Samurai practiced a daily meditation on their own deaths
The 18th-century warrior Yamamoto Tsunetomo taught that visualizing one's body being destroyed by arrows or fire was the only way to achieve true freedom.
In the early 1700s, the Japanese samurai turned Zen priest Yamamoto Tsunetomo codified the philosophy of bushido in a text titled Hagakure, or Umbral Leaves. He argued that the fundamental flaw in human logic is the constant denial of mortality. To overcome this, he prescribed a brutal daily ritual: a vivid meditation on the end of one's own life.
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