五輪の書 gorin no sho Book of Five Rings
Abstract
五輪の書, gorin no sho, the writing of the five rings, is the title of the five scrolls Miyamoto Musashi wrote in his last two years, as their copies date them, 1643 to 1645, and the title is not in the book: the book calls itself only this book of five scrolls, earth, water, fire, wind and void. A note of 1755 in a Kumamoto biography prefaced in 1776 already names the book, and a name for it, 五輪ノ卷, is in print by 1886, 五輪の書 with the particle by 1898 and 五輪書 by 1908, in the oldest rows naming the book that the National Diet Library's full-text search finds under eight spellings of the title; the form with the particle is the one the 1915 edition printed. The five scrolls give their own reasons for their titles rather than a Buddhist scheme, though the dictionaries frame the book's five elements as Buddhist. A Book of Five Rings is in English by 1964 and is the title of the first English translation found here, of 1974; the titles of the English translations read here since, Cleary's, Groff's and Bennett's, keep the rings, and Tokitsu gives it as the popular title beside his own.
Overview
The sense. The title of the five scrolls Miyamoto Musashi wrote in a Kumamoto cave in his last two years, named for the five elements, earth, water, fire, wind and void. The school the scrolls teach, 二天一流, has its own history; the two names meet in the same witnesses.
The words. 五輪 is a Buddhist word before it is anything else: the five 輪, wheels or rings, are the five 大 that make up the world, earth, water, fire, wind and void, and the great historical dictionary of Japanese gives the word that sense first, with a citation of 1296 [1]. The same five stack up in the five-ringed stūpa that stands in every old graveyard, and the same word is what Japanese now calls the Olympics: by the Yomiuri's own account, the paper first used it in a headline of 25 July 1936, 五輪旗・伯林に着く, a week before the Berlin games opened, and its sportswriter Kawamoto Nobumasa coined the word from this book's title, which he met in an essay by Kikuchi Kan 菊池寛 he happened to be reading [2]; the great historical dictionary dates the name to after the Berlin games [1]. の is of and 書 a writing, both ordinary words. Gorin no sho is the writing of the five rings, and the rings are the five scrolls, each named for one element. The dictionaries head the book 五輪書, without the particle; 五輪の書 with the particle is in print by 1898 and is the title the 1915 edition printed, while the 1939 edition printed 原本五輪書, without it, so both forms are right.
The text in English. A Book of Five Rings is in English print by 1964, and Victor Harris's translation of 1974 made it the book's English title.
The historical record
1643 to 1645. Miyamoto Musashi 宮本武蔵, the five scrolls. The preface, as the copies give it: the way of strategy I call the Niten school, and I mean now for the first time to set down in a book what I have trained at for years; in the first ten days of the tenth month of 1643 I climbed Mount Iwato in Higo, bowed to heaven, paid reverence to Kannon, faced the Buddha, I, Shinmen Musashi Fujiwara no Genshin, a warrior born in Harima, sixty years old [3]. The Water scroll opens the same way, naming the Niten school. But when the Earth scroll comes to explain the name, the name it explains is the other one: to make known the use of these two swords it is called the two-sword school (the wording varies slightly witness to witness), and the Fire and Void scrolls open on the two-sword school, while the Wind scroll, which opens on the other schools, comes to the name at the end of that opening passage. In the three printed texts read here (1909, 1915, 1939), each searched whole, the book also never calls itself 五輪書, which stands there only in the editors' headings and running titles; what it says, under the heading 此兵法の書五卷に仕立る事, on making this book of strategy in five scrolls, is I divide the way in five and write it scroll by scroll so its reasons can be known … as earth, water, fire, wind and void, in five scrolls (the 1909 print; the 1915 print has 其別, its distinctions, for 其利, and the 1939 print 其理, its principles, and 五色, five colors, for 五卷, five scrolls). The colophons are dated the twelfth or thirteenth day of the fifth month of 1645, a week before the received date of his death, and address the scrolls to different pupils across the surviving copies. None in Musashi's own hand survives, the 世界大百科事典, the 日本大百科全書 and the マイペディア say [1]. The 1909 biography called the copy it printed, then held by a Maeda family of Tamana in Higo, the original, 原書, but that copy's scrolls close with a colophon, 寛文七年二月五日 寺尾夢世勝延 to 山本源助殿 (寛 at the leaf, both prints), the fifth day of the second month of 1667, and the 1915 print gives the same 1667 line, with 山本源介 for 源助, as the reading of the copy it calls 顯本 [3]. One encyclopedia, the 日本大百科全書, holds as a good copy, 善本, the scroll that Terao Magonojō 寺尾孫之丞 addressed to his pupil Yamamoto Gensuke in the fifth month of 1667, now in the Hosokawa family's Eisei Bunko [1]; the 1909 colophon is of the second month, and whether the 1909 copy is that scroll, neither says.
1755 to 1776. Toyota Kagehide 豊田景英, 二天記, the Kumamoto biography. Compiled over three generations of the Toyota family from what Musashi's surviving pupils told the grandfather, and the source of most of what is told about him. Its note on sources is dated 1755 and belongs to the book's first form, 武公伝, which Kagehide renamed 二天記 and had prefaced in 1776. The note says the old men's stories were set down as they were told, with a little added from the book of the five … and the like: the 1910 print writes that title 五倫の書, with 倫, not 輪, and the 1909 print 五輪ノ書, with the rings [4]. Its account of the death says he passed the five-ring scrolls to Terao Katsunobu and the thirty-five articles to Terao Kumanosuke Nobuyuki 寺尾求馬助信行; and of the school it says that it is called 實相圓滿の兵法、逝去不絶、二天一流, the strategy of true form, perfect and complete, unbroken by death: the Niten school. It also records where the name came from: Musashi took the Buddhist name Niten Dōraku through the monk Shunzan of Taishōji [4].
1886 to 1908. The title in print. Of the rows whose excerpt names Musashi's book, the oldest the National Diet Library's full-text search finds, under eight spellings of the title, is an 1886 life of Musashi by 藤野富之助, which retells the bequest of the 五輪ノ卷 to Terao; an 1893 fencing manual by 隈元実道 quotes a passage of the Water scroll, citing it as 回天五輪ノ卷; 宮本武藏五輪の書, with the particle, is in the contents of a journal in 1898, the first row of that form whose excerpt names the book; and 五輪書, the dictionaries' form, is in a letter of 池辺義象 printed in 1908, the first row of that form whose excerpt names the book (a 1901 row's 五輪書ノ如ハ, beside Katō Kiyomasa's return from Korea, does not) [5].
1909. The Miyamoto Musashi Memorial Society, 『宮本武蔵』. The Memorial Society's biography prints the whole text of the five scrolls as its ninth chapter, headed 五輪書, from a copy then in a Kumamoto family's hands [6].
1915 and 1939. The two editions a reader could buy. A 1915 collection prints the text under the running title 五輪の書 with the particle, from a copy whose colophons are addressed to two pupils, Terao Magonojō and Furuhashi Sōzaemon 古橋惣左衞門, and whose closing note calls its writer one of Furuhashi's line; it marks where a second copy, which it calls 顯本, differs, and its editor notes that the book is also called the five-ring scrolls [7]. A 1939 edition, priced at sixty sen, prints the title 原本五輪書, without the particle, on its title page and in its colophon; it is a typeset, not a facsimile, and it drops the preface and the colophons [8].
The dictionary today. 五輪書, in the 精選版日本国語大辞典, a book of the martial way of the early Edo period, five scrolls, by Miyamoto Musashi, composed about 1645; the デジタル大辞泉 gives its date as unknown, and the 世界大百科事典 says doubt about its composition remains [1].
What is not a source. The Buddhist reading of the five elements is a frame the encyclopedias put around the title, not a source for it; the text itself says it borrows no old words of Buddhism or Confucianism. The Olympic 五輪 came from the book's title in 1936, by the Yomiuri's account through an essay of Kikuchi Kan [2], and is not a witness to it. Musashi's other texts are neighbors, not sources, for this title: his twenty-one articles of 1645 have their own history and are not a witness to it.
The title in English
1964. Junzo Sasamori and Gordon Warner, This Is Kendo. A kendo handbook in English gives the book as Gorin no Sho (A Book of Five Rings), ten years before Harris's [9].
1974. Victor Harris, A Book of Five Rings. The first English translation in the sources read here, and the rings that Cleary's, Groff's and Bennett's titles keep. Harris's note glosses Go Rin No Sho as a book of five rings, gives the "Go Dai" (Five Greats) of Buddhism as the five elements which make up the cosmos, and the Buddhist "Go Rin" (Five Rings) as the five parts of the human body [10].
1993. Thomas Cleary, The Book of Five Rings. Cleary's introduction says the book is more properly titled in English The Book of Five Spheres [11].
2004. William Scott Wilson, The Lone Samurai. Wilson's biography of Musashi has a section in its fourth chapter, The Concept of the Five Rings in Esoteric Buddhism, that reads the title as the Buddhist word [12]. Wilson's translation of the five scrolls appeared in 2002; its wording is not quoted here.
2004. Kenji Tokitsu, Miyamoto Musashi: His Life and Writings. Tokitsu calls the book Gorin no sho, or "Writings on the Five Elements", popularly known as The Book of Five Rings [13].
2012. David K. Groff, The Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi's Art of Strategy. Groff's title keeps the rings [14].
2018. Alexander Bennett, The Complete Musashi: The Book of Five Rings and Other Works. The most recent translation read here says that Musashi never titled the five scrolls so, that Nagaoka Naoyuki 長岡直之, who studied under him as a boy, and Toyota Masakata 豊田正剛, Nagaoka's attendant, conceived Gorin-no-sho as a shorthand title in their notes, and this designation stuck, and that the five elements point to Buddhist doctrine without that being Musashi's intention. He renders the fifth scroll Ether [15].
Today. JMdict: 五輪書, The Book of Five Rings [16]. A rendering of the title must keep the five, and rings is what sixty years of English have agreed on.
A reading
五輪の書 with the particle is the title the 1915 collection printed; 五輪書 without it is the dictionaries' and the 1939 edition's. What the sources say plainly is that the title is not in the book, which calls itself five scrolls, and that no copy in Musashi's own hand survives, the encyclopedias say: the copies read here are his pupils'. Book of Five Rings is not a translation of the Buddhist word, but it is what the book is called.
Japanese Scrolls by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase
References
- 「五輪書」・「五輪」, デジタル大辞泉・精選版日本国語大辞典・改訂新版世界大百科事典・日本大百科全書, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/五輪書 · https://kotobank.jp/word/五輪
- 「なぜオリンピックは『五輪』と言うの？」, YOMIURI ONLINE, 5 July 2016 (the page's own date; 20160704 in its address), archived 6 July 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160706154802/http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/komachi/special/feature/CO024451/20160704-OYT8T50078.html
- 宮本武蔵, 五輪書, 1643–45, in three typesets: 『宮本武蔵』, 1909; 『武術叢書』, 1915; 『原本五輪書』, 教材社, 1939, the Earth scroll's naming of the school at scan 8 and the Water scroll's opening at scan 12; the 1909 editors' note on the copy, scan 97, and its 1667 colophon, scan 120; the 1915 print's note of that colophon, scan 130. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/97 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/120 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/945805/1/127 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/945805/1/130 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1071527/1/8 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1071527/1/12
- 豊田景英, 『二天記』, 安永五年 (1776), in 『肥後文献叢書』, 第二巻, 1910, scans 94, 95 and 101. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/766733/1/94 · the note as printed in 『二刀一流剣道秘要』, 武徳誌発行所, 1909 (NDL full-text excerpt; the page is not open outside Japan). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/860425
- 藤野富之助, 『剣道達人武蔵実記』, 1886 (NDL full-text excerpt). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/782065 · 隈元実道, 『武道教範』, 1893, scan 26. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/860494/1/26 · 『國學院雜誌』, May 1898, contents (NDL full-text excerpt). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/3364684 · 『東亜の光』, August 1908, 池辺義象's letter (NDL full-text excerpt). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1591421
- 宮本武蔵遺蹟顕彰会, 『宮本武蔵』, 金港堂, 1909, scan 97. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/97
- 吉丸一昌, editor, in 『武術叢書』, 国書刊行会, 1915, scans 5, 127 and 142. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/945805/1/5 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/945805/1/142
- 『原本五輪書』, 教材社, 1939, scans 2 and 42. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1071527/1/2 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1071527/1/42
- Junzo Sasamori and Gordon Warner, This Is Kendo: The Art of Japanese Fencing, Charles E. Tuttle, 1964, p. 49.
- Victor Harris, translator, A Book of Five Rings, Overlook Press, 1974.
- Thomas Cleary, translator, The Book of Five Rings, Shambhala, 1993.
- William Scott Wilson, The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi, Kodansha International, 2004, pp. 110, 158 and 258.
- Kenji Tokitsu, Miyamoto Musashi: His Life and Writings, translated by Sherab Chödzin Kohn, Shambhala, 2004, p. ix.
- David K. Groff, translator, The Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi's Art of Strategy, Watkins, 2012; read in the Chartwell Books edition, 2016, pp. 22, 44, 61, 80 and 247.
- Alexander Bennett, translator, The Complete Musashi: The Book of Five Rings and Other Works, Tuttle, 2018; read in the EPUB, which carries no page numbers, so no page is cited.
- JMdict (EDRDG), 「五輪書」and「二天一流」, at jisho. https://jisho.org/word/五輪書 · https://jisho.org/word/二天一流
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