The Warrior Scholar Ideal Blog: The Way of the Warrior—the Will to Die 007

In our last blog post, The Way of Flow 006, we discussed the mental state that the ancient warriors embraced. We did not, however, address the mind-set that one must acquire beforehand. 

In training to become a warrior, one must train not only to become victorious in battle with the enemy.

One must also train to die in battle. One must aspire to accept, and even embrace, the prospect of dying in battle, for only in so doing will one emancipate oneself from the dread of death that knows no respecter of persons.

This is no mean feat.

Nor is it a defeatist attitude that we’re encouraging: Until and unless one trains to die in defense of oneself and one’s loved ones, one fails to become as capable and resolved as one needs to be to protect them at all costs.

The 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes insisted that the greatest of all evils, that which human beings dread more than they dread anything else, isn’t just death, but, rather, a violent death. It’s hard to argue against this. We habitually, both subconsciously and with explicit consciousness, take steps to avoid injury to ourselves. Outside of those who are very old and/or very sick, no one wants to die, much less be killed.

This all makes perfectly good sense. However, for those who aspire to develop martial excellence by becoming warriors, the counsel of the epic Japanese Samurai warrior, Miyamoto Musashi, is imperative. “Generally speaking,” Musashi pointedly asserted, “the Way of the Warrior is resolute acceptance of death.”

Resolute acceptance of death.

Another Japanese warrior, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, elaborated upon how one may achieve this.

“Meditation on inevitable death,” Tsunetomo said, “should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.”

By meditating upon one’s death, i.e. by focusing one’s attention with the mind’s eye upon not just the visual, but the visceral, experience of it one can go some distance toward strengthening one’s will to die.

Tsunetomo also makes the point that “resolute acceptance of death” isn’t mere acquiescence to the inevitable, the hoisting of the white flag of defeat. Rather, it’s the choice that the Warrior makes every moment of his existence. “Every day,” he says, “without fail one should consider himself as dead.” He stresses that, when “confronted with two alternatives, life and death, one is to choose death without hesitation.”

Tsunetomo gives his reason for why he believes the choice of death should categorically trump that for “life.”

“All of us want to live, and that is absolutely natural. However, we should learn from childhood on to choose our best way to die. If we don’t do that, we end up spending our days like a dog, only in search of harbor, food and expressing a blind loyalty to his owner in return. That isn’t enough to make our lives have meaning.”

What does all of this mean?

Both Tsunetomo and Musashi are making the point that bare existence, life in itself, though fundamental, is not an unqualified good. On this score, they are each of a piece with countless others separated by place and time. Socrates, for example, famously declared that the unexamined life is not worth living, and when push came to shove, he willingly chose to die for his convictions rather than avail himself of the escape plan that his friends hatched for him.

Whether one is a Christian or not, no one can credibly deny that Jesus of Nazareth, the man around whose life over 2,000 years ago Earthlings measure time and who at least a third of the human population alive today recognize as God in the flesh, is a pretty major world historic figure. According to the Christian narrative, Jesus, though more than capable of evading it, voluntarily and with eagerness, from love, chose to not just die, but suffer the most agonizing, the most brutal of deaths on a cross. And Jesus did all of this to save the human species by making them right again with their Creator.

Socrates and Jesus exemplified the resolute acceptance of death that Musashi extolls.

As I see it, the Warrior must always be ready to die, to surmount his fear of experiencing a violent death, for unless he does, he will never become the warrior that he could become. By definition, the Warrior—not the “Tough Guy,” or “the Bad Ass,” but the Warrior—has the will to die, and die violently, in battle, protecting himself and/or innocents against the predations of the enemy. The alternative to embracing the prospect of one’s death in war is to embrace one’s life over and above all else.

And as long as one clings to one’s life at all costs, then one sets oneself up to become the proverbial coward that dies a thousand deaths.

Moreover, while the scenarios that Tsunetomo encourages us to meditate upon are indeed scary, they aren’t necessarily sufficiently scary for those who train in a martial art, an art of war. For the Warrior, those who are warriors and who continue to make themselves into warriors, thoughts of his own death in battle, at the hands of the enemy, should occupy his mind. Some amount of time each day should be reserved for exercising his imagination so as to encompass all of the graphic details of the various ways in which he can fall to the enemy’s sword.

Of course, these hypothetical deaths that he will do his best to experience, and experience viscerally, can and should be accompanied by thoughts of the creative ways in which the Warrior will critically injure, maim, and, yes, possibly kill the enemy as well.

The choice to die in righteous battle, you see, is the choice to kill the enemy.

As Tsunetomo says: “If you are slain in battle, you should be resolved to have your corpse facing the enemy.”

Musashi echoes this sentiment: “This is the truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. Not to do so, and to die with a weapon not yet drawn is false.”

More Musashi: “When you attack the enemy, your spirit must go to the extent of pulling the stakes out of a wall and using them as spears and halberds.”

To repeat: Until the Warrior in training becomes at peace with the idea of falling in battle, he can never become the Warrior, for once that last wall—the fear of all fears, the fear of violent death—has been broken, the will to extinguish, by whatever means, the existence of the enemy is unleashed.

The Will to Die is the Will to Victory.

So, unless the Will to Die, the “resolute acceptance of death,” exists, the Will to Victory isn’t perfected.

Train accordingly.

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

LtCol Al Ridenhour USMC (ret)

Authors, The Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited