Zen and the Way of the Sword: Arming the Samurai Psyche

Zen - serene, contemplative, a discipline of meditation associated with painting, rock gardens, and flower arranging - seems an odd ingredient in the martial psyche of the Japanese samurai. "One who is a samurai must before all things keep constantly in mind...the fact that he has to die, " wrote a seventeenth-century warrior. "That is his chief business." But the demands of that "business, " writes Winston King, found the perfect philosophical match in the teachings of Zen Buddhism.