Welcome back to this article series on perfection and immortality!
In Part 2, I talked a lot about fractals, repeating, self-similar patterns that have a complex relationship with perspective and infinity. I noted that the more one delves into fractals, the more often one encounters paradoxes, such as the Coastline Paradox.
As you might remember from Part 1, part of my argument regarding immortality is that achieving immortality seems to inevitably intersect with a paradox: how do you make something perfect and immortal out of imperfect, mortal parts?
In Part 3, I wanted to talk about swordsmanship as a way to explore the paradox of perfection.
If you haven’t read Parts 1 & 2, you can do so below:
Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Miyamoto Musashi and the Paradox of Invincibility
In the manga Vagabond, based on the life of the famed swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, the protagonist’s goal is to master the art of swordsmanship so completely that he becomes invincible. He is striving to achieve an absolute, and over the course of his journey, he realizes that attaining that perfection in swordsmanship ends up means perfecting everything about himself.
There’s a moment in the manga where he comes across a flower whose stem has been cut. Musashi is struck by how clean the cut is—it didn’t crush any of the fibers or rip the stem, a feat that could only be achieved by applying the perfect amount of pressure with a blade. He learns that the flowers were cut by the leader of the Yagyu School of swordsmanship, Sekishusai Yagyu, and resolves to duel him.
As an aside, I want to note that Musashi was able to recognize perfection in something very small and innocuous—the way a flower stem was cut with a sword. This evokes the idea that perfection can manifest in subtle and seemingly innocuous ways.
When Musashi meets Sekishusai Yagyu, the latter is sick in bed and seemingly helpless. Nevertheless, Musashi is overwhelmed—the sheer presence of Yagyu is humbling because he embodies the kind of perfection Musashi seeks. By looking in Yagyu’s eyes, Musashi is suddenly reminded of nature scenes—a vast forest, a waterfall, a hawk in the sky—then abruptly feels that he is floating in the night sky.
Musashi reflects that his own father was given the title of “invincible”, but lived in fear of losing his status, and so closed himself off from the rest of the world. Looking at Yagyu, however, Musashi realizes that Sekishusai is truly invincible, which prompts him to reflect that “The world is infinite. It encompasses everything.”
This is an important distinction: Musashi realizes that invincibility isn’t something narrow and restrictive, like walking a tightrope. It’s something vast, freeing, and all-encompassing.
After trying and failing to muster the nerve to kill Yagyu, the two talk. During the conversation, Musashi asks what it means to be invincible, to which Yagyu replies:
“The more you think about it…the more you squint your eyes in desperation to see…the more obscured the answer becomes. If something is too obscure to see…then try closing your eyes.”
A paradox.
Later, Musashi ponders Yagyu’s words, struggling to understand them. He closes his eyes, and Musashi is pictured as a lone figure amidst an infinite white expanse.
He imagines that Yagyu is speaking to him: “Well…? Do you see how infinite you are?”
This is the beginning of Musashi’s true understanding of invincibility, perfection, and the height of both swordsmanship and self-cultivation.
Musashi uses swordsmanship as his tool to explore the path to perfection, and it’s the main lens through which he perceives perfection in others. His litmus test for perfection is whether someone can be defeated in a duel—if they can, they are not perfect.
However, Musashi’s approach isn’t perfect—he relies on his bloodlust and his egotistical desire to win to grant him the will to overpower his enemies in duels. Until Yagyu, Musashi mistakenly believes that the path to invincibility can be achieved through dominating others.
We can contrast the encounter with Sekishusai Yagyu against Musashi’s other opponents: in his fight against Inshun Hozoin, the spear-fighting monk, Musashi searches for any tiny gap in his opponent’s defenses or a moment of vulnerability, hesitation, or fear—a flaw he can exploit.
With Yagyu, however, Musashi can sense no flaws and no weaknesses, and is thus unable to even summon the will to attack. Faced with true invincibility, Musashi’s narrow view of invincibility dissolves. Instead of a bloody contest of wills, he sees it as an extension of the order of the universe—the flowing of water, the expanse of the sky, and the circle of life.
This echoes what Yagyu says to Musashi before the two part ways (which itself is a quote from Yagyu’s master, Ise no Kami Kami’izumi): “My sword is one with heaven and earth. With my way, the sword need not even be present.”
Again, Yagyu’s words seem to be a paradox: if his sword is his key to winning a fight, why does he “need no sword”?
Ihei Misawa and the Paradox of Victory through Surrender
A similar paradox seems to occur in Akira Kurosawa’s last film “After the Rain”, which focuses on a kind, generous ronin named Ihei Misawa whose skill as a swordsman is unmatched. Despite his deadly abilities, Misawa prefers to resolve conflicts peacefully, displaying a selfless and self-deprecating nature.
Partway through the film, Misawa recounts a ruse he would use in his younger days: he would challenge masters of swordfighting schools to duels (a tense, stressful thing for a master to undergo, since their reputation was at stake) then surrender before the fight began in order to win the master’s favor and get on their good side.
After doing this many times, Misawa challenged Tsuji Gettan, a renowned swordmaster. During the duel, Tsuji sensed that Ihei was badly prepared, but was nevertheless perfectly calm. Gettan sensed in Ihei no desire to defeat him, and yet Ihei had challenged him to a duel—a paradox.
In a surprising twist, Gettan lowered his sword and surrendered. As Gettan explained later, he’d fought an uncounted number of duels, but none of them were like the one with Misawa, leaving Gettan bewildered. For Gettan, every person who challenged did so because they were driven by a desire similar to Miyamoto Musashi’s: to prove their skill, to dominate, and to feed their ego.
Because Ihei possessed none of these drives and had no fear (since he knew he could surrender at any time), Ihei seemed to possess equanimity, which is called “upekṣā” in Buddhism and is described as:
“Neither a thought nor an emotion, it is the steady conscious realization of reality’s transience. It is the ground for wisdom and freedom and the protector of compassion and love. While some may think of equanimity as dry neutrality or cool aloofness, mature equanimity produces a radiance and warmth of being. The Buddha described a mind filled with equanimity as “abundant, exalted, immeasurable, without hostility and ill-will.”
To Gettan, facing a swordsman that possessed equanimity was humbling and overwhelming—the same feelings Musashi experienced when facing Yagyu. It’s not a sense that fighting has no chance to produce victory, it’s the sense that victory is pointless—when both swordsmen are united in the grand scheme of the universe, does it matter which one defeats the other? Within the endless, turning wheel of the cosmos, what is the difference between victory and defeat, self and other?
This is the meaning of Sekishusai Yagyu’s words, “My sword is one with heaven and earth. With my way, the sword need not even be present.” True invincibility, the perfection of swordsmanship, is not manifested through fighting, but through peace. Yagyu exemplifies what Taoism might call wu wei, or “actionless action,” which I will describe as “aligning oneself with the cosmos and becoming a conduit for it.”
The Achievement of Enlightenment
In the examples above, the practice of swordsmanship can act as a vehicle to a kind of enlightenment: the confrontation between self and other leads to the recognition of the walls between the self and the wider world, which leads to the dissolution of the ego and recognition of the unity between the individual experience (the microcosm) and the universe (the macrocosm).
This unifying of the self with the universe can be seen as a re-integration, since a person who previously held themselves apart as an individual separate from nature and from other human beings now realizes that they were always part of a grander whole, and the resulting freedom, exaltation, and warmth of being manifests in their words, thoughts, and actions.
This “enlightened” state represents the perfection of a human being and their transcendence beyond dualities. But now that we’ve explored what it means to achieve perfection, how does it relate to immortality?
To answer that, I want to talk about hermetic alchemy.
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