二天一流 niten ichiryū Two Heavens One Style
二天一流 (niten ichiryū), the Niten school, is the name Miyamoto Musashi's school of two swords has carried since after his death. Every dated witness from his own hand and his lifetime calls the school 二刀, two swords; 二天, two heavens, was his own Buddhist name, and the school took it after he died.
Abstract
二天一流, niten ichiryū, the Niten school, is the name the school of two swords that Miyamoto Musashi's five scrolls teach has carried since after his death. Every dated witness from Musashi's own hand and his lifetime calls the school 二刀, two swords, not 二天, two heavens: 二天 is Musashi's own Buddhist sobriquet, given to the school only after his death. Two Heavens One Style reads the school's name one character at a time; it is in English print by 2004, and word for word in a translation of 2012.
Overview
The sense. The name of the school of two swords that Musashi's five scrolls teach, which took his own name 二天 after his death. The five scrolls themselves, 五輪の書, have their own history; the two names meet in the same witnesses.
The words. 二天一流 is three words, not four. 一流 is one word, a school, this school: the text says this school, my school, the way of this school throughout, and every school of the sword is a 流. 二天, two heavens, is a rare and mostly Buddhist compound (the sun and moon devas; two of the four heavenly kings), but here it is not a compound at all: it is Musashi's own name, the sobriquet he signed his paintings with and the name on the stele his son raised [1]. So niten ichiryū is the Niten school, the way one says the Yagyū school; it does not describe a technique. The English Two Heavens One Style reads the four characters one at a time, as English has done since at least 2004; the 二天 in it is a name.
The text in English. The school's name has gone three ways: two swords as one, closest to Musashi's own word for it; Two Heavens One Style, one character at a time, since at least 2004; and Two Heavens as One, which reads 二天 as the man's name.
The historical record
1641. Miyamoto Musashi 宮本武蔵, 兵法三十五箇条, the memorandum for Lord Hosokawa Tadatoshi. The thirty-five articles Musashi presented to his patron open by naming the school: the two-sword school of strategy, which I have trained in for years and now for the first time set down on paper [2]. This is the oldest dated text in which Musashi names his school, and the name is two swords.
Before 1657. Hayashi Razan 林羅山, the inscription on Musashi's portrait. The Confucian scholar of the shogun's court wrote a Chinese eulogy on a portrait of Musashi, quoted later as: the swordsman Shinmen Genshin holds a sword in each hand and calls it the school of two swords as one [3]. A later biography says the pupil Ishikawa Sakyō 石川左京 had the portrait made when Musashi left Edo, kept it as an object of devotion, and asked Razan for the words. Again, two swords.
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 [4]. 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 only at its close. The book also never calls itself 五輪書; what it says is why this book of strategy is made in five scrolls: 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 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. No copy in Musashi's own hand survives, and the oldest dated copy is the one his pupil Terao Magonojō 寺尾孫之丞 made for a pupil of his own in 1667.
1654. Miyamoto Iori 宮本伊織, the stele at Kokura. Nine years after the death, Musashi's adopted son raised a stone whose title names him Niten, styled thus, and whose text says: Musashi Genshin, styled Niten … was the founder of two-sword strategy [5]. On the stone, 二天 is the man, and the art is still called two swords.
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 editorial note says the book was filled out from the Book of the Five Rings and the like; 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 simply that it is called 二天一流. It also records where the name came from: Musashi took the Buddhist name Niten Dōraku through the monk Shunzan of Taishōji [6].
1744 to 1793. The other names. A memorial stone of 1744 at Kasadera in Nagoya, raised by his pupils' pupils for the hundredth anniversary of his death, calls it the Enmei school of two-sword strategy [7]; a Kansei-era survey of the sword schools, of 1790, calls Musashi's school also the Enmei school, and says he thought it out afresh and founded a two-sword school [8]; a stone of 1793 at Shinpōji that followed the first forty-nine years later writes the true Enmei school [9]. Enmei is the name the dictionaries say Musashi used first, in his youth.
1883 to 1892. The Kumamoto han school's roster. When the Ministry of Education gathered the old domain schools' records, Kumamoto's own school listed its sixteen instructors of the sword by school, and two of the names are Musashi's: two of the Niten school, three of the Niten Ichi school [10]. By the end of the shogunate, 二天 had been the school's name for two centuries, and it was taught under both spellings in the town where the book was written.
1909. The first separate edition. The year the first modern biography printed the five scrolls whole [11], the first separate edition was titled the two-sword school's essentials of the way of the sword.
The dictionary today. 二天一流, a school of swordsmanship founded by Miyamoto Musashi, at first called the Enmei school, and after Musashi's death renamed by his pupil Terao Kumanosuke Nobuyuki [1]. The encyclopedias add that the renaming was about 1666, from the master's Buddhist name.
What is not a source. Musashi's other texts are neighbors, not sources, for this name: his twenty-one articles of 1645 have their own history and are not a witness to it. The English explanations of 二天 as two swords raised to the sky are the translators' guesses, named as such below.
The name in English
1974. Victor Harris, A Book of Five Rings. Harris writes the school Ni Ten Ichi Ryu and explains, Niten means "Two Heavens", said by some to allude to his fighting attitude with a sword in each hand held above his head; he heads the naming section The Name Ichi Ryu Ni To (One school—two swords) [12]. His pupil's name is wrong throughout: Teruo Nobuyuki in the introduction and Teruo Magonojo at the colophons, for Terao 寺尾, and Nobuyuki 信行 is the brother, not the man the scrolls are addressed to; the 1982 reprint reads Two Heavens-as-One School.
1993. Thomas Cleary, The Book of Five Rings. Cleary renders the school the Individual School of Two Skies, reading 一流 as individual and 天 as sky, and the naming section Naming This Individual School "Two Swords", with Two Swords in One in the text [13].
2004. William Scott Wilson, The Lone Samurai. Wilson's biography of Musashi quotes the opening of the 1641 memorandum as Having trained myself daily in the Two Heavens, One Style, I now take brush to paper, and lists the memorandum's first heading as Calling this the Way of Two Heavens, One Style [14]. The Japanese of both says two swords, 兵法二刀の一流 and 此道二刀と名付事 [2], so the English gives Musashi's own memorandum the school's later name.
2004. Kenji Tokitsu, Miyamoto Musashi: His Life and Writings. Tokitsu calls the school School of the Two Heavens United, or School of Two Swords Raised to the Heavens Becoming One, offering the two swords raised toward the sky as the sense of 二天 [15].
2012. David K. Groff, The Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi's Art of Strategy. Groff keeps both names where the text has them, each followed by its English in the book's own square brackets: the preface reads My way of military strategy I call the Ni Ten Ichi Ryū, Two Heavens One Style, and so does the opening of the Water scroll, while the Earth scroll's naming section reads I call this the Ni Tō Ichi Ryū, Two Swords One Style [16]. His note to the preface says what the Japanese shows: Musashi uses this name for his style only twice; otherwise, he uses the term "Two Sword Style" or "Two Swords One Style", and 二天 was also the pen-name he used to sign and seal his calligraphy later in life [16].
2018. Alexander Bennett, The Complete Musashi. The most recent scholarly translation says what this account says: he refers to it mostly as Nitō Ichi-ryū (School of Two Swords as One), and it was at the very end of his life in Kumamoto that the school became "School of Two Heavens as One" [17].
Today. JMdict: 二天一流, style of classical Japanese swordsmanship involving use of two swords [18]. A rendering of the school's name must keep 一流 as one word, school, and may keep Two Heavens only as a name.
A reading
二天一流 is the school's name in the dictionaries, and has been since about 1666, the encyclopedias say. What the sources say plainly is that it is not quite the name Musashi used of it in his own hand, which was two swords: 二天 was the man. The five scrolls say both, and they survive only in his pupils' copies. This reading takes 二刀一流 as Musashi's own word and 二天一流 as the school's.
References
- 「二天一流」・「二天」, 精選版日本国語大辞典・日本大百科全書, at kotobank. https://kotobank.jp/word/二天一流
- 宮本武蔵, 『兵法三十五箇条』, 1641, in 『武術叢書』, 1915, scan 123, and 『宮本武蔵』, 1909, scan 63. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/945805/1/123 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/63
- 林羅山, 武蔵像賛, before 1657, quoted in 『肥後文献叢書』, 第二巻, 1910, scan 102, and 『宮本武蔵』, 1909, scan 85. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/766733/1/102 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/85
- 宮本武蔵, 五輪書, 1643–45, in three typesets: 『宮本武蔵』, 1909; 『武術叢書』, 1915; 『五輪の書: 原本』, 教材社, 1939. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/97 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/945805/1/127 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1071527/1/7
- 宮本伊織, the Kokura stele, 1654, printed in 『本朝武芸小伝』, 1716, in 『武術叢書』, 1915, scan 42; a manuscript copy in 『扶桑名画伝』, scan 77; and 『宮本武蔵』, 1909, scan 80. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/945805/1/42 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2551785/1/77 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/80
- 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
- A memorial stele, 延享元年 (1744), Kasadera, Nagoya, quoted in 『宮本武蔵』, 1909, scan 57. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/57
- 三上元龍, 『撃剣叢談』, 寛政二年 (1790), in 『武術叢書』, 1915, scan 107. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/945805/1/107
- A memorial stele, 寛政五年 (1793), Shinpōji, quoted in 『宮本武蔵』, 1909, scan 58. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/992019/1/58
- 文部省, 『日本教育史資料』, 1892, scan 115. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/809556/1/115
- 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
- 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 and 258.
- Kenji Tokitsu, Miyamoto Musashi: His Life and Writings, translated by Sherab Chödzin Kohn, Shambhala, 2004.
- 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.
- 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
Books Cited
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