独行道 dokkōdō The Path of Aloneness

独行道 is a rule for living that a person sets and keeps alone. The middle character, 行, can mean walking or doing. So the phrase reads two ways: going down the road alone, or acting on one's own strength and leaning on no one. Either way it is a vow made to oneself. Which reading you take is yours.

独行道 is a combination of the word 独行 (read dokkō) meaning "going alone; self-reliant" and 道 (read dō) meaning "the way; teachings".

Twenty-one articles brushed by Miyamoto Musashi, on the judgment of the museum that holds the sheet, and dated by the sheet's colophon and by the school's chronicles to the twelfth day of the fifth month of 1645, a week before his death; the prefecture that holds the sheet judges that colophon, with its address to his pupil Terao Magonojō, a later hand, while the one scholar to study the sheet as a text, in 1967, reads it as Musashi's own, written on another day.

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 独行道.

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