Japanese philosophy. The Japanese received from the Chinese almost all the philosophical, political, and superstitious knowledge they have, if we are to believe the Portuguese, the first of the Europeans to have sailed to Japan and to have told us something about that country. Francis-Xavier, of the Society of Jesus, was led there in 1549 by an ardent and admirable zeal to spread the Christian religion; he preached there, and was heard, and Christ would perhaps be worshiped the full length of Japan if he had not alarmed the people by an imprudent conduct that made them suspect it was more about the loss of their liberty than the salvation of their souls. The role of apostle allows no other; he had no sooner been dishonored in Japan by being associated with his own interests and politics than persecutions arose, scaffolds were raised, and blood flowed everywhere. There is such hatred of the name Christian in Japan that today you cannot approach Japan without treading Christ underfoot, an ignominious ceremony to which it is said that some Europeans, more attached to money than to their God, are not unwilling to subject themselves.

The fables which the Japanese and Chinese tell about the antiquity of their origin are almost the same. It results from the comparison that has been made between them that these societies of men were forming and civilizing in a similar era. The famous Kempfer, who travelled through Japan as a naturalist, geographer, political and theological scholar, and whose voyage holds a distinguished rank among our best books, [1] divides Japanese history into fabled, uncertain, and true. The fabled period begins long before the creation of the world according to sacred chronology. [2] These peoples also had the mania of pushing back their origin. To believe them, their first government was theocratic; you have to hear the marvels they recount about its wonders and its duration. The time of the marriage of the god Isanagi Mikotto and the goddess Isanami Mikotto was for them the golden age. Go from one pole to the other; question the various peoples, and everywhere you will see idolatry and superstition establishing themselves by the same means. Everywhere there are men who make themselves respectable to their peers by passing as gods or descendants of gods. Find a savage people, do good, say you are a god, and you will be believed, and you will be worshipped during your life and after your death.

The uncertain period is filled with the reign of a certain number of kings whose era cannot be fixed. They succeed the original founders and apply themselves to purging their subjects of some remaining natural ferocity through the institution of laws and the invention of the arts, the invention of the arts that make life a pleasure, and the institution of laws that makes for its security.

Fohi, the first Chinese legislator, is also the first legislator of the Japanese , and this name is no less celebrated in one of these lands than the other. He is represented sometimes in the shape of a serpent, sometimes in the shape of a man with a head but no body, two symbols of science and wisdom. It is to him that the Japanese attribute the knowledge of celestial motions, signs of the zodiac, the revolutions of the year, its division into months, and an infinite number of useful discoveries. They say he lived in the year 396 from creation, which is false, since the story of the universal flood is true. [3]

The first Chinese and the first Japanese , instructed by a single man, must not have had very different religions. The Xekia of the former is the Shaka of the latter. It is of the same period; but the Siamese, the Japanese , and the Chinese who equally revere it do not agree on the precise time when he lived.

The true history of Japan scarcely goes back before 660 before the birth of Christ, which is the date of the reign of Jimmu, Jimmu who was so dear to his peoples that they gave him the surname Nin-O , the very great, very good, optimus , maximus ; they honor him with the same discoveries as Fohi.

It was under this prince that the philosopher Roosi lived, in other words the old man child [ enfant vieillard ]. Koosi or Confucius was born 50 years after Roosi. Confucius has temples in Japan, and the worship of him is little different from divine honors. Among the most illustrious disciples of Confucius, in Japan they call Ganquai, another old man child. The soul of Ganquai, who died at 33, was transmitted to Kossobosati, disciple of Xekia: whence it is evident that the only notions of philosophy, ethics, and religion in Japan in the early days were those of Xekia, Confucius, and the Chinese, whatever the diversity time may have introduced into them.

The doctrine of Shaka and of Confucius is not the same. The doctrine of Confucius prevailed in China, and Japan preferred that of Shaka or Xekia.

Under the reign of Suinin, Kobota, as philosopher in the sect of Xekia, took to Japan the book Kio. It is properly a compilation of the doctrine of his master. This philosophy was known at the same time in China. What a difference between our philosophers and those! Xekia’s imaginings spread to India, China, and Japan, and became the law of a hundred million men. A man is sometimes born among us with the most sublime talents; he writes the wisest things, and changes not the slightest habit, lives in obscurity, and dies unknown.

It appears that the first glimmerings of light that illuminated China and Japan came from India and Brahmanism.

Kobota established in Japan the esoteric and exoteric doctrine of Fohi. He had scarce arrived when the Fakubashi, or temple of the white horse, was erected to him; this temple still subsists. It was named the white horse because Kobota appeared in Japan riding a horse of that color.

The doctrine of Shaka did not all at once become the doctrine of the people. It was still individual and secret when Darma, the twenty-eighth disciple of Xekia, went from India to Japan.

Mokuris followed after Darma. He showed himself first in the Tinsiku on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. That was where he announced the doctrine of a god as supervisor of the world and protector of men, under the name Amida . This idea thrived and spread into the neighboring lands, whence it reached China and Japan. This event is a date in Japanese chronology. Prince Tonda Josimits took the knowledge of Amida to the land of Sinano. It was to the god Amida that the Sinquosi temple was erected, and his statue lost no time performing miracles there, for people must have them. Same impostures in Egypt, India, China, Japan. God permitted this resemblance between the true religion and false ones so our faith would be a merit for us; for the true religion alone has true miracles. We have been illuminated by means which the devil was allowed to use to cast into perdition the nations on which God had not determined in his eternal decrees to open the eye of his mercy.

So now you have superstition and idolatry escaping from the Egyptian sanctuaries and going afar to infect India, China, and Japan under the name of the Xekian doctrine. Let us now see the revolutions which this doctrine experienced: for it is not given to the opinions of men to remain the same as they traverse time and space.

First we observe that all of Japan does not follow the dogma of Xekia. The national lie is tolerant under these peoples; it allows an infinite number of foreign lies to subsist peaceably alongside itself.

After Christianity had been extirpated by a massacre of thirty-seven thousand men executed almost in a moment, the nation divided into three sects. Some attached themselves to the Shinto or the old religion; others embraced the Budso or doctrine of Buddha or of Shaka or of Xekia, and the rest stayed with Sindo or the code of ethical philosophers.

Of the Shinto, the Budso, and the Sindo . The Shinto that is called sinsin and kammitsi , the oldest cult in Japan, is that of idols. Idolatry is the first step of the human mind in the natural history of religion; from there it advances to Manichaeism, from Manichaeism to the unity of God, to return to idolatry, and turn in the same circle. Sin and Kami are Japan’s two idols. All the dogmas of this theology relate to present happiness. The notion which the Shintoists seem to have of the immortality of the soul is most obscure; they worry little about the future: a happy rendezvous today, they say to their gods, and we will require no more of you. They recognize, however, a great god who lives in the highest heaven, and subaltern gods which they have placed in the stars; but they honor them neither by sacrifices nor by feasts. They are too far from them to expect good or fear evil from them. They swear by these useless gods, and invoke those which they imagine to preside over the elements, plants, animals, and the important events of life.

They have a sovereign pontiff who claims to be a direct descendant of the gods who once governed the nation. Those gods even still hold a general assembly in his house in the tenth month of every year. He has the right to install among them those he judges worthy, and of course he is not clumsy enough to neglect the predecessor of the reigning prince, and the prince is not without deference to a man from whom he hopes divine honors someday. That is how despotism and superstition provide each other mutual support.

There is nothing so mysterious and miserable as the psychology of this sect. It is the fable of disfigured chaos. At the origin of things was chaos; something came out of it that resembled a thorn; the thorn mutated, transformed itself, and the Kunitokhodachi mikoto or spirit appeared. Otherwise, there is nothing in the books on the nature of the gods or their attributes that has a hint of common sense.

The Shintoists who have sensed the poverty of their system have borrowed a few opinions from the Buddhists. Some of them with their own sect believe that the soul of Amida passed by metempsychosis into Tin-sio-dai-sin and gave birth to the first of the gods; that the souls of good people rise into a happy place above the thirty-third heaven; that those of the wicked wander until they have expiated their crimes; and that future happiness is obtained by abstinence from anything that can soil the soul, the sanctifications of feasts, religious pilgrimages, and mortifications of the flesh.

Everything for this people relates back to civil and political propriety, and it is not for that any less happy or more wicked.

Its hermits, for it has some, are ignorant and ambitious, and the small number of religious ceremonies to which the people are subjected conforms to its permissive and sensuous character.

The Budsoists worship the foreign gods Budso and Fotoques [ hotoke ]; their religion is that of Xekia. The name Budso is Indian, and not Japanese . It comes from Budda or Buddha, which is a synonym of Hermes.

Shaka or Xekia had called himself a god. The Indians regard him still as a divine emanation. It is in the form of this man that Vishnu incarnated himself for the ninth time; and in Japan the words Budda and Shaka designate foreign gods, whatever they are, not excepting the saints and philosophers who preached the Xekian doctrine.

It was difficult for this doctrine to take hold in China and Japan where minds were prejudiced by the doctrine of Confucius, who scorned idols; but what can enthusiasm and obstinacy not overcome, aided by peoples’ inconstancy and their inclination for the new and supernatural! With these advantages Dharma attacked the wisdom of Confucius. It is said that he cut off his eyelids lest meditation lead him into sleep. Besides, the Japanese were enchanted by a dogma that promised them immortality and rewards to come, and a multitude of disciples of Confucius went over to the sect of Xekia, preached by a man who had first made himself venerable by his ethical holiness. The first public idol of Xekia was raised by the Japanese in the year 543 CE. Soon it was accompanied by the statue of Amida, and the miracles of Amida drew in the city and the court.

Amida is regarded by the disciples of Xekia as the supreme god of the happy abodes where the good live after their death. It is he who rejects or admits them. That is the basis of the exoteric doctrine. The great principle of the exoteric doctrine is that everything is nothing, and everything depends on that nothing. Hence the couplet which a Xekian enthusiast wrote after thirty years of meditations at the foot of a dead tree which he had drawn: Tree, tell me who planted thee? I whose principle is nothing and its end nothing: which is tantamount to this other inscription by a philosopher of the same sect: My heart has neither being nor non-being; it does not go, it does not return, it is retained nowhere. These follies seem quite strange; yet if you try, you will see that by following the subtlety of metaphysics as far as it can go, you will end up with other follies which will hardly be less ridiculous.

Besides, the Xekians ignore the exterior, apply themselves to meditation alone, scorn all discipline that consists in words, and attach themselves only to the exercise they call soquxin , soqubut , or of the heart .

There is, according to them, only one principle of all things, and that principle is everywhere.

All beings emanate from and return to it.

It has existed from all eternity; it is unique, clear, luminous; without shape, reason, motion, action, increase or decrease.

Those who have known it well in this world acquire the perfect glory of Fotoque and his successors.

The others roam and will roam until the end of the world; then the common principle will absorb all.

There are neither punishments nor rewards to come.

No real difference between knowledge and ignorance, between good and evil.

The repose one acquires through meditation is the sovereign good, and the state nearest the general, common, and perfect principle.

As for their life, they form communities, rise at midnight to sing hymns, and in the evening they gather together around a superior who in their presence discusses some ethical point and proposes others for them to meditate on.

Whatever their individual opinions, they love and cultivate them. Understandings, they say, are not linked by parentage as bodies are.

We have to agree that if there are things in which these folks are less good than us, there are also some in which we are not as good as they.

The third sect of the Japanese is the Sendosivists or those who conduct themselves after the sicuto or philosophical path. These are properly without religion. Their sole principle is that one must practice virtue, because virtue alone can make us as happy as our nature can allow. According to them, the wicked man is pitiable enough in this world, without preparing for him a terrible future, and the good man happy enough without also needing a future reward. They require of man that he be virtuous, because he is reasonable, and that he be reasonable because he is neither a stone nor a brute. These are the true principles of the ethics of Confucius and his Japanese disciple Moosi. The works of Moosi enjoy the greatest authority in Japan.

The ethics of the Sendosivists or Japanese philosophers comes down to four principal points.

The first or dsin is the manner of conforming one’s actions to virtue.

The second gi , to do justice to all men.

The third re , on the decency and honesty of conduct.

The fourth tsi , rules of prudence.

The fifth sin , purity of conscience and rectitude of the will.

According to them, no metempsychosis; there is a universal soul that animates all, from which all emanates, and which absorbs all. They have some notions of spirituality, they believe in the eternity of the world, they celebrate the memory of their parents with sacrifices, they recognize no national gods, and they have neither temples nor religious ceremonies. If they go along with public worship, it is out of obedience to the laws. They practice ablutions and abstain from commerce with women in the days prior to their commemorative feasts. They do not burn the bodies of the dead, but bury them as we do; they not only allow suicide, they even encourage it, which proves how little importance life has for them. The image of Confucius is in their schools. It was required of them at the time of the extirpation of Christianity that they have an idol; it is placed in their foyers, crowned with flowers and scented with incense. Their sect suffered greatly from the persecution of the Christians, and they were obliged to hide their books. It has not been long since a Japanese prince named Sisen , who had developed an interest in the sciences and philosophy, founded an academy in these domains, called to it the most educated men, and encouraged them with rewards to study; and reason was beginning to make progress in one canton of the empire when some vile little sacrificers who lived on superstition and the credulity of peoples, mortified by the discredit of their imaginings, brought complaints before the emperor and the dairo and threatened the nation with the greatest disasters if they failed quickly to stifle this rising impious race. Sisen suddenly saw ecclesiastical and civil tyranny conspiring against him, and found no way to escape the peril surrounding him but by renouncing all his plans and yielding his books and dignities to his son. It is Kaempfer himself who relates this fact, which should instruct us about the kinds of obstacles which the progress of reason must meet with everywhere. See Bayle, Brucker, Possevin, etc. [4] See also the articles Indians, Chinese, and Egyptians.

1. Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), Histoire naturelle, civile, et ecclésiastique de l’empire du Japon (1729). Here is an English translation from the original Dutch published two years earlier: The History of Japan (London, 1727).

2. I.e. , Biblical chronology, which was widely believed to begin with Creation about 4000 B.C.E. (see Diderot’s own article Sacred chronology).

3. Not a very obvious connection, but an allusion (see also note 2) to the difficulty of integrating Biblical chronology with the chronologies, until then mostly unknown, of other civilizations.

4. The references are to French Huguenot writer Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), German historian of philosophy Johann Jakob Brucker (1696-1770), and (possibly) Jesuit diplomat and encyclopedist Antonio Possevino (1533-1611).