Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks: The Bendo and Benmei

Abstract

[...] Tucker contends that the Bendo and Benmei are fundamentally political works and that this political dimension was implicit in the philosophical dictionary genre. [...] Sorai uses koto as it was used in the Eastern Zhou (771.221 B.C.), to mean not only affair but also a ritual or ceremonial practice, as he did in a discussion of filial piety in Sorai sensei tomonsho (Master Sorai's responsals): You asked about the practice of filial piety.

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Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks: The Bendo and Benmei. By John A. Tucker. Honolulu: Association for Asian Studies and the University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. Pp. 496. Hardcover $56.00.

John Tucker's Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks: The Bendo and Benmei is an important contribution to the field of Japanese philosophy. Not only does it offer readers a complete and annotated translation of this leading Japanese Confucian's two most important works, the Bendo (Distinguishing the way) and the Benmei (Distinguishing names); it also includes a lengthy introduction presenting Tucker's own interpretation of these two works, summarizing their content and reviewing the history of Sorai's philosophy in the Tokugawa period and the pertinent Japanese and English-language scholarship. Specialists will find the introduction useful, and firsttime readers of the Bendo and Benmei will learn what they need to know to make their way through these difficult works.

Tucker's interpretation of the Bendo and Benmei is both original and provocative. He begins with the bold assertion that the ''conceptual analysis'' in these works is comparable to that found in three other philosophical traditions: the Western tradition, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and continuing through Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, Leibniz, Diderot, and Voltaire; the Confucian tradition, starting with the Analects and continuing up through Neo-Confucianism; and the Buddhist tradition after Nagarjuna. Even though this comparative point seems obvious, no one has put it quite this way.

Tucker argues, too, that the Bendo and Benmei were modeled on the Xingli ziyi (The meaning of Chinese terms), a philosophical dictionary written by the Song Neo- Confucian Chen Beixi (1159-1223). Apparently a 1552 Korean edition of Chen's Ziyi was transmitted to Japan in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and inspired the pioneering Japanese Confucian Hayashi Razan (1583-1657) to write Seiri jigi genkai (Vernacular explication of Beixi's Ziyi ), which was published in 1659. Tucker points out that Hayashi often differed with Chen, as did others, such as Ito Jinsai (1627-1705), who wrote their own philosophical dictionaries. Writing about this new genre's significance in the Tokugawa context, Tucker observes that ''it served as an open medium, structurally and methodologically, for contesting philosophical terrain wherein increasingly diverse semasiologies of the Confucian way vied for patrons and authority'' (p. 6). Tucker is the first Western scholar to highlight the importance of Chen's Xingli ziyi for Tokugawa Confucian philosophers and to explain why this mattered.

Tucker's third argument is that Ogyu Sorai's Bendo and Benmei-long seen as a critique of the philosophy of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), who is conventionally regarded as the father of Neo-Confucianism-can be read as ''outgrowths of the invitation to doubt, encouraged among those pursuing Neo-Confucian learning'' (p. 9). That is, the Bendo and Benmei were not a destructive attack on Neo-Confucianism but an attempt to reconceptualize it. Here Tucker follows his mentor William Theodore de Bary, as he admits:

This study, in emphasizing that Sorai's two Ben, in form, method, and significant content, issued from a genre defined by a late-Song Neo-Confucian text, Beixi's Ziyi, extends de Bary's line of analysis in particular by showing that, at the very least, those aspects of Sorai's masterpiece were not generated simply by a return to the Six Classics, or kobunjigaku, the supposed ''study of ancient words and literature.'' (p. 12)

Reading Sorai's writings as an outgrowth of Neo-Confucianism is Tucker's signature interpretation, and although he makes a strong and persuasive case, this view has not been well received by scholars familiar with Sorai.

Finally, Tucker contends that the Bendo and Benmei are fundamentally political works and that this political dimension was implicit in the philosophical dictionary genre. Those who wrote such works, he explains, ''were not defining terms simply out of their academic passion for philology, textual exegesis, or lexicographic clarity. Rather they were engaging as well in an essentially political activity, one that must be construed as directly addressing the existing polity or, more seriously, potentially subverting it'' (p. 8). According to Tucker, this also was the case with Sorai, who wrote the Bendo and Benmei in support of the Tokugawa regime:

The two Ben outline a plan not for a liberal, enlightened realm of broadly educated, politically concerned people, but for an absolute prince intent on ruling on behalf of his realm, checked only by his political responsibility to promote peace and stability through instituting the way of the early kings. Most specifically, the prince promotes the way of the early kings, an amalgam of rites, music, penal laws, and administrative structures that the people, his subjects, must follow, without doubts or questioning. If they do their duty in following the early kings' way as set forth for them, then much as in Plato's ideal Republic, where justice prevails when each performs his proper role, so in Sorai's authoritarian utopia will peace and stability be the by-products. (pp. 8-9)

This, Tucker maintains, is why Sorai presents the way of the early kings as he does- as ''a civilizing, sociopolitical way of administrative and penal law providing peace and stability (and presumably the greatest happiness) for the realm below heaven'' (p. 14)-and why rites and music are offered as ''cultural palliatives meant to mask the realities of rule by penal law and administrative institutions'' (p. 13). This is a plausible reading. After all, by the 1720s the Tokugawa regime was facing profound administrative and fiscal problems. Yoshimune, the eighth shogun, asked Sorai to offer recommendations for reform, which circulated secretly for a time and came to be known as Seidan (A discourse on government). Sorai also was being courted by the shogun and might have been brought into the government had he not died in 1728.

Tucker's translation has obvious strengths. It is readable and shows evidence of much revision and polishing, although his translation of the Bendo is more elegant and finished than his rendering of the Benmei, perhaps because he had several English translations to consult. In addition, Tucker's familiarity with the philosophical context in which Sorai wrote enhances his understanding of the Bendo and Benmei. Having earlier translated Yamaga Soko 's Seikyo yo roku and Ito Jinsai's Gomo jigi, he is able to point out where Sorai agrees or disagrees with his predecessors. What distinguishes this translation from others is Tucker's command of the Chinese philosophical tradition, as he identifies every Chinese work that Sorai cites, or alludes to, in the Bendo and Benmei. Here he made good use of the available Japanese commentaries, without which this feature of his translation would have been impossible. Finally, Tucker's grounding in Neo-Confucian philosophy allows him to add informed commentary. All this makes Ogyu Sorai's Philosophical Masterworks a valuable resource for both specialists and neophytes.

Tucker sometimes is an idiosyncratic translator whose choice of English equivalents for the Chinese terms in the Bendo?P and Benmei do not always make sense. His translation of kunshi (Chin: junzi ...) is a good example. Although this word is usually rendered as "gentleman" (Waley), "superior man" (Chan), or "noble person (de Bary)," Tucker prefers "prince" because "originally the term referred to the son of a ruler, that is, a prince" (p. 43). Unfortunately, his choice succeeds only in reversing the relationship of the ethical and political meanings of kunshi. He also translates kunshi as "ruler," "princely scholar," "morally refined person," and "ruling elite," without explaining the reasons for the differences. Also puzzling is Tucker's translation of shitsu (Chin: zhi ...) as "refinement." "Refinement" is the opposite of its usual rendering.as "natural substance" (Waley), "native substance" (Lau), or "substance" (Chan, de Bary). For example, when Tucker translates ... as "the remark does not refer to whether there is refinement or culture in the way people practice rites" (p. 325), he elides the distinction between shitsu (Chin: zhi ...) and bun (Chin: wen ...), whose locus classicus is the Lunyu passage that reads:

...

The Master said, ''Where substance prevails over refinement, there is the savage; where refinement prevails over substance, there is the scribe; where refinement and substance are symmetrically ordered, there is the noble person.''1

Given the importance of "refinement" to both Confucius and his latter-day interpreter Sorai, this is a troubling error. But near the end of his Benmei translation Tucker does render shitsu as "physical disposition" (pp. 253, 255, 257, 280, 282. 283), which is closer to the usual translations of the word shitsu as it occurs in the Lunyu. Tucker is on surer ground when he translates gi (Chin: yi ...) as "ritual principle," which is more faithful to Confucius?f use of that word in the second half of the Lunyu than the usual translation as "righteousness."

To my disappointment, Tucker says nothing about the two words that have challenged Sorai's translators: koto (Chin: shi ...) and mono (Chin: wu ...). Like most modern translators, he is content to render the former as "affair" and the latter as "thing." Sorai's use of koto, however, suggests that "affair" is not always an accurate translation. In the Benmei, for example, Sorai frequently speaks of "rehearsing koto," which does not make much sense if you translate it as "rehearsing affairs." In fact, Sorai uses koto as it was used in the Eastern Zhou (771.221 B.C.), to mean not only "affair" but also a ritual or ceremonial practice, as he did in a discussion of filial piety in Sorai sensei tomonsho (Master Sorai's responsals): "You asked about the practice of filial piety. In the Sages?f teachings, filial piety, brotherly respect, loyalty, and trust are called ?ethe virtuous acts of the Doctrine of the Mean?f and are described as koto that everyone, whether noble or mean, should carry out."2 Because koto refers in this passage to prescribed or ritualized behavior, translating koto as "affair" here would weaken the performative dimension of the virtues that Sorai is discussing. Tucker's translation of mono (Chin: wu) poses similar problems. Sorai uses this word to refer to a particular quality of the ancient Chinese forms of speech and behavior that survived in the Six Classics, but Tucker insists on translating mono as "thing," thus overlooking a level of meaning that Sorai is highlighting. So when both koto and mono occur together in the passage ..., Tucker is content to translate both as "thing": "By prolonged practice of these ?ethings,?f the virtues we seek to preserve will be perfected: this is what is called ?ethings coming?f to us" (p. 330). Besides being nonsensical, Tucker's translation elides Sorai's subtle distinction between koto and mono.

In sum, Tucker gives us a highly readable and carefully annotated translation of Sorai's two most important works, but, as with all translations, it must be used with caution and always compared with the original.

Footnote

Notes

1 - Wm. Theodore de Bary, comp., Sources of Chinese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 50.

2 - Samuel Hideo Yamashita, trans., Master Sorai's Responsals: An Annotated Translation of Sorai sensei Tomonsho (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994), p. 77.