Zhu Xi and “Zhu Xi-ism”: Toward a Critical Perspective on the Ansai School

Abstract

The present essay appears in a collection of Koyasu’s essays called Edo as Method. “Edo as method,” for Koyasu, means to critically trace modern Japan’s construction of the images of Edo thinkers in order to deconstruct the historical image of modern Japan constructed on the basis of “Edo”—thus also illuminating the meaning of Edo thought in its contemporary discursive context. In his critiques of Maruyama’s famous study of the Ansai school, Koyasu points out that in his interest in the ideas that helped construct Japan’s modern kokutai ideology, Maruyama virtually ignored the school’s “inward” dimensions of practice, self-cultivation, ritual and personal realization—including Ansai’s emphasis on the power of oral communication. Ansai was revered within the Kimon school as the one who had grasped the true meaning of the Dao transmitted by the sages, as the privileged narrator who knew the heart of the sages and could pass this meaning on to his disciples through the power of his lectures. This is why the Ansai school was able to indigenize the Confucian Way more completely than other schools of Zhu Xi learning, but this “indigenization” was really accomplished on the level of the “lordship of the mind” rather than the level of modern nationalist discourse. Koyasu also questions whether the whole schema of typologizing discourse through the polarity of “universalism” vs. “particularism” is appropriate for understanding the structure of pre-modern East Asian thought.