3 Enryō was born in 1858 at the temple Jikōji in Ura, in what is today’s Nagaoka city, Niigata prefecture. He was the first child of the twenty-eight-year-old abbot Engo and twenty-three-year-old Iku. Jikōji was a sub-temple of the True Pure Land School’s (referred to as the “True School” below) Ōtani branch Higashi Honganji, which meant that Enryō was destined to take over the temple. He was born four years after American Admiral PERRY and his four battleships cruised into Edo Bay. Entering the new Meiji Period, Ja-pan was ending its isolation and undergoing dramatic change. As a child, Enryō studied the scriptures under his father and participated in the morning and evening rituals at the temple. He wrote that he enjoyed listening to people’s stories and spending time thinking by himself. But, secretly he felt uneasy about being the eldest son and heir to the abbotship. From the spring of his tenth year Enryō started attending the private tutoring school of ISHIGURO Tadanori in the neighboring village. It took him around an hour to walk there so he could take classes in Chinese classics and arithmetic. The study of Chinese classics was the foundation of education at that time, and the course of study began with reading aloud (simply pronouncing the words). Ishiguro was a twenty-three year-old doctor of Western medicine and had been working as an assistant at a medical center in the capital city of Edo (Tokyo). It seemed to Ishiguro that trouble was brewing in Edo. Eldest Son of the Temple Chinese Classics Studies (1)
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