独行道 dokkōdō The Path of Aloneness

独行道 is the title of a rule of one man's own conduct: all but one of its articles says what he does not do. The middle character, 行, can mean walking or doing, so the title reads two ways: the way one walks alone, or the way of solitary conduct. The tradition has called the sheet it heads a vow to himself, a self-admonition and a parting word. 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 宮本武蔵, on Kumamoto Prefecture's judgment of the hand, 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 寺尾孫之丞, a later hand, while the first scholar on record 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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