These are quotes from The Book of Five Rings
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1318780
This is information on the warrior Musashi.
http://www.musashi-miyamoto.com/dokkodo.html
In this interpretation, the first precept has to do with accepting what is.
I think, in the sense of not railing against fate. Yet, if we were not to rail against fate, how could there be change? If Isolate of Being has to do with self management, or with change occurring effortlessly through determined self possession, then this makes sense to me. In Eastern culture though, fate is viewed differently than in Western culture. I think fate is seen as the engine in Eastern culture, and that our task is seen to be to work within it thereby refining the self. In Western culture, we see it as our work to challenge fate. (In never accepting things like caste systems or aristocracies or disease or chronic poverty.) Refining the self for us...we are still figuring that out, I think. Whether that is possible, how it all works, whether refining is even required.
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A history of Hapkido
http://modernhapkido.org/history.htm
My first karate instructor told us that the peasant classes were not allowed weapons or fighting skills. So (and I have, shamefully enough, forgotten what method we practiced) practitioners of the form of martial arts he taught learned to challenge invaders with empty hands and to transform whatever was at hand into lethal weapons. When armed soldiers were come to destroy them, the native practitioners of this art of transforming themselves into weapons filled their bellies with small stones to damage the soldiers' swords when they cut them in half.
Winning, though losing.
So, that would be an apt description of the Isolate of Being, right?
Cedar
