Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
But its poverty in every line, except the communal sanctions, caused it in a short time to lose its place. The two causes just assigned for the fall of Bushido, however, could hardly have wrought its ruin had it been more than a utilitarian and agnostic system of morality, calculated to maintain the social ascendency of a small fraction of the nation.
The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushido was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, that it was required not only of woman but of man.
When Bushido imposed itself on all above the herd, they had a sense of honor not surpassed by the people of any nation; but commerce, the destruction of the castes of samurai, heimin, and eta, the plunging of a military people into business and competition with Western cunning, and the lacquer of Christianity which had done little more than Occidentalize to a considerable degree a few thousands, without giving them the practice of the golden rule, or an appreciation of the Sermon on the Mount, had robbed the Japanese of an ancient code of morality and honor, and replaced it with nothing worth while an insatiable ambition to equal Occidental peoples and to conquer Oriental ones, and a thousand factories which killed women and children.
Palaye gives, have, of course, little application to Japanese conditions; but the larger and more general causes that helped to undermine Knighthood and Chivalry in and after the Middle Ages are as surely working for the decline of Bushido.
Money and the love of it being thus diligently ignored, Bushido itself could long remain free from a thousand and one evils of which money is the root. This is sufficient reason for the fact that our public men have long been free from corruption; but, alas, how fast plutocracy is making its way in our time and generation!
That he should extirpate every scion of the Toyotomi family was not inconsistent with the canons of the tune or with the interests of his own security. But death at the hands of a common executioner ought never to have been decreed for the son of the u-daijin, and the cruelty of the order finds no excuse. No tenet of bushido can be reconciled with such inhumanity.
In all of his teachings the idea of personality in the full and proper sense of this word is always implicit, and sometimes is quite distinct. The many strong and noble characters which glorify the feudal era are the product of Japonicized Confucianism, "Bushido," and bear powerful witness to its practical emphasis on personality.
We have seen that Shintoism, Mencius and Wan Yang Ming, have all clearly taught it; but Bushido and all other militant schools of ethics, engrossed, doubtless, with questions of immediate practical need, too often forgot duly to emphasize this fact. Life has grown larger in these latter times. Callings nobler and broader than a warrior's claim our attention to-day.
Like His Hebrew precursors, the prophets notably Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Habakkuk Bushido laid particular stress on the moral conduct of rulers and public men and of nations, whereas the Ethics of Christ, which deal almost solely with individuals and His personal followers, will find more and more practical application as individualism, in its capacity of a moral factor, grows in potency.
Bushido similarly praised those women most "who emancipated themselves from the frailty of their sex and displayed an heroic fortitude worthy of the strongest and the bravest of men."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking