Bushido, Inazo Nitobe [top rated ebook readers .txt] 📗

history; the second will be dwelt upon at greater length, as being most

likely to interest students of International Ethics and Comparative

Ethology in our ways of thought and action; and the rest will be dealt

with as corollaries.

The Japanese word which I have roughly rendered Chivalry, is, in the

original, more expressive than Horsemanship. Bu-shi-do means literally

Military-Knight-Ways—the ways which fighting nobles should observe in

their daily life as well as in their vocation; in a word, the “Precepts

of Knighthood,” the noblesse oblige of the warrior class. Having thus

given its literal significance, I may be allowed henceforth to use the

word in the original. The use of the original term is also advisable

for this reason, that a teaching so circumscribed and unique,

engendering a cast of mind and character so peculiar, so local, must

wear the badge of its singularity on its face; then, some words have a

national timbre so expressive of race characteristics that the best of

translators can do them but scant justice, not to say positive injustice

and grievance. Who can improve by translation what the German “Gemüth”

signifies, or who does not feel the difference between the two words

verbally so closely allied as the English gentleman and the French

gentilhomme?

Bushido, then, is the code of moral principles which the knights were

required or instructed to observe. It is not a written code; at best it

consists of a few maxims handed down from mouth to mouth or coming from

the pen of some well-known warrior or savant. More frequently it is a

code unuttered and unwritten, possessing all the more the powerful

sanction of veritable deed, and of a law written on the fleshly tablets

of the heart. It was founded not on the creation of one brain, however

able, or on the life of a single personage, however renowned. It was an

organic growth of decades and centuries of military career. It, perhaps,

fills the same position in the history of ethics that the English

Constitution does in political history; yet it has had nothing to

compare with the Magna Charta or the Habeas Corpus Act. True, early in

the seventeenth century Military Statutes (_Buké Hatto_) were

promulgated; but their thirteen short articles were taken up mostly with

marriages, castles, leagues, etc., and didactic regulations were but

meagerly touched upon. We cannot, therefore, point out any definite time

and place and say, “Here is its fountain head.” Only as it attains

consciousness in the feudal age, its origin, in respect to time, may be

identified with feudalism. But feudalism itself is woven of many

threads, and Bushido shares its intricate nature. As in England the

political institutions of feudalism may be said to date from the Norman

Conquest, so we may say that in Japan its rise was simultaneous with the

ascendency of Yoritomo, late in the twelfth century. As, however, in

England, we find the social elements of feudalism far back in the period

previous to William the Conqueror, so, too, the germs of feudalism in

Japan had been long existent before the period I have mentioned.

Again, in Japan as in Europe, when feudalism was formally inaugurated,

the professional class of warriors naturally came into prominence. These

were known as samurai, meaning literally, like the old English cniht

(knecht, knight), guards or attendants—resembling in character the

soldurii whom Caesar mentioned as existing in Aquitania, or the

comitati, who, according to Tacitus, followed Germanic chiefs in his

time; or, to take a still later parallel, the milites medii that one

reads about in the history of Mediaeval Europe. A Sinico-Japanese word

Bu-ké or Bu-shi (Fighting Knights) was also adopted in common use.

They were a privileged class, and must originally have been a rough

breed who made fighting their vocation. This class was naturally

recruited, in a long period of constant warfare, from the manliest and

the most adventurous, and all the while the process of elimination went

on, the timid and the feeble being sorted out, and only “a rude race,

all masculine, with brutish strength,” to borrow Emerson’s phrase,

surviving to form families and the ranks of the samurai. Coming to

profess great honor and great privileges, and correspondingly great

responsibilities, they soon felt the need of a common standard of

behavior, especially as they were always on a belligerent footing and

belonged to different clans. Just as physicians limit competition among

themselves by professional courtesy, just as lawyers sit in courts of

honor in cases of violated etiquette, so must also warriors possess some

resort for final judgment on their misdemeanors.

Fair play in fight! What fertile germs of morality lie in this primitive

sense of savagery and childhood. Is it not the root of all military and

civic virtues? We smile (as if we had outgrown it!) at the boyish desire

of the small Britisher, Tom Brown, “to leave behind him the name of a

fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one.”

And yet, who does not know that this desire is the corner-stone on which

moral structures of mighty dimensions can be reared? May I not go even

so far as to say that the gentlest and most peace-loving of religions

endorses this aspiration? This desire of Tom’s is the basis on which the

greatness of England is largely built, and it will not take us long to

discover that Bushido does not stand on a lesser pedestal. If fighting

in itself, be it offensive or defensive, is, as Quakers rightly testify,

brutal and wrong, we can still say with Lessing, “We know from what

failings our virtue springs.”[3] “Sneaks” and “cowards” are epithets of

the worst opprobrium to healthy, simple natures. Childhood begins life

with these notions, and knighthood also; but, as life grows larger and

its relations many-sided, the early faith seeks sanction from higher

authority and more rational sources for its own justification,

satisfaction and development. If military interests had operated alone,

without higher moral support, how far short of chivalry would the ideal

of knighthood have fallen! In Europe, Christianity, interpreted with

concessions convenient to chivalry, infused it nevertheless with

spiritual data. “Religion, war and glory were the three souls of a

perfect Christian knight,” says Lamartine. In Japan there were several

SOURCES OF BUSHIDO,

of which I may begin with Buddhism. It furnished a sense of calm trust

in Fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in

sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness with

death. A foremost teacher of swordsmanship, when he saw his pupil

master the utmost of his art, told him, “Beyond this my instruction must

give way to Zen teaching.” “Zen” is the Japanese equivalent for the

Dhyâna, which “represents human effort to reach through meditation zones

of thought beyond the range of verbal expression.”[4] Its method is

contemplation, and its purport, as far as I understand it, to be

convinced of a principle that underlies all phenomena, and, if it can,

of the Absolute itself, and thus to put oneself in harmony with this

Absolute. Thus defined, the teaching was more than the dogma of a sect,

and whoever attains to the perception of the Absolute raises himself

above mundane things and awakes, “to a new Heaven and a new Earth.”

[Footnote 3: Ruskin was one of the most gentle-hearted and peace loving

men that ever lived. Yet he believed in war with all the fervor of a

worshiper of the strenuous life. “When I tell you,” he says in the

Crown of Wild Olive, “that war is the foundation of all the arts, I

mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and

faculties of men. It is very strange to me to discover this, and very

dreadful, but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. * I found in

brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word and strength

of thought in war; that they were nourished in war and wasted by peace,

taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war and betrayed by

peace; in a word, that they were born in war and expired in peace.”]

[Footnote 4: Lafcadio Hearn, Exotics and Retrospectives, p. 84.]

What Buddhism failed to give, Shintoism offered in abundance. Such

loyalty to the sovereign, such reverence for ancestral memory, and such

filial piety as are not taught by any other creed, were inculcated by

the Shinto doctrines, imparting passivity to the otherwise arrogant

character of the samurai. Shinto theology has no place for the dogma of

“original sin.” On the contrary, it believes in the innate goodness and

God-like purity of the human soul, adoring it as the adytum from which

divine oracles are proclaimed. Everybody has observed that the Shinto

shrines are conspicuously devoid of objects and instruments of worship,

and that a plain mirror hung in the sanctuary forms the essential part

of its furnishing. The presence of this article, is easy to explain: it

typifies the human heart, which, when perfectly placid and clear,

reflects the very image of the Deity. When you stand, therefore, in

front of the shrine to worship, you see your own image reflected on its

shining surface, and the act of worship is tantamount to the old Delphic

injunction, “Know Thyself.” But self-knowledge does not imply, either in

the Greek or Japanese teaching, knowledge of the physical part of man,

not his anatomy or his psycho-physics; knowledge was to be of a moral

kind, the introspection of our moral nature. Mommsen, comparing the

Greek and the Roman, says that when the former worshiped he raised his

eyes to heaven, for his prayer was contemplation, while the latter

veiled his head, for his was reflection. Essentially like the Roman

conception of religion, our reflection brought into prominence not so

much the moral as the national consciousness of the individual. Its

nature-worship endeared the country to our inmost souls, while its

ancestor-worship, tracing from lineage to lineage, made the Imperial

family the fountain-head of the whole nation. To us the country is more

than land and soil from which to mine gold or to reap grain—it is the

sacred abode of the gods, the spirits of our forefathers: to us the

Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a Rechtsstaat, or even the

Patron of a Culturstaat—he is the bodily representative of Heaven on

earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy. If what M.

Boutmy[5] says is true of English royalty—that it “is not only the

image of authority, but the author and symbol of national unity,” as I

believe it to be, doubly and trebly may this be affirmed of royalty in

Japan.

[Footnote 5: The English People, p. 188.]

The tenets of Shintoism cover the two predominating features of the

emotional life of our race—Patriotism and Loyalty. Arthur May Knapp

very truly says: “In Hebrew literature it is often difficult to tell

whether the writer is speaking of God or of the Commonwealth; of heaven

or of Jerusalem; of the Messiah or of the nation itself.”[6] A similar

confusion may be noticed in the nomenclature of our national faith.

I said confusion, because it will be so deemed by a logical intellect

on account of its verbal ambiguity; still, being a framework of

national instinct and race feelings, Shintoism never pretends to a

systematic philosophy or a rational theology. This religion—or, is

it not more correct to say, the race emotions which this religion

expressed?—thoroughly imbued Bushido with loyalty to the sovereign and

love of country. These acted more as impulses than as doctrines; for

Shintoism, unlike the Mediaeval Christian Church, prescribed to its

votaries scarcely any