文武両道 bunbu ryōdō Literary and Military Arts

Literary and Military Arts in Japanese is 文武両道 which is read bunbu ryōdō

文武両道, read bunbu ryōdō: both ways, letters and arms.

The four characters name the civil and the martial held together in one person, the sword and the pen, and they have never meant a choice between the two, only the refusal to choose. Under them is the Chinese pair 文武, which in the Analects is not two arts but two kings, Wen and Wu, the founders of Zhou, one civil and one martial by name, whose way is the balance of the two.

Japan made the pair two ways in a book of moral tales for the young, where a court keeps letters and arms as its left and right wings, and both ways in Nichiren, for whom governing is knowing when to put arms first and when letters.

The shogunate wrote the balance into the opening article of its first law for the warrior houses, and Miyamoto Musashi, the swordsman and calligrapher who is the phrase's archetype, opens the Book of Earth with his own sentence on it, in the older form two ways: a samurai is said to follow the two ways of letters and arms, and to cultivate both is the way; most samurai, he complains, take the way to mean only knowing how to die.

In a Japanese school today the phrase is praise for a student good at both books and sport. The English title is the house's own rendering; historians say the civil and military arts, and the pen and the sword, the idiom everyone reaches for, must not turn the phrase into a proverb about which is mightier.

bunbu ryōdō is composed of the kanji 文 (read bun) meaning "art; literature", 武 (read bu) meaning "military; arms; chivalry", 両 (read ryō) meaning "both; two" and 道 (read dō) meaning "the way; teachings".

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 文武両道.

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The scrolls are 12 1/4" W × 43" H (31 × 109 cm) with real silk borders and Japanese paper that are layered so the scroll hangs straight and will not warp over time. The scrolls themselves are made by Sankō (株式会社三幸) in Gifu prefecture, which has been making high quality scrolls since 1947, and we have worked with Sankō for over two decades.

Eri Takase was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, and holds the rank of Shihan, the highest rank in Japanese calligraphy, from the Bokuteki-kai and the Bunka-shodo. About Master Takase