Thomas Cleary is My Homeboy!

Thomas Cleary is one of my favorite authors... well... actually, it's not that he particularly writes a lot of "original" work, but rather that he's one of the foremost authoritative translators of classical Far Eastern literature that i've ever had the benefit of coming across.  From Tiara no Shigesuke's Code of the Samurai to Sun Tzu's The Art of War to Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings, Cleary brings a masterful blend of scholarly knowledge and commentary with a contemporary translation of each text that still honors the original intent and "flavor" of some of those ancient (but still potent for the modern aspiring warrior) treatises.  

And one of his newest works is currently captivating my spare reading cycles.  It's called Training the Samurai Mind, and is unique because it walks through the Japanese history of the concept of Bushido (the warrior code of conduct that governed Samurai thought and action) chronologically from the mid-1300's all the way to the Meji restoration at the turn of the 20th century.  Each section is told from the point of view of a samurai general or warrior from their own particular era, and so as you read, you begin to understand how a warrior caste whose soul occupation was combat coped with everything from outside invasion, internal strife, political intrigue and the eventual threat of domination from the rapidly modernizing outside world.  Like all of Cleary's works that i've read to date, this one is fascinating, and i'm totally diggin' being able to immerse myself across nearly 600 years of Samurai thought in just a few hundred pages.