Confucian and Buddhist philosophies of education at Watsuji Tetsuro

Watsuji Tetsurō is a Japanese philosopher, peripherally associated with the Kyôto School of Philosophy. He is best-known for his philosophy of how milieu affects culture, and for his relational ethics. In his systematic ethics, written in three volumes of Ethics (1937, 1946, 1949), he had fragments of an ethics of education. He saw school as essential for forming people into their culture and its ways of cooperation. But at the same time, he argued that education must enable people to critically engage the problems of their culture and be part of cultural and historical change. His vision of education practically expresses his “ethics of emptiness,” where there is a back and forth between negating individual egotism (emptying the self) to realize relationality, and negating the closure of groups (emptying totality) in order to make space for creative individuality.

dynamic philosophy of education, it is necessary to concretize what Watsuji meant. To do this, I turn to Watsuji’s under-researched books on two traditional Japanese philosophies: Confucianism and Buddhism. I will explore two books, Confucius (1938) and The Wayfarer Dōgen (1926), and examine their tensional visions of education.

In Confucius, Watsuji details a view of education as learning one’s place in the practical nexus of acts—the cooperative web of relations that people are born into. He depicted education not as merely individual learning but as a communal process, wherein students learn communal virtues that they carry from the family to political life. These virtues also have a call and response structure, similar to Nel Noddings’s caring education, where the virtues of the one-caring are mutually related to the virtues of the cared-for. Furthermore, this process of education and social connection was seen as a lifelong process of becoming human. However, there are also dangers in this approach to Confucianism, in its lack of individual criticality and its tendency to fall into conservative views of an unchanging society. It also tends to lose the personal self behind the social roles, a self that is necessary for social change.

In contrast, The Wayfarer Dōgen depicts Dōgen’s education as a Buddhist monk and how he formed his disciples as a Zen master. This process shows a view of education, not as learning one’s place, but as awakening to self. It begins not with submission but with a critical stance toward the social order and Confucian virtues like filial piety. However, the way beyond the social order is through a process of self-negation and self-transformation from a deep personal encounter with one’s master, letting go of oneself, and awakening to a selfless self. It is this “self” that is able to creatively transform culture and history, with a deep respect for the uniqueness of individuals.

Watsuji’s ideas and readings of traditional Japanese philosophy will be examined with rigorous reference to Watsuji’s philosophical oeuvre. But education is not a matter of merely abstract ideas but of actual practices in life as it is lived. Thus, we will engage these ideas in connection to Watsuji’s own personal experience of schooling—as is seen in his autobiography and essays. And we will also consider these philosophies in light of real questions we face in education today, both in Japan and around the world, and both in school and throughout the lifelong process of human formation: Is there something deeper in education rather than merely learning information and skills? Does education prepare us to genuinely encounter others in society? How can we socialize people without losing their unique and creative individuality? And how do we resolve the tension between socialization and individuality?