Something Terrible Is About To Happen
Life as a samurai was no picnic.
I mean, sure, there was the fancy armour and the social status and the cool swords, but there was also the ever-present threat of battle and the obligation to slice open your belly at the slightest hint of dishonour. There was the knowledge that, as Katō Kiyomasa put it, your sole intention should be to “grasp the long and the short swords and to die.”
In order to achieve the state of mind required to cope with all this, the samurai practised a form of meditation known as Maranasati or “death awareness” in which they kept death at the forefront of their minds. Fixating on every form of anguish and torture they could imagine:
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day, when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead.
