Yamazaki Ansai

Yamazaki Ansai was a Japanese philosopher and scholar of the early Tokugawa period, born in Kyoto in 1619, the last of four children of a former rōnin who had become a doctor. He began his career as a Buddhist monk at temples on Mount Hiei and in Tosa, but on the advice of fellow monks he turned to the Neo-Confucian scholars and was captivated by the writings of Zhu Xi, which became the basis of his moral teaching. His first work, Heresies Refuted of 1647, rejected the Buddhist faith outright. He then spent some thirty-five years editing, annotating and publishing Confucian and Shinto texts, opened a private school in Kyoto in 1655, and lectured on the Cheng-Zhu school in Edo before the daimyō. He combined Neo-Confucian ideas with Shinto to create Suika Shinto.