The theme of our story is not what all samurai were "in fact" (because this is too long and too complicated a conversation), but how they themselves, as well as the Japanese intellectuals of those times, wanted to see the ideal samurai. After all, history studies not only (and perhaps not so much) the sphere of what the life of society and an individual was or is, but also the sphere of human ideas about what it should be, because our ideals are formed on the basis of some experience and in our own queue strongly influence our further behavior. A deep understanding of the specifics of Japanese samurai ideals can shed light on many mysteries, cultural and historical paradoxes of the Land of the Rising Sun both in the Middle Ages and today.
So, bushido. Who among those interested in traditional Japan has not heard of him? Sometimes it is understood as a certain set of laws, rules, that is, a "code" (you must admit that in the literature you can often find the phrase "samurai code"), sometimes - as a "handbook" of a samurai, and even often with an indication of the author (most often this is called Dai-doji Yuzan or even the writer of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries Nitobe Inazo, whose work, published in 1899, is indeed called "Bushido. The Soul of Japan", but in fact is another attempt to study samurai ethics, along with many other works) …
However, it is enough to ponder over the word itself, in its translation from Japanese, to get closer to understanding what bushido is and what it means to be a samurai. So, bushi is a "warrior", do is a path (as in judo or karate-do). And immediately the first riddle: where is the very concept of samurai here? It has been replaced by the broader and more elevated term bushi for the Japanese ear. After all, "samurai" is simply translated as "a servant accompanying a noble person," from the verb saburau - "to serve." This was the name of the armed servants of an influential lord at the dawn of samurai, which arose in the X-XI centuries in the north of Honshu during the colonization of the island and the wars with the Ainu, as well as civil strife. Apparently, the first use of the word "samurai" is an absolutely peaceful tanka from the anthology "Kokin-shu" (905), in which the servant is asked to ask the master for an umbrella,for the dew under the trees is larger than raindrops (of course, in the light of the samurai's readiness to disappear, like dew on the grass, this poem can be understood in another way, but it is unlikely that the author, who lived in a relatively peaceful time, put this very meaning).
Bushi, on the other hand, is much more ancient, moreover, a Chinese word that has a colossal semantic load. It is written in two hieroglyphs, each of which indicates a certain virtue. Boo - the ability to stop, subjugate weapons with the help of culture and writing. As the Chinese believed, "boo pacifies the country and brings the people to harmony." Xi (or shi) at first meant a person with certain skills and knowledge in a particular area, but later came to mean a representative of the upper class, a "noble man." Thus, a bushi is a person who maintains peace and harmony through military or other means. The word "bushi" was first mentioned in the Japanese chronicle "Nihongi" under the year 723 and then gradually replaced the purely Japanese words tsuwamono and mononofu, which also meant "warrior", but did not carry such a complex semantic load as bushi. So,in the word bushi itself lies a certain ideal of a warrior as not just a person who has the right to violence, but also a person of duty, who is obliged to maintain harmony in society between its members with the help of both strength and reason. The words bushi and samurai did not immediately become synonyms, this happened somewhere towards the end of the 12th century, in parallel with the conquest of an increasingly important and honorable place in society by the samurai and the displacement of the court nobility (kuge) from power. The samurai have traveled a path somewhat similar to the evolution that their European counterpart, the knights, underwent.in parallel with the conquest of an increasingly important and honorable place in society by the samurai and the displacement of the court nobility (kuge) from power. The samurai have traveled a path somewhat similar to the evolution that their European counterpart, the knights, underwent.in parallel with the conquest of an increasingly important and honorable place in society by the samurai and the displacement of the court nobility (kuge) from power. The samurai have traveled a path somewhat similar to the evolution that their European counterpart, the knights, underwent.
Now a little about before - "the way". Do is the Japanese form of Chinese Tao, and the essence of true Tao, as you know, has never been expressed in words. However, in our case, do is something more than an occupation, a certain profession, skill, mastery (there is a Japanese term for all this, jutsu). To much more comprehensive, it means that a person devotes all of himself, his life to a certain Path. Do also presupposes the existence of a certain system of values, norms and restrictions, and the daily practice of the body, spirit and mind. Do is in some way fate, and class belonging, and the choice in favor of self-improvement (the path is dynamic, it is “walked” on it, and not just accepted or rejected, on it you can “get ahead of others” or “lag behind”, and even death is not its end, for in the next rebirth there is a chance to be reborn again bushi).
Naturally, bushido is not the only Path known to the medieval Japanese. There were also the Paths of a monk, artisan, peasant, court aristocrat, geisha-joro, etc. But it was the bushi that were considered since the early Middle Ages as the elite - the bearers of a certain ideally balanced set of values, which were later proclaimed as the modern Japanese nation was formed the basis of "Yamato Damashii" - "the spirit of the Japanese nation", becoming a kind of "national idea". It is the respect for the ideals of bushido, the desire to imitate the elite (as W. McDougall once wrote in his Introduction to Social Psychology), and not the rather controversial love of real peasants for real samurai - their masters, that gave rise to the famous proverb: - sakura, so among people there are samurai "(note that we are not talking about the most magnificent,in the most attractive Japanese colors).
A lot has been written about bushido throughout the history of samurai, from the beginning of its formation to the present day. In this chapter, we will restrict ourselves to the era from the 12th to the 19th centuries, when samurai played a major role in the life of Japanese society, and in the next chapter, using the psychology of kamikaze pilots as an example, we will try to trace the fate of bushido in the 20th century). The most important sources for those interested in the formation of ideas related to the Warrior's Path can be works of all kinds. These are gunki - epic war stories, the most important of which are (we cite only those that exist in Russian translation) "The Tale of the Hogen years", "The Tale of the Heiji Years", "The Tale of the Taira House", "The Tale of great world "," The Tale of Yoshitsune "; plays of Tetra No and Kabuki (especially from the cycle "about men" - that is, as a rule, about samurai);poems on the theme of bushido - for example, the so-called giri-haiku (giri - "honor"). Finally, the most important source are treatises on bushido written by the samurai themselves. There are many of them, but among them there are several small volumes of "reasoning" and "house rules" compiled by princes and prominent bushi of the 13th-17th centuries and addressed rather to daimyo - "lord" (they are not as well known to the Russian reading public as " Rules of military houses "-" Buke Hat-to "of the early Kugawa period, consisting of prescriptions grouped into 13 points), and much more famous in Japan and abroad, addressed to the samurai servant proper, and somewhat more voluminous" Hagakure "(" The Hidden in foliage ", the author is a samurai of the Nabeshima clan Yamamoto tsunetomo, 1659-1719) and" Budoseshinshu "(" Advice to the one who enters the Path of a warrior ", author - Daidoji Yuzan,vassal of the Tokugawa shogun family, 1636–1730).
The reason for the popularity of the last two treatises lies not only in their brilliant literary form and undoubted semantic merits, but also in the fact that they (especially "Budoseshinshu") were originally conceived as an attempt to revive the samurai virtues, which, as their authors believed, came into decline into a peaceful the Tokugawa era (lasting the 17th, 18th and first half of the 19th century). Hence the deliberate, polemical acuteness of many of their theses, as well as the expectation of wide dissemination among samurai (for comparison: the clan rules of the 13th-17th centuries, which were discussed a little higher, were not recommended by the authors themselves to be disseminated outside the clan - they were considered some kind of secret " a repository of wisdom "along with the features of weapons, etc., although this often does not negate their universality, because many of their postulates are very similar).
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Finally, among the numerous treatises on Bushido of the "post-Samurai" times, we stopped at two, as it seems to us, the most profound and original - the world-famous Bushido, which we have already mentioned. The Soul of Japan "by Dr. Nitobe Inazo (1899) and" Hagakure Nyumon "(something like detailed commentaries on" Hagakure ", with a considerable share of his own interesting interpretations of bushido) of a talented actor, director, martial arts master, but above all a classic of Japanese literature of the XX century Mishima Yukio (real name and surname - Hiraoka Kimitake, 1925-1970).
In general, the creators of samurai ideals can be considered not only the anonymous author of The Tale of the Taira House, not only Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Yuzan Daidoji, or any other author who has ever written about bushido. Of course, such creators and "co-creators" were also quite real samurai (and partly also non-samurai, oriented to the behavior of the military elite - an excellent example is the cycle of short stories of the city dweller Ihara Saikaku about the samurai duty, literally imbued with the spirit of bushido), who (deliberately or no) strived to follow this Path and walked along it.
From the book: History of Humanity. East