Confucian Values and Popular Zen: Sekimon Shingaku in Eighteenth-Century Japan - Hardcover

Sawada, Janine Anderson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0824814142 ISBN 13: 9780824814144

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press, 1993

Synopsis

A study of Shingaku, a popular religious teaching in early modern Japan that selectively combined elements of Neo-Confucianism and Zen. Especially notes its mystical and moral elements to show that it was more than a facile merchant ethic. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Although East Asian religion is commonly characterized as "syncretic", the historical interaction of Buddhist, Confucian, and other traditions is often neglected by scholars of mainstream religious thought. In this thought-provoking study, Janine Sawada moves beyond conventional approaches to the history of Japanese religion by analyzing the ways in which Neo-Confucianism and Zen formed a popular synthesis in early modern Japan. She shows how Shingaku, a teaching founded by merchant Ishida Baigan, blossomed after his death into a widespread religious movement that selectively combined ideas and practices from these traditions. Drawing on new research into original Shingaku sources, Sawada challenges the view that the teaching was a facile "merchant ethic" by illuminating the importance of Shingaku mystical experience and its intimate relation to moral cultivation in the program developed by Baigan's successor, Teshima Toan. This book also suggests the need for an approach to the history of Japanese education that accounts for the informal transmission of ideas as well as institutional schooling. Shingaku contributed to the development of Japanese education by effectively disseminating moral and religious knowledge on a large scale to the less-educated sectors of Tokugawa society. Sawada interprets the popularity of the movement as part of a general trend in early modern Japan in which ordinary people sought forms of learning that could be pursued in the context of daily life.

About the Author:

Janine Anderson Sawada is currently assistant professor of religion at Grinnell College.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0824814142
• ISBN 13: 9780824814144
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256