文武両道 bunbu ryōdō Literary and Military Arts

文武両道 is the pen and the sword held together in one person. 文 is letters and learning, 武 is arms, and 両道 is both ways. The phrase holds the two at once and refuses the choice between them. In a Japanese school today it is the praise for a student good at both books and sport. A person who chooses it may mean the scholar-warrior, the athlete-scholar, or the rule that one half is not enough.

文武両道 is composed of the kanji 文 (read bun) meaning "art; literature", 武 (read bu) meaning "military; arms; chivalry", 両 (read ryō) meaning "both; two" and 道 (read dō) meaning "the way; teachings".

The pair 文武 began in the Analects and the 禮記 as two Zhou kings, Wen and Wu, whose combined "way" was the model of good rule; Japan turned the pair into "two ways" by 1252 (the 十訓抄) and "both ways" by 1265 (Nichiren), first as a rule for governing a state and, by the seventeenth century, as a warrior's own balance of letters and arms.

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