Miyamoto Musashi's Final Work | Hacker News Reader

Miyamoto Musashi's Final Work

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26 pointsrgrieselhuber26 comments

Could you imagine coming to interview at a company that had these "core values" on a brass plate on the wall?

  * Accept everything just the way it is.
  * Be detached from desire your whole life long.
  * In all things have no preferences.
  * You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.

I would say I forgot something in my car, then 15 seconds later they would hear screeching tires. No thank you.

You have to understand that Musashi is a swordsman. Understand these precepts in that context first, then generalize.

For example, the precept against preferences makes perfect sense for a swordsman. If you prefer a particular attack, then this becomes a weakness. You will tend to see openings for that kind of attack instead of seeing a better opening for a different attack. You also become more predictable.

In the west, a non-swordsman would instead say, "If all you have is a hammer, then everything starts looking like a nail."

Applying the above to computer programming: Sometimes people will implement something in their favorite language despite another being vastly superior for the particular purpose.

The correct analysis and generalization of the other precepts are left as an exercise.

No, actually, that goes double for me showing up for an interview as a feudal swordsman. Replace the sound of screeching tires with galloping hooves.

So lack of preference is a strictly tactical precept then. Well, who cares? If someone's supposed to sacrifice their body for your cause, is it because you use the best tactics? Hell no. It can't be passion, nor excitement for change, nor desire for something greater -- he's already disclaimed those.

The presumed motivation is strictly honor, which takes us back to "do what is expected of you," which even then was hardly a new message in Japan. These precepts at best struggle to transcend their cultural trappings.

I would not say that Musashi disclaims a "desire for something greater." His later life seems to be all about that, as do these precepts.

I think these "precepts at best struggle to transcend their cultural trappings" in our case because the cultural trappings are particularly difficult. After all, most of us do not have real experience as warriors.

    * Accept everything just the way it is

I don't think that's the best translation. How about, "You must deal with what is."

    * Be detached from desire your whole life long.

How about, "Don't be ruled by your desires."

    * You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.

This one is difficult to translate from a warrior context to a non-warrior one. But it can still be usefully translated to the coder's context. Zed Shaw's talk posted to HN recently makes the same point:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420650

A translation to our context might be "Be true to yourself, no matter how surreal the workplace gets." The same idea is also embodied in the "Just Leave Pattern."

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JustLeave

A drama program undergraduate classmate of mine once noted that Shakespeare's Hamlet was far from "universal." After all, many places in Africa, marrying your widowed sister-in-law is the right and proper thing to do! To get to the universal, you often have to dig. It strikes me that this is as it should be.

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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=424519

Thanks for posting that. I read Book of 5 Rings a couple of times when I was younger and still obsessively practising martial arts. I hadn't come across this though.

I don't stack up well against #13 unfortunately! (Unless that's intended as an extension of #2 perhaps; "don't be a glutton")

"Do not seek pleasure for its own sake." What do you think he was trying to say?

I think he meant don't peruse pleasure for the pleasure's sake - e.g. like having sex with a women only because of sex.

When you do something like that, you're ignoring lots of other factors that often turn out to be very important.

Soooooooo....basically just Tao-ism?

Sooooooo...just a bunch of precepts to turn you into a nihilistic Bushido robot who can make for an efficient killing machine?

i would highly recommend the beautiful mushahi-miyamoto samurai trilogy by hiroshi-inagaki. very, very nice indeed. it has the feel of 'siddhartha' by herman-hesse, but with samurai scenes.

Or read the epic novel "Musashi" by Eiji Yoshikawa, on which the movie is based. Or the "Vagabond" series of graphic novels. All first-rate entertainment, if you like samurai stories.

In all things have no preferences.

Even when it comes to lists of precepts?

The 'many ways to the top of the mountain' precept covers the existence of other valid precepts.

1. Accept everything just the way it is.

Not a big fan of that one, I think some situations are out of your control however nothing would have gotten done in this world if everyone followed this moto.

Accepting doesn't mean standing in the corner picking your nose for the duration of your life.

If you are really interested in this concept, I highly recommend reading Katie Byron. All her work is about accepting life as it is.

i don't think he meant it as "do nothing." rather, he meant something more like accepting the world as it is given to you, accepting the truth instead of rationalizing, etc

acceptance is a big part of moving on

this isn't just an idealist guess on my part. just from the little I've read from his "Book of Five Rings" it's clear he was a pragmatist. his style/philosophy was essentially "do the best thing in the given situation," not different in spirit from Bruce Lee's style

>"i don't think he meant it as "do nothing."

But then again, a lot of eastern ascetics and mystics mean exactly that.

Those are the mystics who didn't "get it." They were fooled into inaction by others who profited by being able to deal with the world as it was.

If we did accept everything just the way it is, then we would have to accept ourselves the way we are, too. Since we are motivated by the pursuit of material possessions, comfort, good food, desire and pleasure (among many other things), then I am tempted to conclude that Miyamoto Musashi's work is a little bit self-contradictory.

This one is a bit of a double-edged sword (no pun intended) but the way I look at that precept doesn't preclude doing something to change the situation. It just means being willing to stare reality in the face and accept (eg. understand) it for what it really is.

Good point. I think the same.

However, I suppose the word "accept" usually conveys the idea of doing nothing to change to situation. It's all about how the words are defined, which leads to pseudo-philosophical nonsense. Moreover, I assume the text was translated from Japanese, and there's always something lost in translation.

Not being able to accept reality the way it is often leads to inaction. "We'd be able to refactor that subsystem if the other developers had written tests and documented, damn them!" [inaction follows]

Your also talking about a book written in 1645 not just another language. The translation to "accept" on Wikipedia is far from the original concept so focusing on our connotations of our word is missing the point. I would say "Look at the world as it is not what you want it to be." but that's longer and less catchy.

"In all things have no preferences." > "React to what is happening not just what your ideas let you to see."

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