Bronze Statue of Kaibara Ekken at his gravesite (Kinryū-Temple, Fukuoka-City, Japan)
Kaibara was born into a family of advisors to the
daimyo of
Fukuoka Domain in
Chikuzen Province(modern-day
Fukuoka Prefecture). He accompanied his father to
Edo in 1648, and was sent in 1649 to
Nagasaki to study Western science. At his father's urging, he continued his studies in Nagasaki as a
rōnin from 1650 through 1656. He then re-entered service to
Kuroda, which led to his continuing studies in Kyoto. After his father's death in 1665, he returned to Fukuoka.
[1]Kaibara's two most significant contributions to Japanese culture were the study of nature based on a blend of Western natural science and Neo-Confucianism, and the translation of the complex writings of Neo-Confucianism into vernacular Japanese.
Kaibara's science was confined to
Botany and
Materia medica and focused on the "natural law". Kaibara became as famous in Japan as people such as
Charles Darwinwhen it came to science. He advanced the study of botany in Japan when he wrote
Yamato honzō,(Medicinal herbs of Japan) which was a seminal study of Japanese
plants. The 19th-century German Japanologist
Philipp Franz von Siebold called him the "Aristotle of Japan."
[1]Kaibara was known for his manuals of behavior, such as changing his Confucian ethical system based on the teachings of
Zhu Xi (also known as
Chu Hsi) into an easy "self-help" manuals. As an educator and philosopher, it appears that Kaibara's main goal in life was to further the process of weaving Neo-Confucianism into Japanese culture. In this context, he is best known for such books as
Precepts for Children and
Greater Learning for Women (
Onna daigaku); but modern scholarship argues that it was actually prepared by other hands. Although the genesis of the work remains unchallenged, the oldest extant copy (1733) ends with the lines "as related by our teacher Ekiken Kaibara" and the publisher's colophon states that the text was written from lectures of our teacher Kaibara."
[2]Published works[edit]
- Dazaifu jinja engi (History of Dazaifu Shrine).[3]
- Jingikun (Lessons of the Deities).[3]
- Onna daigaku (Greater Learning for Women), c. 1729.[4]
- Shinju heikō aimotorazaru ron (Treatise on the Non-Divergence of Shintō and Confucianism).[3]
- Yamato honzō (Medicinal herbs of Japan), 1709.
- Yamato sōhon (Grasses of Japan).[5]
- Yōjōkun (The Book of Life-nourishing Principles), 1713.[5]
References[edit]
- Kaibara, Ekiken and Shingoro Takaishi. (1905). Women and the Wisdom of Japan (Basil Hall Chamberlain, translator). London: John Murray....Click link for digitized, full-text copy of this book
- Ko, Dorothy, JaHyun Kim Haboush and Joan R. Piggott. (2003).Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23138-4
- Yonemoto, Marcia. (2003). Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period (1603–1868). Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23269-0
External links[edit]
