Background
Atsutane Hirata was born on 6 October 1776 in Akita. He was a son of a samurai named Ovvada.
平田 篤胤
Atsutane Hirata was born on 6 October 1776 in Akita. He was a son of a samurai named Ovvada.
In youth Hirata studied Confucianism.
In 1795 he ran away from his native domain and went to Edo. In 1800 he became the adopted son of a samurai of the domain of Matsuyama named Hirata. He proclaimed himself a disciple of the eminent scholar of Japanese studies Motoori Norinaga, stating that he began instruction under Motoori in 1801. But since Motoori died in that year, it would appear that Hirata was never actually a disciple.
In 1804 he adopted the literary name Masugano- ya and set himself up as a teacher.
Among his more important works sre Tama-no-hashira (1812), a work on cosmology that was written under the influence of the Sandaikyo by Motoori Norinaga’s disciple Hattori Chuyo (1756-1824); Kodo tail (1811), Koshicho (1818), and Tamadasuki (1831).
In 1806 he wrote Iionkyo gaihen, a work of great importance in the devel¬opment of his thought, though it remained in manuscript during his lifetime and was not widely known until the latter part of the Meiji period. The work was clearly written under the influence of Christianity as it was known in China in late Ming times and emphasizes the concepts of a supreme deity and a life after death.
In 1803 Hirata wrote his first work, entitled Kamosho, an attack on the Bendosho, a work by the Confucian thinker Dazai Shundai.
The Koshiden (1825), a commentary on Hirata’s own considerably rewritten version of the Kojiki.
All his works deal with Hirata’s interpretation of Shinto beliefs. In these, he establishes Amc-no- minakanushi-no-kami as the supreme deity of the Shinto pantheon and, rejecting the vague underworld called Yominokuni posited by traditional Shinto, substitutes a world of the dead presided over by the deity Okuni- nushi-no-kami, who judges the souls of the deceased.
To support his contentions, he turned to the study of legends concerning the afterlife preserved in India and China, asserting that all such legends derived originally from Japan. Such ctlinocentricity and the supreme position accorded to Japan in his thought fitted well with the concept of reverence for the emperor, and as a result Hirata’s thought exerted considerable influence over the movement to drive out the foreigners and restore power to the emperor that came to prominence at the end of the Edo period, as well as over the measures to make Shinto the state religion that were carried out in the early Meiji period.
His unusual views were attacked as unorthodox by the followers of Motoori Norinaga, and the shogunate likewise looked upon them as dangerous and placed a ban upon his writings in 1841. Hirata was ordered to return to his domain and died in Akita two years later.
He is said to have had 550 disciples while he was alive, and after his death the number of persons calling themselves his followers swelled to over 1,300.