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

credenda, furnishing them at the same time with

agenda of a straightforward and simple type.

 

[Footnote 6: “Feudal and Modern Japan” Vol. I, p. 183.]

 

As to strictly ethical doctrines, the teachings of Confucius were the

most prolific source of Bushido. His enunciation of the five moral

relations between master and servant (the governing and the governed),

father and son, husband and wife, older and younger brother, and between

friend and friend, was but a confirmation of what the race instinct had

recognized before his writings were introduced from China. The calm,

benignant, and worldly-wise character of his politico-ethical precepts

was particularly well suited to the samurai, who formed the ruling

class. His aristocratic and conservative tone was well adapted to the

requirements of these warrior statesmen. Next to Confucius, Mencius

exercised an immense authority over Bushido. His forcible and often

quite democratic theories were exceedingly taking to sympathetic

natures, and they were even thought dangerous to, and subversive of, the

existing social order, hence his works were for a long time under

censure. Still, the words of this master mind found permanent lodgment

in the heart of the samurai.

 

The writings of Confucius and Mencius formed the principal text-books

for youths and the highest authority in discussion among the old. A mere

acquaintance with the classics of these two sages was held, however, in

no high esteem. A common proverb ridicules one who has only an

intellectual knowledge of Confucius, as a man ever studious but ignorant

of Analects. A typical samurai calls a literary savant a book-smelling

sot. Another compares learning to an ill-smelling vegetable that must be

boiled and boiled before it is fit for use. A man who has read a little

smells a little pedantic, and a man who has read much smells yet more

so; both are alike unpleasant. The writer meant thereby that knowledge

becomes really such only when it is assimilated in the mind of the

learner and shows in his character. An intellectual specialist was

considered a machine. Intellect itself was considered subordinate to

ethical emotion. Man and the universe were conceived to be alike

spiritual and ethical. Bushido could not accept the judgment of Huxley,

that the cosmic process was unmoral.

 

Bushido made light of knowledge as such. It was not pursued as an end in

itself, but as a means to the attainment of wisdom. Hence, he who

stopped short of this end was regarded no higher than a convenient

machine, which could turn out poems and maxims at bidding. Thus,

knowledge was conceived as identical with its practical application in

life; and this Socratic doctrine found its greatest exponent in the

Chinese philosopher, Wan Yang Ming, who never wearies of repeating, “To

know and to act are one and the same.”

 

I beg leave for a moment’s digression while I am on this subject,

inasmuch as some of the noblest types of bushi were strongly

influenced by the teachings of this sage. Western readers will easily

recognize in his writings many parallels to the New Testament. Making

allowance for the terms peculiar to either teaching, the passage, “Seek

ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things

shall be added unto you,” conveys a thought that may be found on almost

any page of Wan Yang Ming. A Japanese disciple[7] of his says—“The lord

of heaven and earth, of all living beings, dwelling in the heart of man,

becomes his mind (_Kokoro_); hence a mind is a living thing, and is ever

luminous:” and again, “The spiritual light of our essential being is

pure, and is not affected by the will of man. Spontaneously springing up

in our mind, it shows what is right and wrong: it is then called

conscience; it is even the light that proceedeth from the god of

heaven.” How very much do these words sound like some passages from

Isaac Pennington or other philosophic mystics! I am inclined to think

that the Japanese mind, as expressed in the simple tenets of the Shinto

religion, was particularly open to the reception of Yang Ming’s

precepts. He carried his doctrine of the infallibility of conscience to

extreme transcendentalism, attributing to it the faculty to perceive,

not only the distinction between right and wrong, but also the nature

of psychical facts and physical phenomena. He went as far as, if not

farther than, Berkeley and Fichte, in Idealism, denying the existence of

things outside of human ken. If his system had all the logical errors

charged to Solipsism, it had all the efficacy of strong conviction and

its moral import in developing individuality of character and equanimity

of temper cannot be gainsaid.

 

[Footnote 7: Miwa Shissai.]

 

Thus, whatever the sources, the essential principles which Bushido

imbibed from them and assimilated to itself, were few and simple. Few

and simple as these were, they were sufficient to furnish a safe conduct

of life even through the unsafest days of the most unsettled period of

our nation’s history. The wholesome, unsophisticated nature of our

warrior ancestors derived ample food for their spirit from a sheaf of

commonplace and fragmentary teachings, gleaned as it were on the

highways and byways of ancient thought, and, stimulated by the demands

of the age, formed from these gleanings anew and unique type of manhood.

An acute French savant, M. de la Mazelière, thus sums up his

impressions of the sixteenth century:—“Toward the middle of the

sixteenth century, all is confusion in Japan, in the government, in

society, in the church. But the civil wars, the manners returning to

barbarism, the necessity for each to execute justice for himself,—these

formed men comparable to those Italians of the sixteenth century, in

whom Taine praises ‘the vigorous initiative, the habit of sudden

resolutions and desperate undertakings, the grand capacity to do and to

suffer.’ In Japan as in Italy ‘the rude manners of the Middle Ages made

of man a superb animal, wholly militant and wholly resistant.’ And this

is why the sixteenth century displays in the highest degree the

principal quality of the Japanese race, that great diversity which one

finds there between minds (_esprits_) as well as between temperaments.

While in India and even in China men seem to differ chiefly in degree of

energy or intelligence, in Japan they differ by originality of character

as well. Now, individuality is the sign of superior races and of

civilizations already developed. If we make use of an expression dear to

Nietzsche, we might say that in Asia, to speak of humanity is to speak

of its plains; in Japan as in Europe, one represents it above all by its

mountains.”

 

To the pervading characteristics of the men of whom M. de la Mazelière

writes, let us now address ourselves. I shall begin with

 

RECTITUDE OR JUSTICE,

 

the most cogent precept in the code of the samurai. Nothing is more

loathsome to him than underhand dealings and crooked undertakings. The

conception of Rectitude may be erroneous—it may be narrow. A well-known

bushi defines it as a power of resolution;—“Rectitude is the power of

deciding upon a certain course of conduct in accordance with reason,

without wavering;—to die when it is right to die, to strike when to

strike is right.” Another speaks of it in the following terms:

“Rectitude is the bone that gives firmness and stature. As without

bones the head cannot rest on the top of the spine, nor hands move nor

feet stand, so without rectitude neither talent nor learning can make of

a human frame a samurai. With it the lack of accomplishments is as

nothing.” Mencius calls Benevolence man’s mind, and Rectitude or

Righteousness his path. “How lamentable,” he exclaims, “is it to neglect

the path and not pursue it, to lose the mind and not know to seek it

again! When men’s fowls and dogs are lost, they know to seek for them

again, but they lose their mind and do not know to seek for it.” Have we

not here “as in a glass darkly” a parable propounded three hundred years

later in another clime and by a greater Teacher, who called Himself _the

Way_ of Righteousness, through whom the lost could be found? But I stray

from my point. Righteousness, according to Mencius, is a straight and

narrow path which a man ought to take to regain the lost paradise.

 

Even in the latter days of feudalism, when the long continuance of peace

brought leisure into the life of the warrior class, and with it

dissipations of all kinds and gentle accomplishments, the epithet

Gishi (a man of rectitude) was considered superior to any name that

signified mastery of learning or art. The Forty-seven Faithfuls—of whom

so much is made in our popular education—are known in common parlance

as the Forty-seven Gishi.

 

In times when cunning artifice was liable to pass for military tact and

downright falsehood for ruse de guerre, this manly virtue, frank and

honest, was a jewel that shone the brightest and was most highly

praised. Rectitude is a twin brother to Valor, another martial virtue.

But before proceeding to speak of Valor, let me linger a little while on

what I may term a derivation from Rectitude, which, at first deviating

slightly from its original, became more and more removed from it, until

its meaning was perverted in the popular acceptance. I speak of Gi-ri,

literally the Right Reason, but which came in time to mean a vague sense

of duty which public opinion expected an incumbent to fulfil. In its

original and unalloyed sense, it meant duty, pure and simple,—hence,

we speak of the Giri we owe to parents, to superiors, to inferiors, to

society at large, and so forth. In these instances Giri is duty; for

what else is duty than what Right Reason demands and commands us to do.

Should not Right Reason be our categorical imperative?

 

Giri primarily meant no more than duty, and I dare say its etymology

was derived from the fact that in our conduct, say to our parents,

though love should be the only motive, lacking that, there must be

some other authority to enforce filial piety; and they formulated

this authority in Giri. Very rightly did they formulate this

authority—Giri—since if love does not rush to deeds of virtue,

recourse must be had to man’s intellect and his reason must be quickened

to convince him of the necessity of acting aright. The same is true of

any other moral obligation. The instant Duty becomes onerous. Right

Reason steps in to prevent our shirking it. Giri thus understood is a

severe taskmaster, with a birch-rod in his hand to make sluggards

perform their part. It is a secondary power in ethics; as a motive it

is infinitely inferior to the Christian doctrine of love, which should

be the law. I deem it a product of the conditions of an artificial

society—of a society in which accident of birth and unmerited favour

instituted class distinctions, in which the family was the social unit,

in which seniority of age was of more account than superiority of

talents, in which natural affections had often to succumb before

arbitrary man-made customs. Because of this very artificiality, Giri

in time degenerated into a vague sense of propriety called up to explain

this and sanction that,—as, for example, why a mother must, if need be,

sacrifice all her other children in order to save the first-born; or why

a daughter must sell her chastity to get funds to pay for the father’s

dissipation, and the like. Starting as Right Reason, Giri has, in my

opinion, often stooped to casuistry. It has even degenerated into

cowardly fear of censure. I might say of Giri what Scott wrote of

patriotism, that “as it is the