The Philosophy of Qi

Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714) was a prominent Japanese scholar who spread Neo-Confucian ideas and moral teachings throughout Japan. He was also known as the "Aristotle of Japan" for his studies of the natural world. Of his many writings, The Record of Great Doubts is the culmination of a lifetime of seeking a unified view of humans and nature. The text represents one of the central reflections in East Asian thought on the significance of qi ch'i, the material force coursing through all life, and is available here for the first time in English with a comprehensive introduction situating Ekken within the currents of his time and within the larger debates of Neo-Confucianism in East Asia.

Mary Evelyn Tucker is visiting professor at Yale in the Institution for Social and Public Policy and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She is also a research associate at the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard. She is the author of Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese Neo-Confucianism and is the coeditor of Confucianism and Ecology and of the two volume Confucian Spirituality. With John A. Grim, she is the director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, an international project involving conferences, books, and a web site. Together the editors of the ten volume series World Religions and Ecology published by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard.