On Being a Samurai
By Paul Nyssen
I laugh every time I see advertisements for Musashi health supplements on the backs of our local buses. A computer-game warrior, all menace and muscle, selling fantasy. The threatening salami chopper, fearless because thoughtless, living “as though already dead.” Musashi would have laughed too. The use of his name borders on insult. Still, I imagine he had a sense of humour.
A true hero is not someone who seeks danger. A hero is someone who could walk away, but doesn’t. Someone who risks his life for others.
The man who stopped an attacker at Bondi, Ahmed al Ahmed, is what a hero does. The word samurai means one who serves. In that moment, Ahmed—a Muslim saving Jewish lives—was a samurai. He acted as though already dead. Dead to himself.
He later said it was his soul that directed him. An affirmation of life over self. No hierarchy of people. Lives equal to his own. People equal to his people. That is service to something higher, whether you name it God or not.
Few of us will ever be tested like that, and we should be grateful. For most of us, there will be nothing spectacular. Yet the battle is daily.
I don’t remember whether it was Buddha or Confucius who said it—maybe neither—but it’s true: between the man who defeats an army of a thousand and the man who defeats himself, the latter is the greater conqueror. That is what the crucifixion story points to. Whether it’s factual doesn’t matter to me. The meaning does. The defeat of the self creates a void—space for something beyond ego to move through us.
Negation doesn’t tolerate this. The closer you get, the more vicious the resistance becomes. That’s where being a samurai matters. Remove the self and you reduce your vulnerability. Each quiet victory strengthens you. And there are no medals. Inner battles rarely are visible.
The hardest enemy is the sense that the effort is useless. Why be good when it costs you and gives nothing back? Fear of hell or prison doesn’t count. Fear doesn’t make you good.
Why do it anyway? I don’t have a clean answer. Once, belief in an afterlife made it easier. Now all I can say is notice how affirmation feels, and how negation feels.
I met a middle-aged Frenchman on a ferry in Thailand who joked about buying a boy as part of a hotel package. He laughed—until he suspected I might be police. Later, when he saw me in Bangkok, he ran. He knew. There were no justifications. He had negated that boy’s humanity—and in doing so, his own. Shame chased him.
We can’t know with certainty whether God or Satan exist. But we know how choosing affirmation or negation feels.
Negation rarely begins with cruelty. It begins with despair. With the belief that the battle is already lost, that one is beyond repair. Some people come to prefer the abyss because it feels honest. They settle into it. Enjoy it. Until one day they realise they are trapped, and there is no way back.
That is when negation turns outward. That is when men like Denis Nilsen (serial killer of underage boys) begin to destroy what they believe caused their fall.
The danger is not imperfection. The danger is believing that imperfection disqualifies you from serving anything good.
Often the only reward for resisting negation is that others sense it in you. They don’t know why you feel safe—only that you do. I’ve had men approach me at truck stops, on bike rides, at campsites, at cliffs at sunset. A few are alive because someone listened.
To be a samurai is to serve—not because you are pure, but because you are available. Not perfect. Not holy. Simply open.
I know this because the man who rescued me from the streets of Piccadilly Circus was himself a deeply flawed man. A boy-addicted punter.
And yet, in that moment, affirmation moved through him anyway.
No one should despair and choose negation. No one is exempt from being a servant of something better.