Bushido - Inazo Nitobe (color ebook reader TXT) 📗

fairest, so it is often the most

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