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Rh along with other products of Chinese civilisation, the Confucian philosophy lay dormant during the Middle Ages, the period of the supremacy of Buddhism. It awoke with a start in the early part of the seventeenth century, when Ieyasu, the great warrior, ruler and patron of learning, caused the Confucian Classics to be printed in Japan for the first time. During the two hundred and fifty years that followed, the whole intellect of the country was moulded by Confucian ideas. Confucius himself had, it is true, laboured for the establishment of a centralised monarchy. But his main doctrine of unquestioning submission to rulers and parents fitted in perfectly with the feudal ideas of Old Japan; and the conviction of the paramount importance of such subordination lingers on as an element of stability, in spite of the recent social cataclysm which has involved Japanese Confucianism, properly so-called, in the ruin of all other Japanese institutions.

The most eminent Japanese names among the Confucianists are Itō Jinsai and his son, Otō Togai, at Kyōto; Aral Hakuseki, and Ogyū Sorai at Yedo. All four flourished about the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. They were merely expositors. No Japanese had the originality—it would have been hooted down as impious audacity—to develop the Confucian system further, to alter or amend it. There are not even any Japanese translations or commentaries worth reading. The Japanese have, for the most part, rested content with reprinting the text of the Classics themselves, and also the text of the principal Chinese commentators (especially that of Shushi, 朱子), pointed with diacritical marks to facilitate their perusal by Japanese students. The Chinese Classics thus edited formed the chief vehicle of every boy's education from the seventeenth century until the remodelling of the system of public instruction on European lines after the revolution of 1868. At present they have fallen into almost total neglect, though phrases and allusions borrowed from them still pass current in literature, and even to some extent in the language of every-day life. Seidō, the great temple of Confucius in Tōkyō, is now utilised as an Educational Museum.