FUJIWARA SEIKA (1561–1619) was a Japanese Confucian scholar of the early Tokugawa period. Once regarded as the founder of Tokugawa neo-Confucianism, Fujiwara Seika is today understood increasingly as a transitional figure in the development of an intellectually self-contained Confucianism out of the Zen-flavored Confucianism that flourished in the Gozan Zen temples of the Muromachi period.

Seika was a twelfth-generation descendant of the thirteenth-century court poet Fujiwara no Teika, but his immediate forebears were small local lords in the Harima area (present-day Hyōgo prefecture). A younger son, at the age of seven or eight he was sent to study at a Zen temple in the area where, it so happened, the priests were interested in Confucianism. When he was eighteen, his father and elder brother were killed in battle, and the family's ancestral lands were lost. Through the mediation of two uncles who were priests at important...