Reading a Samurai code alongside Howard Thurman’s meditations on nonviolence
Tsunetomo and Thurman both say death is not to be feared for those who understand their purpose in life.
When you read wildly and wantonly, you often encounter peculiar resonances and conjunctions. Recently I was reading two books simultaneously, from totally different cultural contexts, with totally different purposes.
On the one hand, I was delving into Tsunetomo’s In the Shadow of the Leaves. It’s an 18th century Japanese text laying out the Bushido ethos, the “Code of the Samurai.” It’s, well, it’s a complicated book. In many places, it’s remarkably graceful. Wise, elegantly poetic, and thought-provoking. It sings of detachment from the world, of stoicism and simplicity, of the moral rot of grasping, selfishness, and greed, and of compassion as the highest virtue. I’ve collected what I saw as the best of it here.
And at the same time, it’s a book that celebrates both fanaticism and death. Death, which is both inescapable and to be embraced. Fanaticism, which is the complete unquestioning obedience to one’s Master, to the point where death itself doesn’t matter. If your Master says, Hey, go disembowel yourself with a sharp pointy object, you do, and you do so as a point of pride. It tells story after story of brutal death and horror, all with a strange abstracted joy. It’s full of death, full of quotes like this:
