Bushido, Inazo Nitobe [top rated ebook readers .txt] 📗
- Author: Inazo Nitobe
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suspicious, mask of other feelings.” Carried beyond or below Right
Reason, Giri became a monstrous misnomer. It harbored under its wings
every sort of sophistry and hypocrisy. It might easily—have been turned
into a nest of cowardice, if Bushido had not a keen and correct sense of
COURAGE, THE SPIRIT OF DARING
AND BEARING,
to the consideration of which we shall now return. Courage was scarcely
deemed worthy to be counted among virtues, unless it was exercised in
the cause of Righteousness. In his “Analects” Confucius defines Courage
by explaining, as is often his wont, what its negative is. “Perceiving
what is right,” he says, “and doing it not, argues lack of courage.” Put
this epigram into a positive statement, and it runs, “Courage is doing
what is right.” To run all kinds of hazards, to jeopardize one’s self,
to rush into the jaws of death—these are too often identified with
Valor, and in the profession of arms such rashness of conduct—what
Shakespeare calls, “valor misbegot”—is unjustly applauded; but not so
in the Precepts of Knighthood. Death for a cause unworthy of dying for,
was called a “dog’s death.” “To rush into the thick of battle and to be
slain in it,” says a Prince of Mito, “is easy enough, and the merest
churl is equal to the task; but,” he continues, “it is true courage to
live when it is right to live, and to die only when it is right to die,”
and yet the Prince had not even heard of the name of Plato, who defines
courage as “the knowledge of things that a man should fear and that he
should not fear.” A distinction which is made in the West between moral
and physical courage has long been recognized among us. What samurai
youth has not heard of “Great Valor” and the “Valor of a Villein?”
Valor, Fortitude, Bravery, Fearlessness, Courage, being the qualities of
soul which appeal most easily to juvenile minds, and which can be
trained by exercise and example, were, so to speak, the most popular
virtues, early emulated among the youth. Stories of military exploits
were repeated almost before boys left their mother’s breast. Does a
little booby cry for any ache? The mother scolds him in this fashion:
“What a coward to cry for a trifling pain! What will you do when your
arm is cut off in battle? What when you are called upon to commit
harakiri?” We all know the pathetic fortitude of a famished little
boy-prince of Sendai, who in the drama is made to say to his little
page, “Seest thou those tiny sparrows in the nest, how their yellow
bills are opened wide, and now see! there comes their mother with worms
to feed them. How eagerly and happily the little ones eat! but for a
samurai, when his stomach is empty, it is a disgrace to feel hunger.”
Anecdotes of fortitude and bravery abound in nursery tales, though
stories of this kind are not by any means the only method of early
imbuing the spirit with daring and fearlessness. Parents, with sternness
sometimes verging on cruelty, set their children to tasks that called
forth all the pluck that was in them. “Bears hurl their cubs down the
gorge,” they said. Samurai’s sons were let down the steep valleys of
hardship, and spurred to Sisyphus-like tasks. Occasional deprivation of
food or exposure to cold, was considered a highly efficacious test for
inuring them to endurance. Children of tender age were sent among utter
strangers with some message to deliver, were made to rise before the
sun, and before breakfast attend to their reading exercises, walking to
their teacher with bare feet in the cold of winter; they
frequently—once or twice a month, as on the festival of a god of
learning,—came together in small groups and passed the night without
sleep, in reading aloud by turns. Pilgrimages to all sorts of uncanny
places—to execution grounds, to graveyards, to houses reputed to be
haunted, were favorite pastimes of the young. In the days when
decapitation was public, not only were small boys sent to witness the
ghastly scene, but they were made to visit alone the place in the
darkness of night and there to leave a mark of their visit on the
trunkless head.
Does this ultra-Spartan system of “drilling the nerves” strike the
modern pedagogist with horror and doubt—doubt whether the tendency
would not be brutalizing, nipping in the bud the tender emotions of the
heart? Let us see what other concepts Bushido had of Valor.
The spiritual aspect of valor is evidenced by composure—calm presence
of mind. Tranquillity is courage in repose. It is a statical
manifestation of valor, as daring deeds are a dynamical. A truly brave
man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the
equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the
midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind. Earthquakes do not shake
him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the
menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who,
for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain
in the face of death. Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing
or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—of
what we call a capacious mind (_yoy[=u]_), which, for from being pressed
or crowded, has always room for something more.
It passes current among us as a piece of authentic history, that as
[=O]ta Dokan, the great builder of the castle of Tokyo, was pierced
through with a spear, his assassin, knowing the poetical predilection of
his victim, accompanied his thrust with this couplet—
“Ah! how in moments like these
Our heart doth grudge the light of life;”
whereupon the expiring hero, not one whit daunted by the mortal wound in
his side, added the lines—
“Had not in hours of peace,
It learned to lightly look on life.”
There is even a sportive element in a courageous nature. Things which
are serious to ordinary people, may be but play to the valiant. Hence in
old warfare it was not at all rare for the parties to a conflict to
exchange repartee or to begin a rhetorical contest. Combat was not
solely a matter of brute force; it was, as, well, an intellectual
engagement.
Of such character was the battle fought on the bank of the Koromo River,
late in the eleventh century. The eastern army routed, its leader,
Sadato, took to flight. When the pursuing general pressed him hard and
called aloud—“It is a disgrace for a warrior to show his back to the
enemy,” Sadato reined his horse; upon this the conquering chief shouted
an impromptu verse—
“Torn into shreds is the warp of the cloth” (_koromo_).
Scarcely had the words escaped his lips when the defeated warrior,
undismayed, completed the couplet—
“Since age has worn its threads by use.”
Yoshiie, whose bow had all the while been bent, suddenly unstrung it and
turned away, leaving his prospective victim to do as he pleased. When
asked the reason of his strange behavior, he replied that he could not
bear to put to shame one who had kept his presence of mind while hotly
pursued by his enemy.
The sorrow which overtook Antony and Octavius at the death of Brutus,
has been the general experience of brave men. Kenshin, who fought for
fourteen years with Shingen, when he heard of the latter’s death, wept
aloud at the loss of “the best of enemies.” It was this same Kenshin who
had set a noble example for all time, in his treatment of Shingen, whose
provinces lay in a mountainous region quite away from the sea, and who
had consequently depended upon the H[=o]j[=o] provinces of the Tokaido
for salt. The H[=o]j[=o] prince wishing to weaken him, although not
openly at war with him, had cut off from Shingen all traffic in this
important article. Kenshin, hearing of his enemy’s dilemma and able to
obtain his salt from the coast of his own dominions, wrote Shingen that
in his opinion the H[=o]j[=o] lord had committed a very mean act, and
that although he (Kenshin) was at war with him (Shingen) he had ordered
his subjects to furnish him with plenty of salt—adding, “I do not fight
with salt, but with the sword,” affording more than a parallel to the
words of Camillus, “We Romans do not fight with gold, but with iron.”
Nietzsche spoke for the samurai heart when he wrote, “You are to be
proud of your enemy; then, the success of your enemy is your success
also.” Indeed valor and honor alike required that we should own as
enemies in war only such as prove worthy of being friends in peace. When
valor attains this height, it becomes akin to
BENEVOLENCE, THE FEELING OF
DISTRESS,
love, magnanimity, affection for others, sympathy and pity, which were
ever recognized to be supreme virtues, the highest of all the attributes
of the human soul. Benevolence was deemed a princely virtue in a twofold
sense;—princely among the manifold attributes of a noble spirit;
princely as particularly befitting a princely profession. We needed no
Shakespeare to feel—though, perhaps, like the rest of the world, we
needed him to express it—that mercy became a monarch better than his
crown, that it was above his sceptered sway. How often both Confucius
and Mencius repeat the highest requirement of a ruler of men to consist
in benevolence. Confucius would say, “Let but a prince cultivate virtue,
people will flock to him; with people will come to him lands; lands will
bring forth for him wealth; wealth will give him the benefit of right
uses. Virtue is the root, and wealth an outcome.” Again, “Never has
there been a case of a sovereign loving benevolence, and the people not
loving righteousness,” Mencius follows close at his heels and says,
“Instances are on record where individuals attained to supreme power
in a single state, without benevolence, but never have I heard of a
whole empire falling into the hands of one who lacked this virtue.”
Also,—“It is impossible that any one should become ruler of the
people to whom they have not yielded the subjection of their hearts.”
Both defined this indispensable requirement in a ruler by saying,
“Benevolence—Benevolence is Man.” Under the régime of feudalism, which
could easily be perverted into militarism, it was to Benevolence that
we owed our deliverance from despotism of the worst kind. An utter
surrender of “life and limb” on the part of the governed would have left
nothing for the governing but self-will, and this has for its natural
consequence the growth of that absolutism so often called “oriental
despotism,”—as though there were no despots of occidental history!
Let it be far from me to uphold despotism of any sort; but it is a
mistake to identify feudalism with it. When Frederick the Great wrote
that “Kings are the first servants of the State,” jurists thought
rightly that a new era was reached in the development of freedom.
Strangely coinciding in time, in the backwoods of North-western Japan,
Yozan of Yonézawa made exactly the same declaration, showing that
feudalism was not all tyranny and oppression. A feudal prince, although
unmindful of owing reciprocal obligations to his vassals, felt a higher
sense of responsibility to his ancestors and to Heaven. He was a father
to his subjects, whom Heaven entrusted to his care. In a sense not
usually assigned to the term, Bushido accepted and corroborated paternal
government—paternal also as opposed to the less interested avuncular
government (Uncle Sam’s, to wit!). The difference between a despotic and
a paternal government lies in this, that in the one the
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