Miyamoto Musashi The Book of Five Rings Translated by Victor Harris (1982).

     Miyamoto Musashi The Book of Five Rings Translated by Victor Harris (1982). I finally read this book; it’s been sitting on the shelf for about twenty years. I must have tried reading it once before; and reading it now, I see why I gave up on it. The introduction includes a brief life of Musashi; he was a killer, and in my opinion no amount of twaddle about sincerity, honesty, discipline and the Way will excuse that fact. It’s obvious that Harris admires Musashi and all that he stands for, and this affects his translation. I don’t know how opaque the original is, but the translation is riddled with vague abstractions and fuzzy language about the Way.

    Musashi does give some practical guidance, but he ends every short paragraph in which he describes some principle or strategy with an exhortation to study this deeply. Since he himself says he can’t describe his methods in detail, this exhortation amounts to nothing. Musashi clearly believes that if you want to succeed you must apply yourself and focus on your goal to the exclusion of pretty well all else. That’s a truism, and it doesn’t take a three-hundred-year old text to teach us that. More interesting is the assumption that the nature of the goal is irrelevant. Only the method of achieving it counts, and the only methods that count are the ones that lead to success.
     Musashi does not question the rights and wrongs of setting out on a life of murder; he questions only the rights and wrongs of achieving success in killing. Underlying this is apparently some creed of martial honour. Musashi duelled with anyone who came his way and offered to fight, and killed about 60 people by the time he quit. Whether he quit because he’d had enough, or because no one else would challenge him, is unclear. In any case, he never questioned the rights and wrongs of wanting to live this way.
     The closest thing to an excuse for his behaviour is the wretched political and social conditions of 17th century Japan. The samurai had essentially lost their place in society, and their only viable trade was as mercenaries for the few warlords who were left, and who during that century were subjugated by the Tokugawa clan. One can argue that when murder is the only way to survive, murder is condonable. But the very conditions that made the samurai unnecessary also made murder unnecessary. Musashi did take part in battles, but most of his killing was done in the course of duels. Duelling is a particularly stupid way of maintaining one’s honour, and the honour one gains by success in duelling is indeed Nothing, or the Void, as Musashi calls it. In the end, Musashi’s philosophy amounts to little more than a fancifully packaged nihilism.
     Eastwood’s The Unforgiven has the best comment on this lifestyle: “Right and wrong ain’t got nothing to do with it.” Exactly; and while that ethos makes for a certain thrill in certain kinds of fantasy, it is not one on which to base a life. If anything, not fighting takes more courage in the kind of society in which Musashi lived than fighting does; but that’s an answer to a question that Musashi did not conceive of, and perhaps could not understand if it were put to him. The fact that for a while this book enjoyed a vogue as a guide to corporate behaviour among American executives (who believed that the Japanese were beating them in the market by using Musashi as inspiration) merely confirms the lack of morality of the American Way of Business. We can understand, and I can empathise with, the boys of all ages who find the figure of the Warrior attractive. But the confusion of the killer with the Warrior is disturbing. A killer kills because he wants to. A Warrior kills because he has to. * (2003)
     Update 2020 06 20: Gordon Dickson's Dorsai stories are I think a definitive exploration of Warrior's ethos.