=Revival of Pure Shinto=.--The seventeenth century witnessed a great revival of Chinese learning in Japan. It embraced not only the renewed study of the ancient classics of Confucius and Mencius, but the philosophical writings of Chu-hi and other sceptical writers of the Sung Dynasty (960-1278). The Samurai, or governing caste of the nation, devoted themselves to these studies with amazing zeal and enthusiasm, to the great neglect of Buddhism, which from this time forward was left mainly to the common people. This movement reached a climax in the eighteenth century, when a reaction set in. Kada, Mabuchi, and other patriotic scholars, resenting the undue preponderance allowed to Chinese thought, did their utmost, by commentaries and exegetical treatises, to recall attention to the monuments of the ancient national literature, such as the _Kojiki_, _Nihongi_, and _Manyōshiu_, which had been so long neglected that they were in great part unintelligible even to educated men. Under their pupil and successor Motoöri (1730-1801), this movement assumed a religious character. His patriotic prejudices were offended by the foreign elements which he found in the Ryōbu and other prevailing forms of Shinto, while the Sung doctrine of a "Great Absolute" was not only odious to him on account of its alien origin, but failed to satisfy his soul-hunger for a more personal object of worship. He therefore turned back to the older form of Shinto. To its propagation by lectures and books he devoted many years of his life, and not without success. He had numerous followers among the more educated classes. Motoöri's principal work is the _Kojiki den_, a commentary on the _Kojiki_, in which he loses no opportunity of attacking everything Chinese and of exalting the old Japanese customs, language, and religion in a spirit of ardent and undiscriminating patriotism. He seems to have been wholly blind to the fact that the exotic faiths and philosophies, whose intrusion into Shinto he so bitterly resented, contain elements far otherwise valuable to mankind than the ritual of the _Yengishiki_ and the old-world myths of the _Kojiki_.