Thus, on October 10, he once again went out to Mount Iwato, where he had previously practiced both swordsmanship and Zen meditation, and climbed the path up the rocky outcropping leading to Reigan Cave. By early autumn, he felt that it was time to prepare a legacy beyond his paintings, his reputation, and what was understood of his style of swordsmanship. Kumamoto, the castle town in which he resided, was hot and muggy, but Musashi persevered in the dojo, although he did not push his students to physical and mental exhaustion the way other teachers often did. In the summer of 1643, at the age of fifty-nine, an ailing Miyamoto Musashi was still practicing calligraphy, chanting passages from Noh theater, studying classical poetry, and teaching swordsmanship to a few disciples. At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Here, William Scott Wilson, historian and translator of The Book of Five Rings, delineates those principles and discusses the huge influence the book has had. A major reason for the lasting importance of Musashi Miyamoto-the historical figure played by Toshiro Mifune in The Samurai Trilogy- in Japanese and world culture is his work The Book of Five Rings, a seventeenth-century treatise on the wandering samurai’s principles of swordplay and spirituality that is still widely read today.
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