Yamazaki Ansai - Split With Buddhism

Split With Buddhism

Ansai's rejection of Buddhism was based upon what he perceived as a fundamental insufficiency/flaw in Buddhist moral principles. In Neo Confucianism, Ansai had found the "Truth": the universal and eternal cosmic Way that could not be found in Buddhism. His critique was based upon two, interconnected fallacies that he perceived in Buddhist thought. First, Ansai believed that Buddhism lacked a normative system for informing ethical behavior (stemming from his interpretation that the Buddhist notion of nature (sei) as nothingness or emptiness, was a metaphysical, and not an ethical ideal). Due to this, Buddhism contained no theory of mind-heart, and thus, was inadequate for cultivating the mind (both of which were integral to Ansai's ethical thought). From Ansai's Neo-Confucian perspective, the mind was full (being inherently imbued with the concepts of the Five Relationships and the Five Virtues), not empty (as he believed Buddhism perceived it). In the latter part of his life, when Ansai was attempting to prove the ontological unity of Shinto and Confucianism, he proclaimed that before the arrival of Buddhism to Japan, early Shinto and Confucianism were actually the same. He blamed the influence of Buddhist thought for creating a false dichotomy between the two systems (which in Ansai's view differed only in name).