Ishida Baigan

Ishida Baigan ( Japanese 石田 梅岩 ; * October 12, 1685 in the province of Tamba ; † October 29, 1744 in Kyoto ) was a Japanese scholar who founded the philosophical school Shingaku (also Sekimon Shingaku , 石 問 心 学 ).

biography

Ishida was born as the second son of a farmer and his formal name was Kōchō ( 興 長 ), his first name was Kampei ( 勘 平 ), as a scholar he called himself Baigan. Ishida was accepted as an apprentice in a merchant household in Kyoto. At the same time, he took lessons in various schools and began to grapple with ethical issues.

When he was a student of Oguri Ryōun ( 小 栗 了 雲 ), a lay Buddhist of the Ōbaku school of Zen Buddhism, Ishida achieved his enlightenment at the age of 35. Thereupon he opened an academy in Kyoto and probably began from 1729 to hold lectures in which he presented his ideas of Shingaku ("heart teaching"). His school soon attracted followers and spread across the country, especially among the merchant class.

Ishida Baigan's students include: a. Tejima Toan .

Teaching

Shingaku as a term already existed earlier and denoted a philosophical trend that came from the China of the Song Dynasty , and came to Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries. The philosophy was influenced by the Chinese philosopher Zhen Dexiu , the Korean scholar Yi T'oegye and his Japanese admirer Yamazaki Ansai . Another direction of teaching is based on the ideas of Wang Ji and Nakae Tōju . Baigan's teaching was a personally colored and formulated variant, which was strongly influenced by neo-Confucian ideas. However, Baigan also adopted Daoist , Buddhist and Shinto elements. Baigan himself did not speak of his teaching as Shingaku, this was only confirmed by his successor Tejima Toan, who also gave the teaching the name Sekimon Shingaku (German: "Heart teaching of Ishida") to distinguish it.

The core idea of ​​Baigan's teaching was that man had to polish his “heart” (can also be understood as “spirit”), which he published in Tohi mondō ( 都 鄙 問答 , “conversation between [one from] the city]” in 1793 [one of the] country ”). In order to be able to polish the heart constantly, Ishida propagated a number of Confucian virtues such as humility, honesty, and parental devotion. He also criticized the Buddhism-based degradation of the traders as the lower class of society.

In 1774, Ishida published Seika ron , in which he set out his thoughts on the form of government and stated that someone who is not in control of his family could not possibly rule a country.

literature

• Horst Hammitzsch : Shingaku 心 學 A movement of popular enlightenment and education in the Tokugawa period . In: Monumenta Nipponica . Volume 4, No. 1 , 1941, p. 1-32 .
• Eiji Takemura : The Perception of Work in Tokugawa Japan: A Study of Ishida Baigan and Ninomiya Sontoku . In: University Press of America . 1997, ISBN 0-7618-0886-8 .

Web links

• Yazaki Hiroyuki:  "Ishida Baigan" . In: Encyclopedia of Shinto. Kokugaku-in , April 12, 2006 (English)

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . So Ishida is the family name, Baigan the first name.