Paper short abstract:

The way Andô Shôeki安藤昌益 described the nonhuman world in his encyclopedic work kinjû kan禽獣巻 provides insights into how he blended his original ideas and well known concepts from Ancient China, which also proves that he was not the idiosyncratic thinker of the Tokugawa period he was presumed to be.

Paper long abstract:

Even after more than a century following his rediscovery, Andô Shôeki 安藤昌益 (1703-1762) raises more questions than answers. He spent most of his life in northern Japan, where he worked as a doctor while writing numerous treatises on medicine, metaphysics, and natural philosophy as well as texts on political and social issues. In his most prominent work the Shizen shin eidô 自然真榮道, he criticizes the authorities, denounces rulers as robbers, advocates farming, and establishes his cosmology and metaphysics. Recent attempts were made to put Shôekis thinking within the broader scale of East Asian Thought, which made him less of a standout and more of a reinterpreter of less popular ideologies of Chinese philosophy, such as Primitivist and Yangist Daoist views found in the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi, nongjia 農 家 (“agriculturalists”) concepts, the minimalism of Mozi and the intellectual ideas found in the Huainanzi. This blending of traditional Chinese concepts and Shôeki’s own spin on them and preference for the reinterpretation of Chinese characters poses a great challenge to the translators of his work.

In my presentation, I would like to present one chapter from my dissertation project of Shôeki’s attempt of an encyclopdia, the kinjû kan禽獣巻 (Volume on birds and beasts), in which this mixture of handed down knowledge of Chinese sources and its reinterpretation of those narratives become apparent in his description of various nonhuman animals. Within my doctoral thesis, I argue that without a solid understanding of Neoconfucian concepts and their Chinese origins, Shôeki’s reference book and other Japanese premodern leishu like Ekken’s Yamato honzô 大和本草or the Wakan Sansai Zue 和漢三才図会 are almost impossible to understand. This also means that Shôeki was by no means an “outsider” but very much following the traditional path of other Neoconfucians of his time.