投稿者: admin

The Book of Five Rings — The Water Scroll: What Musashi Meant by Everyday Mind

On Tuning Yourself — and Why “Calm Down” Is the Wrong Advice

This is one of the articles in the series on Miyamoto Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings”.

Miyamoto Musashi opens the Water Scroll with something that reads, at first glance, like a contradiction.

He has just written a book of instruction. And now, at the beginning of its second chapter, he says this:

「此書に書付たるを、我身にとつて、書付を見るとおもはず、習とおもはず、にせものにせずして、則、我心より見出したる利にして、常に其身に成て、能々工夫すべし。」

Do not think of what is written here as something to be read. Do not think of it as something to be learned. Do not imitate it. Instead, find it yourself — from within your own mind — and make it part of your body, and think deeply about it always.

A teaching that instructs you not to treat it as a teaching. A guide that tells you not to follow it.

I’ve thought about this passage for years. And the more I sit with it, the more I think it is the most important thing Musashi wrote.

The Book That Points Beyond Itself

In Zen, there is a tradition of the kōan — a question or statement that cannot be resolved through ordinary logical thinking, designed to push the student past the limits of conceptual understanding into direct experience. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Not a riddle with an answer, but a device for breaking through the habit of looking for answers in the wrong place.

Musashi was deeply formed by Zen. And I think this opening passage functions in the same way.

He is not being modest. He is making a precise and demanding point: that what he is about to describe — the qualities of mind and body that make a warrior genuinely capable — cannot be acquired by reading about them. They can only be found. In your own experience, through your own practice, forged in your own body over time.

The book is a finger pointing at the moon. Musashi is reminding you, before you get any further, not to stare at the finger.

What Musashi Says About Everyday Mind

What follows this opening is something that surprises many first-time readers of the Water Scroll. This is, after all, a manual on swordsmanship — on the techniques and tactics of actual combat. You might expect him to move immediately into specifics: posture, grip, footwork, the mechanics of the strike.

Instead, he writes about heijōshin — everyday mind. Ordinary mind. The mind of someone going about their daily life without urgency or alarm.

「兵法の道におゐて、心の持様ハ、常の心に替る事なかれ。常にも兵法のときにも、少も替らずして、心を廣く直にして、きつくひつぱらず、すこしもたるまず、心のかたよらぬやうに、心をまん中に置て、心を静にゆるがせて、其ゆるぎのせつなも、ゆるぎやまぬやうに、能々吟味すべし。」

In the Way of strategy, the mind should not differ from the everyday mind. In both ordinary times and in combat, it should be exactly the same — broad and straight, neither pulled tight nor left slack, not leaning to one side, placed at the center, kept still yet moving, and even in its movement, never ceasing.

Neither pulled tight nor left slack.

Not the stillness of something frozen. Not the looseness of something unready. The stillness of something perfectly balanced — still yet moving — available for whatever is required.

I want to stay with this image for a moment, because I think it is one of the most precise descriptions of functional composure I have ever encountered. And I also want to be honest about how long it took me to actually understand it.

The Kendo Match I Kept Losing

I practiced kendo for ten years, starting when I was six years old, at the dojo attached to the police station near my home in Kobe. By the time I was a teenager, I had developed enough technique to compete — and enough ego to be completely derailed by competition.

There is a specific experience in kendo that non-practitioners find difficult to visualize. When two competitors strike simultaneously — both going for men, the strike to the head — the strikes often land within fractions of a second of each other. To a casual observer, they appear simultaneous. To the three judges on the floor, they are not. The difference of a few tenths of a second is visible to trained eyes.

What is less well known is that the competitors themselves can feel it.

When you are in a state of genuine heijōshin — when your mind is placed at the center, neither tight nor slack, moving without stopping — you can sense, at the moment of the mutual strike, whether your timing was ahead or behind. You feel the gap. And if you are behind, and if your mind is clear enough, you can adjust — shifting in the fraction of a second before the opponent’s shinai arrives, turning a mutual strike into a clean point.

When you are gripping the outcome — when you need to win, when the score is close and the match is ending and every nerve is pulling toward the result — this perception disappears. Not because your technique has changed. Because your mind has changed. It has become tight. Pulled toward the future, toward the result, away from the present moment of the strike.

And that tightness, that fraction of a second of mental latency, is the difference between winning and losing.

I lost a great many matches this way as a teenager. I knew what I was doing wrong. I simply could not stop doing it.

The Self-Help Books That Didn’t Help

In my twenties, I read a great deal of what we now call self-development literature. I had been studying Zen and Buddhist philosophy since my university years in Kyoto, and I wanted to understand the relationship — where these Western frameworks overlapped with what I was finding in the classical texts, and where they diverged.

At first, I found some of it genuinely interesting. The early readings were fresh. Ah, so that is how this tradition looks from outside. There were useful observations, clear writing, ideas worth sitting with.

But over time, a feeling accumulated that I eventually found a word for: 修飾 — shūshoku. Decoration. Ornament. Something that makes a surface look richer than what lies beneath it.

Self-development books, at their most characteristic, are books you can read and feel, temporarily, as though you have done something. The reading itself produces a sensation of progress. You close the cover feeling slightly improved.

Bushido. The Book of Five Rings. These books produce the opposite sensation.

You finish them and feel the distance. You feel how far the road is. How much has not yet been done. How many years of practice stand between where you are and what the text is describing.

This is not a criticism of self-development literature in the ordinary sense. It is an observation about what the two traditions are actually trying to do.

Self-development books, at their best, give you something to add. A framework. A technique. A habit. Something to install.

Musashi is not giving you something to add. He is describing something you have to become. And that is a different project entirely — one that cannot be completed by reading, and that the reading itself can never substitute for.

“Just Calm Down” — And Why It Made Things Worse

When I was young and losing matches I should have won, the advice I received — from coaches, from older practitioners, from the books I was reading — was essentially a variation of the same thing: be calm, maintain equanimity, don’t let emotion affect your performance.

Good advice. Useless as instruction.

Because the attempt to be calm is itself a form of tension. I must be calm is a thought. Thoughts take up the same mental space that perception needs. And the harder I tried to achieve the state I’d been told to achieve, the further I moved from it.

I remember sitting with this problem for a long time — not in a formal meditative sense, but as a persistent, unanswered question: What is heijōshin, actually? Is it just the absence of anxiety? A practiced suppression of reaction? Something you arrive at by trying hard enough to arrive at it?

None of those answers felt right. And then, at some point — I cannot tell you exactly when, because it was not a single moment of insight but a gradual settling — I arrived at a different image.

A guitar string.

Not the silence before the string is plucked. Not the tension of a string pulled too tight. Not the limpness of a string left slack. The specific state of a string that has been tuned correctly — taut enough to vibrate cleanly, relaxed enough to move freely. The state that produces the right note when it is struck.

This, I realized, was what Musashi meant. Not be calm. Not suppress your reactions. Not try harder to be still.

Tune yourself.

Tuning, Not Adding

This reframing changed something for me in a way that the self-development books had not.

Because tuning is not addition. You do not tune a guitar by putting more string on it. You do not tune a person by giving them more techniques, more frameworks, more things to remember and apply under pressure. Tuning is the removal of what is wrong — the tightening of what is too loose, the releasing of what is too tight — until the instrument is capable of producing what it was always capable of producing, if only it were properly calibrated.

Heijōshin is not a state you achieve. It is the state that remains when you have stopped pulling too hard, stopped going slack, stopped leaning to one side. Musashi says: place the mind at the center. Not higher, not lower. Not pitched toward the future result, not dragging in the past exchange. At the center. Now.

This cannot be done by adding something. It can only be done by removing the interference — the grip, the anxiety, the need for the outcome to be a particular thing — that prevents the natural state from expressing itself.

Why the Daily Practice Is the Point

And this is where the Water Scroll circles back to the Earth Scroll, to the nine principles, to the thousand days and the ten thousand days.

Because you cannot tune an instrument in the middle of a performance. The tuning happens before. In the daily practice, in the repeated training, in the accumulated experience of striking and being struck, of losing and understanding why, of returning to the dojo the next day and beginning again.

The daily practice is not preparation for the moment when heijōshin matters. The daily practice is how heijōshin is built. Slowly, through repetition, the nervous system learns what the centered state feels like — until it becomes the default, until it becomes the ground from which everything else operates, until the performance and the preparation are no longer different things.

Musashi says: in both ordinary times and in combat, it should be exactly the same.

Not: practice being calm so that you can be calm when it matters.

Be the same person in both situations. Which requires, first, that you have built a person who is worth being consistently.

In kendo, coaches say: don’t be attached to winning. I misunderstood this for years. I thought it meant: accept that you might lose. A kind of resigned equanimity.

It does not mean that.

It means: if you have trained properly, if you have done the daily work, if your ground is solid — the winning will take care of itself. Your job is not to grip the result. Your job is to be present, tuned, available. To place the mind at the center and let the body do what it has been trained to do.

The attachment to winning is the thing that prevents winning. Not because wanting to win is wrong. But because the grip of wanting interferes with the clarity of perceiving — and perceiving, in the fraction of a second that everything is decided, is everything.

What This Looks Like Away From the Dojo

I am aware that most people reading this have never competed in kendo, and will never compete in kendo. So let me say what I think this translates to.

Every situation that matters — every presentation, negotiation, difficult conversation, decision made under pressure, moment when your actual capability will either express itself or fail to — has the same structure as the mutual strike. The outcome depends on whether you are present or not. Whether your mind is at the center or pulled toward the result. Whether the string is tuned or pulled tight.

And the state of the string at that moment is not determined in that moment. It is determined by everything that came before it. By whether you have been building the ground, doing the daily practice, paying attention to the small things, removing the conditions for failure.

The self-development book cannot give you this. The framework, the technique, the morning routine — these are not useless, but they are not sufficient. They are things you add. What Musashi is describing is not a thing you add.

It is what you become when you have been doing the right things, consistently, for long enough.

修飾の書 — the books of decoration — promise to make you better. They are not lying, exactly. But they are describing a different project.

Musashi’s project is older, slower, and harder to sell.

Do not treat this as teaching. Do not imitate it. Find it yourself — from within your own mind — and make it part of your body.

He told you at the beginning. He is still telling you now.

Previous : The Book of Five Rings — The Earth Scroll: The Philosophy of Not Losing

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

The Book of Five Rings — The Earth Scroll: The Philosophy of Not Losing

What Miyamoto Musashi Understood About Risk, Readiness, and the Ground Beneath Your Feet

This is one of the articles in the series on Miyamoto Musashi’s “The Book of Five Rings”.

There is a particular kind of person in any organization.

Not the loudest voice in the room. Not necessarily the most decorated, the most credentialed, or the most visible. But the one who, when things start to go wrong, seems to have already known. Not in a dramatic way — there’s no moment where they say I told you so. It’s subtler than that. They noticed something three weeks ago. A shift in tone during a meeting. A pattern in the numbers that didn’t quite fit. A silence where there should have been enthusiasm. And they adjusted. Quietly. Without announcement.

By the time the problem becomes visible to everyone else, this person has already done something about it.

I’ve been thinking about this kind of person for a long time. And I’ve come to believe that what they possess is not a special talent. It is the product of a specific orientation — one that Miyamoto Musashi describes in the opening scroll of The Book of Five Rings with a clarity that I find, even now, slightly startling.

He calls it 地 — Chi. Earth.

The Nine Principles of the Earth Scroll

The Earth Scroll is where Musashi lays his foundation. Before technique, before tactics, before any discussion of how to engage an opponent, he establishes what kind of person the warrior — or the craftsman, or the merchant, or anyone engaged in serious work — must become.

He offers nine principles. I want to quote them in full, because the list as a whole says something that no single principle captures alone:

Do not harbor sinister designs. Train diligently in your chosen Way. Cultivate a wide range of interests in the arts. Be knowledgeable in a variety of occupations. Know the difference between loss and gain in worldly matters. Develop an intuitive judgment and understanding for everything. Perceive those things which cannot be seen. Pay attention even to trifles. Do not engage in useless activity.

Read these quickly and they sound like general wisdom — the kind of thing you might find on a motivational poster, vaguely Eastern in flavor, easily consumed and forgotten.

Read them slowly, and a different picture emerges.

Not Winning. Not Losing.

Here is the interpretation that I keep returning to, and that I think gets closest to what Musashi actually means:

These nine principles are not a formula for winning. They are a systematic approach to eliminating the conditions that cause defeat.

This distinction matters more than it might initially appear.

Most strategic thinking — in business, in competition, in self-development — is organized around the pursuit of advantage. How do I get ahead? How do I outperform? How do I win? The question is inherently forward-looking and externally oriented. Victory is defined by what happens to the other side.

Musashi’s orientation is different. He is asking a prior question: What are the conditions under which I become beatable? And then he is working backward from there, systematically removing each one.

Sinister designs — harboring them in yourself — cloud judgment. Remove them. Narrow knowledge creates blind spots. Remove them. Inability to distinguish loss from gain leads to poor decisions under pressure. Remove it. Undeveloped intuition means you miss what’s coming before it arrives. Remove it. Attention to trifles — or rather, the failure of such attention — means the early signals are lost. Remove that failure.

What remains, when you have done this work seriously and over time, is not a person who wins. It is a person who has made themselves very difficult to defeat.

This is, I believe, a fundamentally different project than what most self-development culture is selling.

The Ground Beneath Your Feet

The scroll is called Earth for a reason.

Earth does not attack. Earth does not advance. Earth receives everything — rain, weight, the full force of whatever is placed upon it — and holds. Its strength is not aggressive. It is foundational. And its depth is what makes everything built upon it stable.

Musashi is describing the same quality in a person. Not dominance. Not aggression. Unshakeability.

But — and this is the part that gets overlooked — unshakeability is not a temperament you are born with. It is built. Deliberately, through the exact practices Musashi describes: the wide cultivation of knowledge across different domains, the daily training in your chosen path, the sustained practice of attending to what is small and easy to miss.

The ground beneath your feet does not become solid by accident. It becomes solid because of what has been layered into it, over time, with intention.

Risk Management, Before the Numbers Exist

Let me make this concrete.

In contemporary organizational life, risk management is largely a retrospective discipline. We build dashboards to track what has already happened. We write reports on what the numbers revealed last quarter. We conduct postmortems on decisions that were made with the information available at the time.

This is not useless. But it is, by definition, always behind.

Musashi’s principles — particularly develop intuitive judgment, perceive those things which cannot be seen, and pay attention even to trifles — describe something that operates before the numbers exist. Before the problem surfaces in a report. Before the quarterly review. Before the situation becomes obvious to everyone in the room.

What are we talking about, in practical terms?

The slight change in how a usually reliable colleague responds to a routine question. The meeting that ended a little too smoothly — where the dissent that should have been there wasn’t. The client who is still technically engaged but whose emails have become just fractionally shorter, just fractionally slower. The project that is on schedule by every measurable metric but feels, in some way that is difficult to articulate, slightly wrong.

These are not mystical perceptions. They are the output of sustained observation. Of having paid attention to the small things long enough that the deviation from normal registers — not as a conclusion, but as a signal worth investigating.

The capacity to notice what cannot yet be measured is not a gift. It is what accumulates in a person who has made a practice of attention.

Musashi calls it perceiving those things which cannot be seen. We might call it intuition. Either way, it is the product of the same discipline: daily training, wide knowledge, careful observation of trifles, sustained over time.

“Do Not Engage in Useless Activity”

The ninth principle is the one I find most demanding: do not engage in useless activity.

On the surface, this sounds like advice about efficiency — cut waste, focus on what matters, eliminate distraction. And it does include that. But in the context of the other eight principles, it means something more specific.

Every hour spent on activity that does not deepen your knowledge, sharpen your judgment, or strengthen your capacity to perceive what is happening — every hour spent in the noise of competition for its own sake, in the performance of busyness, in the reactive churn that most organizational life generates — is an hour not spent building the ground beneath your feet.

Musashi is ruthless about this. Not because he was ascetic — he was a painter, a sculptor, a poet; he cultivated breadth deliberately. But because he understood that the building of genuine capability is a slow process, and that the time available for it is finite.

Do not engage in useless activity is not a productivity principle. It is a statement about what kind of life produces the kind of person Musashi is trying to describe.

What “Daily Training” Actually Means

The second principle — train diligently in your chosen Way — is the one most people think they already understand.

They don’t. Or rather, they understand the word training without understanding the word daily.

In the Japanese original, the character Musashi uses for diligent carries connotations not of intensity but of consistency. The daily quality of the practice. The refusal to let it lapse because yesterday was difficult, because the conditions aren’t right, because you’ve already reached a certain level of competence and the urgency has faded.

The person who is very difficult to defeat is not the one who trained hardest during their best years. It is the one who trained consistently across all their years — when it was inconvenient, when it was unrewarding, when the gains were invisible.

This is what Musashi means by kitae — forging. And it is why he is uninterested in talent, in natural ability, in the kind of competence that arrives quickly and impresses easily. He is interested in what a person becomes when the practice has been sustained long enough that it is no longer something they do, but something they are.

The Accumulation You Cannot See

The work that the Earth Scroll describes does not produce results that are easy to measure or quick to appear. You cannot do these things for ninety days and assess the outcome. You cannot feel them working in the way you can feel a new exercise routine working. They accumulate in ways that are largely invisible — until the moment when they are needed, and then they are unmistakably present.

The person who noticed the shift three weeks ago. The one who read the room when everyone else was reading the slides. The one who, when everything came apart, didn’t panic — not because they were naturally calm, but because they had built, over years, a ground solid enough to stand on.

That is what the Earth Scroll is pointing at.

I am not going to tell you that practicing these nine principles will produce that person. I don’t know your situation, your practice, your discipline, or what you are willing to sustain over time. Musashi doesn’t know either. He doesn’t make promises.

What he does do is describe, with unusual precision, the specific qualities that need to be built — and the specific practices that build them. Whether you take that seriously is, as it has always been, entirely up to you.

The Nine Principles, Reconsidered

Let me return to the list one more time — not as a collection of separate instructions, but as a unified picture of a single orientation:

A person who harbors no sinister designs has nothing to hide and nothing to defend — which means their perception is clear.

A person who trains daily has a ground beneath their feet that does not shift under pressure.

A person who cultivates wide knowledge has no blind spots large enough to fall through.

A person who understands loss and gain does not make decisions from fear or from greed.

A person who has developed intuition perceives what is coming before it arrives.

A person who attends to trifles catches the signal before it becomes the emergency.

A person who does not engage in useless activity has time and energy for what actually matters.

Taken together: a person who is very, very difficult to defeat.

Not because they are more aggressive than their opponents. Not because they are more talented. But because they have done the slow, invisible work of removing, one by one, everything that could cause them to fail.

This is Musashi’s Earth. This is the ground he is asking you to build.

The question — as always — is whether you are willing to do it slowly enough for it to actually work.

Previous : A Self-help Book Written by a Samurai, for Samurai — The Book of Five Rings: Before We Begin

Next : The Book of Five Rings — The Water Scroll: What Musashi Meant by Everyday Mind

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT was founded by Takeshi Kitagawa, a designer based in Osaka. Drawing on a lifetime of practice in Kendo, Judo, and personal study of Zen and Shinto, this project explores what these traditions might still offer the people living today — not as answers, but as a different way of seeing.
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

A Self-help Book Written by a Samurai, for Samurai — The Book of Five Rings: Before We Begin

A Samurai’s Self-Help Book — Written in Blood, Not Buzzwords

For readers without a Medium membership: You can access the full article through a friend link here.

Think about the people you’ve worked with over the years.

Most of us, if we’re honest, fall somewhere on a spectrum between mildly competitive and quietly exhausted — reacting to small provocations, burning energy on turf wars that won’t matter in six months, carrying low-grade irritation through meetings and commutes and dinner conversations that should have ended an hour ago.

But every so often — maybe once or twice in a career, if you’re paying attention — you encounter someone who operates differently.

You know the type, even if you’ve only met one. Calm in a way that doesn’t read as passive. Unhurried without being disengaged. They don’t bite on small provocations. They don’t waste themselves on battles that aren’t worth fighting. And yet — when something real is at stake, when the situation genuinely demands it — you suddenly realize that this person was never mild. They were ready. The composure wasn’t absence. It was preparation.

In Japanese, there’s a word that gestures at this quality: 『空』 — kū. Void. Not emptiness as lack, but emptiness as availability. A readiness that comes from having nothing unnecessary left to carry.

You’ve probably worked alongside someone like this — maybe once, if you were lucky. When you did, you may have found yourself wondering: What does that person understand that the rest of us don’t?

I’d like to introduce you to a book that takes that question seriously.

Self-Help, Written in Blood

Let me say something that might surprise you.

The Book of Five Rings — 『五輪書』, Go Rin No Sho — is, at its core, a self-development book.

I say this knowing that the word “self-development” has been so thoroughly colonized by the wellness industry that it barely means anything anymore. Breathwork retreats. Productivity systems. Curated morning routines. The kind of Zen that comes with a subscription and a guided audio track.

The Book of Five Rings is not that.

It was written in 1645 by Miyamoto Musashi — a man who had survived sixty-one duels without a single defeat, who had killed opponents with a wooden sword because he couldn’t be bothered to arrive on time with a real one, and who spent the final two years of his life alone in a cave in Kyushu, writing down everything he had come to understand. He completed the manuscript approximately two weeks before he died.

What he wrote is a self-development book in the original sense of the term: a practitioner’s account of what it actually takes to forge yourself into someone capable — not of winning fights, but of being genuinely ready for whatever the situation demands.

This is not a spiritual manual. It is not a philosophy text. It is not a competitive strategy guide, despite how it has been marketed in airport bookshops since the 1980s.

It is something harder to categorize: a warrior’s honest account of how a human being is built.

And Musashi wrote it not only for warriors.

“The Principle Is the Same for Any Profession”

This is where most Western readings of Musashi go wrong — by treating the book as a metaphor, when Musashi himself is being entirely literal.

In the very first scroll — the Earth Scroll, 地の巻 — he does something unexpected. He starts writing about carpenters.

He describes the master builder who surveys his available lumber with clear eyes — who understands the quality and character of each piece, assigns strong timber to load-bearing work, uses finer grain where it will be seen, wastes nothing, forces nothing. And he says, without apology: the principle is the same. The general and the master carpenter are doing the same essential thing, at different scales, in different materials.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. Musashi is making a foundational claim: the qualities that produce a great warrior — the judgment, the self-knowledge, the long practice, the composure under pressure — are the same qualities that produce excellence in any serious work. The domain changes. The underlying discipline does not.

He will say the same thing about merchants. About officials. About anyone who takes their craft seriously enough to actually study it.

The Book of Five Rings is, in this sense, a samurai’s self-help book. Written by a warrior, for warriors — but addressed, at its deepest level, to anyone willing to ask what genuine preparation actually requires.

A Thousand Days to Forge. Ten Thousand Days to Refine.

There is a line in the Earth Scroll that I have returned to more times than I can count:

「千の稽古を鍛とし、万の稽古を練とす。」

A thousand days of training to forge. Ten thousand days of training to refine.

The word 鍛 — kitae — means to forge in the literal, metallurgical sense: hammering heated metal into shape through repeated impact. The word 練 — neri — means to knead, to work, to refine something until its essential quality becomes fully realized.

Musashi is not being poetic. He is being precise. Ten thousand days is approximately twenty-seven years. He is describing a process that operates on a timescale most contemporary self-development culture finds genuinely uncomfortable — because it does not fit into a six-week program, a ninety-day challenge, or a weekend intensive.

And yet, a few lines later, he writes something that reframes the entire scale:

「昨日の我に今日は勝ち、明日は下手に勝ち、後は上手に勝つ。」

Today, defeat the self of yesterday. Tomorrow, surpass those of lesser skill. Later, surpass those of greater skill.

Notice the sequence. He does not begin with the external. He does not say: beat your competitors. He does not say: lead the market. He does not say: be the best.

He says: defeat the self of yesterday.

The unit of measurement is always internal. The only opponent that ultimately matters is the person you were the day before.

In an era that has made external comparison nearly involuntary — where the metrics of success are almost entirely defined by what others are doing and what they think of you — I find this quietly radical. Not as philosophy. As practice.

What This Series Is, and What It Isn’t

I want to be transparent about where I’m standing.

I grew up in Kobe. I practiced kendo for ten years at a police dojo, starting when I was six years old. I spent years at temples in Kyoto studying Zen and Buddhist philosophy, came under the deep influence of Laozi and the traditions that flowed from him. And over time — through Japanese classical literature, through history, through years of walking in the mountains and stopping to bow at the small shrines at the edges of old forests — I came to understand that none of these traditions could be fully understood without Shinto. Without the older, pre-doctrinal sense that something inhabits the ancient cedars, the mountain stones, the places where rivers meet.

I say this not to establish authority, but to be clear about the angle of approach.

I will push back on Western interpretations when I believe they have missed something essential. I will also be honest when Musashi is difficult — when his worldview is severe, or uncompromising in ways that deserve acknowledgment rather than romanticization. He was a man of his time and his particular formation. Some of what he wrote translates across centuries with startling immediacy. Some of it requires more careful handling.

And I will not promise you that engaging with this material will change anything for you.

What I will say is this: the qualities that The Book of Five Rings describes — the composure that comes from genuine preparation, the internal compass that doesn’t depend on external validation, the readiness that looks, from the outside, like unusual calm — these are not mythological. They are the product of a specific kind of practice, sustained over time.

Whether that practice is possible for you, and what form it might take in your life, is not something I can determine. That is between you and the work.

But I think it is worth understanding what Musashi actually said — before deciding.

The Structure of What Follows

The Book of Five Rings is organized around five scrolls, each named for one of the five great elements of Buddhist cosmology:

地 Earth — Foundation. The nature of strategy. Who this book is for and why.

水 Water — Technique. The qualities of mind that allow skill to become instinct.

火 Fire — Combat. Timing, rhythm, and the read-and-respond that happens under real pressure.

風 Wind — Other schools. What they get right, what they miss, and where Musashi parts ways with them.

空 Void — The hardest to explain. The shortest section. The ground from which everything else becomes possible.

We will move through each scroll in turn — not as scholars annotating a historical document, but as people trying to understand what it is actually saying, and whether it has anything genuine to offer the conditions of contemporary life.

Each installment will include a dialogue. Nicholas — an American CEO who has been living in Osaka’s Kitahama financial district for five years, a lifelong Yankees fan who has a habit of translating abstract philosophy into baseball — will be there. So will Catherine, a graduate student at Osaka University from California, who brings both the rigor of good sociological training and the particular openness of someone genuinely living inside a culture not their own.

Their questions will not always be comfortable. Neither, I suspect, will some of Musashi’s answers.

That seems appropriate.

Next: The Book of Five Rings — The Earth Scroll: The Philosophy of Not Losing

For readers who wish to explore the source material themselves,
 an English translation of The Book of Five Rings can be found here.

SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and culture — not as a guide, but as a mirror. The views in this piece are my own — shaped by how I grew up, what I practiced, and what I noticed. They are not the correct interpretation of Zen, or of anything else. 
English is not my first language; I use AI as a linguistic tool to bridge that gap. The thinking is mine. The words are a collaboration.

The Man Who Chose the Hard Way: Reading Yoshikawa’s Musashi as a Mirror

What Do You Think About When Death Gets Close?

I don’t mean this as a dramatic opener. It’s a real question — one I find myself returning to whenever I read the final pages of Yoshikawa Eiji’s Musashi.

There’s a moment in the novel — the duel at Ganryūjima — that I’ve read more than once, and each time it does something strange to me. Sasaki Kojirō arrives first. He is polished, precise, supremely confident. He has spent his life perfecting a single technique — the Tsubame Gaeshi, a strike so fast it was said to cut down a swallow in mid-flight. He waits on the beach, composed, certain. The morning is still. The sea is flat.

Then he waits a little longer.
And longer still.

When Musashi’s boat finally appears on the horizon, Kojirō is already irritated. By the time it beaches, he is furious. Musashi is late — deliberately, almost insultingly late. He steps off the boat holding not a proper sword but a roughly shaped piece of wood, carved from his oar during the crossing. He hasn’t even bothered to bring a real blade.

Kojirō draws immediately, his scabbard thrown aside. The throw is elegant. Unnecessary. The gesture of a man performing his own legend.

Musashi doesn’t react. He watches.

What Yoshikawa captures in the pages that follow isn’t really a fight. It’s two completely different relationships with death meeting head-on.

Kojirō dies not because his technique fails him. He dies because Musashi, in that moment, simply isn’t afraid. And Kojirō — for all his mastery — is.

Before We Go Further: What Is This Novel?

If you’ve never encountered Musashi before, a brief orientation might be useful — because the book has an unusual status, somewhere between historical fiction, national mythology, and genuine philosophical text.

Yoshikawa Eiji’s Musashi was serialized in Japan’s Asahi Shimbun newspaper from 1935 to 1939. It’s a long novel — over a thousand pages in English translation — and it follows the life of Miyamoto Musashi from his chaotic youth through decades of wandering, dueling, and reluctant self-examination. It was enormously popular when it was published and remains so today. For many Japanese readers, Yoshikawa’s Musashi is Musashi — the historical figure and the fictional character have fused almost completely in the public imagination.

The important thing to understand is that Yoshikawa was writing fiction. He took the broad outlines of a real life and built a novel around them. The historical Miyamoto Musashi was a real person — a swordsman, a painter, and a strategist who lived from roughly 1584 to 1645. The duel at Ganryūjima almost certainly happened. Many of the other details are invented or embellished.

But the historical Musashi did leave behind one verified text of his own: the Go Rin No Sho (五輪書), the Book of Five Rings, written in the final weeks of his life in a mountain cave. That text has never gone out of print. It’s studied in Japanese martial arts schools, taught in business schools in the United States and Europe, and has been cited by everyone from hedge fund managers to professional athletes as a framework for thinking under pressure.

So we have two versions of Musashi: the literary one Yoshikawa gave us, and the historical one who actually put brush to paper in 1645. I find both valuable, and I think they’re best read in sequence — the novel first, as a way of understanding the person, and then the Go Rin No Sho as a way of encountering the mind directly.

That’s the order I want to follow here.

A Young Man Who Couldn’t Stop Fighting

The Musashi of the novel’s early chapters is not someone you’d necessarily admire. He is raw, furious, and convinced that killing enough people will eventually make him invincible. He fights with the kind of desperation that looks like courage but is mostly fear with nowhere to go.

Yoshikawa doesn’t let him off the hook for this. The novel’s structure — and it’s a long novel, originally serialized in a newspaper over nearly a decade — is essentially the story of what happens when a gifted, violent young man is slowly forced to confront the difference between winning fights and understanding what he’s actually doing.

That transformation doesn’t happen through a single revelation. It happens through loss. Through humiliation. Through being suspended in a tree for days by the monk Takuan. Through falling in love with someone he can’t have. Through watching people he respects die in ways that make no dramatic sense.

Musashi doesn’t become great because he trained harder. He becomes great because he eventually stopped running from the parts of himself he didn’t like.

From Emotion to Observation

There’s a passage in the novel — I’m paraphrasing here, because the nuance matters more than the exact words — where the older Musashi reflects on how his sword has changed. When he was young, he fought against his opponent. Later, he realized he had spent most of his career fighting against himself. The anger, the pride, the need to prove something. His own emotions were his most dangerous enemy.

What he eventually developed — and what Yoshikawa renders in increasingly sparse, almost meditative prose as the novel progresses — is something closer to observation than aggression. Not passivity. Not detachment in the sense of not caring. Something harder to describe: a quality of presence that didn’t flinch, didn’t project, didn’t anticipate. He became someone who could see a situation as it actually was, not as his fear or ambition needed it to be.

I’m aware that sounds like the kind of thing you’d read on a motivational poster. But in the context of Yoshikawa’s novel, it earns that description slowly, over hundreds of pages of failure.

When I think about it in terms of ordinary life — not sword fights, but the situations where I’ve made decisions badly — the pattern is recognizable. The times I’ve acted from wounded pride, or reacted before I understood what was actually happening. Musashi’s arc, as Yoshikawa tells it, is essentially a very long, painful lesson in the gap between reaction and response.

I’m not sure I’ve fully learned it either.

Why He Won at Ganryūjima (My Reading, Not the Official One)

There are many interpretations of why Musashi defeated Kojirō. The psychological game of arriving late. The sun in Kojirō’s eyes. Superior reach with the longer wooden sword.

But what strikes me in Yoshikawa’s rendering is something subtler.

Kojirō, by that point in the novel, has become his own technique. He is the Tsubame Gaeshi. He has identified completely with his reputation, his method, his certainty. When Musashi steps off that boat, Kojirō is already furious — and that fury is the tell. It means he needs the duel to go a certain way. He has something to lose.

Musashi, by contrast, has spent the journey across the water carving a sword from an oar. In Zen terms — and I’m reading this in, I should say, not claiming Yoshikawa intended this explicitly — he arrives in something close to mushin (無心): no-mind, or perhaps more accurately, no-agenda. He isn’t fighting to prove something. He isn’t fighting to protect a reputation. He’s simply there, present, awake to what the moment actually requires.

Ku (空) — emptiness, in the Buddhist sense — isn’t a void. It’s the absence of obstruction. A mirror that reflects everything because it clings to nothing.

That’s my reading of it. You might read it differently. The novel supports multiple interpretations, and I think that’s part of its value.

What I Take From This (For Myself, Not As Advice)

I want to be careful here, because this kind of writing slides easily into prescription — here’s what Musashi can teach you about leadership — and that’s not what I’m interested in.

But I’ll say what I actually do with it, and leave you to decide whether it’s relevant to you.

When I’m in a situation where I feel reactive — where something has been said or done and I want to respond immediately, from that tight place in the chest — I sometimes think of Kojirō. Not Musashi. Kojirō.

Because Kojirō is the more relatable figure, honestly. He worked extraordinarily hard. He was genuinely skilled. He had real reasons to be confident. And he still lost, because in that final moment he couldn’t find the gap between what was happening and his feelings about it.

That gap is very small, and very hard to hold open, and I don’t always manage it. But I find the image useful. The question it leaves me with isn’t how do I become more like Musashi? — that feels like the wrong framing. It’s more like: in this particular moment, what is actually happening, versus what am I afraid is happening?

Those are often different things.

What This Means to Me

I’ve lived most of my life surrounded by the aesthetics of the sword — not as violence, but as michi (道), the Way. Kendo was part of my childhood in the way that Saturday morning baseball might have been part of someone else’s. Not something I chose, exactly. Something that was simply there, shaping how I held my body, how I entered a room, what I noticed when I was nervous.

Reading Yoshikawa’s Musashi as an adult is a strange experience because of that. I recognize things in it that I absorbed long before I had language for them. The idea that your biggest opponent is internal. That the perfection of technique, without an equally serious reckoning with the self, eventually becomes a trap.

I don’t know if this maps onto your life. I suspect something in it might, because the psychological pattern Yoshikawa is describing — the long, uncomfortable work of learning to act from clarity rather than fear — doesn’t seem uniquely Japanese to me. But I’m aware that I’m reading it from inside a particular tradition, and you’re reading it from outside one.

That difference matters. I’d rather honor it than flatten it.

What I can say is this: when I finished the novel again recently, the feeling I was left with wasn’t admiration for Musashi exactly. It was something more like recognition. The awareness that the hardest thing he had to defeat was something he carried with him everywhere.

Reading the Book of Five Rings written by Miyamoto Musashi

Read an article about Sasaki Kojiro, whom Musashi fought.

Takeshi Kitagawa is a graphic and textile designer based in Osaka. He writes about Japanese philosophy and aesthetics for Western readers at SHIBUMIWORKS PROJECT.

A note on process: The thinking in this piece is mine, shaped by decades of living inside Japanese culture. The English is a collaboration with AI. As I’ve written elsewhere: AI is my brush, not my brain.