Still working on Haikai to kanbungaku. However, this time the chapter is Fûgaron 風雅論 (Theories of fûga [poetic elegance]) by Ibi Takashi 揖斐高.
Fûga is a word that comes up a lot in discussions of haikai, especially when it comes to Bashô, so it makes sense to figure out where it comes from. Ibi tells us that it originates in Shijing (Classic of poetry, or Book of odes) 詩經, the collection of poems dated 10th-7th BCE that is one of the major books of the Chinese literary canon. Its contents break down into feng 風 (airs), xiaoya (lesser odes, maybe?) 小雅, daya 大雅 (grand odes?) and song 頌 (hymns). "Fûga" comes from the first three types, feng and ya, and thus is more or less synonymous with "poetry." In the early modern period, under the influence of Confucian thought, poetry = shi 詩 = kanshi, waka, and haikai = fûga.
Ibi notes that in the modern period, accounts of the history of Confucianism in early modern Japan go this way: the bakufu underpinned its social system with neo-Confucianism, which focused on the development of personal morality through self-cultivation. In the Genroku period Itô Jinsai 伊藤仁斎 advanced a kind of humanism-tinged school of thought that came to be called kogaku ("antiquarian studies"); he took a dim view of Zhu Xi's addition of Da Xue and Zhong Yong to the Confucian canon, and advocated that greater attention be paid to recapturing an "authentic" understanding of the Analects and Mencius without recourse to commentary. Later, Ogyû Sorai 荻生徂徠 picked up on a lot of the ideas put forth by Jinsai, adding in an emphasis on the appreciation and composition of music and art, which eventually resulted in the study of literature gaining independence from inquiry into ethics and politics. However, he says that this version of the story needs some more exploration.
