The Institutions of Suicide and Redress（3）（2/2）
《武士道》作者：（日）新渡户稻造 2017-04-14 12:42
easons entirely undeserving of death, hot headed youths rushed into it as insects fly into fire; mixed and dubious motives drove more samurai to this deed than nuns into convent gates. Life was cheap—cheap as reckoned by the popular standard of honor. The saddest feature was that honor, which was always in the agio, so to speak, was not always solid gold, but alloyed with baser metals. No one circle in the Inferno will boast of greater density of Japanese population than the seventh, to which Dante consigns all victims of self-destruction!
And yet, for a true samurai to hasten death or to court it, was alike cowardice. A typical fighter, when he lost battle after battle and was pursued from plain to hill and from bush to cavern, found himself hungry and alone in the dark hollow of a tree, his sword blunt with use, his bow broken and arrows exhausted—did not the noblest of the Romans fall upon his own sword in Phillippi under like circumstances?—deemed it cowardly to die, but with a fortitude approaching a Christian martyr’s, cheered himself with an impromptu verse:
“Come! evermore come,
Ye dread sorrows and pains!
And heap on my burden’d back;
That I not one test may lack
Of what strength in me remains!”
This, then, was the Bushido teaching—Bear and face all cal***ties and adversities with patience and a pure conscience; for as Mencius[2] taught, “When Heaven is about to confer a great office on anyone, it first exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with toil; it exposes his body to hunger and subjects him to extreme poverty; and it confounds his undertakings. In all these ways it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies.” True honor lies in fulfilling Heaven’s decree and no death incurred in so doing is ignominious, whereas death to avoid what Heaven has in store is cowardly indeed! In that quaint book of Sir Thomas Browne’s, Religio Medici there is an exact English equivalent for what is repeatedly taught in our Precepts. Let me quote it: “It is a brave act of valor to contemn death, but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.” A renowned priest of the seventeenth century satirically observed—“Talk as he may, a samurai who ne’er has died is apt in decisive moments to flee or hide.” Again—“Him who once has died in the bottom of his breast, no spears of Sanada nor all the arrows of Tametomo can pierce.” How near we come to the portals of the temple whose Builder taught“He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it!”These are but a few of the numerous examples that tend to confirm the moral identity of the human species, notwithstanding an attempt so assiduously made to render the distinction between Christian and Pagan as great as possible.
And yet, for a true samurai to hasten death or to court it, was alike cowardice. A typical fighter, when he lost battle after battle and was pursued from plain to hill and from bush to cavern, found himself hungry and alone in the dark hollow of a tree, his sword blunt with use, his bow broken and arrows exhausted—did not the noblest of the Romans fall upon his own sword in Phillippi under like circumstances?—deemed it cowardly to die, but with a fortitude approaching a Christian martyr’s, cheered himself with an impromptu verse:
“Come! evermore come,
Ye dread sorrows and pains!
And heap on my burden’d back;
That I not one test may lack
Of what strength in me remains!”
This, then, was the Bushido teaching—Bear and face all cal***ties and adversities with patience and a pure conscience; for as Mencius[2] taught, “When Heaven is about to confer a great office on anyone, it first exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with toil; it exposes his body to hunger and subjects him to extreme poverty; and it confounds his undertakings. In all these ways it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetencies.” True honor lies in fulfilling Heaven’s decree and no death incurred in so doing is ignominious, whereas death to avoid what Heaven has in store is cowardly indeed! In that quaint book of Sir Thomas Browne’s, Religio Medici there is an exact English equivalent for what is repeatedly taught in our Precepts. Let me quote it: “It is a brave act of valor to contemn death, but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.” A renowned priest of the seventeenth century satirically observed—“Talk as he may, a samurai who ne’er has died is apt in decisive moments to flee or hide.” Again—“Him who once has died in the bottom of his breast, no spears of Sanada nor all the arrows of Tametomo can pierce.” How near we come to the portals of the temple whose Builder taught“He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it!”These are but a few of the numerous examples that tend to confirm the moral identity of the human species, notwithstanding an attempt so assiduously made to render the distinction between Christian and Pagan as great as possible.