Parting the curtain for a look at the authentic world of the samurai, these 17th-century works demonstrate that Zen mental control and meditational training were as important as swordsmanship and fighting skills. The acclaimed translator of The Book of the Five Rings offers fresh renderings of Yagyu Munenori's Martial Arts: The Book of Family Traditions and his mentor Takuan Soho's The Inscrutable Subtlety of Immovable Wisdom and Notes on the Peerless Sword. In his introduction, Thomas Cleary puts these influential figures into the context of their time, the early days of the Tokugawa shogunate.