ABSTRACT
The Wang Yang-ming school had a particularly strong following at the end of the Edo period in those han, such as Satsuma and Choshu, where militant activists would emerge to participate in the political movements leading to the downfall of the Bakufu. It can be argued that the reason Zhu Xi philosophy appealed to the Tokugawa authorities was simply that it was the school that was gaining currency at that time among neo-Confucian scholars. Specifically it was the Zhu Xi school of neo-Confucianism that was adopted as the official philosophy of the Bakufu. Traditionally, the founding Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu, has been credited with giving his official blessing to this school, but Ieyasu was not committed exclusively to Zhu Xi neo-Confucianism; he was also influenced by Buddhist and Shinto thought. The scholars who liberated Sung neo-Confucianism from this dependence on Buddhism were Fujiwara Seika and his disciple, Hayashi Razan.
