Miyamoto Musashi
1584–1645 4 entries
Biography
Miyamoto Musashi was a Japanese swordsman, strategist, painter and writer, the most famous duellist in Japanese history. Born around 1584, he fought his first duel at thirteen and, by his own account, won more than sixty duels without a single defeat. The best known of them was fought in 1612 on the island of Ganryūjima against Sasaki Kojirō, whom he is said to have killed with a wooden sword carved from an oar. He founded the Niten Ichi-ryū school, which teaches fighting with two swords at once.
In his later years he lived in Kumamoto under the protection of the Hosokawa lords, and turned to painting, calligraphy and craftsmanship, in which he was also a master. In a cave called Reigandō he wrote The Book of Five Rings, a treatise on strategy and the way of the warrior, and a week before his death he wrote the Dokkōdō, the twenty-one precepts of “the way of walking alone”. He died in 1645.
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