Compasses and Carpenter's Squares: a Study of Ito Jinsai (1627-1705) and Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) (Japan).

Abstract

This is a study of two Japanese Confucian thinkers, Ito Jinsai (1627-1705) and Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728), and their creation of a new Confucian discourse. Using their often neglected minor writings and letters, as well as their more famous works, this study considers Jinsai's and Sorai's new discourse in relation to their personalities and personal histories, including their childhood, youth, and middle years. It demonstrates that the important ideas Jinsai presented in his later writings were not formulated in vacuo but rather were the product of his early attempts at realizing virtue through quiet-sitting and his eventual discovery of a more dynamic and less solitary method of self-cultivation, his alienation and subsequent reconciliation with his family and friends, and his later success as a teacher and scholar. Similarly, it suggests that Sorai's acute awareness of his family's warrior origins, his rural adolescence, his years as a house Confucian, and his deep personal faith in Heaven all had a greater determinative impact on his famous later works than has so far been realized. The new discourse advanced by Jinsai and Sorai is also examined in the light of both the continuing development of Neo-Confucian philosophy and enduring Confucian values, practices, and institutions. Jinsai and Sorai were, after all, Confucian scholars caught up in the doctrinal controversies that divided the growing community of Japanese Confucians and were responding to the new varieties of Neo-Confucianism brought to Japan from China and Korea. In addition, they were keenly aware of the larger and older Confucian tradition, and their call for a return to the classical Confucian texts and a revival of what they believed were the original teachings of Confucianism must been seen in these terms. This study also notes some of the affinities between the philosophies of Jinsai and Sorai and the new urban culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and suggests that much of what Jinsai and Sorai wrote reflects their respective milieu and periods. What this study argues, then, is that the new discourse created by Jinsai and Sorai was the product of individual crises, experiences, and concerns as well as larger forces and influences, all of which must be considered if one is to underst and how they came to formulate the new discourse and why their doing so is important.