HAYASHI RAZAN (1583–1657), also commonly referred to as Hayashi Dōshun; Japanese Confucian thinker of the early Tokugawa period. Hayashi Razan was born and raised in Kyoto as the scion of a family of samurai turned urban merchants. He was sent as a child to study at Kenninji, a Zen temple, but he resisted suggestions that he become a priest. Instead, from his mid-teens he committed himself to the study of Confucianism and Chinese secular learning. He began his career as a Confucian in 1603 at the age of twenty-one by conducting public lectures on the Analects of Confucius as explicated by the Chinese Song Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi. In this manner Razan sought to establish Zhu Xi Neo-Confucianism as a public teaching independent of both the hermetic traditions of medieval scholarship and the Zen-accented Confucianism that flourished in the major Zen temples of the Muromachi period. Toward...