ABSTRACT
The legacy of Ieyasu or private instructions to his successors in the Shogunate, embodying his views as to how best the government should be carried on by them, is a document that exists in several recensions, and has obviously been supplemented at a later period to include developments up to the middle of the seventeenth century or beyond, since it mentions institutions that had not come into being at the death of the Divine Lord, but only developed in the days of Iemitsu and Ietsuna. This fact has cast some discredit on it, but it seems, however, that a large part of it quite succinctly represents the principles and intentions of the founder of the Edo Shogunate as to how it was to be carried on, formulated no doubt not without the assistance of his confidants, the Hondas, Hayashi, Suden, and Tenkai. And since this latter, with Kasuga no Tsubone, lived right on into the period of the third Shogun Iemitsu, the pair of them being then generally credited with being the necessary “elder statesmen” whose advice was always taken, and since also Tenkai maintained that he was in communication by means of inspired dreams with the Divine Ieyasu, as did also on more than one occasion his grandson Iemitsu, these would be quite capable of redacting the legacy in any way that might be profitable to the family. This document therefore hardly differs in principle from other religious and ethical instructions that purport to emanate from some great one, and to control an institution that he launched. It corresponds to the house laws of the other clan chiefs, and in many cases contains identical material, the product of experience in administering clans and military rule that had been gathered in the course of the preceding centuries since Yoritomo. And since the Tokugawas administered the country exactly like a feudal clan and at their own expense, it would hardly be otherwise.
