Jeeze it's been a long time since I posted anything here... small child + new job = no spare time. Anyhow, I just finished Miyamoto Musashi: His Life And Writings by Kenji Tokitsu and wanted to get my thoughts down on paper (so to speak). The centerpiece of the book is a new translation of the Gorin no sho, which I'll get to momentarily, but there is a lot of additional material regarding the development of Japanese martial arts which is just as interesting, if not more so. The punchline is that this is a volume with interesting things to say; details follow.
I first encountered the Gorin no sho (aka "The Book of Five Rings/Spheres") almost a decade ago sitting on a bookcase in my chief instructor's office1. It was an interesting read, but it was obvious to me at the time that I was missing a lot. Some of the text made no sense and other portions, while comprehensible, were highly ambiguous. Which shouldn't be that surprising; a lot is going to be lost in translation due to the temporal and cultural distance between here and there. Additionally, as Mr. Tokitsu points out, the Gorin no sho is not a systematic exposition of Musashi's school but rather a set of notes intended for his students. It seems reasonable to assert that you need a lot of additional context in order to get anything useful out of the work.
If that is indeed the case then a good translator will try to restore some of that lost context, an area where Tokitsu really shines. His translation includes extensive commentary on the meaning of various passages, made more valuable by the fact that he's a martial artist of some depth and is thus able to explain them from a practitioner's standpoint. For example, he devotes a couple of pages to the Japanese term "hyoshi"2, a word which is usually translated as "rhythm" or "cadence" though neither translation really does the concept justice. This compares favorably with the treatment of the same term in another version of the Gorin no sho in my posession which was prepared by a team of professional translators; they simply translate the term as "rhythm" and move on without further comment3. Tokitsu's translation is by far the most accessible of the one's I've seen and is definintely worth reading even if you've read others before.
In addition to his translation of the Gorin no sho Tokitsu provides a biography of Musashi and a discussion of Musashi's lesser-known works. The most interesting of these, in my opinion, is the Dokkodo, a list of principles for living which Musashi composed shortly before his death. It's one thing to hear someone say that Musashi was devoted to the study of the martial arts and quite another to get it straight from the horse's mouth. The Dokkodo presents an ascetic vision of life in which the practitioner discards as irrelevant most common comforts in order to better focus on eir practice. Presuming that it's not simply self-serving propaganda (and there's no reason to believe that it is) Musashi was devoted to martial study in a manner which really has no contemporary parallel.
Tokitsu recognizes this and uses it as a springboard for a discussion of the historic and contemporary practice of budo4. As he outlines it the problem with contemporary study, in both the East and the West, is that there is no longer a strong, extrinsic motivating factor driving each individual's study. Absent such motivation the practice of budo becomes less urgent; it's a matter of personal development rather than alignment with some cosmic scheme or the existing social order. I don't know that's necessarily a bad thing, but he definitely has a point.
I've a friend who is the chief instructor for a small chain of dojos. Pursuing/teaching the martial arts is his job and his livelihood; he spends far more time doing so than the casual practitioner. And yet there's not a snowball's chance in hell that he'll ever get close to the level of competence demonstrated by some of the individuals cited by Tokitsu. Why is that? Well, my friend has a wife, a kid, a mortgage, and so on; in short, he has a life outside of the martial arts. Even if he were inclined to do so he's not in the position to chuck it all and wander the Earth perfecting his practice.
Tokitsu's thesis in this regard, if he can be said to have one, boils down to "things aren't like they used to be"; I'm more or less in agreement on that point. He asks whether anything can replace the extrinsic motivations which used to exist and comes to the conclusion "probably not". My take is that, in Western philosphy at least, we used to have a strong belief in the perfectability of mankind, so perfectionism might at one time have filled this void. But that seems highly unlikely now; while we can support the idea of doing something for its own sake the idea of pursuing it exclusively is unlikely to find much popular or philosphic support. I really don't do his argument justice; go read it for yourself.
1 I believe it was this edition published by Shambala.
2 Pp. 342 - 343.
3 Pp. 24 - 25.
4 Pp. 302 - 335.
