Chinese learning and intellectual life

Abstract

This chapter discusses Chinese learning of the Heian upper class, a portion of which was regarded as fundamental in the education of males. By the early Heian, the continental immigrants (kikajin) had largely been assimilated among the Japanese population, and their skills had been acquired by Japanese. At the center of Chinese learning and Confucian teaching in the Heian scheme was an idea of the Chinese sage-king. The sage-king myth was cultivated in part through the writing of histories in the Chinese manner, or at least in what Japanese had come to regard as the Chinese manner. If Six National Histories helped enact as well as record the fiction of a harmonious Confucian state, the compiling of official statutes may well be the one substantive achievement of that state. The institution that shaped the men who staffed the statutory system's bureaucracy, wrote the sage-kings' histories, and compiled their laws was the Heian Academy.

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