Bushido
- Thread starter Zauriel
- Start date
gokarosama
gokarosama
- 1 Mar 2005
- 46
- 1
Bushido rules?
To demand suddenly a list of all the rules is probably the wrong way to go about understanding Bushido. There is no "Bushido Bible" that a samurai sat and crammed with before battle.
A more reasonable request might be for a few links to Bushido-oriented websites--or better yet, books-- which could constitute a primer for your interests. Keep in mind, too, as much as Bushido might interest the modern dilettante, it was based among other things in a feudal mindset, quite different from modern sensibilities regarding social class, human rights, etc.
A very accessible, if somewhat romantic, introduction can be found in Nitobe Izano's Bushido: The Soul of Japan(which you can find here among other places). About a year ago the bookstores in Japan were pushing this one as "A book Tom Cruise read for preparation for THE LAST SAMURAI!" Possibly a dubious distinction, but you can take comfort that this book was well-known long before anyone in Hollywood picked it up.
Second might be a book named Bushido Shoshinshu or "Code of the Samurai" by Shigesuke Taira, which can be found in translation here.
You might do a Google search for "Samurai's Creed" or "7 Virtues of Bushido," which will provide you with an historically accepted, if brief and unadorned, list of values, if that is what you must have.
In the end what I would avoid doing is taking the word of video game sites and hollywood as anything but the shallowest surface scratch of what was not just a hobby, but a complete mindset and way of life (and, most prominently in Bushido teachings, death) for a very long time.
To demand suddenly a list of all the rules is probably the wrong way to go about understanding Bushido. There is no "Bushido Bible" that a samurai sat and crammed with before battle.
A more reasonable request might be for a few links to Bushido-oriented websites--or better yet, books-- which could constitute a primer for your interests. Keep in mind, too, as much as Bushido might interest the modern dilettante, it was based among other things in a feudal mindset, quite different from modern sensibilities regarding social class, human rights, etc.
A very accessible, if somewhat romantic, introduction can be found in Nitobe Izano's Bushido: The Soul of Japan(which you can find here among other places). About a year ago the bookstores in Japan were pushing this one as "A book Tom Cruise read for preparation for THE LAST SAMURAI!" Possibly a dubious distinction, but you can take comfort that this book was well-known long before anyone in Hollywood picked it up.
Second might be a book named Bushido Shoshinshu or "Code of the Samurai" by Shigesuke Taira, which can be found in translation here.
You might do a Google search for "Samurai's Creed" or "7 Virtues of Bushido," which will provide you with an historically accepted, if brief and unadorned, list of values, if that is what you must have.
In the end what I would avoid doing is taking the word of video game sites and hollywood as anything but the shallowest surface scratch of what was not just a hobby, but a complete mindset and way of life (and, most prominently in Bushido teachings, death) for a very long time.
Index
窶禿塒弯
- 26 Feb 2005
- 601
- 27
Nitobe's Bushido is beautifully written but it is very romanticised. Shoshinshu seems like the most realistically written one I've read; Hagakure is another idealised text written by a samurai bureaucrat. I'd say most of the books I have seen written on the subject were penned after the warring states period when samurai (and others) actually had time to write, so they tend to be a little fanciful and lofty, not focused as much on the gritty, day to day pragmatic aspects of the bushi way of thinking. Like European knights, the samurai tradition evolved from a soldiering one (albeit elite), to a bureaucratic and social position. I think it would make sense to identify what period one was discussing before attempting a definition.
