The 9 Rules of Musashi (How to Master Anything)

In the spring of 1638, below the walls of Hara Castle, a stone thrown by a rebel peasant struck a fifty-four-year-old man serving with the shogun's army. He had fought more than sixty duels and never lost one. His name was Miyamoto Musashi. Five years later, he began the Book of Five Rings, and at the end of its first scroll he wrote nine rules for anyone who wanted to learn his Way. Not one of them mentions the sword. This video is about those nine rules. Not as poetry, but as a method: how a master is built, in any craft, and nine things you can practice tomorrow morning. Told through Musashi's own writings, Confucius, Hokusai, Hon'ami Kōetsu, Johannes Gutenberg, Benjamin Franklin's moral algebra, the go prodigy Shūsaku and the tea master Sen no Rikyū. Topics covered: The stone at Hara Castle (1638) | 1. Do not think in crooked ways | 2. The Way is in the training: a thousand days to forge, ten thousand to polish | Hokusai at eighty-eight | 3. Touch every art: Hon'ami Kōetsu | 4. Know the ways of every trade: Gutenberg's press | 5. Know the gain and the loss: Franklin's moral algebra | 6. Judge the true worth of things: the carpenter's timber | 7. Perceive what the eyes cannot see: Shūsaku's ear-reddening move | 8. Pay attention even to small things | 9. Do nothing that is of no use: Rikyū's morning glory | The trap: restlessness disguised as mastery The nine rules are quoted in our own translation from the original Japanese text. SOURCES Miyamoto Musashi, Gorin no Sho (The Book of Five Rings, 1643–1645): Books of Earth, Water, Fire and Wind · Musashi's letter to Arima Naozumi on the siege of Hara Castle (1638) · Confucius, Analects 2.2 · Katsushika Hokusai, afterword to One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834) · Benjamin Franklin, letter to Joseph Priestley (19 September 1772) · John Power, Invincible: The Games of Shusaku (1982) · John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution (2002) · Kenji Tokitsu, Miyamoto Musashi: His Life and Writings (2004) ARTWORK & FOOTAGE Public-domain works by Miyamoto Musashi, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Utagawa Kunisada, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Kitagawa Utamaro, Sesshū Tōyō, Hon'ami Kōetsu, Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Kano Tan'yū, Kano Motonobu, Kano Takanobu, Kano Tsunenobu, Maruyama Ōkyo, Mori Sosen, Hakuin Ekaku, Iwasa Matabei, Kanō Shōei, Hishikawa Moronobu, Tōshūsai Sharaku, Torii Kiyonaga, Kawanabe Kyōsai, Shibata Zeshin, Tani Bunchō, Toyohara Chikanobu, Ogata Gekkō, Mizuno Toshikata, Ikeda Shōen, Totoya Hokkei, Kubo Shunman, Isoda Koryūsai, Katsukawa Shunshō, Katsukawa Shunkō, Nishimura Shigenaga, Ryūryūkyo Shinsai, Katsushika Taito II, Kikukawa Eizan, Keisai Eisen, Hosoda Eishi, Yashima Gakutei, Gigadō Ashiyuki, Utagawa Yoshitsuna, Saitō Shūho, Fei Qinghu, Wu Zhen, Jost Amman, Michael Wolgemut, Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, Petrus Christus, the Limbourg brothers, Quentin Massys, Marinus van Reymerswaele, Quirijn van Brekelenkam, Canaletto, Rembrandt, Gerard ter Borch, Laurent de La Hyre, Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Nicolaes Maes, William Hogarth, Hieronymus Bosch, Erasmus Hornick, Joseph-Siffred Duplessis and others, via Wikimedia Commons, the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the Wellcome Collection. Teaching Reading and Writing (Izumiya Ichibei, 1790), photo by PHGCOM, CC BY-SA 4.0. Night sky time-lapse: ESO (CC BY 4.0). MUSIC Original score by Flumera. #philosophy #musashi #mastery