During the dark and dreary Middle Ages which followed this golden period, and which were brought about by the degeneration of the ruling nobles and by the gradually rising power of the military class, Chinese learning fled to the protecting hands of Buddhist priests; and in its quiet refuge within the monastery walls it continued to breathe its humble existence, until it found at the beginning of the sixteenth century a powerful patron in the great founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The education of the common people, too, seems to have been kept up by the monks--a fact still preserved in the word _tera-koya_, 'church seminary,' a term used, until forty years ago, to express the tiny private schools for children. It must be remembered that the education thus given was always of an exclusively secular character, basing itself on the Confucian morals.
Before passing on to the consideration of Laoism, let me say something about the so-called orthodox form of the teaching of Confucius, which is one of the latest developments of that doctrine. Orthodox Confucianism, as represented by the famous Chinese philosopher and commentator of the Confucian canon, Chu-Hsi (1130-1200), found its admirer in a Japanese scholar, Fujiwara-no-Seigwa (1560-1619), who in his youth had joined the priesthood, which however he afterwards renounced. He gave lectures on the Chinese classics at Kyôto. He was held in great esteem by Tokugawa Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa line of Shoguns, who embraced the Chinese system of ethics as preached by Chu-Hsi. During the two hundred and fifty years of the Tokugawa rule, this system, under the hereditary direction of the descendants of Hayashi Razan (1583-1657), one of the most distinguished disciples of Seigwa, was recognised as the established doctrine.
According to the somewhat hazy ideas of Chu-Hsi's philosophy, which I ask your permission to sketch here on account of the high public esteem in which we have held them for the last three centuries, the ultimate basis of the universe is Infinity, or _Tai Kieh_, which, though containing within itself all the germs of all forms of existence and excellence, is utterly void of form or sensible qualities. It consists of two qualities, _li_ and _chi_, which may be roughly rendered into 'force-element' and 'matter-element.' These are self-existences, are present in all things, and are found in their formation. The 'force-element,' or _li_, we are told, is the perfection of heavenly virtue. It is in inanimate things as well as in man and other animate beings, and pervades all space. The 'matter-element,' or _chi_, is endowed with the male and the female principles, or positive and negative polarities, as we might call them. It is, moreover, characterised by the five constituent qualities of _wood_, _fire_, _earth_, _metal_, and _water_. Hence its other name, _Wu-hsieng_, or 'Five Qualities.'