As mentioned recently, I’ve been reading certain articles from George J. Tanabe Jr’s Religions of Japan in Practice, including one about the sekimon shingaku (石門心学) movement in Japan. According to Janine Anderson Sawade, who wrote the particular essay, the movement arose during the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868) as a kind of “Neo-Confucianism for the masses”, but traces its ideas form the Chinese philosopher Mencius who posited that human nature was inherently good, but obscured by society’s negative influence, while humaneness and upright behavior restored the positive nature.
The Tokugawa-era Shingaku movement took the teachings of Mencius, the Song-Dynasty Neo-Confucianists as well as strong influences from Zen Buddhism to create a kind of popular teaching that was easy for semi-literate villagers to understand, since Confucian classics were in classical Chinese usually, and reformulated to family-friendly teachings. The gist of the teachings was discovering the original mind, alluded to by Mencius, but also taught in Zen Buddhism, that was inherently good and compassionate.
The teaching was characteristic of Asian culture, in its fusion of Confucian values, with Buddhism and Japanese Shinto, compared to Western culture which tends toward a “one-size fits all” or “this or that” approach to religion. The movement began with Ishida Baigan (1685-1744) and his successor Teshima Toan (1718-1786) but later a group of well-trained preachers traveled the country spreading the word. The most famous was Nakazawa Dōni (中沢道二 1725 – 1803). The article I mentioned above contained some sermons by Dōni, which I actually really enjoyed reading, so I wanted to share a couple with readers here. Here’s one Dōni gave describing a recent incident for him on a hot summer day, while cooling off on a chair:
At one point, a gutter-worm crawled up onto my chair and seemed to be struggling painfully for some reason; then a needlelike thing emerged from its back. While I was watching, this thing divided into two parts and became wings: the gutter-worm became a kind of dragonfly and, somehow or other flew off.
While I was marveling over nature’s handiwork, another gutter-worm crawled up. This one, too, had winglike forms on its back. It also struggled to open up the wings into two parts, but they didn’t separate. Then I had an idea. Thinking, “No fear, I’ll spread your wings for you in an instant,” I took a tooth pick out of my wallet and divided its wings for it. Then it appeared to fly up about a fathom, but suddenly it fell down into the water and died. All that trouble for nothing; it would have been better to leave things up to the will of the Buddha. I had simply been overeager and needlessly destroyed life.
Please think about everything from this perspective. None of us is able to wait for the right season. We force things because of our impatience. As a result, we end up bungling things in midcourse. (pg. 57)
Or another sermon here about the essential teachings of religion (here you can see strong Buddhist influences):
What is there outside the mind? As long as one has no desires, “this very mind is Buddha.” As soon as one removes delusion, one is instantly a perfect Buddha. All of the sutras are about the mind. The Amida Sutra, the Sutra on the Great Sun Buddha, the Lotus Sutra, and the Nirvana Sutra are not at all different from each other. They all teach that the mind is the most important thing.
What is called the Confucian Way is also about the mind; its books are a map of the mind. The true, living Confucian Way is expressed in the saying “A single principle penetrates my Way” [Analects 4:15]…not even one word in all these books means anything else. They are all about mind.
In Shintō too, the Chronicles of Japan, the Record of Former Events, the Essential Meaning of the Record of Old Things, and various mystical writings, are all books that record matters of the gods [kami]. True Shintō is about the mind. Or to express the meaning of the unity of three teachings in verse:
Many are the paths to climb up the mountain,
But we see the same moon on the lofty peak.Numerous paths originate at the foot of a great mountain. No matter what path one climbs to view the moon, it is always the same moon.
I thought these were pretty darn good sermons, and offer a look into Tokugawa-era Japanese religion which I was not previously aware of. I’ll post more sermons later if I can, or talk more on the Shingaku movement if I find more information. Interesting stuff.
Namo Shakyamuni Buddha
Hello, this blog is about my life as a father, Buddhist and Japanophile / Koreaphile. Any useful information I can pass along will hopefully make the 
Thanks for a thought-provoking post Doug.
“human nature was inherently good, but obscured by society’s negative influence”
So is he saying that if the cultural matrix in which people exist is ‘right’ people’s natural goodness will show forth? I can buy it to a limit extent but personally I take a dimmer view of humanity. Plus I don’t really believe in ‘inherent’ essences … we’re not good or bad but have the potential to be both. In fact an admixture of both is probably inevitable I think given the constraints of our reality.
“No matter what path one climbs to view the moon, it is always the same moon.”
This old saw? I think that there may well be areas of overlap between traditions – sometimes very large ones – but when you get down to figuring out how each of the describe the ‘mountain’ you begin to wonder whether it is one mountain or many. The image of a big stable mountain also conveys a sense of some big objective truth waiting to be found but in fact philosophers East and West have shown that whatever is there is much slipperier to pin down.
Hi Kyoushin,
Keep in Mencius lived long before Buddhism came to China, as did Confucius. This is mostly a discussion of Confucian thought (with a 18-century Japanese-Buddhist mix), not a discussion of Buddhism per se, hence there won’t necessarily be agreement.
However, notion of inherent compassion (or more properly the potential for it) and such is something taken up by other, mostly non-Pure Land schools, so I’d be hesitant to scoff at it too much.
The parable of the mountain, to me, is interesting because it’s definitely not in a New Age context (this is Tokugawa-era Japan, bear in mind), and does reflect a more Asian sentiment of borrowing from various religions traditions. Having married into the culture a bit, it’s led me to question the “our way or the highway” approach Westerners take toward religion, including a strictly Buddhist-only view of things. I am reminding of a nice little quote from the novel Dune Messiah, posted elsewhere on this blog, where one of the characters ask “where is the one man who can escape the destiny of his own prejudices”, which is the very thing I hope to accomplish, even my spiritual prejudices.
Hence I find this stuff kind of interesting. I failed to mention in the post that Dōni was raised in a strictly Nichiren Buddhist family, so he seemed to rebel against that strict upbringing by teaching a more ecumenical approach. Shingaku Sekimon is probably the forerunner to other New Religious Movements in Japan, so the individual teachings may not be very interesting or novel, but the synthesis itself is what fascinates me.
Hi Doug,
Keep in Mencius lived long before Buddhism came to China, as did Confucius. This is mostly a discussion of Confucian thought (with a 18-century Japanese-Buddhist mix), not a discussion of Buddhism per se,
Sorry if I had a ‘tone’. I wasn’t scoffing though, just asking for clarification on some of the interesting topics you raised – and I didn’t actually mention Buddhism.
- I don’t really know anything about Mencius or Confucianism which is why I was wondering if you could say a little more about your statement “human nature was inherently good, but obscured by society’s negative influence”. If society is basically a collection of inherently good people where is the ‘negative influence’ coming from? … Culture? That is what I am asking out of interest.
- Saying that ‘human nature is inherently good’ is not the same as saying that there is an ‘inherent potential for compassion’. Though both statements are pretty meaningless anyway I think.
- I don’t accept that the flipside of accepting the the mountain/paths analogy is “our way or the highway”. If anything I would argue that it is only possible to follow multiple traditions when we respect the differences between them particularly when it comes to the summum bonum of each.
Cheers, K
Hi Kyoushin,
No worries. I read your first post as a kind of Buddhist refutation (I was expecting someone to do so at some point), so apologies for sounding defensive. You raise lots of questions, but to be honest, I don’t have a lot of answers. I posted this more as a point of interest, and point of introduction.
Regarding your latest comments.
- Like you, I know very little about Mencius, but now I am intrigued lately. According to Wikipedia, Confucian scholars of his time disagreed as to whether people were inherently good or bad. Mencius took the “good” view, while others in his generation took the “bad” view. Much later in the Song Dynasty, Mencius’s views were declared orthodoxy and the basis for Neo-Confucian thought. I want to read more on the subject myself because some of Mencius’s arguments are kind of intriguing (based on what little I saw in Wikipedia), and want to get a better picture myself.
- True on the differences between inherent and potential, but it’s a subject I admit I don’t understand the finer details of. I don’t think it’s a meaningless statement though, as I think it has some bearing on religion, practice and such.
- I definitely agree that mixing and matching religion isn’t the ideal solution, and it’s good to step outside one’s own path from time to time to explore other things for a new perspective. I think thought Westerners still feel a kind of cultural pressure to identify themselves with a single religion, and that’s what I don’t agree with. That kind of pressure is absent from Asian culture from what little experience I have. Here I speak from experience, not from anything you said.
Ok thanks Doug … we’re cool
The perspective of Mencius as you summarised it sounds a lot like the anarchist view that if the state or authorities disappear / stop their meddling then people’s essential goodness will out. There are also similarities with the Tao te Ching of course. Personally I’ve noticed that certainly the more that the state or rulers, or society/culture, float abstract ideas of rights and laws then people do tend to neglect their own ethical condition and self-responsibility. However I don’t think that it necessarily follows that people are inherently good. In fact it could just as easily be used to argue that people are bad – jumping at the first opportunity to be absolved of self-reponsibility.
Regards, K