Reexamining the Sinosphere: Transmissions and Transformations in ...

Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇齋 (1619–1682) was a particularly ardent advocate of Zhu Xi’s brand of Neo-Confucianism. Although eclectic in his embrace of Shinto beliefs, and not entirely averse to Cheng Yi’s brand of Neo-Confucianism, he nonetheless vehemently opposed the fusion of Zhu Xi’s and Cheng Yi’s commentaries, vigorously championing the former’s more eclectic approach to the Yijing in two well-known works: Ekikyō hongi taikō 易經本義大綱 (A summary of the basic meaning of the Classic of Changes) and Shu Eki engi 朱易衍義 (The extended meaning of Zhu Xi’s Changes). Significantly, in the eighteenth century the Tokugawa authorities adopted this latter work as the official version of the classic.

A fascinating feature of Ansai’s thought is that, although he was a fierce and persistent critic of the Korean scholar Yi T’oegye’s Chuyŏk gyemong chŏnui 易學啓蒙伝疑 (My doubts about commentaries on the Introduction to the Study of the Changes), Abe Yoshio has argued convincingly that some of Ansai’s ideas seem clearly to have been inspired by T’oegye.¹⁶ Similarly, despite long-standing prejudices, it is clear that at least some Korean (and Chinese) scholars were impressed and influenced by Japanese scholarship.¹⁷

Kaibara Ekken 貝原益軒 (1630–1714), a student of Ansai in his early years, used the Yijing to critique Zhu Xi’s mainstream idea that a dualistic distinction existed between the “principle” (li 理) of a given category of things, from human beings to trees to inanimate objects, and the “material force” (qi 氣) of which an individual thing was constituted. Zhu maintained, for instance, that what Mencius 孟子 (372–289 BCE) considered to be the original good nature of all humans (i.e., their “principle”) could be obscured in individual cases by an impure or unbalanced endowment of qi. Ekken argued, however, that the Yijing itself never distinguished between the two, and thus Zhu Xi was wrong to dichotomize them. As I will show, a number of other East Asian thinkers—Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese—also rejected Zhu’s idea of a liqi duality, arguing that there was no principle apart from material force and, thus, no evil inherent in qi.