Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

Tsunetomo, Yamamoto
Wilson, William Scott

Hardcover

PhilosophyGeneral Eastern ReligionsMartial Arts

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1590309855
ISBN13: 9781590309858
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: May 15 2012
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.73
Height: 0.75 Width: 5.65 Depth: 7.80
Language: English
A foremost scholar of samurai texts approaches this martial arts classic as a meditation on the Zen concept of death of the ego--offering a fresh translation unlike any other.

Discover what it takes to be a samurai with the 18th-century martial arts treatise that delves into minds of legendary Japanese warriors.

Living and dying with bravery and honor is at the heart of Hagakure, a series of texts written by an eighteenth-century samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo. It is a window into the samurai mind, illuminating the concept of bushido--the Way of the Warrior--which dictated how samurai were expected to behave, conduct themselves, live, and die. While Hagakure was for many years a secret text known only to the warrior vassals of the Nabeshima clan to which the author belonged, it later came to be recognized as a classic exposition of samurai thought.

The original Hagakure consists of over 1,300 short texts that Tsunetomo dictated to a younger samurai over a seven-year period. William Scott Wilson has selected and translated here three hundred of the most representative of those texts to create an accessible distillation of this guide for samurai. No other translator has so thoroughly and eruditely rendered this text into English.

For this edition, Wilson has added a new introduction that casts Hagakure in a different light than ever before. Tsunetomo refers to bushido as the Way of death, a description that has held a morbid fascination for readers over the years. But in Tsunetomo's time, bushido was a nuanced concept that related heavily to the Zen concept of muga, the death of the ego. Wilson's revised introduction gives the historical and philosophical background for that more metaphorical reading of Hagakure, and through this lens, the classic takes on a fresh and nuanced appeal.

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