Miyamoto Musashi - The Complete Book of Five Rings

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

THE

Complete

Book of Five Rings

Introduction

A LEGENDARY FIGURE

In popular Japanese culture, Miyamoto Musashi is a legendary figure. This warrior of the seventeenth century, a master of the sword but also a painter, sculptor, and calligrapher, left us a body of written work that has an important place in the history of the Japanese sword. His dense and brief Gorin no sho, or "Writings on the Five Elements," popularly known as The Book of Five Rings, is a summary of the art of the sword and a treatise on strategy.

Although the painting, sculpture, and calligraphy of Musashi are less well known, they are considered by connoisseurs to be of the first order.

Because of the extension of his art into so many domains and the way in which he explored the limits of the knowledge of his time, Miyamoto Musashi reminds us of Leonardo da Vinci. His personality and his adventurous life have been popularized by a famous novel and many films.

Here I present a completely new and annotated translation of the principal work of Miyamoto Musashi. Because of its concision, the Gorin no sho is a hard text for contemporary Japanese people to understand. The misunderstandings can only be greater for Westerners, who might draw the impression from the apparent clarity of the text that they are understanding it when in fact the author's essential ideas are eluding them. For this reason I have accompanied the text with clarifications, some of which are historic,

others linguistic, and still others related to the nature of martial arts practice. I undertook this project even though several translations of the Gorin no sho already exist. Through carefully rereading the Japanese text, I discovered that these translations contained many errors or misunderstandings.

Translation of this work is a difficult undertaking because of the considerable evolution the Japanese language has undergone since Musashi's time, but even more so because of the major problem connected with the roleat once limited and importantplayed by verbal explanation in the traditional martial arts. That which is expressed in words is a little like the knot in an obi: only the knot is manifest, visible, but without the continuity of the belt, the whole thing would not hold together. What takes on meaning in the nodal point of the word is the entirety of a shared experience.

The principal mode of transmission of the martial arts was direct teaching. Words played a small role, and writing was confined for the most part to a simple enumeration of technical terms. This approach did not stem from respect for tradition; rather, it was connected with the very considerable difficulty of communicating techniques of the body and mind in writing. In the Scroll of Water, the second section of the Gorin no sho, for example, when Musashi explains techniques in words, it is difficult to understand, since the execution of each technique takes only a few seconds. The description in writing of a movement of the body that lasts only a few seconds is very complexI continually have this experience in my own work. Nevertheless, at certain moments in the course of a student's development, a single word can trigger a profound understanding of the art by creating a new order for the experiences accumulated in the silence of physical practice. Musashi's words have this objective.

One of the big obstacles in translating the work of Musashi lies in this gap between his words and his body. I have attempted to bridge this gap through my own experience of budo, for the Gorin no sho is one of the books that serve me as a guide in the practice of the way of martial arts. The name and image of Musashi have been familiar to me from earliest childhood through stories, films, and, later, novels.

Musashi reappeared for me in the form of the Gorin no sho at a time when, after several years of practicing karate, I began to wonder about the relation

ship between this art and the tradition of the sword, which I saw as the essence of budo. It should be noted that from the cultural and ideological point of view, the tradition of karate is different in some respects from that of budo. Karate was a local practice transmitted secretly on the island of Okinawa (in the extreme south of Japan), and it was not included in the framework of budo until around 1930. The degree of technical refinement and depth that had been reached by karate at that time was nowhere near that of the Japanese art of the sword. Nonetheless, it quickly emerged, after the presentation of karate to the Japanese public, that this art fit in well with the modern life of the twentieth century and was capable of developing as a contemporary form of budo. For this discipline, newly a part of budo, the most important reference point was the Japanese art of the sword. By relying on this tradition, and particularly that of kendo and judo, karate found its budo form. Hence for Japanese karate practitioners, writings on the art of the sword became the cultural and technical reference points for their art.

As a result, the Gorin no sho has been my companion for the last twenty-five of my forty plus years of practicing budo. Of course, the intensity of my practice is not of the same order as Musashi's, but I have tried to bridge the gap between Musashi's words and the body through my own practice, however limited.

The other difficulty encountered in translating the Gorin no sho is more classical: How is it possible to bring out the proper sense of a word when the cultures involved are as different as those of the contemporary Western world and Japan of the seventeenth century? I will give just one example: In this work, Musashi very frequently uses the term kokoro, which is customarily translated "mind" or "heart." Many sentences, if translated literally, would yield expressions such as "Your mind must be resolute, tight, calm," and so on. Since the English language makes much greater use of expressions in which the person takes on the role of subject, the translation that seems to me to render these Japanese expressions the best is "Be determined, tight, calm," and so on. The idea expressed in Japanese by kokoro is included in the English personal form of the subject. In English when you say "Be calm," the underlying idea is that the mind should be calm, the primacy of the mind over the body being implicitly understood. In Japanese this primacy is not

assumed in the same way. Musashi wrote: "The mind should not be pulled about by the body; the body should not be pulled about by the mind." This way of distinguishing the mind and body was established within the context of a way of thinking and a language in which the prevailing tendency is to mix the mind and body together nonhierarchically and in which an analytical effort has to be made to distinguish them. A superficial interpretation might see an affirmation of dualistic thinking in such remarks as Musashi's above, whereas, quite to the contrary, we find in such remarks efforts aimed at establishing distinctions that are not taken for granted.