69 Again, the academic ability of the students differed greatly from per-son to person, with some having specialized knowledge and others being completely blank slates. Most of the students did not, of course, know English and most had never even heard of subjects like psychology or ethics. In the beginning there were only these sorts of in-house students, but later the school began to offer what is referred to today as a cor-respondence course. In 1888 the Philosophy Academy Lecture Records be-gan publication and in January a system was established for students outside of the physical school. No qualifications were required to become an external student. In order to make things more conven-ient for those in the countryside, the school transcribed its in-house class lectures by hand and published them in the form of the above records. In this way educational opportunities were opened up for “those without resources and those without leisure time,” concretely realizing the educational principles of the Academy. Lecture records were published three times a month, allowing a great number of peo-ple to learn about philosophy and other subjects. Statistics for the following year show that there was a total of more than 1,800 exter-nal students, based as far away as Hokkaidō in the north and the Ko-rean peninsula in the south. One of the students, KAWAGUCHI Ekai, was a Buddhist scholar and explorer known for having gone into Nepal and Tibet, which were closed to foreigners, and bringing back original Buddhist scrip-tures. When the school was founded he was twenty-two years old and at first he did not have any academic qualifications so he read the lecture records as an external student based in Ōsaka. Eventually, he
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