THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR
to a similar fate? It is evident that the habit of despising wounds and death when they fell to his own lot, taught the bushi to deal them out to others with indifference. Cruelty in his case sprang from callousness to suffering rather than from vindictiveness. His faculty of intellectual realisation had been blunted by the stoicism he was compelled to practise.
No feature of the bushi's character is more discreditable than his slavish yielding to the erotic passion. In the camp, where the presence of women was generally impossible, he thought no shame of resorting to unnatural liaisons, and out of that indulgence there grew a perverted code of morality which surrounded such acts with a halo of martial manliness.[1] But in that respect the conduct of the Japanese samurai is deprived of singularity by numerous counterparts in other countries. What differentiates him is his undisguised indifference to chastity for its own sake, as well as to the obligations imposed by the marriage tie. It is remarkable that Buddhism, which in all its forms, with one exception, insisted upon the observance of celibacy by its ministers, failed completely, in the case of its disciples, to subject the passions of the flesh to any of the restraints that Christianity enforced so successfully in Imperial Rome. In vain the student looks among the heroes of the Military epoch for a man who made purity
- ↑ See Appendix, note 37.
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