Napoleon was fighting combined allied armies, had several independent corps acting under him (with no radio communication) and was running a country at the same time. There are no certainties in war. At Waterloo, an entire corps did not show up as planned and heavy rain negated his best weapon, his heavy cavalry. Even so, the English general (soon to be the Duke of Wellington) said, "It was a near thing."
This is pretty common across cultures: prosocial philosophies work among people who have no thirst for power.
I’d say it was romanticism/idealism rather than overt propaganda. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, had some contrary opinions too and he wasn’t frightened to air them. For example, he thought the 47 Ronin of the famous ‘Asano Incident’ were foolhardy for waiting a year before enacting their murderous revenge upon Lord Kira Yoshinaka. What if he’d died of natural causes or an accident in that intervening time? They’d’ve lost their opportunity to avenge their master’s unfair seppuku.
You kind of hit the nail on the head of what I meant.
Yeah, exactly my thinking.
Yes, there are historical nuances. We need to consider the environment and the authors of these works when we evaluate them.
I admit my knowledge of the history is very limited but in my understanding, the philosophical element was largely developed in the monasteries. Both Chan at Shaolin and Zen for the Japanese were appealing to soldiers who went to the monasteries to retire and find peace. They learned that these meditative or spiritual concepts were applicable with their experience of war and developed what we know as "martial virtue". While you are absolutely right that China has a long history of war these "enlightened warriors" were the exception to that norm.
Old Chinese saying said, "If you don't want to draw blood, you should not fight." 99.9% of the time, you truly don't hate your opponent that much and want to draw blood out of him.
I understand what you mean but I question it. Is not physical movement, itself, spiritual?
All animals move accordingly to their design as suited for the environment, the human animal is said to be in the image of G-d and the only one who is capable of overthink
Be warned, in the social studies, this ‘defining’ is known as ‘operationalism’ and what happens is the debate becomes diverted to endless arguments about the definition! Anyway, we have an innate, very general and functional idea of what ‘spiritual’ means and in post #8, I gave a truly excellent, superb, succinct and precise definition for it, so I’d suggest we just carry on with the discussion of the topic.
I wonder if these practises were adopted by warriors as a means to heal themselves after the truly terrible things they had likely done in their careers?
‘Spiritual’ is an adjective so it’s a means of affecting the spirit, so it’s perhaps like a tool, rather than spiritual in and of itself.
A link yes, movements steers us to an outcome, but the movements themselves aren’t spiritual-imbued in the way, say a Catholic believes the actual ceremony of mass (a series of movements and incantations) are spiritual.
Feelings are subjective and thus can be misleading. Try not to drawn conclusions from them but instead search for empirical evidence such as ‘every spiritual practise uses movements to hone the development of x, y and z’.
Like coming full circle
