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Samurai are best known for taking life—but here is a samurai doctor’s prescription for how to preserve life, and to make yours a long and healthy one. Unlike other samurai of his time, the samurai Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714) was concerned less with swordsmanship than with how to maintain and nurture the healthy mind and body upon which martial techniques and philosophy depended. While serving as the chief medical doctor and healer to the Kuroda clan, he came to a holistic view of how the physical, mental, and spiritual lives of his patients were connected. Drawing from his medical practice, the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, and his life experience, Ekiken created this text as a guide to sustaining health and stamina from youth to old age. Ekiken’s advice regarding moderation, food and drink, sleep, sexual activity, bathing, and therapeutic practices is still amazingly intuitive and appropriate nearly three hundred years after this book was written.Editorial ReviewsAbout the AuthorWilliam Scott Wilson is the foremost translator into English of traditional Japanese texts on samurai culture. He received BA degrees from Dartmouth College and the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies, and an MA in Japanese literary studies from the University of Washington. His best-selling books include The Book of Five Rings, The Unfettered Mind, and The Lone Samurai, a biography of Miyamoto Musashi.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. General Remarks 1 You should consider the foundation of your body to be your father and mother, and its beginning to be Heaven and Earth. As you are born and then nourished by Heaven and Earth and your father and mother, you cannot truly consider your body a personal possession with which you can do as you choose. Rather, your body is a treasured gift from Heaven and Earth. It is also something left to you by your parents. Thus, you should cherish it, nourish it, neither damage nor destroy it, and take care of it for the natural span of its life. This is the basis of being dutiful to Heaven and Earth and to your father and mother. Should you lose your body, you are good for nothing. Further, to damage or destroy it thoughtlessly is the highest ingratitude. Indeed, to consider the gift of life as your possession alone and then to abuse it by overindulging in food, drink, sex, or in any other manner is to squander your health and invite disease to enter. To hasten your own demise so thoughtlessly demonstrates extreme ingratitude. It also suggests a fundamental ignorance. Once born into the world, you can lead a long, happy, and enjoyable life if you are intently respectful of your father and mother and Heaven and Earth, and if you walk the path of morality and compliance with duty. Isn’t such a life what everyone truly desires? If this is what you seek, you must first consider the above-mentioned new Way in which to look at life, learn the techniques of the Way of Nurturing Life discussed in these pages, and regulate your body well. These are the very first rules in human life. 2 There is nothing more precious than the human body. Would you trade it for anything else under Heaven or within the Four Seas? To remain unaware of the techniques for taking care of it and arbitrarily give in to indulgences that would destroy it would be the height of stupidity. Consider the relative importance of human life and of human desires. Every day, be careful with your health on that one day. If you fear the dangers of succumbing to selfish desires, the same way you fear walking on thin ice, you should live a long life and be able to avoid disaster. Why shouldn’t you enjoy life? You should. But even with all the wealth under Heaven and within the Four Seas, it will do you no good if life is short. Indeed, you may pile up a mountain of treasures, but it will be of no use. Thus, there is no greater fortune than following the Way of Nurturing Life, taking care of your body, and living a long life. For this reason, a long life is considered to be the first of the Five Happinesses listed in the Book of Documents. It is, in fact, the very root of the Ten Thousand Happinesses.File Size: 1591 KBPrint Length: 256 pagesPublisher: Shambhala; Reprint edition (April 9, 2013)http://www.amazon.com/Cultivating-Chi-Samurai-Physicians-Tea…