The Instruments of Learning
Athough it is essential to know letters to study, it would be a great misunderstanding of the nature of learning to think that it only consists in reading books, as people have thought from ancient times. Letters are the instruments of learning; they are like the hammers and saws used to build a house. Although hammers and saws are indispensable tools for building a house, a person who only knows their names but not how to build a house cannot be called a carpenter. For this reason, a person who only knows how to read letters but does not know how to discern the principles of things cannot be called a true scholar. Such a person is like a man who is said to have read the Confucian Analects but does not understand it. In like manner, a person who has learned to recite the Kojiki by heart but does not know the present price of rice must be called ignorant in practical studies. A person who has mastered the inner meaning of the Chinese Classics and Histories but does not understand the ways of buying and selling, and is quite incompetent in business dealings, must be said to be a failure in the art of book-keeping. And a person who, after years of hard study and huge outlays of money, becomes proficient in Western studies but is unable to make his own private living, is out of touch with learning pertinent to the current of the times. Such people may be called mere wholesalers of letters. In merit and capacity they are not different from food-consuming dictionaries. They are useless to the nation, and parasites on the economy. Therefore, household management, book-keeping, staying abreast of the trends of the times are also forms of learning. What is the reason for understanding learning exclusively in the sense of reading Japanese, Chinese, and Western books?
