Ito Jinsai

Life and Scholarly Context

Ito Jinsai (1627–1705) was a leading Confucian scholar of the early Edo period in Japan and an early representative of the Kogaku (Ancient Learning) current. Born into a merchant family in Kyoto, he was initially oriented toward commerce but turned to classical learning after suffering ill health in his twenties. This shift from trade to scholarship, common among early modern Japanese intellectuals, shaped his enduring concern with the ethical problems of everyday life rather than with courtly or purely speculative concerns.

Jinsai’s intellectual formation took place in a milieu dominated by Neo-Confucian thought, especially the Zhu Xi school that had been adopted as quasi-official orthodoxy by the Tokugawa shogunate. He studied Chinese classics and Neo-Confucian commentaries, but gradually became dissatisfied with what he regarded as their rigid metaphysical framework.

Around 1662, Jinsai founded the private academy Kogidō (“Hall of Ancient Meanings”) in Kyoto. The Kogidō attracted students from samurai, merchant, and artisan backgrounds and became an influential institution in the urban intellectual life of the Kansai region. Instruction centered on close reading of the Four Books, particularly the Analects and the Mencius, and on rigorous discussion of key ethical terms. Jinsai’s emphasis on philological precision and practical ethics distinguished his academy from schools aligned with official Neo-Confucianism.

Though he never held a government post, Jinsai maintained correspondence and debate with officials and scholars, including those influenced by Yamazaki Ansai and other proponents of Zhu Xi’s philosophy. He remained based in Kyoto until his death in 1705, leaving the Kogidō to his son Ito Tōgai, who continued the family’s scholarly line and helped transmit Jinsai’s ideas to later generations.

Critique of Neo-Confucianism

Jinsai’s most famous work, Gomō jigi (Meanings of Terms in the Analects and Mencius), systematically reinterprets key Confucian terms in opposition to Zhu Xi’s metaphysical vocabulary. His critique targets several interrelated aspects of Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism:

1. Suspicion of metaphysics (ri and qi)
   Neo-Confucian thinkers, especially Zhu Xi, organized much of their philosophy around li (principle) and qi (material force). Jinsai argued that this metaphysical framework was anachronistic relative to Confucius and Mencius and distracted from their practical ethical intent. For Jinsai, the early Confucians did not speculate about abstract principles; rather, they spoke concretely about human sentiments, conduct, and social roles.

2. Return to ancient meanings
   Jinsai proposed that the authentic Confucian way could only be recovered through philological and historical study of the classics. He claimed that later schools had distorted the “ancient meanings” of terms by reading them through foreign metaphysical lenses. Gomō jigi is structured as a series of entries on key terms—such as 仁 (ren, humaneness), 義 (yi, righteousness), and 道 (dao, way)—in which he compares classical usage with later commentaries and argues for more concrete, affective interpretations.

3. Emphasis on the Four Books over the Five Classics
   Following a trend already notable in Ming thought, Jinsai treated the Four Books (Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean) as the most authoritative expression of Confucian teaching, but he prioritized the Analects and Mencius over the other two. He regarded the Mencius as especially important for understanding innate moral feelings, and he resisted Neo-Confucian reconstructions of these texts that subordinated them to metaphysical schemas.

4. Critique of moral quietism
   Jinsai associated parts of Neo-Confucian teaching with a form of moral quietism or inwardness focused on self-purification and contemplation of principle. In contrast, he emphasized active engagement in human relationships—between parent and child, ruler and subject, friends, and spouses—as the true site of moral cultivation. Ethics, for Jinsai, was not separation from the world but careful responsiveness within it.

Later scholars have debated the extent to which Jinsai’s polemics accurately captured Zhu Xi’s subtlety. Proponents of Zhu Xi’s line argue that Jinsai simplified and caricatured Song Neo-Confucianism, while Jinsai’s defenders maintain that his criticisms revealed genuine tensions between abstract principle and lived ethics in that tradition.

Ethics, Language, and Legacy

Central to Jinsai’s thought is a distinctive view of human nature, emotion, and language.

He advanced a strongly this-worldly ethics grounded in the concept of ninjo (human feelings, or the range of human emotional responses). While not endorsing unregulated emotion, he argued that moral life originates in and is guided by natural human affections, such as filial love, compassion for suffering, and the desire for mutual trust. These affective dispositions are not obstacles to virtue but its indispensable basis, provided they are refined and harmonized through education and self-reflection.

Accordingly, Jinsai’s reading of 仁 (ren, humaneness) stresses warm, concrete benevolence—not an impersonal universal principle. He interprets 義 (yi, righteousness) as the appropriateness of action in specific contexts rather than as a rigid, external law. The 道 (dao, way) is thus the path of realizing and coordinating one’s natural sentiments in line with social roles and historical circumstances, rather than an abstract transcendent order.

Language and interpretation play a key role in this ethical vision. Jinsai maintained that misunderstanding the meanings of words leads directly to moral confusion. His philological work aimed not only at textual accuracy but at clarifying how key ethical concepts function in ordinary communication. The proper understanding of terms like ren and yi is, in his view, inseparable from understanding how to live.

Jinsai’s stress on everyday practice extended to his teaching methods. At the Kogidō, he reportedly favored discussion, repeated reading aloud of the classics, and concrete examples from daily life over purely scholastic disputation. Education was framed as the gradual internalization of ethical language and patterns of response, not simply the accumulation of doctrinal propositions.

Historiographically, Jinsai is often paired with Yamaga Sokō and Ogyū Sorai as leading critics of orthodox Neo-Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan. Although Jinsai is commonly grouped under Kogaku, he is sometimes distinguished from Sorai’s later, more historically oriented “Ancient Learning,” which leaned more heavily on pre-Confucian and classical Chinese texts such as the Zuo Commentary and the Rites. Compared with Sorai, Jinsai remained more focused on the Four Books and on moral psychology rather than institutional or political theory.

Jinsai’s influence was most direct among urban commoners and lower-ranking samurai, who found in his humane and practical ethics a framework suited to the complex relational life of Edo-period cities. His work also contributed to later intellectual currents, including strands of kokugaku (nativist studies) that shared his suspicion of Song metaphysics, though kokugaku scholars would redirect this method toward Japanese classics and often rejected Confucianism altogether.

Modern scholarship evaluates Jinsai from diverse perspectives. Some researchers emphasize his role in the broader East Asian philological turn, aligning him with contemporaneous Chinese “evidential learning” (kaozheng) scholars who likewise challenged metaphysical speculation. Others highlight his contribution to Japanese moral philosophy, especially his nuanced account of emotion and his attention to the moral significance of language. Critics, however, have contended that his focus on interpersonal ethics offers limited resources for addressing questions of large-scale political order and economic justice.

Despite these debates, Ito Jinsai is widely regarded as a pivotal figure in early modern Japanese thought: a thinker who re-centered Confucianism on humane feeling, ordinary life, and textual exactitude, and whose work helped shape the plural, internally contested landscape of Tokugawa intellectual culture.