The Five-Direction Sword Pathways

For more than three centuries this page kept being filed as the preface to one of Miyamoto Musashi's other books. The scroll carries no heading, date or signature, and ends only by saying it was written as a preface, which is where its printed names come from. Terao Nobuyuki, the pupil who owned it, copied it at the head of the Thirty-Five Articles, so it was handed down as their preface; Toyoda Masatake, a Yatsushiro retainer who collected the school's traditions, took it for the lost preface to the Five Rings, and one manuscript of that book copies it in at the front. In 1993 Uozumi Takashi, a historian of the martial arts, compared its hand with other writing by Musashi, judged the scroll now in the Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art to be autograph, and dated it between late 1642 and late 1643 — after the articles, before the Five Rings, and written, he argued, to open an early form of that book. Ōkura Ryūji has since judged the scroll a later imitation of Musashi's hand, on newer paper. The text runs to some 560 characters of ornate parallel prose. It rejects the old saying that the sword, which defeats only one man, is not worth learning, and argues that the principle of a sword fight holds on a field of armies. It mocks the dozens of schools that multiply stances into secret grades, and likens the two swords a samurai wears to the sun and moon. Chinese this learned raised the suspicion that a scholar wrote it for him. Toyoda recorded in 1707 that Musashi had a Zen monk of Taishōji, the Hosokawa family temple, correct the style, and Uozumi accepts that account and the attribution with it. Printings from 1909 onward each misread more than ten characters, and the text went largely undiscussed until Uozumi's study.