Baien Miura was an independent and creative thinker of the middle Edo period.
Background
Baien Miura was born on 1 September 1723 in the village of Tominaga, the district of Kunisaki, in the province of Bungo in Kyushu, the son of a physician named Giichi. His personal name was Susumu, his formal name, Yasusada; Baien was his professional name.
Education
In 1739, at the age of sixteen, he studied the writing of poetry and prose in Chinese under Ayabe Keisai, a resident of the castle town of Kitsuki, and later became a student of Fujita Keisho, a teacher of the kogaku, or “ancient learning,” school of Confucianism.
Career
Around 1743 he compiled a collection of his verse in Chinese entitled Dokushoshu. He embarked upon a walking tour in 1745 that took him to Nagasaki, Dazaifu, Kumamoto, and other important cities and historical sites of Kyushu. In 1747 he was invited by the Kurushima family, lords of the fief of Kusu in his native province, to enter official service, but he steadfastly declined the invitation, preferring to devote all his time to his studies.
Around 1751 he began developing his highly original concept of jori, a term that has been translated as the “logic of things,” which denotes a system of natural order underlying man and the universe and is comparable to present-day principles of logic, mathematics, physics, and ethical science. In the years that followed, he labored to formulate a logical system of thought based upon this concept, and in 1775, at the age of fifty-two, set forth his ideas in a work entitled Gengo.
He died in his native village of Tominaga at the age of sixty-six.