In response to Robert W Dillon’s Facebook post titled “Pride and Prejudice: Common Language“.
This…
Robert, isn’t what was written, a policing… a samurai-ing, using the sword, drawn, piercing as a press of a letter, then slicing as a drift toward another key, repeat ad nauseum. This activity, just as a writer, an editor, of word and text. Do not confuse the writing with the editing, for bu-do is a life of editing cultural momenta.
Yet looking back, and to, today, is not the samurai, in reflection, as often the case, as a land named as an act of defense only after a sudden rush to define borders after witnessing crossings of peoples foreign to its cultures? Is not the name an act of preservation of a people and its culture?
So in that vein, and artery, are not samurai, policy makers, executors, editors of cultures chosen by perceptions of divine right, then chosen by perceptions of merited accomplishment, and then perceptions of democratic election?
Is not budo reflected in governance around the world? Some more so, some less so? Is not what was written, out of sincerity, and reflection, an act of moral obligation? An act, a work, an effort, to set the record straight, to rectify, and… is this work not an ongoing process, undone, and continual in its arc toward justice, and equality, for all? Is not budo found right here, and right now?
Isn’t this work, this work to halt the thrusts of aggression, in this very text, and the work to halt the pulls of cravings, here too… and right down to halting the pining for becoming any other way than what is here and now? To guide, and teach, and mentor a peoples in the ways of maturation, to come to revelation, that the betterment of a society is not by hates, and greed, or conceits, but by going straight at its issues directly? When in a people, the hearts cry out for food, and yet overwhelmed, they know not the work at hand to cultivate it? Does not the samurai act, to alleviate the stresses and to direct the efforts in stresses to the efforts in cultivations?
And why do the four samurai of compassion, love, joy, and equanimity work together to accomplish the works of locale and nation? Why do these four samurai get the credit and not I? Because the samurai, these four, are not self, are not other, are not we, are not they… and what then are the samurai without accreditation? For the best kind of leader, as Lao Tzu writes, are the one where the people claim, “we, ourselves, have done it.”This is why the samurai do not explain what they do, this is why it is unexplainable, this is why it is fruitless to explain, and just… do.
“It’s not about you…,” it’s about solving suffering, and that is the work, of bu – do.