Bushido Code of the Samurai Warrior

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Samurai Bushido Code

Originators of the "way of the warrior"

The Samurai Bushido Code (Japanese "way of the warrior", or bushido), was the warrior code of the samurai.

Samurai Warrior Code was a strict code that demanded:

loyalty

devotion

obedience

duty

filial piety

respect

self sacrifice

honor to the death

Under this code, if a samurai warrior failed to uphold his honor he could regain it by performing seppuku (ritual suicide).

The samurai bushido code is an internally-consistent ethical code, grounded in the spiritual approach of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism.

In its purest form, it demands of its practitioners that they look effectively backward at the present from the moment of their own death, as if they were already, in effect, dead.

The Bushido of the Samurai was also a spiritual basis for those who committed kamikaze attacks during World War II.

For this reason many of the martial arts that are rooted in Japanese Bushido were banned by the occupying Americans during the post-war occupation.

Bushido is still practiced today (in modified forms) and in many of today's modern martial arts. The most common forms of bushido martial arts, still practiced in Japan today, are:

judo

karate

jujutsu

aikido

kendo

kenjutsu

The modern sport of kendo takes its basic philosophy from Japanese Bushido, in particular, the theory that the entire purpose of the sport is "one cut, one kill".

Unlike in other martial arts, extended contact, or multiple strikes, tends to be discouraged in favor of clean single strokes on the body or the head.

There are seven virtues associated with the samurai code of bushido: