Seventeen-Article Constitution
composition: contestedauthorship: traditional
witness: preserved in the Nihon Shoki of 720, over a century after the stated date
A set of moral injunctions to officials, not a constitution in any legal sense, imports Confucian and Buddhist authority to argue that harmony and obedience to the sovereign are the basis of order.
- harmony placed first as the ground of political order
- Confucian bureaucratic ethics and Buddhist authority joined in one document
- injunctions to officials rather than enforceable law
- attribution and dating debated on linguistic grounds
The articles open with the value of harmony and proceed through reverence for the Buddhist triad, obedience to imperial commands, ritual propriety in officials, impartiality in judgement, punctuality and the avoidance of envy and private interest. It is preserved in the Nihon Shoki, compiled over a century later, and both the date and Shotoku's authorship are argued: some vocabulary appears anachronistic. Whatever its origin, it is the earliest statement of a Japanese political ethic drawing openly on continental sources.
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