I guess this has fallen to the wayside since March. My bad. I have been attempting to write but haven't been very successful. I mean, how much time do writers really have on there hands? Do they not have lives or laundry to be done?
Anyway, I had this thought and I will attempt to do it. There is a book that I have been slowly working my way through called Hagakure (aka The Book of the Samurai) and it is full of these little slivers of samurai philosophy. My idea is that I will attempt to post an excerpt from this every day with my comments on it as a modern martial artist (ask me about it sometime...). I will start with this post and see how it goes.
Here it goes:
Although it stands to reason that a samurai should be mindful of the Way of the Samurai, it would seem that we are all negligent. Consequently, if someone were to ask, "What is the true meaning of the Way of the Samurai?" the person who would be able to answer promptly is rare. This is because it has not been established in one's mind beforehand. From this, one's unmindfulness of the Way can be known.
Negligence is an extreme thing.
My thoughts on this are that I agree. There is few of us (us being any member of the human race) that can immediately answer what is the meaning of why we do anything. Many of us follow what our parents did or what our bosses do without truly understanding why. It is almost akin to Socratic/Platonic thought-"The unexamined life is not worth living." We tend to over complicate and make things much more difficult than the need to be in order to avoid examining and looking for the truth (being mindful) because it may turn out we have been wrong and must find a different way to live.
Any thoughts?
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