Abstract
This essay explores the thought of Andō Shōeki vis-à-vis interpretive fields broader than those of Japanese intellectual traditions by contextualizing Shōeki’s ideas in relation to several ancient Chinese works pertinent to in-depth understandings of the theoretical foundations of his thought. These texts help illuminate why Shōeki’s writings achieved such cultural broadcast as they did in his day and thereafter. These works reveal that many of the more memorable themes in Shōeki’s writings resonated with larger East Asian patterns of thought, making Shōeki not simply an important Japanese thinker but one of considerable standing in East Asian philosophical history.
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Notes
- 1.
In his survey chapter on Shōeki, Watanabe notes that a Kyoto publisher, Ogawa Genbei, published Shōeki’s Shizen shin’eidō in 1753 and that a “later printing, with minor variations exists, so it would appear that the work met with a certain degree of response at the time.”
- 2.
Naramoto Tatsuya 奈良本辰也, (1966–1967), early on provided a kakikudashi, or Japanese transcription of the kanbun (Sino-Japanese) text, into Japanese.
- 3.
Published by the Nōsangyoson bunka kyōkai 農山漁村文化協會.
- 4.
The text referred to herein is a digital version Abe, 1958, published by Aozora bunko (http://www.aozora.gr.jp/), 2005, pp. 1–57.
- 5.
Koyasu Nobukuni suggests that Norman wasn’t simply interpreting Shōeki in light of his own times. He adds that Norman moreover misread Shōeki’s texts in the process (Koyasu 2011, 124–125).
- 6.
For example, Ryūsaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene (eds.), Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume 1 (1957), includes no mention of Shōeki. The second edition of Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume 2: 1600–2000 pp. 416–424, does include a brief section on Shōeki, but curiously situates him in the chapter, “Eighteenth-Century Rationalism.” More recently, Shōeki has received positive attention from other important scholars (see Najita 1993).
- 7.
A Soviet scholar, I.B. Radul-Zatulovskiĭ authored a Russian language study of Shōeki, Ando Sëėki, filosof, materialist XVIII veka (1961), interpreting Shōeki as a materialist philosopher. While Shōeki does emphasize a “unitary generative force” (ikki 一氣), Radul-Zatulovskiĭ’s agenda is Marxist and so represents yet another reading of Shōeki that reflects the interpreter’s agenda as much as the object of study.
- 8.
Also see W. J. Boot on the question of whether Shōeki has been rightfully forgotten. In a review of Yasunaga’s book, Andō Shōeki, Boot states, “What Shōeki wrote is impassioned, interesting, and sometimes fun to read, but not important, for the simple reason that Shōeki had few disciples, and never founded a school; in his last years he created some commotion in his native village, but that subsided after his death […]. And then he vanished from the scene, to make a reappearance in a second-hand bookshop only in 1899.” (Boot 1995).
- 9.
Also see Watanabe Hiroshi, “Anti-Urban Utopianism: The Thought of Andō Shōeki” (2012). With his chapter on Shōeki as one of the important thinkers of the Tokugawa, Watanabe’s study of Tokugawa and Meiji intellectual history adds credibility and momentum to the notion that Shōeki’s thinking be included in any basic narrative of modern Japanese intellectual history.
- 10.
The English translation of Watanabe’s A History of Japanese Political Thought offers a different translation, “The Way of the Operation of the Self-Acting Truth.” Watanabe bases his translation on a reading of shizen as “self-acting, spontaneously doing” (2012, 199–201). The rendition offered herein follows Shōeki’s fuller textual explanation recognizing shizen 自然 as hitori suru 自り然する, but then explaining hitori suru in terms of the five processes, advancing and retreating, and authenticity.
- 11.
Watanabe does not interpret Shōeki’s use of language in this way. Referring to Shōeki’s philosophical writings, he states, “All of these works were rendered in an idiosyncratic variant of classical Chinese modified to correspond more closely to Japanese word order and grammatical usage, and copiously annotated to indicate intended readings. This was likely the result not only of a poor command of classical Chinese, but also of a conscious indifference to stylistic elegance.” Watanabe, Japanese Political Thought, p. 199. Later, Watanabe does allow that Shōeki’s writings were “full of neologisms and unusual expressions” because he “felt this was the only way to express truths long concealed from mankind” (2012, p. 201). This study shows, however, that Shōeki’s claims were not entirely original.
- 12.
According to Watanabe, in Shōeki’s “‘self-acting world’ there are no written characters, no books, and no scholars.” (Watanabe 2012, 209).
- 13.
While the parallels between Shōeki’s thought and that of the Zhuangzi might seem obvious, Watanabe does not recognize it. Instead Watanabe seemingly accepts Shōeki’s claim that his ideas were “as yet unknown and unspoken by the ancient sages, Shakyamuni, Laozi, Zhuangzi, doctors, sibyls, buddhas, wisemen, or scholars.” Watanabe adds “His work did not derive from the teachings of any master, nor did he come to his knowledge from ancient books” (Watanabe 2012, 200).
- 14.
Translation adopted from Watson, trans., The Complete Works of the Chuang Tzu. Jacques Joly (2014) explores similar themes in Shōeki’s thought and that of the Zhuangzi.
- 15.
Similar analyses of the Zhuangzi are in Fukunaga Mitsuji 福永光司, Sōshi gaihen 莊子:外篇, Chūgoku kotensen, vol. 8 (Fukunaga 1966, 3–16). Speculation about various layers of authorship in the Zhuangzi have circulated among Chinese scholars since the Han dynasty.
- 16.
Watanabe notes that Shōeki allowed for the possibility of a “right man” (seijin 正人), in the future who might appear as “a ruler of human society” (Watanabe 2012). It is also noteworthy that Confucians referred to ideal rulers as “sage” (seijin 聖人) rulers; Shōeki uses the same reading, seijin, but alters (corrects?) the first character 聖 with another 正, indicating “right,” “righteous,” but also “correcting” and “rectifying.” Shōeki’s “right man” would reportedly “correct human behavior” so that the “World of Law” could become “the world of Living Truth, where all engage in Right Cultivation.” Clearly part of this process involves correcting language.
- 17.
For a gender-based reading of this passage in Mencius, see Birdwhistell 2007.
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Tucker, J.A. (2018). Andō Shōeki’s Agrarian Utopianism: An East Asian Philosophical Contextualization. In: Thompson, P., Thompson, K. (eds) Agricultural Ethics in East Asian Perspective. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92603-2_4
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