 The concern for language motivated not only the careful reading of traditional texts, but also increasingly sophisticated philological studies into the meaning of ancient Chinese words. Inspired by detailed Chinese glossaries of key terms, Japanese Confucian scholars argued among themselves about the correct understanding of central ideas by doing their own exegeses of texts and etymological or philological discussions. Some (who came to be associated with a classicist movement sometimes called Kogaku) took their historical philology so strictly that they refused to read any Chinese Confucian texts written after Confucius’s own time, considering the assimilative techniques of neo-Confucianism to be dilutions of original insights, even to the extent of introducing Buddhist or Daoist “distortions” to the original meaning of terms. As for philological methodology, again we find a range of opinion. Should we take a detached, scientific approach that analyzes the occurrences of words simply in their own contexts as objectively as possible? Or should we try to engage them so that they become our language and we can write or even speak in the style of the most ancient Chinese prose and poetry? How can we best understand language: with the detachment of a philologist or with the engagement of a poet? The philosophers of language in Edo-period Confucianism debated such issues.