Aizawa on ritual

विस्तारः (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)

The phrase for this is saisei itchi (祭政一致) meaning the unity of ritual & government

The Mito scholars’ assertion that in antiquity the import of the fundamental principles of human relations had been conveyed to the populace through nonverbal means dovetailed with another dimension of their outlook: a belief in the efficacy of ritual that they inherited from Sorai together with suspicion of Song metaphysics and introspection. As the leading late Mito thinker Aizawa Seishisai (1782-1863) put it in an observation that clearly built on Sorai’s ideas, the people could not be made to understand, but they could be made to follow. To do so, however, a “tool” (gu) was necessary, and the only thing that could function effectively as such a tool was li(=ritual). If li were used to “carry” the people, there would be no need to rely on strident and ultimately ineffective sermonizing. The people would instinctively “keep within the current” of what was correct.

Aizawa looked to such activities to evoke in the populace more than just an awareness of the presence of the court. For people to feel a true commitment to reenact in the present the devoted service offered the ruler in antiquity, they also had to have a sense of continuity with the past.(4) The common people of his day, he noted, lacked such a sense. They knew that “they have a father, but not that they should revere their ancestors.” This was one reason why they were susceptible to heterodox promises of a false peace of mind.

To rectify this Aizawa did not attempt to promote orthodox Confucian family ritual with its premise of the generational dispersal of spirits. Concerned to foster an instinctive identity with a social chain of existence stretching into the past, he instead sought to impress upon the people that ancestral spirits remained permanently close to their descendants with whom, “no matter how many generations have passed,” they shared “one identical body.”¹ Through year-end rites at the graves of their ancestors the people would be able to “preserve eternally” the spirits of their forebears. In this way they, too, like the emperor, would be true to the command of Amaterasu to uphold loyalty and filial piety unto eternity.[^62]

Mito Approaches to the Rituals of Zhou

The Tokugawa thinkers for whom the Rituals of Zhou had the greatest resonance were perhaps the scholars of the late Mito school: Fujita Yukoku 藤田幽谷 (1774-1826), Aizawa Seishisai 會澤正志齋 (1782-1863), and Yukoku’s son Toko (1806-1855). In the last decade of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth, these figures associated with the Mito domain, one of the three main Tokugawa collateral houses, developed a distinctive variety of “Japanese” Confucianism that combined a highly nationalistic orientation (including an acclamation of Shinto) with an intense, if somewhat idiosyncratic, commitment to the Way of the Sages. The late Mito scholars rejected Ogyu Sorai’s interpretation of the Way as something created, the sum total of the rites and institutions established by the sages. To the contrary, they asserted, the Way was grounded in a natural and universal moral order. Despite this significant difference, though, the Mito scholars shared much with Sorai and may be located in the lineage of thought deriving from him. Like Sorai, they were highly dubious about the inward-looking, meditative dimensions of Song and Ming Confucianism, which they saw as encouraging an overly subjective outlook and a debilitating taste for abstract theory on the part of its practitioners. Such an approach, they were convinced, did not connect with the practical needs of society. In its place, they, again like Sorai, looked to rites and institutions as the key means for ordering society.

Establishing appropriate rites and institutions was for the Mito scholars an urgent matter. They saw their society as standing on the brink of disaster, eroded from within by a lack of social cohesion and …