The way of the sword, read for the self

In 1645, in a cave in southern Japan, an undefeated swordsman named Miyamoto Musashi wrote down, in the last weeks of his life, what sixty duels had taught him. The Book of Five Rings is a manual on strategy and timing, and it's been read for nearly four hundred years by people who never held a sword, because what it teaches is self-mastery.

Two other texts sit beside it. The Hagakure, dictated by a samurai named Yamamoto Tsunetomo in 1716, is a collection of reflections on the way of the warrior, blunt and sometimes strange, with one line everyone quotes: the way of the samurai is found in death, which he meant as freedom. A person who's made peace with the end can act without hesitation. And Nitobe Inazō's Bushido, from 1900, written in English to explain the samurai ethic to the West, laid out the virtues: rectitude, courage, benevolence, politeness, honesty, honor, loyalty, and self-control.

I'm not teaching swordsmanship or feudal ethics. I'm teaching what the three have in common, which is a picture of a person who has trained so completely that action and awareness are one. Musashi's instruction, repeated throughout, is: you must practice this. Not understand it. Practice it, until it's in the body and the mind is free.

His line on timing is the Awareness key: in strategy it's important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things. Step back from the thing in your face. Lean into the thing on the horizon. That's attention, deliberately placed.

And his famous nine principles end with the plainest: do nothing which is of no use. Ninety days in, you've cut a lot of what was of no use. Musashi would call that the beginning of the way.