江戸の武士と文武両道：武士道の成り立ちThe Harmonious Ethos of the Edo Samurai

After the turbulent Sengoku period, in which warriors across the land fought to unify the country, the Edo period began, with a unified order under the Tokugawa family. Here the samurai lost their former arena of activity and underwent a great transformation in order to survive. In fact, the samurai came into being not through the martial side alone, but only when their own ethics, values, and virtues were mixed together and sublimated. The ideal that gave rise to the samurai was bunbu ryodo (文武両道).

Bunbu ryodo means to place learning and morality as bun (文) and the martial arts and martial virtue as bu (武), and to master both without leaning to one side, standing on one’s own. It was the way of life samurai took as their ideal in the peaceful world of the Edo period. It remained an ideal, though, and not every samurai lived it out. Violence by samurai did not cease even in the Edo period, but some devoted their lives to the ideal of bunbu ryodo and brought forth a lofty spirit. The samurai of the time thought that leaning toward bu could not govern the country rightly, and leaning toward bun could not protect the people, so they made the cultivation of both, bunbu ryodo, an important goal. The samurai class, having entered a stable age without war, needed to find its reason for being, and so it came to pursue this new virtue, a harmony of bun and bu.

Central here is Zhu Xi learning (朱子学), one of the Confucian schools that spread in the Edo period. We have touched in Shitsurae on how the Tokugawa shogunate encouraged Confucianism as a principle of rule and adopted Zhu Xi learning as the official doctrine. Ieyasu Tokugawa’s intent was to use the morality of Confucianism to gently dismantle the warriors of the Sengoku temper. Zhu Xi learning, a firm system that prized order and hierarchy, suited a philosophy of the regime. In short, because Zhu Xi learning does not put practice first, it had the effect of holding back the rise of samurai who would stand against the governance of the shogunate and the domains, and this was convenient for the rulers. Teaching practice against it was Yangming learning (陽明学). The Tokugawa were most wary that Yangming learning would spread and that samurai would cause disturbances, so they had higher-ranking samurai trained thoroughly in Zhu Xi learning and pressed on with building a unified order.

Under the shogunate’s lead, each domain set up one after another a hanko (藩校), a school for samurai, where Confucian studies and martial arts were the two wheels of the curriculum. Learning based on Zhu Xi in particular was set as the spiritual pillar of bushido, and the pursuit of truth through study and one’s own moral cultivation were stressed through Zhu Xi theory. Confucian teaching rests on the five virtues of benevolence (仁), righteousness (義), propriety (礼), wisdom (智), and faithfulness (信), and through them the samurai learned loyalty and courtesy and took on a Confucian sense of ethics. That is, the samurai turned from their earlier devotion to Zen to set Confucianism as their spiritual pillar, and so adapted to the new age. This cultivation of bun on the basis of Confucianism served to instill in the samurai a sense of mission to govern their own character and fulfill their social responsibility. Did you notice that the Japanese wa (和) I wrote about the other day is already appearing here as a sign?

The samurai of the Edo period were therefore not merely a martial band but shaped an image of themselves as befitting a governing class of learning and virtue. This differs greatly from the image of the samurai in earlier ages.

At the same time, with the arrival of a long peace, the samurai were forced to redefine the meaning of bu. In the Buke Shohatto (武家諸法度, the Laws for the Military Houses), the Edo shogunate laid down that samurai must not neglect training in bunbu ryodo even in peacetime, and must be ready for emergencies. The point of this is that training in martial arts was set not merely as keeping up fighting strength but as discipline for governing oneself and training body and mind. Put simply, it was a quiet disarmament.

In fact, the sword a samurai wore in the Edo period was not for defeating enemies as before but a symbol for keeping order, so it is thought that many samurai never fought in their whole lives. Standing at the top of society as guardians of law and public order, samurai were expected to polish their character through daily practice. Thus the martial ways, such as kenjutsu (剣術) and sojutsu (槍術), the arts of sword and spear, took on the spirit of ways of self-cultivation rather than of fighting. Training in martial arts was both a preparation for emergencies and, at the same time, sublimated into the cultivation of inner virtue.

Appearing in this new age and holding great influence was Soko Yamaga (山鹿素行, 1622-1685). A practical thinker, at once a scholar of military science and a Confucian, he pursued all his life the form samurai should take in a peaceful age. Soko played a pioneering role in fusing the ethics of Zhu Xi learning with the techniques of bu, and put forward the ideal of bunbu ryodo under the concept of shido (士道). In his own time he was better known as a military scholar than as a Confucian, but it deserves special note that a man engaged in bu built the thought of bunbu ryodo on a Confucian base, and that many samurai accepted it. In Soko’s thought, bu and bun were not separate but inseparable: in studying bu one naturally cultivates bun, and in studying bun one’s grasp of bu naturally deepens.

In his book Yamaga Gorui, Soko says that a samurai, standing among farmers, artisans, and merchants, must be equipped with the virtues of bun and bu in order to punish swiftly those who disturb human relations. He taught that a samurai should hold both the virtues of bun, which are right conduct and etiquette, and the virtues of bu, which are valor and dignity. That is, he thought that the individual samurai must prize above all moral cultivation based on Zhu Xi learning, while in the political arena the art of governing, versed in military science, was required. The novel shido that Soko put forward became an ideological guide to how samurai could contribute to society and show their reason for being, or display it, in a peaceful age, and it laid the theoretical foundation for bushido through bunbu ryodo. In a sense, it can be called the spirit of a new age that the samurai produced in the struggle to survive in a time of calm.

In the martial arts, too, the thought of the Yagyu Shinkage school contributed greatly to embodying bunbu ryodo. The Yagyu Shinkage school is a sword school brought to maturity by Munenori Yagyu (柳生宗矩, 1571-1646), of the family of sword instructors to the Edo shogunate, and its teaching has deep philosophy. While serving Ieyasu Tokugawa as sword instructor, Munenori made the first attempt to bring the thought of Zen and a Confucian sense of ethics into the way of the sword. Notably, he pursued the secret of the state of winning without drawing the sword, and set the sword not as a mere art of fighting but as a way of cultivating one’s own mind. The state Munenori opened is the essence of bushido in the Edo period.

In fact, in the shogunate, the Hayashi family, descended from the Confucian Razan Hayashi (林羅山), whom Ieyasu Tokugawa had picked out, served as Confucian scholars on the side of bun, and the Yagyu family of Munenori Yagyu served the shogun as masters of military arts on the side of bu, so the shogunate’s government was supported by the two wheels of bun and bu. That the Hayashi and Yagyu families stood side by side as the two pillars shows how much the fusion of learning and martial arts was prized in the samurai society of the time. This fusion of bunbu ryodo in the Edo period would in time have a deep effect on the spiritual culture of the Japanese. Tesshu Yamaoka, a thinker of the last years of the shogunate, taught that bushido is a concept that harmonizes three ways: Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism. That is, bushido is a morality brewed in the samurai class in which the spirituality of Shinto, the ethics of Confucianism, and the mental discipline of Buddhism (especially Zen) are fused as one. This understanding of bushido is one of the prototypes of the Japanese spirit (日本精神) of modern Japan.

As the virtues of bushido, loyalty to one’s lord, a spirit that prizes honor, sincerity, and even a heart of compassion toward the weak and toward enemies were included, and they were highly praised as virtues fitting a samurai. Courage and calm shown on the battlefield, and even sympathy and mercy toward the enemy, were handed down as samurai virtues. Interestingly, there is a suggestive fact showing that the spirit of bushido, which the samurai produced in the struggle to survive and which was cultivated over the years, was functioning in the Edo period: the spirit of bushido gradually spread beyond the samurai class and took hold among ordinary people in the later Edo period. This suggests that there were samurai, in fair number, who were models for ordinary people.

The ethics of restraining self-interest to serve the public, of devotion to others, and of kindness and repaying favors passed on after the Edo period not only among the samurai but, from Meiji on, as a universal morality of the Japanese.

In this way, the fusion of bun and bu in the Edo period was not just a method of self-cultivation for individual samurai but the source that contributed to forming the national ethical sense later called the Japanese spirit. The hard intellectual tradition of holding together the cultivation of character through Confucianism and the training of the spirit through the martial ways gave pride of spirit to people who had to live as samurai in a peaceful age, and through a lifetime of severe spiritual discipline it came to be engraved deep in our hearts.