Abstract: The statecraft theory system typified by the Sorai School,initiated during mid and late Edo Period in Japan,is established by Ogyu Sorai and his disciples.Its principle of “discarding all the annotations by Confucianists in the Song Dynasty” is based on the demand of development of Japanese society.With its theory origin from the pragmaticism of the pre-Qin period of China,it methodologically reflected the practical rationality in transferring human nature to human sentiment,benevolence theory to ritual theory,and nature-oriented theory to human-oriented theory,and carried out in a process from imagination to identifying,from value judgement to fact judgment,from inherent standards to external standards,and from natural to artificial.As a lasting influential philosophy,it had converted Tao to Technique,which helped Japanese academic achieved the theoretical transformation from Daoli to Wuli,from early modern to modern times,accumulated endogenous ideological resources for the successful practice of Meiji period,and provided references for other Asian countries.However,the postmodern confusion pushed the thinking of the first philosophy to the stage and the outlook of ontology and methodology as well as unification of appearance and nature manifested may be given an overall meaning.

Key words: Daoli, Wuli, the Sorai School, converting Tao to Technique, Neo-Legalists School in Japan, the first philosophy