Ishida Baigan's Views of Life and Death : His Experiences of Apprehension and His Self-Consciousness as a Confucian

Abstract

In this article I clarified how Ishida Baigan (1685-1744), who called himself a Confucian, confronted his existential questions regarding life and death. The main concerns in Confucianism in general are not with such issues of death as a dead person, but with the issues of life related to a living person and this world. Based on Baigan's texts, however, I concluded that he seriously worked on the meanings of both life and death. His philosophical inquiry constituted his investigation of one's nature/heart, that is, his renewal of one's awareness of the meanings of life and death from his cosmological perspectives. After confirming that Baigan basically followed Zhou Dunyi's theory of generation, I showed how he interpreted the spirit of a dead person with his limited reference to it. According to his understanding of neither arising nor ceasing, he claimed that one's nature remains there even after life is over. Furthermore, based on his view of language as containing the function of naming something, Baigan says that when a living person names a dead person as spirit and worships it sincerely, that spirit surely exists.