Bushido meaning “Way of the Warrior”, is a Japanese code of conduct and a way of the samurai life.
It originates from the samurai moral code and stresses frugality, loyalty, martial arts mastery, and honor until death. Born of two main influences, the violent existence of the samurai was tempered by the wisdom and serenity of Confucianism and Buddhism.
Bushidō developed between the 9th to 12th centuries and numerous translated documents dating from the 12th to 16th centuries demonstrate its wide influence across the whole of Japan.
According to the Japanese dictionary Shogakukan Kokugo Daijiten, “Bushidō is defined as a unique philosophy (ronri) that spread through the warrior class from the Muromachi (chusei) period.” In Bushidō: The Soul of Japan (1899), author Nitobe Inazō wrote: “…Bushidō, then, is the code of moral principles which the samurai were required or instructed to observe… More frequently it is a code unuttered and unwritten… It was an organic growth of decades and centuries of military career.”
Nitobe was not the first person to document Japanese chivalry in this way. In his text Feudal and Modern Japan (1896) Historian Arthur May Knapp wrote:
“The samurai of thirty years ago had behind him a thousand years of training in the law of honor, obedience, duty, and self-sacrifice….. It was not needed to create or establish them. As a child he had but to be instructed, as indeed he was from his earliest years, in the etiquette of self-immolation. The fine instinct of honor demanding it was in the very blood…”
Under the Tokugawa Shogunate, aspects of Bushidō became formalized into Japanese Feudal Law.
In May 2008, Thomas Cleary translated a collection of 22 writings on bushido “by warriors, scholars, political advisers, and educators”. The comprehensive collection provides a historically rich view of samurai life and philosophy. The book gives an insider’s view of the samurai world: “the moral and psychological development of the warrior, the ethical standards they were meant to uphold, their training in both martial arts and strategy, and the enormous role that the traditions of Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism had in influencing samurai ideals.” The translations, in 22 chapters, span nearly 500 years from the 14th to the 19th centuries.
