Yamazaki Ansai
YAMAZAKI ANSAI (1618–1682), Japanese Confucian and Shintō scholar of the early Tokugawa period. The son of a samurai who lost his position in the turbulence of the early Tokugawa period, Ansai was set at a young age on a career as a Zen priest. However, in his twenties he became acquainted with the anti-Buddhist writings of the Song Chinese Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi. Inspired by them, he rejected Buddhism in favor of Confucianism, left the monastery, and devoted himself to the study and explication of the ideas of Zhu Xi. He attracted many disciples, drawn primarily from the samurai class, and developed close relations with a number of important political figures. He thus played a significant part in the spread of Confucian learning among the Tokugawa samurai class. Ansai was also deeply interested in the fusion of Confucianism and Shintō that had been developed by contemporary Shintō scholars such as Yoshikawa Koretaru. From Yoshikawa, Ansai received the Shintō religious name of Suika Reisha, and Ansai's own version of Confucian-flavored Shintō is known as Suika Shintō.
Insisting that, like Confucius, he sought only to transmit, not to create, Ansai wrote little of a systematic, interpretive nature. His preferred method was to compile selections of excerpts from the writings of Zhu Xi and to express his own views on Zhu Xi's teachings through lectures on these excerpts and a few chosen texts. Ansai's ideas were thus conveyed primarily in the form of lecture notes taken down by his disciples. As reflected in these notes, Ansai's lectures, delivered in a forceful, colloquial style, sought both to come to terms with the complexities of Zhu Xi's metaphysics and to deliver them to a relatively uneducated audience in a simple, direct fashion. This approach was undoubtedly an important factor behind the popularity and influence of his school.
Similarly, Ansai stressed mastery of a few basic texts rather than wide reading. Whereas other Tokugawa Confucian scholars, such as Hayashi Razan, emphasized the importance of erudition and thereby presented Confucian learning as the special province of the professional scholar, Ansai decried the pursuit of erudition as encouraging dilettantism and as counterproductive to the development of a firm sense of moral priorities. Confucian scholars of other schools criticized his position as narrow and rigid, but it did serve to offer a large audience entry into the forbidding body of Chinese Confucian literature.
Ansai insisted that his selection of the core teachings of Zhu Xi constituted the orthodox tradition. In fact, however, he modified Zhu Xi's ideas in several important ways. For instance, he gave added emphasis to the moral importance of the relation between lord and vassal, depicting the obligation of the vassal to the lord in absolute terms comparable to that between parent and child. The Ansai school position on this subject contributed to the growth of the idea, found widely in the late Tokugawa period, of the absolute, eternal nature of the obligation of loyalty to the imperial line.
Another area in which Ansai deviated significantly from Zhu Xi was in emphasizing the importance of "reverence" over "investigation of the principle of things" in the process of the individual's cultivation of his innate moral nature. The resulting stress on cleaving to the norms of Confucianism and on rigorous introspection to ensure that one's behavior conformed to those norms contributed to the characteristically stern and dogmatic tone of the Ansai school.
Ansai's linking of Confucianism and Shintō was another distinctive feature of his teachings. Unlike other Confucian scholars such as Hayashi Razan, who sought to equate Shintō and the Confucian way, Ansai presented them as two distinct manifestations of a universal truth, each particular to the country in which it originated. Ansai's joining of Shintō and Confucianism added a note of mystery and religious authority to Confucianism that furthered its acceptance in Tokugawa society, while his insistence on the particularly "Japanese" character of Shintō endowed his school with a nationalistic flavor that tended to increase with the passage of time. However, many of the connections Ansai made between Shintō and Confucianism were forced and far-fetched, and his leading disciples, although declaring themselves faithful to the essence of Ansai's teachings, broke with him over the question of the relationship between Confucianism and Shintō. This break led in later years to the division of the Ansai school into two major branches, one Confucian and one Shintō.
Bibliography
An introduction in English to Yamazaki Ansai's major ideas can be found in Okada Takehiko's "Yamazaki Ansai," in Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York, 1979). For an account of the ideological orientation of his school, see Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructions, 1570–1680 (Princeton, N. J., 1985). Bitō Masahide's Nihon hōken shisōshi kenkyū (Tokyo, 1961) presents an incisive treatment of Ansai's place in the development of Tokugawa thought and of the points where Ansai diverges from Zhu Xi.
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