Read an Excerpt

From
the Translator's Introduction

The
Book of Five Rings
and
The
Book of Family Traditions on the Art

of
War
are
two of the most important texts on conflict and strategy emerging from the
Japanese warrior culture. Originally written not only for men-at-arms, they are
explicitly intended to symbolize processes of struggle and mastery in all
concerns and walks of life.

The
Book of Five Rings
was
written in 1643 by Miyamoto Musashi, undefeated dueler, masterless samurai, and
independent teacher.
The
Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War
was
written in 1632 by Yagyu Munenori, victorious warrior, mentor of the Shogun,
and head of the Secret Service.

Both
authors were professional men-at-arms born into a long tradition of martial
culture that had ultimately come to dominate the entire body of Japanese polity
and society. Their writings are relevant not only to members of the ruling
military caste, but also to leaders in other professions, as well as people in
search of individual mastery in whatever their chosen path.

The
Book of Five Rings
and
The
Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War
are
both written in Japanese, rather than the literary Chinese customary in elite
bureaucratic, religious, and intellectual circles in Japan at that time. The
Japanese in which they are written, furthermore, is relatively uncomplicated
and quite free of the subtle complexities of classical high court Japanese.
Although the crudity of Musashi's syntax and morphology make for clumsy
reading, nevertheless the basic simplicity and deliberate clarity of both works
make them accessible to a wide and varied audience.

The
rise and empowerment of the samurai class in Japan may be seen in the two terms
used to refer to its members,
samurai
and
bushi.
The
word
samurai
comes
from the Japanese verb
saburau,
which
means "to serve as an attendant." The word
bushi
is
Sino-Japanese and means "armed gentry." The word
samurai
was
used by other social classes, while the warriors referred to themselves by the
more dignified term
bushi.

The
original samurai were attendants of nobles. In time their functions expanded to
the administration, policing, and defense of the vast estates of the nobles,
who were mostly absentee landlords. Eventually the samurai demanded and won a
greater share of the wealth and political power that the nobles had called
their own. Ultimately the military paragovernment of the Shoguns, known as the
Bakufu, or Tent Government, overshadowed the imperial organization and
dominated the whole country.

Musashi
and Yagyu lived in the founding era of the third Tent Government, which lasted
from the beginning of the seventeenth century through the middle of the
nineteenth century. While inheriting the martial traditions of its
predecessors, this third Tent Government differed notably in certain respects.

The
first Tent Government was established in eastern Japan near the end of the
twelfth century and lasted for nearly one hundred and fifty years. The warriors
of this time were descendants of noble houses, many of whom had honed their
martial skills for generations in warfare against the Ainu people in eastern
Japan. As the Tent Government was seated in Kamakura, a small town near modern
Tokyo, this period of Japanese history is commonly called the Kamakura era.

The
second Tent Government supplanted the First in 1338. The warrior class had
expanded and become more differentiated by this time, with lesser and thinner
genealogical ties to the ancient aristocracy. The Shoguns of this period
established their Tent Government in Kyoto, the old imperial capital, and tried
to establish high culture among the new samurai elite. This period of Japanese
history is commonly called the Ashikaga era, after the surname of the Shoguns,
or the Muromachi era, after the name of the outlying district of Kyoto in which
the Tent Government was located.

To
understand Japanese history and culture, it

is
essential to realize that no government ever united the whole country until the
Meiji Restoration of 1868. The imperial government had always ruled the whole
land in theory, but never in fact. The imperial house had never really been
more than a center of powerful factions, competing with other powerful
factions. Even when everyone recognized the ritual and political status of the
emperor in theory, direct imperial rule only reached a portion of the land.

As
this is true of the imperial house, so it is also true of the military
governments. The reign of the Shoguns was always complicated and mitigated by
the very nature of the overall Japanese power structure. The rule of the
Kamakura Tent Government was not absolute, that of the Muromachi Tent
Government even less. Separatism, rivalry, and civil warfare marked the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

By
this time, known as the era of the Warring States, the way of war was open to
anyone who could obtain arms by any means. Lower-class samurai rose up to
overthrow the upper-class samurai, and Japan was plunged into chaos. It was not
until the latter part of the sixteenth century that a series of hegemons
emerged with strategy and power sufficient to move dramatically toward
unification. The third Tent Government was built on the achievements of those
hegemons.

Within
the context of traditional Japanese society, the founder of the third Shogunate
was an upstart and a usurper. Aware of this, he set out to establish a most
elaborate system of checks and controls to ensure the impossibility of such an
event ever occurring again. Moving his capital again to eastern Japan, away
from the heartland of the ancient aristocracy and imperial regime, the new
Shogun disarmed the peasants and disenfranchised the samurai class, removing
all warriors from the land and settling them in castle towns. This period of
Japanese history is commonly known as the Tokugawa era, after the surname of
the Shoguns, or the Edo period, after the name of the new capital city, now
called Tokyo.

Tokugawa
Japan was divided into more than two hundred baronies, which were classified
according to their relationship to the Tokugawa clan. The barons were
controlled by a number of methods, including regulation of marriage and
successorship, movement of territories, and an elaborate hostage system. The
baronies were obliged to minimize their contingents of warriors, resulting in a
large number of unemployed samurai known as
ronin,
or
wanderers.

Many
of the disenfranchised samurai became schoolteachers, physicians, or priests.
Some continued to practice martial traditions, and to teach them to others.
Some became hooligans and criminals, eventually to constitute one of the most
serious social problems of the later Tokugawa period. Certain differences, both
technical and philosophical, between
The
Book of Five Rings
and
The
Book of Family Traditions on the Art of War
stem
from the fact that Miyamoto Musashi was a masterless samurai pursuing a career
as a dueler and an independent teacher of martial arts, while Yagyu Munenori
was a distinguished war veteran and a servant of the central military government.

The
Book of Five Rings

More
properly titled in English
The
Book of Five Spheres,
Miyamoto
Musashi's work is devoted to the art of war as a purely pragmatic enterprise.
Musashi decries empty showmanship and commercialization in martial arts,
focusing attention on the psychology and physics of lethal assault and decisive
victory as the essence of warfare. His scientifically aggressive, thoroughly
ruthless approach to military science, while not universal among Japanese
martialists, represents a highly concentrated characterization of one
particular type of samurai warrior.

Although
a vast body of legend grew up around his dramatic exploits, little is known for
certain about the life of Miyamoto Musashi. What he says of himself in
The
Book of Five Rings
is
the primary source of historical information. He killed a man for the first
time when he was thirteen years old, for the last time when he was twenty-nine.
At some point he apparently gave up using a real sword but continued to inflict
mortal wounds on his adversaries until the end of his fighting career.

The
last three decades of Musashi's life were spent refining and teaching his
military science. It is said that he never combed his hair, never took a bath,
never married, never made a home, and never fathered children. Although he also
took up cultural arts, as indeed he recommends to everyone, Musashi himself
basically pursued an ascetic warrior's path to the end.

Born
into strife, raised in mortal combat, ultimately witness to a transition to
peacetime polity on a scale unprecedented in the history of his nation,
Miyamoto Musashi abandoned an ordinary life to exemplify and hand on two
essential elements of ancient martial and strategic traditions.

The
first of these basic principles is keeping inwardly calm and clear even in the
midst of violent chaos; the second is not forgetting about the possibility of
disorder in times of order. As a warrior of two very different worlds, a world
of war and a world of peace, Musashi was obliged to practice both of these
fundamental aspects of the warrior's way in a most highly intensified manner,
lending to his work a keenness and a ferocity that can hardly be surpassed.