36 Facts About Yamazaki Ansai

Yamazaki Ansai was a Japanese philosopher and scholar.

Yamazaki Ansai began his career as a Buddhist monk, but eventually came to follow the teachings of Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi.

Yamazaki Ansai combined Neo-Confucian ideas with Shinto to create Suika Shinto.

The decade following Tosa, Yamazaki Ansai lived, studied, and taught in Kyoto.

Yamazaki Ansai frequently went to Edo, to give lectures on Cheng-Zhu school of Neo-Confucianism in front of a large number of daimyos.

Yamazaki Ansai's lectures focused on Ansai's own, hand selected canon.

Yamazaki Ansai's canon consisted mostly of the classic Confucian writings that Zhu Xi had emphasized: the Elementary Learning, the Reflections on Things at Hand, and the Four Books.

In 1658, Yamazaki Ansai moved to Edo, where he spent the next 7 years of his life, continuing his studying of Neo-Confucian texts, as well as beginning his research on a never completed historiography of Japan.

Yamazaki Ansai accepted the position and spent the next seven years of his life as the personal teacher of Neo-Confucian philosophy to Masayuki.

For tutoring Masayuki for six out of the twelve months of the year, Yamazaki Ansai was given a salary of 100 gold ryo, two seasonal garments, and one haori coat.

Also, Yamazaki Ansai was able to receive the secret teachings of the Yoshida and Ise Shinto traditions, which he would use in attempting to reconstruct a "pure Shinto", that would reflect the Way of Neo-Confucianism.

In 1680, when Yamazaki Ansai put forth a radical re-interpretation of the Great Learning that defied traditional Confucian thought, he had a falling out with two of his best students, Sato Naokata and Asami Keisai, who could not accept Yamazaki Ansai's new interpretation.

In Neo Confucianism, Yamazaki Ansai had found the "Truth": the universal and eternal cosmic Way that could not be found in Buddhism.

Yamazaki Ansai's critique was based upon two, interconnected fallacies that he perceived in Buddhist thought.

Yamazaki Ansai blamed the influence of Buddhist thought for creating a false dichotomy between the two systems.

Yamazaki Ansai's teachings were seen to be part of a larger Neo-Confucian trend of the early Tokugawa period, referred to by Abe Yoshino as the rigaku.

In particular, Yamazaki Ansai believed he was a "faithful transmitter" of the writings of both Zhu Xi, and the Korean Neo-Confucian Yi T'oegye, with special emphasis on Zhu's teachings.

Yamazaki Ansai referred to such a process as the "plumbing of principle".

However, instead of focusing on the "plumbing of principle" Yamazaki Ansai believed in order to properly achieve meibun, what was primary was an attitude of reverence : steadiness of the mind and guarded behavior.

Since Zhu considered reverence to be the necessary precondition for the "plumbing of principle", Yamazaki Ansai believed that reverence was the essential element of Zhu's moral thought.

Yamazaki Ansai linked morality with the Five Evolutive phases, to show that not only are cosmic and moral principles natural and inevitable, but that they mutually influence one another.

Yamazaki Ansai stressed the Confucian concept of Great Learning, in which a person's actions extend outward toward the family, society, and finally to the cosmos.

However, of all of the relationships that Yamazaki Ansai emphasized, the relationship between the lord and vassal was the most important.

From his own experience, Yamazaki Ansai believed that certain Shinto customs and rituals reflected Confucian values.

Since Yamazaki Ansai believed in the ontological unity of everything, he believed that in the Shinto tradition, he could discover the Way, rooted in Japanese society.

From his interpretation of a passage from the Nihongi, where O-ana-muchi converses with his own spirit, Yamazaki Ansai believed that every person's body is a shrine, that houses a living spirit.

Yamazaki Ansai believed this to be analogous to the Confucian practice of self-cultivation.

Yamazaki Ansai believed that just as much as the emperor, the bakufu was part of the sacred political order.

However, Yamazaki Ansai believed that challenging political authority was paramount to disrupting the harmonic balance between heaven and man.

From Ooms' perspective, Yamazaki Ansai believed the Shinto texts he read to be records of historical facts.

Second, Yamazaki Ansai employs an allegorical interpretation of the text, by analogically equating symbols he found within Shinto texts as expressions of Confucian truths.

Third, Yamazaki Ansai interpreted the texts on a moral level, drawing ethical paradigms out of Shinto myths.

The last level was anagogical, whereby Yamazaki Ansai argued for the supremacy of the Japanese nation, using his own interpretations of Shinto texts.

Yamazaki Ansai was part of a larger movement in the early Tokugawa era that revived and helped proliferate Neo-Confucian thought in Japan.

Yamazaki Ansai was the first to introduce the writings of the Korean Neo-Confucian scholar Yi T'ogeye to Japan, and was instrumental in popularizing Zhu Xi's thought.

The institutions that Yamazaki Ansai had created did not last for very long.