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Yog said:At the rate I'm writing these essays Danzo will adopt Sakura.
Essay on the Responsility and Duty of Power
By
Sakura Haruno
When asked to answer a life-defining philosophical question that have plagued mankind in general and shinobi in particular since time immemorial, if not from their very beginnings one must first make sure that she is, in fact, going to answer the question asked, and not what she thinks was asked of her. If this bad pun may be forgiven, one must define the definitions. And in the case of this question, the words that need defining are Responsibility, Duty and Power, all cornerstones and guiding lights of the shinobi, and, in truth, not just shinobi, but every life.
For the first two of those I will be using a dictionary definitions, as those would likely be the least disputed and most widely accepted. The nuances of shinobi understandings of those words are, while important, not great enough, I believe, to warrant attempts to come up with specific definitions for them alone. After all, shinobi are not the only ones who are responsible and not the only ones to know duty, as samurai, daimyos or even merchants would attest to.
The dictionary I used, obtained in Konoha public library eloquently defines responsibility as the state of being responsible. The definition of "responsible" however, is of more use, stating that being responsible is "being answerable or accountable, as for something within one's power, control, or management". What is interesting here is that even in civilian-created book power is intrinsically interwoven with responsibility, inseparable from it. The other definition form the rather long list which is given in the book, including an unhelpful "involving accountability or responsibility", that, I assume is applicable to the question in hand, is the one telling me that being responsible is being "chargeable with being the author, cause, or occasion of something".
The second word of the question before me, by order, but not by importance, is duty. Its definition is far more straightforward and non-recursive, something that I think is owed to the fact that everyone in our world, be they civilian scholar or a mighty warrior, are far more intimately acquainted with duty than with responsibility. Two of the list of definitions are something that I believe is relevant to the topic at hand. The fist one is "something that one is expected or required to do by moral or legal obligation.". The second one, more interesting by far, is "the binding or obligatory force of something that is morally or legally right; moral or legal obligation". It is more interesting because the duty in it is equaled with "force" or, in other words "power".
Perhaps it can even be said that the question before me is not the one aimed at testing my ability to understand the relationship between the concept of power and two other different, if related, concepts, but rather the one investigating my level of comprehension of the full and vast concept that is the "power".
And here I come to the last, or, perhaps, only word of the question asked of me. Power. To attempt to explain it I will not be using dictionary definitions, for this is an essay meant to be written by a shinobi student and read by a shinobi teacher, and I have yet to come across a shinobi dictionary. As such, I will try to formulate my own definition, based on my experiences and thoughts.
So, what is power? Is it the level of the mastery of combat? Another name for chakra perhaps? Some foolish student can perhaps answer like this, but then one would only have to look at the ruling daimyos, by whose word thousands of powerful samurai and shinobi alike died without question, and this notion would be dispelled. Without question daimyos, any of whom can be killed in direct combat by even a weakest genin, are powerful indeed. Perhaps, then, power is the ability to command to kill? This one is closer to the true meaning, I think, but is still incorrect. For look at merchants – yes, they can commission shinobi services, but can you imagine any village taking an assassination contract on a daimyo from even the richest of merchants? And yet in some aspects it is money and those who hold the money that truly control the world.
No, at the core of it, it is my belief that power is what can also be called "potency" or "freedom". It is one's ability to affect the world around him and to control one's own self, directly or otherwise. It is the measure of how free, internally and externally one is.
And in this paradigm the question indeed collapses into itself, unraveling as the zen koan it truly is.
The responsibility of power is power and the lesser powers. For power cannot, by definition, affect greater power, and can affect lesser ones, or spawn new ones, growing as it does so.
The duty of power is to be. It is to exist and grow, to develop and mature, to propagate and change as needed. It is, simply, to be.
For without it there is nothing. No duty. No responsibility. No shinobi. No self.