Confucianism 【儒教】

Confucianism owes its basic orientation largely to Kong Qiu (K'ung Ch'iu), a teacher and philosopher of the Zhou (Chou) dynasty (1027 BC−256 BC). Confucius, as he is known in the West, wished to restore the hierarchical but harmonious feudal society he believed to have existed at the beginning of the Zhou dynasty. This concern gave the tradition a generally conservative orientation, an element of protest against contemporary society, and an intense interest in political power and office. Confucius believed that the ideal social order should be achieved not by the enforcement of law but by the moral example of those in authority. Rulers should delegate power to officials chosen solely on the basis of their moral and intellectual capacities. The source of each individual's morality lay in filial piety, a child's respect for and obedience to its parents (in practice mainly to the father, for the tradition concerned itself rather little with women). Confucius taught further that men should study and cultivate themselves to become “superior men” (zhunzi or chun-tzu; J: kunshi). This ideal, held to be an end in itself, was characterized by knowledge of classical songs, ritual, and music and by such virtues as loyalty, uprightness, and moderation. Most important, however, was ren (jen; J: jin), a kind of benevolence or altruism. The humanism that these concerns suggest was reflected in Confucius's lack of interest in metaphysical or religious questions and in the rational temper of his thought.

Confucius called himself “a transmitter, not a creator,” and did not write original works. Tradition, however, ascribes to him the editing of the following texts: Yi jing (I ching; Book of Changes), basically a manual of divination; Shu jing (Shu ching; Book of Documents), a collection of historical works; Shi jing (Shih ching; Book of Songs), an anthology of early song texts; Li (Ritual), a ritual text no longer extant; and Chun qiu (Ch'un ch'iu; Spring and Autumn Annals), a brief history of Confucius's own state of Lu. With these were later grouped the Lun yu (Lun yü; Analects), a collection of sayings by Confucius and his disciples; the Xiao jing (Hsiao ching; Classic of Filial Piety); and a number of commentaries and ritual compendia including the influential Li ji (Li chi; Record of Ritual). These texts constituted the Confucian canon, and their study was a basic commitment of Confucians in all times and places.

After his death, followers of Confucius suffered persecution under the despotic Qin (Ch'in) dynasty (221 BC−206 BC). Under the succeeding Han dynasty (206 BC−AD 220) Confucianism entered its long ascendancy in China. The principle of Confucian meritocracy was institutionalized in 124 BC when a state college staffed by doctors of the Confucian classics and a system of written examinations for appointment to the state bureaucracy were established. During the Han, Confucius himself became the object of a state cult of sacrifices and worship. At the same time, a detailed cosmology was developed according to which the universe was seen as an organic structure under the control of Heaven and composed of the two forces of yin (negative) and yang (positive) and the five elements. Man, particularly the ruler, played a pivotal role as mediator between Heaven and the natural order. It was the ruler's function to instruct his subjects to conform to Confucian precepts; according to his success or failure, Heaven responded with auspicious events, portents, or visitations. This system gave rise to a school of divination and a body of literature that dealt with directional taboos and calendrical superstitions. Known as yinyang dao (yin-yang tao; J: Ommyōdō), this system was only tenuously Confucian and indeed contrary to the rational spirit of Confucius's teaching, yet it exercised great influence on the lives of the Chinese and later of the Japanese.

Confucianism was transmitted to the kingdoms of Korea during the course of the 4th century. Tradition claims that from there it was introduced to Japan with the arrival from the Korean state of Paekche (J: Kudara) in 404 and 405, respectively, of the Korean scholars who are known in Japan as Achiki and Wani. The increasing centralization of Japanese society from the late 6th century created a climate particularly favorable to Confucianism. From the reign of the empress Suiko (r 593−628), the tradition is closely linked with the development of the Japanese state. It was not, however, its exclusive official ideology, for the Japanese court, like its Chinese model, remained ideologically pluralist.

The opening of diplomatic relations with the Chinese Sui dynasty (589−618) and its successor the Tang (T'ang) dynasty (618−907) created a more direct path for the transmission of Confucianism to Japan. From 608, students were included in the Japanese missions to China, and men such as Minabuchi no Shōan (fl early 7th century) and the scholar-monk Sōmin (d 653), who spent many years in China, spread Confucian ideas on their return. Some were closely involved in the Taika Reform of the second half of the 7th century, and there is little doubt that their Confucian ideas played an important role in this sustained attempt by the Japanese court to emulate the style and institutions of the centralized bureaucracy of Tang China. To the extent that the latter was a Confucian state, therefore, the conduct and institutions of government in Japan now also assumed a Confucian coloring. Although the Tang Confucian state ritual program was apparently not adopted in full, Japanese emperors assumed the Confucian stance of moral responsibility for the welfare of their subjects, enjoined Confucian values on their officials, and issued decrees proclaiming the importance of ritual propriety for the maintenance of social order. The ritsuryō system of administration (the word ritsuryō refers to penal and administrative codes) established during this period also shows Confucian influence in its underlying assumption that government is moral in purpose. Still, the ritsuryō lawmakers appear to have balked at the full-scale Confucianization of Japanese society, and there were several departures from the Chinese model.

The most conspicuous and sustained Confucian influence in ancient Japan was in the field of state-sponsored education. Here the Japanese attempted to reproduce the Chinese system of metropolitan and provincial schools and state examinations designed to provide Confucian-educated personnel for the bureaucracy. As established under the ritsuryō codes, the Daigakuryō, a university, was a department of the Shikibushō (Ministry of Ceremonial). Its academic staff included one doctor and two assistant doctors of the Confucian classics. The curriculum was devoted to these classics and followed the Tang model. Students selected texts for study from a list of seven classics with prescribed commentaries by Han or post-Han Chinese scholars. In addition, all studied the Analects and the Classic of Filial Piety. Study appears to have been rigidly formalized and to have stressed memorization. Outside the capital, kokugaku (provincial schools) modeled on the metropolitan university were officially prescribed for each province. The curriculum probably resembled that of the university. Graduates could proceed to the university for further study or take the state examinations for admission to court rank and office in the Ministry of Ceremonial.

Such, in outline, were the institutions of Confucian learning prescribed under the early-8th-century codes. Had they functioned ideally, they might have made Confucian learning the basic qualification for bureaucratic office and realized the principle of Confucian meritocracy.From the beginning, however, there were serious obstacles. First, it was a long time before the university or the provincial schools even began to approach their prescribed strength. Second, the restricted social basis for admission effectively excluded a truly meritocratic standard of recruitment to the bureaucracy through the system. Confucian education, therefore, did not become in Japan, as it did in Tang China, an important path to highest office. The university functioned instead to train middle- and lower-ranking officials whom birth normally denied high rank and office. Finally, in Japanese society at large, Confucianism never seriously challenged Buddhism as the dominant religious or intellectual persuasion. It was mainly to Buddhism that the Nara government looked for ideological support, and even officers of the Confucian Daigakuryō seem to have embraced it as their private faith.

By the early 10th century, the general decay of the ritsuryō system was well advanced. Confucianism, as yet shallowly rooted in Japan, rapidly declined into a remote and formal pursuit. The meritocratic ideal of Confucian education was undermined by the growth within the university of semiprivate halls (bessō) devoted to the interests of particular families, such as the Kangakuin of the Fujiwara family. Hereditary occupation of academic office became established, and, from the 11th century, university posts were virtually monopolized by a few court families. Moreover, Buddhism increasingly penetrated the university. The standard of examination, believed hitherto to have been high, also declined. Examination questions were leaked, and, from the 11th century, many students passed merely on the recommendation of an unqualified dignitary.

The state-sponsored Confucianism of the Tang dynasty and of ancient Japan had tended to stress the institutional and ritual aspects of the tradition. During the Song (Sung) dynasty (960−1279) in China, however, Confucianism underwent a revival and development known as Neo-Confucianism, and it was in this form that it was destined to become most widely studied in Japan from the 13th or 14th century. There were two main schools of Neo-Confucianism. The more important is known as the Cheng-Zhu (Ch'eng-Chu) school. In Japanese it is usually referred to as Shushigaku (the Zhu Xi school). This was a dualistic system of thought centered on the concepts of “principle” (li; J: ri) and “ether” or “material force” (qi or ch'i; J: ki). Principle was the organizing, rationally accessible category that governed the properties of things and the course of events. It was permanent, good, and unchanging and was endowed in man as his nature. This nature, however, could be obscured by the quality of the material force, the physical component of man's makeup and of the world. It was man's task to purify his qi by a number of techniques, including objective study of principle itself and subjective introspection. Zhu Xi Neo-Confucianism was admirably suited to a conservative order and was established as the official orthodoxy in China, having become the basis for the civil service examinations by 1314.

The second school of Neo-Confucianism reached maturity only in the Ming dynasty (1368−1644). It is usually known in Japan as the Yangming (J: Yōmei) school (see Yōmeigaku) after the cognomen of its leading thinker, Wang Yangming (1472−1529). Wang deplored what he considered the unpractical and academic emphasis of the Zhu Xi system. He reformulated Neo-Confucian doctrine as a monistic idealism in which the mind contained all things and was itself principle (li). Wang thus rejected the objective study of principle and substituted subjective intuition as the standard of moral action. Wang's system, because of its activism, subjectivity, and concern with internal motivation rather than adherence to external norms, held a potential appeal for those dissatisfied with the status quo, especially in times of rapid change.

The date of the arrival of Neo-Confucian doctrines in Japan is uncertain, but it was in the Zen Buddhist community (see Gozan) rather than among the traditional Kyōto court Confucian families that they first took root. Zen monks saw in Neo-Confucianism a useful secular complement to their own religious teachings, of particular value in their relations with political leaders. This eclecticism set the tone for the Confucianism of the Kamakura (1185−1333) and Muromachi (1333−1568) periods, and there came into being a type of Buddhist-Confucian monk known as a jusō. The first century of the Muromachi period saw a continuation of the activity of jusō and the subordination of Confucianism to Buddhism. At the same time, syncretism between Neo-Confucianism and Shintō was also explored by such scholars as Ichijō Kaneyoshi and Yoshida Kanetomo, who founded schools of thought that survived into the Edo period.

The establishment of the Tokugawa peace made the world-denying assumptions of Buddhism less attractive and heightened interest in questions of society and of government. Confucianism was equipped to meet this concern at many levels. Its ideal society was in many respects congruent with the feudal order of Tokugawa Japan. Samurai, whom peace caused increasingly to assume the role of bureaucrats, could derive a moral raison d'être from the gentlemen-officials of the Confucian ideal. Increased wealth, leisure, and use of printing made the tradition ever more widely accessible. Japanese Confucian scholarship and thought achieved genuine creativity, and the Edo period became the golden age of the tradition in Japan.

Confucianism was accorded official recognition under the third Tokugawa shōgun, Iemitsu (r 1623−51), and its position was further improved under the fifth shōgun, Tsunayoshi (r 1680−1709), himself a keen student of the tradition. During the reigns of the next two shōguns, however, Confucian influence was exercised less on an institutional basis than through the personal efforts of the scholar Arai Hakuseki. The eighth shōgun, Yoshimune (r 1716−45), encouraged diffusion of Confucian teachings among the non-samurai urban population. He also employed Confucian advisers such as Muro Kyūsō and the brilliant Ogyū Sorai.

Shogunate patronage of Neo-Confucianism underwent an important development during the period of the Kansei Reforms (1787−93). Ideological uniformity was imposed in 1790 by prohibiting all but Cheng-Zhu teachings (the so-called Kansei prohibition on heterodoxy). An official college known as the Shōheizaka Gakumonjo (see Shōheikō), designed to train shogunal administrators, was founded a few years later. Examinations based on a Cheng-Zhu syllabus were now conducted every three years (from 1818 every five years). For the first time since the failure of the ancient Daigakuryō, Confucian learning could be considered a formal preparation for government service. In the late Edo period the shogunate also established special schools for commoners in shogunal lands and supported lectures by representatives of popular religious movements, such as Shingaku, which had a strong Confucian component.

The most conspicuous Confucian institutions of the Edo period were the official domain schools (hankō). The majority of the staff of the domain schools were Confucian scholars, and the curriculum placed great weight on the study of Confucian texts. Samurai who did not attend domain schools might go to private institutions, often run by a single Confucian scholar who usually employed the Confucian classics as his texts. By 1870 there were some 1,400 such schools in Japan. The non-samurai social classes were less well provided with the opportunity for Confucian study. Some 17 domains, however, are known to have admitted commoners into their schools. Moreover, Confucian ethics, particularly filial piety, were an element in terakoya (village school) education, whose main purpose was the inculcation of basic literacy among commoners. It has been estimated that, by 1868, some 43 percent of boys and 10 percent of girls attended some form of school. All of these would probably have been exposed at least to the main Confucian ethical concepts.

The effect of this wide diffusion of Confucian teaching is difficult to gauge. It is clear, however, that there were important limitations to the penetration of Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan, when compared with Buddhism or Shintō. Religious practices remained largely Buddhist or Shintō, and the number of Buddhist publications greatly outnumbered the Confucian. Furthermore, the basic structure of Japanese society was not radically modified by Confucianism. Confucian meritocracy made undramatic progress against the predominantly hereditary occupation system. The samurai were not dissuaded from their martial values by Confucian civilian ideals, and the Japanese kinship system remained to a large extent unaltered by Confucian norms. The native system of ethical values, too, although many of its concepts assumed Confucian names, retained much of its indigenous character. However, the conservative, hierarchical, and harmonistic emphases of Confucianism certainly exerted an integrating and stabilizing influence at many levels and in many areas of Edo-period life, especially in the intellectual life of the period.

Traditional accounts divide Tokugawa Confucianism into four phases, in each of which a seminal thinker developed or reinterpreted the ideas of a particular school of thought. The first phase spanned the 17th century, but its ideas also found adherents throughout the remainder of the period. Its dominating assumption was that the Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming dynasties was broadly congruent with the realities of Japanese society. Two important schools emerged in the Cheng-Zhu tradition. The Kyōgakuha school, founded by Fujiwara Seika and whose most prominent scholar was Hayashi Razan, developed under Razan the medieval tradition of syncretism between Neo-Confucianism and Shintō. The Kimon Gakuha (Yamazaki school), founded by Yamazaki Ansai, emphasized a “reverence” (tsutsushimi), and its insistence on the loyalty owed by subjects to their ruler was to exert influence on the imperial loyalists of the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The first important exponent of the doctrines of Wang Yangming was Nakae Tōju.His most influential disciple was Kumazawa Banzan, whose rational and humanitarian views on administrative and economic issues laid the foundation for much of the Confucian social and economic thought of the Edo period.

The second phase began in the mid-17th century, when thinkers began to find an incongruity between their own experience and sense of the needs of contemporary society and what they felt to be the static, contemplative emphasis of Neo-Confucianism. These men rejected much of the Neo-Confucian system of metaphysics and self-cultivation and advocated a return to what they held to be pristine Confucianism. They are often grouped together under the name of Kogakuha (School of Ancient Learning; see Kogaku). The earliest major figure in this tradition is Yamaga Sokō, who advocated regulation of society less by self-cultivation in the manner of orthodox Neo-Confucianism than by the external restraints of rituals and codes of conduct. His detailed prescriptions for samurai became known as bushidō (the Way of the warrior). Another critic of Neo-Confucianism was Itō Jinsai, who taught a practical ethics based on benevolence, loyalty, and faithfulness. His rejection of Neo-Confucianism was consolidated and given a political thrust by Ogyū Sorai, who urged rigorous philological study of the classics to enable an adaptation of the institutions created by the ancient sage-kings of China to the ordering of contemporary society.

The third phase of Tokugawa Confucian thought, which spanned the 18th century and beyond, was complex and even confused. Several trends can be identified. A tendency toward rationality and empiricism is seen in a number of thinkers, mainly in the Cheng-Zhu tradition, such as Kaibara Ekiken. In response to the sectarian spirit occasioned by Sorai's attack on the Cheng-Zhu system, the Setchūgakuha (Eclectic school) drew on Chinese exegetical studies and the philological approach of Sorai. Arising from the Kansei prohibition on heterodoxy of 1790, the Cheng-Zhu school underwent a revival and came to form the conceptual basis for early Japanese attempts to understand Western science. Yet another trend was the reformulation of Confucian doctrines syncretically with Shintō and Buddhism. The popular Shingaku (Heart Learning) movement founded by Ishida Baigan in the early 18th century exemplifies this development, and it gained many adherents among townsmen. Its rural counterpart, the Hōtoku (Repayment of Virtue) movement led by the peasant teacher Ninomiya Sontoku, flourished in the 19th century.

The final phase of Edo Confucian thought coincided with the quickening of intellectual life that took place against the background of the challenge of the West and the decline of shogunal power. One theme was an increased, if largely private, interest in the teachings of Wang Yangming, whose combination of activism and subjectivity was attractive in a time of intellectual and political turbulence. The most conspicuous trend, however, was the reemergence, with an intensified element of national feeling, of the ancient synthesis of Confucianism, Shintō, and imperial ideology. The chief origin of this trend was among the Mito school, which compiled the Dai Nihon shi (1657−1906, History of Great Japan), whose emphasis on loyalty, particularly toward the emperor, attained prominence in the first half of the 19th century. Similar loyalist and nationalist feeling was expressed in Nihon gaishi (ca 1836, Unofficial History of Japan) by the Confucian historian Rai San'yō. Such proimperial and antiforeign rhetoric was widely influential and inspired imperial restoration activists such as Yoshida Shōin. Not all Confucian thinkers of the time, however, accepted the antiforeign views that were inspired by the Mito school. Men such as Sakuma Shōzan, a military scientist and Cheng-Zhu thinker, and Yokoi Shōnan tried to assimilate the implications of Western science and civilization within a Confucian metaphysical framework.

From one point of view the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the establishment of the new bureaucratic state may be interpreted as a long-delayed realization of Confucian meritocracy. For many Japanese, however, the opening of Japan to massive Western influence must have shattered the cogency and integrity of the traditional Confucian world view. After a brief initial period during which the restorationists attempted to model the Japanese state on the Confucian-inspired institutions of the early 8th century, a reaction took place. The shogunal college and most of the domain schools were refounded as Western-style institutions or abolished within a few years of the Restoration. Confucianism, however, had by now become so well established that its influence was likely to persist, even if only in fragmented form. That it reasserted itself so soon was in no small degree due to the influence on the Meiji emperor (r 1867−1912) of his Confucian preceptor Motoda Nagazane and to the advocacy of the philosopher and educator Nishimura Shigeki, who attempted a synthesis of Confucian metaphysics with Western thought. The culmination of their efforts, the influential Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890, expressed a combination of Shintō tradition concerning the imperial dynasty with a Confucian view of the duties of his subjects. In this way, the survival into modern times of the Mito fusion of Confucian ethics with national tradition was secured.

The deterioration of both the domestic and the international situations by the early 1930s provided a receptive atmosphere for this synthesis of nationalism with Confucianism. From about 1933, Confucian ideas were seen as a means for achieving the ideological mobilization of the nation, and the promotion of Confucianism was an essential feature of both domestic and foreign policy. The most notable example of this was the Kokutai no hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Polity of Japan) of 1937, which presents the emperor as a ruler in the Confucian style and enjoins loyalty, filial piety, harmony, and diligent industry upon the Japanese people.

Following defeat in World War II, however, the Japanese once more turned their backs on their Confucian heritage. In recent years, however, there have been signs of a modest revival of interest. Popular studies of the Confucian classics continue to be published, and the Analects are still quoted in speeches on such occasions as graduation days. Although echoes of prewar Confucianism may still occasionally be heard, this new interest in the tradition seems usually to be free of explicitly nationalist sentiments.