Book of Five Rings

五輪の書, read gorin no sho: the Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi's account of his way of the sword, written in five scrolls in a cave on Mount Iwato in Higo in the last two years of his life. The rings are the scrolls. 五輪 is a Buddhist word before it is anything else, the five elements that make up the world, earth, water, fire, wind and void, the same five that stack up in the five-ringed stūpa of every old graveyard; Musashi named a scroll for each and wrote that he divided the way in five so its reasons could be known, borrowing, he said, no old words of Buddhism or Confucianism. The title is not in the book, which calls itself five scrolls; the earliest names for it come from his pupils' Kumamoto, and 五輪書 without the particle is the dictionaries' form. The scroll writes 五輪の書 with it, as the two editions that gave the text its modern Japanese readers printed the title, so both forms are right and a buyer who meets the other has not met a mistake. Rings for 輪 is Victor Harris's, from the first English translation, and English has kept it since; A Book of Five Rings was his title, and every translation after him has followed it. The kanji 五 (read go) means five 輪 (read rin) means "ring", the grammatical element の (read no) means "of" and 書 (read sho) means "book; writings".