context: painting > Zen painting > Artists > Miyamoto Musashi

Miyamoto Musashi the Fighter

When he was 21, after five years of wandering the country, Musashi showed up in Kyoto, Japan's biggest city, at the great Yoshioka swordfighting school, the country's greatest, where shoguns learned to fight. It was run at this point by two brothers, said to be the greatest of this great family. Musashi challenged Seijuro, the older brother. Seijuro showed up with a real sword, Musashi with a wooden one - with which he knocked him cold with a single blow. After being nursed back to health, Seijuro dropped martial arts and became a monk.

A fluke, surely? Brother Denshichiro challenged Musashi, to regain the reputation of the school. When this younger brother was clearly not abiding by the 'first strike' rule and was trying to kill Musashi, Musashi threw aside his wooden sword, took the other's sword from him and killed him with it.

That left it to Seijuro's son Matashichiro to get revenge and save the school, but plainly he couldn't defeat Musashi - or at least, not on his own. Word got through to Musashi that his next opponent would be bringing plenty of backup, and some people offered to accompany him, but he declined. His one concession to the fact that he would be outnumbered was that he took a real sword, and got to the agreed site first. Matashichiro turned up with over a hundred men armed with swords, spears, bows and arrows. Musashi stepped out and attacked.

It is said that a few of them dragged themselves back to town alive. Musashi was completely unmarked, an arrow through a sleeve the closest anyone came.

I've no idea how true these stories are, but the Yoshioka sequence there is among many others, and not even his most celebrated. There's enough solid documentation that it's clear that he was one of the great warriors, whether we believe taking on a hundred men or not. I know this is nothing to do with art, but I would imagine you can understand why stories like this about a genuinely great artist were hard to ignore.