I know very little about these so-called sword saints, as I can't find any information regarding them online besides stuff from D&D, Sekiro, and For Honor, and it's driving me nuts. I know that Miyamoto Musashi was considered a sword saint, but that's all I know about them besides the fact that they were supposed to be legendary swordmasters. How much prestige did they have? What was their place in society as a whole? Were they regarded as celebrities? Who were some other kensei in history? All that jazz.
Does anyone perhaps have any resources or answers? I'm really curious about this now.
Kensei, sword saints, were essentially ronin, masterless samurai, who became renowned for the duelling skills.
To understand it, we first have to understand the rise and fall of the samurai. Originally, the samurai were a military class, somewhat similar to European knights. Retainers to lords, landowners, diplomats, soldiers, bodyguards, and everything else that required education and military muscle.
Following the creation of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600, civil wars in Japan essentially stopped, which posed an existential crisis for the samurai. What need a military caste when there are no wars and warring lords?
The gradual decline in military campaigning led many samurai, often descended from great samurai dynasties, to focus more on individual military prowess and tuition. Many established dojos and sought to push their own school of fighting, leading inevitably to duels between rival schools.
The stories of wandering swordsmen are many and various, but it becomes very difficult to separate fact from fiction. Essentially, many samurai from defeated and indentured clans turned to wandering as opposed to taking positions in the new regime. Forming a name for yourself as a swordsman was one way to do this, duelling, training, and teaching (and often begging) as a way to sustain oneself without taking a formal role to the new overlords.
The most famous kensei is likely Miyamoto Musashi, but little is known about his life that is not wrapped in myth. It is known that he killed many opponents in single duels, including rival kensei Sasaki Kojiro. We know he wrote the Book of Five Rings, and we suspect he fought in the armies ofvarious lords prior to the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate. We know very little else that isn’t confused in myth. He killed his first opponent, Arima Kihei, aged 13, beating him to death with a wooden sword.
In 1612 he fought Kojiro in a very anticipated and ceremonial duel. It was on the beach, and Musashi was late (sometimes attributed to playing mind games with his opponent.) Musashi again beats Kojiro to death with a large wooden sword. Legend goes that the two exchanged sword strokes at the same time, with Kojiro cutting off Musashi’s headband. Musashi’s custom made longer wooden sword reached Kojiro and struck his skull. How do we separate this from fiction, however?
As the time goes on and we enter the 18th and 19th centuries, the samurai becomes increasingly mythicised. From a factual perspective, the role of the samurai had virtually vanished from society. Often poor, landless, and jobless, they often traded on the legendary status of the past. A famous example here is the Hagakure, a book on how to ‘be’ a samurai. Written by Tsunetomo in around 1710, it is widely criticised by modern historians as a reverie of a mythical death cult by a samurai with nothing better to do. Harsh, perhaps, but indicative of the status of samurai of this era.
To conclude, it’s hard to say! The samurai before the reign of the Tokugawa were essentially military elites. After 1600, they fell into obsolescence over the period of a hundred years or so, with the idea of individual military prowess replacing the servitude and military allegiance to a feudal lord.
Some notable duellists of this era are the aforementioned Musashi and Kojiro, and Tsukahara Bokuden, the latter dying in 1584, prior to the domination of the Tokugawa.
Today, it is generally considered that the title of ‘kensei’ should only be given to one person, specifically Musashi. Rather than being used to describe any swordsman, it is a singular noun: ‘he is THE kensei’. As with knights, ninja, vikings, and the like, it is very hard to separate myth from reality.
EDIT: Some further reading:
It's a very modern word according to the Nihon kokugo daijiten (the largest and most comprehensive dictionary of Japanese that exists) - which only cites an example from 1932, the essay Hanashi no kuzukago by Kikuchi Kan (1888-1948).
The Daijiten tends to include the oldest usage (known at the time of compilation) of words, and I'm not aware of the word ever being used in older sources, so I'm leaning towards the term being a relatively recent invention (which means "they" did not exist, full stop).