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Confucian Thought during the Tokugawa Period
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Bito, Masahide |
| Copyright Year | 1984 |
| Abstract | At the beginning of the Tokugawa Period (1603-1868 A.D.), the School of Chu Hsi was respected as the orthodox school of Confucianism. However, from the middle of the 17th century, questions and criticism were raised by Nakae Toju, Yamaga Soko, Ito Jinsai and Ogyu Sorai, all of whom attempted to establish new theories. Although their theories refiected various other differences, they shared one common attitude or approach in that they all tried to deny the most basic proposition in the school of Chu Hsi, "HSing is Li". (Hging is original or true nature of the human heart, and li are moral rules or their original principles governing one's mode of social living.) To say these two are identical means that moral principles are inherent in the true nature of man; therefore people innately possess the ability to judge behavior as morally sound or not on the basis of the original nature of their hearts. Different though they were in their tenets, what was common to all the abovementioned scholars is that they denied this basic proposition of the Chu Hsi School. This denial seems to be related to a fundamental diffk)rence between the Chinese and Japanese family system. Whereas the Chinese family is purely a, paternal kinship organization, the ie as a unit of social organization in Japan is not always based on true kinship, but rather displays the characteristics of a fictive corporate organization formed to preserve a family name by artificially insuring the succession to family business so as to maintain its prosperity. A person does not qualify as a member of society just by being born into a family. Rather he can become a fu11 member of society only after achieving a proper position in an ie structure. In China, on the other hand, a boy born into a family automatically receives the rights and obligations of a family member. These become the basis of his social activities, and it is up to each person individually to choose an area of activity. This difierence is probably one of the reasons why the Japanese have lacked a concept of individual morality and why the theory of Chu Hsi, which forwarded this characteristic ofindividualism, met resistance in Japan. Japanese scholars imbued with the notion of ie as an integral group, and the state as an aggregate of ie, sought to explain the true basis of morality lies in role performance within such units. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://minpaku.repo.nii.ac.jp/index.php?action=pages_view_main&active_action=repository_action_common_download&attribute_id=18&block_id=21&file_no=1&item_id=3374&item_no=1&page_id=13 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
