Post by Pathfinder on Aug 10, 2023 15:33:02 GMT
The Heart of the Knight
Once spirited and disciplined, one may be called a good knight. However, since
the heart is the source from which spirit and discipline emerge, it is by cleaning
the source that the flow will be clear.
Every part of the body has its desire; if the heart is not upright, it will be hard
for spirit and discipline to stand. So though the heart is in the chest, as it is the
ruler of the whole body, it might be better to say there is nothing apart from it.
First, as to how a knight’s heart should be, it is best to aim for the Way. That
is why there is the saying in the discourses of Confucius, “A knight aspires to the
Way.” Since the ideograph for aspiration is composed of the ideographs for
knight and heart, the heart of a knight must have an aspiration. And when it
comes to aspiration, there is nothing worth aspiring to but the Way. If you aspire
to the Way, you should wish to become wiser and wiser, governing yourself and
governing others.
Asked what a noble man is, Confucius replied, “Cultivate yourself by being
respectful, cultivate yourself to give others security.” This is governing yourself
and governing others. Master Cheng of the Song dynasty said, “Knights seek
savants, savants seek sages, sages seek celestials.” This is the will to become
wiser and wiser.
To maintain a knight’s will to govern self and govern others, there is a
constant heart, and there is mental labor. As for a constant heart, Mencius said,
“Those who have a constant heart even without a constant livelihood are only
the knights.” This is the heart that remains unshaken even on the border of death
and life, even in the midst of poverty, misery, and hardship. As for mental labor,
Mencius said, “Some labor mentally, some labor physically. Those who labor
physically feed others, those who labor mentally are fed by others. Those who
are fed by others govern others, those who feed others are governed by others.”
This implies the attitude of compassion and concern for the people.
So a constant heart is the fidelity of knights, mental labor is the economy of
knights. It might be objected that the economy is to be run by those who govern
the people and the land, so it’s questionable whether one should act without the
appropriate office, but that is not so—in general, knights are at the top of the
four castes; as they eat without tilling and wear clothes without weaving, how
could they not have some means of repaying the labor of those who do the tilling
and weaving?
Even so, Mencius says, “When in straits, just conduct yourself well; when
successful, do good for the world too.” So as knights also have their ups and
downs, there must also be differences in their behavior according to the time.
Confucius warned against strategizing for government if you are not in such a
position, so it is not good to assert yourself. Yet a means of doing good for the
world has to be understood ahead of time, or else it won’t be possible to put it
into effect all at once, so you should reflect on the past, study the Way, and
master both culture and arms. This is a means of doing good for the world that
should not differ in straits or success.
Lu Donglai’s maxim for officials says, “Mental labor does not compare to
physical labor,” cautioning us that a knight’s mental labor in doing his best at his
job is not as good as the farmers’ constant labor feeding people. Isn’t it
embarrassing?
Once I was on an outing with two or three knights late in the autumn when the
farmers were busy taking in the rice harvest. I said to my companions, “All of us
live easily on salaries of one or two hundred koku. Isn’t a stroll such as this due
to the benevolence of the ruler above and the work of the farmers below? It takes
ten or twenty families working day and night like that, wives and children
included, just to support one of our families. So if we spend our days idly,
neglecting our professional roles, we’ll suffer divine punishment.”
So this means a knight should labor with his mind. Moreover, though it isn’t
good to be forward, Master Cheng said that people ranked as knights and above
should have an attitude of love for people. A knight is only a real knight when he
has this sympathetic heart.
This means governing self is heart, governing others is heart, loving people is
heart; everything else has to do with heart too, so you have to study the heart.
Study of the heart may seem like Zen study, but Zen is a path studied by people
who wither in mountain forests; even if they have settled their minds they are far
from the principles of social norms, so that is quite different from what I’m
talking about here.
But latter-day scholars sometimes take ritual, music, and literature for
scholarship, or they consider extensive reading and strong memory to be
scholarship, or they take glossing and annotating to be scholarship. Though these
are all partial aspects of scholarship, if you take them alone to be learning, you’ll
acquire the bad habit of obsession with externals, which will hardly fulfill the
basic purpose of governing yourself and governing others.
Were I to speak to scholars such as these, I’d say that scholarship means
studying the heart and mind. It’s fundamentally different from Zen study and
also different from doctrines such as those of Lu Xiangshan and Wang
Yangming.
In recent times there’s something called Mind Studies, which may be called
an accessible doctrine for ignorant men and women. It is not good for knights
and great men because it is too soft.
The study of heart and mind I’m talking about can be inferred from the
context of this discourse. In any case, if it’s not good from the heart, nothing can
be good. Where could the teaching of Mencius come from if not the heart?
Therefore Mencius said, “The path of learning is nothing but seeking the free
heart.” There can be no real learning apart from making the heart upright and the
mind sincere. But if you just look for the heart and mind without any purpose,
that will become Zen study, or an aberrant technique. So you should not seek
your subjective mind but rather seek the heart of the Way.
The Way of the Knight
For a knight to govern himself and govern others, first he must govern his heart
and mind, but it is not good to do it with the subjective mind; it must be found in
the heart of the Way.
The heart of the Way is in everyone’s mind; that is to say, it is nature.
Although no one is bad by nature and everyone is good, a lot of people are
blinded by selfishness associated with human desires. Though there are some
good ones among them who aren’t blind, as they understand one side they are
ignorant of another. None but sages are as clear as the cloudless sky.
So sages are the only ones in whom the heart of the Way is completely clear,
and their actions and statements have become the Way, the doctrines that people
should keep generation after generation. Even as the Way of sages, though, it’s
not that it isn’t in everyone’s heart; it’s just that there’s a difference between
partiality and totality. Seen from the biased point of view of the subjective mind,
there are doctrines that sometimes seem stupid; genuine scholarship would be to
consider this impression your own shortcoming, have deep faith in the sages, and
investigate and clarify their Way, applying it to present-day human relations,
seeking the most appropriate of principles.
The true path of the knight is only to be practiced in accordance with this
Way, but military clans in recent times have their own so-called bushido. I don’t
know who defined it, but while some is in accord with the Way, there is a lot
that does not escape subjective bias. Just to mention one or two points, there are
those who consider it loyalty to cut their guts after their lords die, or consider it
justice to take in defectors. These are what Mencius calls unjust morals. The
worst are those who have even come to call slash-and-grab robbery a practice of
warriors. Though strength is considered essential for warriors, unless it is based
on the Way of sages it can degenerate into predation.
Even if you are spirited and disciplined and you slight death, you may still act
in ways that violate gallantry and justice, so the true path of the knight is to
understand the Way of sages and seek the most appropriate principles.
When Tokugawa Ieyasu began to govern the land, he was dismayed by the
fact that people’s hearts had been so violent since the Muromachi rule, with
many cases of subjects killing lords and sons killing fathers. In order that people
might know the Way, he recruited Confucians, promoted learning, and had lots
of classics and histories printed and circulated. Many distinguished scholars
emerged, not only from his own clan and major retainers, but also from among
the people of the other feudal chieftains, ultimately to produce the present state
of complete order. It is as different from an uncivilized era like the Muromachi
as day is from night. Never having degenerated into chaos again once order was
established, this regime is as remote from the Muromachi’s constant chaos and
demise in disarray as the sky is from the earth. The excellence of civilized
qualities is evident.
Anyway, even in the Muromachi era, men of merit who were considered
good, such as Hosokawa Yoriyuki and Imagawa Sadayo, were not uneducated.
Nevertheless, I don’t even like to talk about the men who served the Muromachi
regime, so I’ll leave them aside for now. Before them, serving the orthodox
emperor with complete loyalty and great fidelity outstanding in history, it is men
like Lieutenant General Kusunoki and Miyake Takanori who can be said to have
been competent in both culture and arms.
While Miyake Takanori was born into the military, he chose to read books.
When Kusunoki was dying, in his last instructions to his son Masayuki he
included an admonition to study more and more. So, while loyalty and
righteousness were natural in such men as Kusunoki the elder, Kusunoki the
junior, and Miyake Takanori among the warriors, and such aristocrats as
Fujiwara no Fujifusa and Kitabatake Chikafusa, the reason they were clear about
their cause and had no regrets was their learning. Though there were some
heroes after them who had cultural ability, beginning with Shingen and Kenshin,
the only ones with real learning were Maeda Toshiie and Kato Kiyomasa. The
times being what they were, they didn’t study widely, but they put what they
learned into practice far better than today’s scholars.
In scholarship knights should follow the legacy of Tokugawa Ieyasu near at
hand, while aspiring from afar to real learning like that of the emperor Nintoku
and the prince Uji no Wakiiratsuko. In the middle ages, Emperor Tenchi and
great ministers such as Nakatomi no Kamatari and Sugawara Michizane had
some success through real learning, but the rest, emperors and ministers alike,
admired the splendor of Sui and Tang China, imitating Chinese styles even in
attire and administrative organization. Their ritual, music, and cultural artifacts
were beautiful, but it was just empty embellishment, and there does not appear to
have been any who practiced the true Way of sages. This is worthless, like
buying a treasure chest but returning the jewels. If they were really going to
study the Way of sages, the classics should have been enough—they wouldn’t
have gone so far as to send envoys to China. Idly imitating the decadent ways of
a foreign country in a late stage of its history and losing the pristine simplicity of
their own nation, they also made a religion of Buddhism, which is humane and
gentle, distorting the regal law, so they became effete, and this resulted in the
deterioration of the imperial house.
Scholarship is basically not a matter of studying Tang dynasty Chinese culture
but studying the Way of China; it is not studying a Chinese way, for the Way of
the sages of China cannot be different from the ancestral Way of our own
sovereign nation. Although the virtues of our ancestral deities were superior to
the sages of China, because there was no writing in those times, no detailed
account has come down. When the Way of sages happened to be transmitted to
his court, the sage emperor Ojin heartily approved of it, and that is why he had
his princes study it too.
Well, then, when Prince Osasagi became emperor, he ignored the dilapidated
condition of the imperial palace and forgave several years’ taxes to enable the
populace to prosper, not disgracing his posthumous name Nintoku, which means
“humane.” When Prince Uji deferred the throne to his older brother and the older
brother refused, Uji ended his own life to make his brother emperor. In this he
was superior even to Taibo and Bo Yi.
It was because they ably followed the Way of sages in their character and their
administration that theirs could be called true learning. In the middle ages there
may have been an appearance of culture, but it was empty embellishment, not
real culture.
Training the Samurai Mind
Thomas Cleaery
Once spirited and disciplined, one may be called a good knight. However, since
the heart is the source from which spirit and discipline emerge, it is by cleaning
the source that the flow will be clear.
Every part of the body has its desire; if the heart is not upright, it will be hard
for spirit and discipline to stand. So though the heart is in the chest, as it is the
ruler of the whole body, it might be better to say there is nothing apart from it.
First, as to how a knight’s heart should be, it is best to aim for the Way. That
is why there is the saying in the discourses of Confucius, “A knight aspires to the
Way.” Since the ideograph for aspiration is composed of the ideographs for
knight and heart, the heart of a knight must have an aspiration. And when it
comes to aspiration, there is nothing worth aspiring to but the Way. If you aspire
to the Way, you should wish to become wiser and wiser, governing yourself and
governing others.
Asked what a noble man is, Confucius replied, “Cultivate yourself by being
respectful, cultivate yourself to give others security.” This is governing yourself
and governing others. Master Cheng of the Song dynasty said, “Knights seek
savants, savants seek sages, sages seek celestials.” This is the will to become
wiser and wiser.
To maintain a knight’s will to govern self and govern others, there is a
constant heart, and there is mental labor. As for a constant heart, Mencius said,
“Those who have a constant heart even without a constant livelihood are only
the knights.” This is the heart that remains unshaken even on the border of death
and life, even in the midst of poverty, misery, and hardship. As for mental labor,
Mencius said, “Some labor mentally, some labor physically. Those who labor
physically feed others, those who labor mentally are fed by others. Those who
are fed by others govern others, those who feed others are governed by others.”
This implies the attitude of compassion and concern for the people.
So a constant heart is the fidelity of knights, mental labor is the economy of
knights. It might be objected that the economy is to be run by those who govern
the people and the land, so it’s questionable whether one should act without the
appropriate office, but that is not so—in general, knights are at the top of the
four castes; as they eat without tilling and wear clothes without weaving, how
could they not have some means of repaying the labor of those who do the tilling
and weaving?
Even so, Mencius says, “When in straits, just conduct yourself well; when
successful, do good for the world too.” So as knights also have their ups and
downs, there must also be differences in their behavior according to the time.
Confucius warned against strategizing for government if you are not in such a
position, so it is not good to assert yourself. Yet a means of doing good for the
world has to be understood ahead of time, or else it won’t be possible to put it
into effect all at once, so you should reflect on the past, study the Way, and
master both culture and arms. This is a means of doing good for the world that
should not differ in straits or success.
Lu Donglai’s maxim for officials says, “Mental labor does not compare to
physical labor,” cautioning us that a knight’s mental labor in doing his best at his
job is not as good as the farmers’ constant labor feeding people. Isn’t it
embarrassing?
Once I was on an outing with two or three knights late in the autumn when the
farmers were busy taking in the rice harvest. I said to my companions, “All of us
live easily on salaries of one or two hundred koku. Isn’t a stroll such as this due
to the benevolence of the ruler above and the work of the farmers below? It takes
ten or twenty families working day and night like that, wives and children
included, just to support one of our families. So if we spend our days idly,
neglecting our professional roles, we’ll suffer divine punishment.”
So this means a knight should labor with his mind. Moreover, though it isn’t
good to be forward, Master Cheng said that people ranked as knights and above
should have an attitude of love for people. A knight is only a real knight when he
has this sympathetic heart.
This means governing self is heart, governing others is heart, loving people is
heart; everything else has to do with heart too, so you have to study the heart.
Study of the heart may seem like Zen study, but Zen is a path studied by people
who wither in mountain forests; even if they have settled their minds they are far
from the principles of social norms, so that is quite different from what I’m
talking about here.
But latter-day scholars sometimes take ritual, music, and literature for
scholarship, or they consider extensive reading and strong memory to be
scholarship, or they take glossing and annotating to be scholarship. Though these
are all partial aspects of scholarship, if you take them alone to be learning, you’ll
acquire the bad habit of obsession with externals, which will hardly fulfill the
basic purpose of governing yourself and governing others.
Were I to speak to scholars such as these, I’d say that scholarship means
studying the heart and mind. It’s fundamentally different from Zen study and
also different from doctrines such as those of Lu Xiangshan and Wang
Yangming.
In recent times there’s something called Mind Studies, which may be called
an accessible doctrine for ignorant men and women. It is not good for knights
and great men because it is too soft.
The study of heart and mind I’m talking about can be inferred from the
context of this discourse. In any case, if it’s not good from the heart, nothing can
be good. Where could the teaching of Mencius come from if not the heart?
Therefore Mencius said, “The path of learning is nothing but seeking the free
heart.” There can be no real learning apart from making the heart upright and the
mind sincere. But if you just look for the heart and mind without any purpose,
that will become Zen study, or an aberrant technique. So you should not seek
your subjective mind but rather seek the heart of the Way.
The Way of the Knight
For a knight to govern himself and govern others, first he must govern his heart
and mind, but it is not good to do it with the subjective mind; it must be found in
the heart of the Way.
The heart of the Way is in everyone’s mind; that is to say, it is nature.
Although no one is bad by nature and everyone is good, a lot of people are
blinded by selfishness associated with human desires. Though there are some
good ones among them who aren’t blind, as they understand one side they are
ignorant of another. None but sages are as clear as the cloudless sky.
So sages are the only ones in whom the heart of the Way is completely clear,
and their actions and statements have become the Way, the doctrines that people
should keep generation after generation. Even as the Way of sages, though, it’s
not that it isn’t in everyone’s heart; it’s just that there’s a difference between
partiality and totality. Seen from the biased point of view of the subjective mind,
there are doctrines that sometimes seem stupid; genuine scholarship would be to
consider this impression your own shortcoming, have deep faith in the sages, and
investigate and clarify their Way, applying it to present-day human relations,
seeking the most appropriate of principles.
The true path of the knight is only to be practiced in accordance with this
Way, but military clans in recent times have their own so-called bushido. I don’t
know who defined it, but while some is in accord with the Way, there is a lot
that does not escape subjective bias. Just to mention one or two points, there are
those who consider it loyalty to cut their guts after their lords die, or consider it
justice to take in defectors. These are what Mencius calls unjust morals. The
worst are those who have even come to call slash-and-grab robbery a practice of
warriors. Though strength is considered essential for warriors, unless it is based
on the Way of sages it can degenerate into predation.
Even if you are spirited and disciplined and you slight death, you may still act
in ways that violate gallantry and justice, so the true path of the knight is to
understand the Way of sages and seek the most appropriate principles.
When Tokugawa Ieyasu began to govern the land, he was dismayed by the
fact that people’s hearts had been so violent since the Muromachi rule, with
many cases of subjects killing lords and sons killing fathers. In order that people
might know the Way, he recruited Confucians, promoted learning, and had lots
of classics and histories printed and circulated. Many distinguished scholars
emerged, not only from his own clan and major retainers, but also from among
the people of the other feudal chieftains, ultimately to produce the present state
of complete order. It is as different from an uncivilized era like the Muromachi
as day is from night. Never having degenerated into chaos again once order was
established, this regime is as remote from the Muromachi’s constant chaos and
demise in disarray as the sky is from the earth. The excellence of civilized
qualities is evident.
Anyway, even in the Muromachi era, men of merit who were considered
good, such as Hosokawa Yoriyuki and Imagawa Sadayo, were not uneducated.
Nevertheless, I don’t even like to talk about the men who served the Muromachi
regime, so I’ll leave them aside for now. Before them, serving the orthodox
emperor with complete loyalty and great fidelity outstanding in history, it is men
like Lieutenant General Kusunoki and Miyake Takanori who can be said to have
been competent in both culture and arms.
While Miyake Takanori was born into the military, he chose to read books.
When Kusunoki was dying, in his last instructions to his son Masayuki he
included an admonition to study more and more. So, while loyalty and
righteousness were natural in such men as Kusunoki the elder, Kusunoki the
junior, and Miyake Takanori among the warriors, and such aristocrats as
Fujiwara no Fujifusa and Kitabatake Chikafusa, the reason they were clear about
their cause and had no regrets was their learning. Though there were some
heroes after them who had cultural ability, beginning with Shingen and Kenshin,
the only ones with real learning were Maeda Toshiie and Kato Kiyomasa. The
times being what they were, they didn’t study widely, but they put what they
learned into practice far better than today’s scholars.
In scholarship knights should follow the legacy of Tokugawa Ieyasu near at
hand, while aspiring from afar to real learning like that of the emperor Nintoku
and the prince Uji no Wakiiratsuko. In the middle ages, Emperor Tenchi and
great ministers such as Nakatomi no Kamatari and Sugawara Michizane had
some success through real learning, but the rest, emperors and ministers alike,
admired the splendor of Sui and Tang China, imitating Chinese styles even in
attire and administrative organization. Their ritual, music, and cultural artifacts
were beautiful, but it was just empty embellishment, and there does not appear to
have been any who practiced the true Way of sages. This is worthless, like
buying a treasure chest but returning the jewels. If they were really going to
study the Way of sages, the classics should have been enough—they wouldn’t
have gone so far as to send envoys to China. Idly imitating the decadent ways of
a foreign country in a late stage of its history and losing the pristine simplicity of
their own nation, they also made a religion of Buddhism, which is humane and
gentle, distorting the regal law, so they became effete, and this resulted in the
deterioration of the imperial house.
Scholarship is basically not a matter of studying Tang dynasty Chinese culture
but studying the Way of China; it is not studying a Chinese way, for the Way of
the sages of China cannot be different from the ancestral Way of our own
sovereign nation. Although the virtues of our ancestral deities were superior to
the sages of China, because there was no writing in those times, no detailed
account has come down. When the Way of sages happened to be transmitted to
his court, the sage emperor Ojin heartily approved of it, and that is why he had
his princes study it too.
Well, then, when Prince Osasagi became emperor, he ignored the dilapidated
condition of the imperial palace and forgave several years’ taxes to enable the
populace to prosper, not disgracing his posthumous name Nintoku, which means
“humane.” When Prince Uji deferred the throne to his older brother and the older
brother refused, Uji ended his own life to make his brother emperor. In this he
was superior even to Taibo and Bo Yi.
It was because they ably followed the Way of sages in their character and their
administration that theirs could be called true learning. In the middle ages there
may have been an appearance of culture, but it was empty embellishment, not
real culture.
Training the Samurai Mind
Thomas Cleaery