Background
Dazai Shundai was born in 1680.
Dazai Shundai was born in 1680.
Shundai went to Kyoto to study the Chu Hsi school of Neo-Confucianism, the officially approved version of Confucian teaching at this time, under Nakano Kiken. Following this, he studied under Ando Tono, a disciple of Ogyu Sorai, and when he felt he had made sufficient progress, went to Edo to study under Sorai himself.
He at first served as a retainer to Matsudaira ladanori, lord of Izushi in the province of Tajima, present- day Hyogo Prefecture, but later retired from service.
Sorai had taught a Confucianism that embraced both the study of poetry and literature and attention to practical concerns of economic and political life, but Shundai in the main carried on and developed the latter strain.
In 1729 completing his best-known work, the Keizairoku, or “Discussion of Economics,” in which he rejected mercantilism and emphasized the prime importance of agriculture, stating the classic theory of feudal economics.
In addition to this and a supplementary work on economics, Keizairoku shut, he wrote Seigaku moudo, an attempt to define the true teachings of Confucius, and a work on composition and rhetoric entitled Bunron.
Sorai, one of the most eminent scholars of Confucianism and Chinese culture, rejected the interpretations of Chu Hsi and the other Neo- Confucian philosophers and attempted through philological research to discover the original meaning of the ancient texts of Confucianism.