Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku (ritual suicide) at the death of one's master. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Loyalty is also contained within this single-mindedness. When one understands this settling into single-mindedness well, his affairs will thin out. And once one has come to this understanding he will be a different person from that point on, though he may not always bear it in mind. But grasping this firmly, one must pile experience upon experience. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.Įveryone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it were somewhere else. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. Living in the present: There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling. If by setting ones heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai. To die without gaining one's aim is a dog's death and fanaticism. But not having attained our aim and continuing to live is cowardice. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one's aim. To say that dying without reaching one's aim is to die a dog's death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. The selections below are grouped by theme.ĭeath: The Way of the Samurai is found in death. ![]() ![]() But some ideas are repeated often enough to be seen as essential to his thought. His ideas were expressed in conversations with his young disciple and so the resulting book is not a systematic code of rules. Among them, a work called Hagakure, or "hidden leaves," has come to be seen as the one which best describes Bushidô, the "way of the samurai." It was written down in the early eighteenth century by a young samurai named Tashirô Tsuramoto, who was recording the wisdom he had learned over seven years of talks with an older, retired samurai of the Nabeshima clan named Yamamoto Tsunetomo. ![]() The lord or other high-ranking members of a clan often wrote out codes of behavior for the clan retainers. In fact, the word samurai itself comes from a verb that means "to serve." One of the most important was the loyalty samurai owed to the lord they served. As opportunities to fight decreased, and samurai were employed in peacetime government positions, more attention was given to the values that defined their class. The Tale of the 47 Rônin according to the Hagakure The Hagakure: The Book of the SamuraiĪfter the unification of Japan in 1590 and the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600, the samurai (warriors) remained at the top of the social scale but had fewer and fewer chances to prove their valor in battle.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |