Japanese Neo-Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai studied

Author: Wang Qing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: Daiso Kurai (1666-1728) was a Confucian scholar in the middle period of the Edo era (1600-1867) in Japan. His family name was Murabito, his given name was Sou , and his sobriquet was Kurai, sometimes written as Kurai. He founded a school known as Sen'en Garden. Kurai was born in Edo, Japan. His father, Daiso Housan, was the personal physician of the fourth shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and later the fifth shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, meaning Kurai was the son of a vassal of a collateral branch of the ruling family. This gave him the opportunity to get close to the center of power later. Because doctors at the time were often versed in Confucianism, he received a Han Chinese education from his father from a young age. When Kurai was fourteen, his father, Housan, was exiled to the remote village of Honmotsu in Chiba Prefecture, Utsunomiya, due to slander. It was a desolate village near the sea. Kurai described how he spent his days there with fishermen and woodcutters, having no books for entertainment and no friends to talk with. He could only repeatedly read a copy of his father's "Commentary on the Great Learning" to pass the time. Kurai spent his youth in solitude and poverty until the fifth year of the Genroku era (1772), when he was twenty-five, his father was exonerated and the family returned to Edo. The author of this book believes that the study of the philosophical thought system of the Japanese Confucian scholar Kurai in academia has undoubtedly been influenced by the model of "Neo-Confucianism = Feudalism" and "Kurai School = Anti-Neo-Confucianism = Modern Thought" constructed by the renowned Japanese historian of political thought, Maruyama Masao, in his work "Studies in the Political Thought of Japan." The author of this book explores a new path for Kurai studies by interpreting the vast and complex original works of Kurai. The author argues that Kurai's philosophy defines "the Way" as the collective term for political and economic systems created by historical sages. Although this negates the universality and eternity of "the Way," he did not do so to prove its historical and particularity but rather to attempt to eliminate the crisis of the Tokugawa regime by restoring and consolidating the feudal land ownership system eroded by the monetary economy. His critique of Neo-Confucianism was not to liberate human nature from the constraints of moral asceticism but to cultivate talent and strengthen the stability of the organic whole of the bakufu-shogunate system. The author has a new path for the study of Kurai.