2min chapter

Made You Think cover image

39: Ground, Water, Fire, Wind, Void. The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi

Made You Think

CHAPTER

The Way of the Warrior Is Resolute Acceptance of Death

The way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death. That's basically a stoic quote in this book by Musashi. I mean, you could see that written in Sanica, and you wouldn't be surprised. When it relates to something we talked about too, in way of Zen, right? There are these strong parallels between Zen Buddhism or Buddhism in general, and kind of the ancient stoic and generally Mediterranean philosophy,. there's a lot of overlaps.

00:00
Speaker 1
Yeah,
Speaker 2
he's almost like created these personas pretty much are still all using the same principles and like not completely, but he uses them as descriptors for different ways of looking at the principles that he talks about.
Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. And he uses this to talk about learning, right? He says, you know, learning is kind of like being a carpenter where the teacher cannot force learning on the student and the student cannot learn in isolation. The teacher is a needle and the disciple is a thread and he was practiced constantly. So the teacher
Speaker 2
can like provide guidance, but you still have to move through the process. Yeah, like a needle by itself can't do much and a thread by itself is just going to aimlessly not be able to be directed right in any way, kind of sit
Speaker 1
there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2
no, I really like that. And it's like the symbiotic relationship, right? Like you can't have one really without the other because you can't even really be a teacher without a student, you know, or disciple as he calls it, right? Because who are you really teaching? You know, the
Speaker 1
needle without the thread is pretty useless. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I thought
Speaker 2
that was really interesting. And then I was looking at in my notes, I just thought that this one, this one thing I'd highlighted that just was very stoic. And I think I had read this actually before I read the stoics the first time, because this was the second time I read the book. And the first time, you know, I hadn't highlighted this and then going back through this time, I found it, it was very early on in the book, he said in the ground book, specifically not the book, you know, in general, he says, generally speaking, the way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death. And I don't know, I found that to be it was like, wow, that's basically a stoic quote in this book by Musashi. Yeah. I don't know, I just found that like not saying there's like a useful, necessarily takeaway there, but it was really interesting to see that effectively. I mean, you could see that written in Sanica, and you wouldn't be surprised.
Speaker 1
When it relates to something we talked about too, in way of Zen, right, that there are these strong parallels between Zen Buddhism or Buddhism in general, and kind of the ancient stoic and generally Mediterranean philosophy, there's a lot of overlaps. Yeah.

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