Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/156

 had a common text-book, the philosophy of Chu: the difference between them was purely one of locality. The first departure from this philosophy was made by the celebrated Nakaye Tōju (1605–1678), who, as already stated, took for guide another Chinese philosopher, Wang Yang-ming. This man's influence was very large. People spoke of him as the "saint of Omi;" he had a multitude of disciples whose lives illustrated the value of his teaching; his school was known as the "Kōseisha," because he resided on the west (sei) of Omi lake (kō), and he numbered among his followers Kumazawa Banzan, one of the most practical and outspoken philosophers of any era. This was the man who, as described in a previous chapter, in an hour when military feudalism was at its zenith and when the nation's dread of political Christianity had become absorbing, preached openly that the samurai were bandits subsisting on unearned incomes, and that Christianity should be suffered to stand or fall on its own merits. The contemporaneous existence of three schools—the "metropolitan," the "southern," and the "lake"—two of which were opposed to the third, produced a result analogous to that caused by contact with the warring sects of Christianity at the close of the nineteenth century: an eclectic school sprang up (1685) under the presidency of Kinoshita Junwan, who numbered among his disciples the celebrated Arai Hakuseki, statesman, philosopher,