This chapter situates in the social context of Tokugawa Japan the emergence of a class of scholars who engaged in the production of texts and in practices that aimed at developing authoritative inquiries on the nature of reality and the laws that govern it (metaphysics); the motivations, norms, and aims of moral life (ethics); the function and rules of language (philology and linguistics); the principles of good government (politics); and the legitimation of cognitive claims (epistemology), among others. Operating within different institutional frameworks and through texts circulating in a variety of formats (manuscript and printed commentaries, treatises, glossaries, dictionaries, collected lecture notes, etc.), these scholars (generically known as jusha) developed a philosophical archive that should be regarded as a qualitatively and quantitatively unprecedented event in Japanese history outside Buddhist institutions.

The Confucian “way of knowing” was validated through classical texts that transmitted the wisdom of antiquity. Early Song rulers promoted Confucianism as the ideological foundation of the state, and the reformulation of Confucianism commonly known as “Neo-Confucianism” took place against the backdrop of the newly unified Song dynasty. Well before the Song, the establishment of government schools and the examination system institutionalized early ideals of learning, transforming them into knowledge useful for governing a bureaucratic state. During the Song, debates over the content of the examinations – and thus what kinds of knowledge were valued – were sparked by political disputes, but disagreements were also based on deeply held beliefs about the meaning of learning and the purpose of knowledge. The cosmological underpinnings of Confucianism were articulated and transmitted through new interpretations of the Classics in the Northern Song, synthesized and systematized by the Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi (1130–1200). History was a way of knowing distinct from the Classics as a source of political and philosophical principles. The Jurchen Jin incorporated and adapted these ways of knowing with their own in their rule of the north. The introduction of print technology altered people’s relationship to texts and to the transmission of knowledge.