Shogun Continued

A note on my previous post. I have been planning to get my hands on Shōgun by James Clavell for about four to five years now, but never really got down to reading it till recently.

The interest for Shōgun actually arose from another excellent and interesting book I read about five years back called Cloud of Sparrows by Takashi Matsuoka. I was discussing the book with a friend of mine (who had actually lent it to me for reading) and he mentioned that Shōgun was much better than Cloud of Sparrows.

I was on the look out for the book then my reading interest also changed and it also slipped my mind, since my reading interests also changed over the period and now I am back a full circle with Shōgun I guess.

karma is karma, neh?

Recently in one of my travels, I saw The Last Samurai on the television. I was also half way through the book Shōgun by James Clavell and found a lot of similarity between the stories. Both about people from outside Japan during a period of conflicts between internal factions caught up in the war.
What I found interesting about both the movie and the book, especially the Shogun was the views of once race on the other each looking at the others as barbarians.
In my travels across the globe I have met a lot of people and lot of traits which I associate with their country, which I have later come to realize is not very true, how judgmental can we become just by viewing a small sample and branding the whole?

Any way I have been collecting some extracts from Shōgun which I thought of presenting here

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"Karma was an Indian word adopted by Japanese, part of Buddhist philosophy that referred to a person's fate in this life, his fate immutably fixed because of deeds done in a previous life, good deeds giving a better position in this life's strata, bad deeds the reverse. Just as the deeds of this life would completely affect the next rebirth. A person was ever being reborn into this world of tears until, after enduring and suffering and learning through many lifetimes, he became perfect at long last, going to nirvana, the Place of Perfect Peace, never having to suffer rebirth again."
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"Karma is the beginning of knowledge. Next is patience. Patience is very important. The strong are the patient ones, Anjin-san. Patience means holding back your inclination to the seven emotions: hate, adoration, joy, anxiety, anger, grief, fear. If you don't give way to the seven, you're patient, then you'll soon understand all manner of things and be in harmony with Eternity"
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"That night Toranaga could not sleep. This was rare for him because normally he could defer the most pressing problem until the next day, knowing that if he was alive the next day he would solve it to the best of his ability. He had long since discovered that peaceful sleep could provide the answer to most puzzles, and if not, what did it really matter? Wasn't life just a dewdrop within a dewdrop?"
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Shōgun by James Clavell

More on Karma in its various Avatars from Wikipedia