including Nakamura Tekisai, Kinoshita Jun'an, the botanist Mukai Gensho, and the agronomist Miyazaki Yasusada. These contacts continued throughout his life by virtue of Ekken's numerous trips to Kyoto and Edo. Ekken's tasks as a Confucian scholar included lecturing to the lord of the Kuroda domain and tutoring his heir. In addition, he was commissioned to produce lineage of the Kuroda family that required some sixteen years of research and writing. He also recorded the topography of Chikuzen Province, in a work that is still considered a model of its kind. Ekken's other major research project, entitled Yamato honzō, consisted of a classification and description of the various types of plants in Japan. It has been praised by Japanese and Western scholars alike as a seminal work in the history of botany in Japan.

Ekken's enduring interest, however, was the popularization of Confucian ethics and methods of self-cultivation for a wide audience. Accordingly, he wrote a number of kunmono, instructional treatises for various groups such as the samurai, the lord, the family, women, and children. His work Onna Daigaku (Learning for Women) is especially well known. In addition, he wrote on methods of study, on literature, on writing, on precepts for daily life, and on the five Confucian virtues. Although a devoted follower of Zhu Xi, toward the end of his life he wrote Taigiroku, a work that records his "great doubts" about Zhu's dualism of Principle (li) and material force (qi). Ekken's ideas were influenced by the thought of the Ming scholar Luo Qinshun (1416–1547), who had articulated a monistic theory of qi. Ekken felt that the dynamic quality of Confucianism had been lost by certain Song and Ming thinkers, and he hoped through the monist theory of qi to reformulate a naturalism and vitalism that he, like Luo, viewed as essential to Confucian thought. Consequently, Ekken was concerned to articulate the vital impulse of the material force that suffused all reality. His thought can thus be described as a naturalist religiosity rooted in profound reverence and gratitude toward Heaven as the source of life and earth as the sustainer of life. He felt that by recognizing one's debt to these "great parents," human beings activated a cosmic filiality toward all living things. This idea of filiality implied that one should preserve nature, not destroy it. The highest form of filiality was humaneness (jin), through which humans formed an identity with all things. Ekken, then, was a reformed Zhu Xi scholar whose broad interests, voluminous writings, and naturalist religiosity mark a high point in Japanese Neo-Confucian thought.

Confucianism in Japan.

Kaibara Ekken's works are collected in Ekken zenshu, 8 vols. (Tokyo, 1910–1911) and Kaibara Ekken, Muro Kyūsō, "Nihon shiso taikei," vol. 34, edited by Araki Kengo and Inoue Tadashi (Tokyo, 1970). Works on Ekken include Inoue Tadashi's Kaibara Ekken (Tokyo, 1963); Kaibara Ekken, Nihon no meicho, vol. 14, edited by Matsuda Michio (Tokyo, 1969).