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