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and two or three schools of poetry. Chinese learning also as many subdivisions, and in Buddhism there are the doctrines of the numerous sects, besides the learning of the heart,[1] which is an offshoot of Buddhism. Then we have astronomy and physical geography, the learning of the Hollanders, and medicine, which is divided into three schools, the ancient, the modern and the Dutch. But Japanese learning is the chief of all these. A man passes for a good Chinese scholar if he has learnt to read the Four Books and the Five Classics, or, according to another enumeration, the Thirteen classics, has run hastily through half a dozen other works, and can compose Chinese prose and what they have a trick of calling poetry. There is nothing very difficult in all this. The Buddhist priests have a much larger task. Their canon (which Hirata here says he has read) consists of some five thousand volumes, seven or eight horse-loads, a tenth part of which is far more than the sinologue has to study; and to make the work harder the priests have to study Chinese as well as their own religious books, or else they could not read the latter. And owing to the strange manner in which Buddhist and Chinese notions have been mixed up with Japanese learning (Shintô), the student of the latter must possess all the knowledge of the sinologue and the priest that he may be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and he must know all the possible arguments which his opponents may have at their command in order to refute them. Besides, if a Japanese studies foreign learning he will be able to select whatever good things there are in it, and turn them to the service of his country. From this point of view Chinese, Indian and even Dutch studies may be looked upon as Japanese learning.
‘In the first place it is necessary to state that the reason why this teaching is called the “study of the ancient way” is because it aims at explaining the facts which begin with the origin of heaven and earth, by means of the ancient ways of thinking and the ancient tongue,
- ↑ This is the form of doctrine taught in the Kinô Dôwa, Shingaku Michi no Hanashi, Tejima Dôwa and similar works.
