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Musashi and Takuan · Part Three — The Book the Letter Was Answering

Heihō Kadensho — the complete one

Yagyū Munenori wrote his own treatise in 1632. It has technique, psychology and ethics in one work, and almost nobody reads it.

Three parts:

殺人刀 Setsuninto — the sword that kills. The practical scroll: technique, the school's method, what to do.

活人剣 Katsujinken — the sword that gives life. One man's death saves ten thousand. The most politically useful sentence in Japanese martial literature, written by the sword instructor of a government that had just finished conquering the country and intended to keep it.

無刀 Mutō — no-sword. Taking an opponent's weapon, and beyond that a doctrine about not depending on having one.

Musashi has no equivalent of the life-giving sword. Go Rin No Sho has no ethics of the sword at all. It does not say when to kill, and it has no state to serve.

And Munenori's is the book that lost. He had rank, office, a domain, the shōgun's ear, and a school that outlasted him by centuries. Musashi had a cave and a stipend and died within weeks of finishing. In 1650 any informed person would have told you Munenori was the significant figure and Musashi a formidable eccentric with no school worth the name. They would have been right about the facts and wrong about the outcome.

不動心 · The next thing

Fudōshin

Munenori received the letter. Fudōshin is what the letter, not the school, teaches.

Fudōshin$297→

One letter, sent rarely. The doctrine as it is written, and nothing else. No launch sequence, no countdown.

This page is one of ten that open out of Musashi and Takuan — The Two Scrolls of 1645, a commentary on Go Rin No Sho and Fudōchi Shinmyōroku, read together. Printed at Part Three — The Book the Letter Was Answering. The page can be rewritten; the code in your copy will keep pointing here.

The book →Dark Kinetics →