The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1741 page)

(Lat., Officium Divinum). The daily prayers prescribed in liturgical churches in Christianity.
In the W., the arrangement of the monastic office goes back to
St Benedict
, who named it the ‘work of God’ (
opus Dei
): in his Rule the offices comprise the ‘day hours’ (
lauds
,
prime, terce, sext, none
,
vespers
, and
compline
) and the ‘night office’ (
mattins
); the whole Psalter was recited each week. In the Middle Ages this office became obligatory for secular clergy as well.
In the E., there is a similar sequence of hours to that of the W., of which the most familiar is Orthros (lauds). The whole office is of great length, and is abbreviated by all except monks in choir.

 
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Office of Readings
.

An
office
prescribed for Roman Catholics which may be said at any hour of the day. It includes two readings, one from the Bible and a second from the
fathers
or from some other Christian writing. It replaced
mattins
in the 1971 revision of the
Breviary
.

 
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see
MIKI TOKUHARU
.

 
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(1666–1728).
Japanese Confucian scholar who laid, indirectly, the foundations for the School of National Learning (
Kokugaku
). When 25, he started to give free lectures in Edo, in front of the temple of Z
j
-j
.
It
Jinsai (1627–1705) had already argued for a return to the classic Confucian sources, in a school known as
Kogid
, ‘School for the Study of Ancient Meaning’. Ogy
followed him at first, but concluded that It
had not gone far enough in making his study of the past serve the needs of society: he was right in criticizing the neo-Confucians, but he had remained, like them, too concerned with individual ethics and self-improvement. In his view,
Hsun Tzu
was a better guide. Ogy
had a profound effect, because it was realized by his pupils that the antiquity of Japan could equally be studied and established as a court of appeal against the domination of Chinese thought.