Distinguishing the Way: BendōOgyū Sorai
Translated by Olof G. Lidin
Monographs (1970) pp. 1–146
Bendō means ‘Distinguishing the Way’, and this was Sorai’s aim in writing this relatively short treatise….
We know that he had a Neo-Confucian training and that he was an orthodox Neo-Confucianist for the first forty and probably fifty years of his life. It was during a time span of some twelve years, from about 1705 until the writing of the Tōmonsho and Bendō, that his mind was in a state of fermentation and he read extensively. The outcome was that by the time the Bendō was written in 1717 he was fully convinced that Neo-Confucianism represented a deviation from the original truth, a heresy that had to be fought and subdued by all the means at his disposal. The Bendō thus represented a proclamation of his new philosophical faith. This was not in itself particularly important, and his contemporaries perhaps did not see it as a portent of things to come, but since it was the beginning of a school, the Sorai-gaku, which was to give a new emphasis and a new tone to intellectual thought throughout the latter part of the Tokugawa era, the appearance of this work is worth being considered as an integral part of later Tokugawa intellectual history.
1970. 146 pages.
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