La Fontaine told the story of a great oak tree that looked with some arrogance at a slender reed bending before every gust of wind. The reed replied: “I may bend, but I do not break.”

Then the storm came. The oak resisted with all its strength until it was uprooted, while the reed remained standing.

The story is simple, but the question it raises is profound: Is strength the ability to resist, or the ability to survive?

Water That Overcomes Rock

Centuries before La Fontaine, Lao Tzu reflected on the same idea through water in his Tao Te Ching. Water, he observed, is among the softest of things, yet it overcomes what is hard and rigid.

Man is born soft and flexible and dies stiff and rigid. The same is true of plants. Softness accompanies life, while rigidity accompanies death.

Here, then, we encounter a paradox that seems to contradict what we have been taught: flexibility is not the opposite of strength. It may, in fact, be one of its highest forms.

The idea moved from philosophy into the movement of the body. In Tai Chi, you do not meet your opponent’s force with equal force. Instead, you absorb his momentum and redirect it. We find the same principle in judo—the “way of gentleness”—and in aikido.

It is as though different civilizations discovered the same truth: you do not have to be harder than your opponent in order to overcome him.

And to those who think that religious tradition knows only rigidity and unquestioning certainty, I would say that our own tradition contains the same lesson.

When God sent Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh, the most powerful tyrant of their time, He said:

“Speak to him gently, that perhaps he may take heed or fear.”

And elsewhere:

“Repel evil with that which is better, and behold, the one between whom and you there was enmity will become as though he were a devoted friend.”

The meaning is not to answer harshness with more harshness, thereby multiplying it, but to redirect its course. Gentleness here is not weakness of principle; it is wisdom in the means we choose.

October… When Water Opened the Way

As the anniversary of the October 1973 War approaches, I remember an Egyptian example that brought this philosophy to life.

The earth embankment of the Bar Lev Line appeared almost insurmountable, and conventional thinking suggested that it would require explosives and equipment stronger than the barrier itself.

But Egyptian ingenuity found the answer in water: high-pressure pumps opened breaches through which troops and equipment could advance.

That soft element, which has no fixed shape, became the tool that opened the way.

Water did not confront the earth with greater hardness. It broke down its cohesion and washed it away.

What the Human Body Teaches Us

By virtue of my profession, I see the same idea in the human body.

Vaccination is something like an “immune Tai Chi”: we introduce the immune system to a safe representation of a threat, allowing it to learn from it and build a memory that can protect us later.

Bone, too, is living tissue that continually remodels itself in response to physical loads.

Conversely, a defensive response can become a source of harm when its regulation is disrupted, as happens with excessive immune responses.

Wisdom, therefore, does not lie in the absence of resistance, but in resistance that is proportionate and intelligent.

Even buildings in Japan, a country prone to earthquakes, do not rely on rigidity alone. They are designed to move in controlled ways that absorb and dissipate energy.

For an engineer, strength does not mean preventing movement. It means moving enough to preserve the structure from collapse.

Education… Preparing the Mind for What We Do Not Yet Know

As someone who has spent a significant part of his life concerned with education, I believe we have built our educational system around memorization and rote learning, as though the task of each new generation were simply to memorize the answers of the generations before it.

We sometimes reduce educational development to preparing students for a labor market that will inevitably change—a market in which some professions will disappear and others will emerge.

The goal is no longer to fill minds with what we already know. It is to build minds capable of dealing with what we do not yet know: minds that learn and then relearn, that question and challenge, and that are willing to reconsider their certainties when new knowledge emerges.

We need generations that possess the wisdom of the reed and the nature of water: firmly rooted in their values, flexible in their thinking, unafraid of the new, but capable of understanding it and participating in shaping it.

Knowledge is not merely a path to employment. It is our greatest opportunity to save humanity.

And What About Nations?

Every living society contains dissenting opinions, an angry generation, unmet demands, and unanswered questions.

The mind that governs can confront all of this with rigidity—rejecting every opposing view, closing the windows, and answering every push with an even stronger push.

It may succeed for a time, just as a rigid tree can withstand ordinary winds. But when the storm arrives, it reveals the difference between rigidity and the ability to adapt.

A wise mind understands that the energy of anger can be transformed into the energy of reform; that an opposing view can be a force to be absorbed and redirected toward what is constructive; and that the rebellious generation of today may build tomorrow if someone opens the way for it instead of blocking it.

But flexibility does not mean having no roots.

It means a constitution that is respected, fundamental values that are not negotiable, and institutions that do not change with the people who occupy them.

Flexibility without roots is chaos. Roots without flexibility are rigidity. Wisdom lies in bringing the two together.

Redefining Strength

Perhaps we have been mistaken for too long in equating strength with rigidity and refusing to retreat, seeing bending as defeat and changing course as hesitation.

A tree that refuses to bend may break.

A person who refuses to change his mind no matter how the facts change may appear steadfast, while in reality being incapable of learning.

And a state that sees its strength in never reconsidering its policies may eventually discover that what it called steadfastness was nothing more than stagnation.

Even in our human relationships, strength sometimes means listening, apologizing, and changing a position once we realize that it was wrong.

But flexibility is not surrender.

The reed bends without uprooting itself, and water changes its shape without losing its nature.

The whole wisdom lies in being flexible in the means while remaining steadfast in the essence; in changing the route without losing the destination; in bending when bending is necessary, and then standing upright again when the storm has passed.

Perhaps, then, the question in life is not: How strong are you?

It is: What kind of strength do you possess?

Is it the strength of the oak that challenges the wind, or the wisdom of the reed that knows when to bend?

History has taught us that strength can defeat strength. But Lao Tzu and La Fontaine, our religious tradition, the martial arts of the East, the human body, earthquake engineering, the philosophy of education, and even the waters of the Suez Canal in October all converge on one meaning:

Sometimes the strongest is not the most rigid, but the one most capable of remaining true to himself while changing.

“The Sword That Gives Life”

Strength as a Path to Peace

By Hossam Badrawi

Last week, I wrote about the philosophy of Tai Chi, about gentleness overcoming rigidity, and about water carving its way through rock.

A reader might reasonably ask me: Is this not an invitation to weakness? Is gentleness enough in a world that respects only the strong?

The answer is that the gentleness I meant was never the opposite of strength. It is the fruit of strength.

A reed bends before the wind because its roots are firmly anchored. A Tai Chi practitioner can absorb his opponent’s strike because his center is stable.

To complete the idea, I want to move today from China to Japan—from the wise man who moves slowly through the garden to the warrior who carries his sword without drawing it: the samurai.

The Sword in Its Scabbard

It may seem strange to search for a philosophy of peace among a class of warriors. Yet Japanese tradition distinguished between two kinds of swords: “the sword that kills” and “the sword that gives life.”

Yagyu Munenori, a master swordsman who served the rulers of Japan in the seventeenth century, wrote that the true sword is one used to save lives rather than take them, and that the purpose of martial skill is to stop evil, not to multiply it.

There is a famous story about the legendary swordsman Tsukahara Bokuden.

While traveling in a boat, he was challenged by an arrogant man who asked to fight him and mockingly inquired about the name of his school of swordsmanship.

Bokuden replied: “The School of Winning Without a Sword.”

He then asked the boatman to stop at a small island so that they could fight there.

The challenger eagerly jumped ashore, ready for battle. Bokuden pushed the boat away, leaving him alone on the island, and said:

“This is my school.”

Bokuden was not a coward. He was one of the greatest swordsmen in Japanese history.

Precisely because he knew his own strength, he had no need to prove it.

“Stopping the Spear”

In ancient Chinese tradition, from which Japan adopted its written characters, there is a famous interpretation of the character associated with “military strength.” Ancient scholars understood it as a combination of two symbols: “to stop” and “the spear.”

Whether or not this interpretation is linguistically accurate, the wisdom it conveys is entirely sound: at its noblest, military strength is the ability to stop war, not to ignite it.

It is the same meaning expressed by Sun Tzu in The Art of War, when he regarded the highest level of military skill as breaking the enemy’s will without fighting, rather than winning a hundred battles.

The Romans expressed a similar idea in their famous saying:

“If you want peace, prepare for war.”

The Same Meaning in Our Tradition

The Qur’an expressed the same idea with remarkable precision:

“And prepare against them whatever force you are able to muster, and steeds of war, by which you may deter the enemy of God and your enemy.”

The stated purpose of strength here is not fighting, but deterrence: that the enemy should see your strength and decide against aggression.

Then the very next verse completes the picture:

“And if they incline toward peace, then incline toward it.”

Strength first, followed by an extended hand toward peace.

The two are not opposites. One is the condition for the other.

Egypt learned this lesson in its recent history.

The peace through which Egypt recovered its land would not have been possible without first demonstrating, in October 1973, that it was capable of war.

It was strength that opened the door to negotiation, not the other way around.

The Samurai Paradox

There is a paradox in the history of the samurai worth contemplating.

The philosophy we know today as Bushido, or the “Way of the Warrior,” did not fully mature during times of war, but during an era of peace.

After the unification of Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the country experienced roughly two and a half centuries without major internal wars.

The samurai no longer had wars to fight, and many became administrators, teachers, poets, calligraphers, and judges.

The sword remained at their sides as a symbol of discipline and honor more than an instrument of killing.

When the Japanese writer Nitobe Inazō published his famous book Bushido: The Soul of Japan in 1899, he listed the warrior’s virtues as righteousness, courage, compassion, courtesy, sincerity, honor, and loyalty.

What particularly struck me was that he made compassion a virtue of the strong.

The Japanese speak of “the tenderness of the warrior,” because compassion has a special meaning when it comes from someone who possesses the power to inflict harm and nevertheless chooses not to.

I am not romanticizing history.

The samurai knew cruelty and bloodshed, like warriors everywhere, and much of what was written about them represented an ideal more than historical reality.

But the ideal itself is what concerns me here, because nations are built upon the ideals they choose to embrace.

The Army Through the Logic of the Sword in Its Scabbard

This brings us to the idea I want to end with:

The modern army, at its highest level, is not an instrument for waging wars but an instrument for preventing them.

Its true success should not be measured by the number of battles it has won, but by the number of battles that never took place because no one dared to start them.

A strong army, in this sense, is the sword that remains in its scabbard while everyone knows how sharp it is.

And, following the samurai example, that sword is governed by three principles:

Its strength must be without arrogance; the sword should never be drawn simply to prove oneself or to display power.

It should be drawn in defense, not aggression. The samurai who drew his sword without cause brought dishonor upon himself.

And it must always be directed toward an external threat, because the greatest disgrace in the Way of the Warrior is to raise one’s sword against those one has sworn to protect.

The sword that protects its people gives life.

The sword that forgets why it was forged loses its soul, even if it remains sharp.

Conclusion

The water I wrote about last week and the sword I write about today are not as contradictory as they may appear.

Both tell us the same thing:

True strength is the strength that does not need to use itself.

Water protects through persistence. The sword protects through deterrence.

And the greatest of warriors, as Bokuden taught us, is the one who wins without a sword.

The greatest army is the one that guards peace through its strength, allowing its people to live their entire lives without ever hearing the sound of artillery.