The Artist and the Artwork

My friend and colleague, The Rogue Scholar, did me the honor of responding to my post about Creating A Work Of Art.  I had argued that we are each a work of art that we are crafting, and her very well considered reply argues that we are the artist, not a work of art.  I hope I am not misrepresenting her view when I say that she sees the martial artist as expressing herself through the performance of the kata.  She also makes a good point about self-improvement by itself not making one a work of art.

There are a lot steps along the way, and I may be using the idea of the self as a work of art more broadly than the term can support.  I’ll try to unpack my meaning and intention and see where that leads.  I agree that that are many paths to self-improvement, but I would argue that the goal of budo training is not simply moral improvement, but refinement of all aspects of one’s self.  Developing one’s moral understanding of the world is a fine, but limited goal.  Budo 武道 teaches, as do the Daoists, a goal of refined simplicity.  It is not just a moral refinement, as Cook Ting demonstrates.  The Way transcends the physical, but is manifest in physical action.  The Way of Budo is not merely moral improvement.

I have to admit that my use of the term “art” runs very closely towards what the Rogue Scholar is talking about when she describes the classical artist.  The Rogue Scholar says “a classical artist creates something that is unique but also serves her tradition.”  My view of what is happening with budo training is very much in this line of thought.  We are creating a work of art in the service of our tradition.  To me, the work each of us is creating is our self.  

No matter how beautifully we can perform the kata, no matter how expressive we can be within the boundaries of the kata, this is not the art of budo.  The kata are like the finger pointing at the moon in Zhuangzi’s writing.  It is a tool that directs us where we want to go, but if we focus on the finger, we will never see the moon.  If we focus only on the kata, we may never understand what they are pointing us towards.  The kata teach us proper breathing, posture and movement.  Budo practice also teaches us to relax our minds and bodies and to respond to the world as it is rather than as we want it to be.

Mastery of the kata, no matter how beautifully it can be demonstrated, should not be the goal of budo training.  The kata are teaching tools.  The question then is, what are they tools for teaching?  Kata are tools at the most basic level for teaching us skills useful in a particular sort of combat.  They are not tools for learning to do kata, though I admit, simply learning to do the kata well is a wonderful experience and feeling.  The skills necessary to perform the kata well should be the same skills necessary for success in that particular type of combat. They are also skills that are wonderful to have in regular day-to-day life.  It is not what we express when performing the kata that is goal for me.  

For me, the goal of budo training is to be able to express what budo teaches in the kata in everyday life.  At the physical level this means that I move in a manner that expresses the principles of my budo all the time, not just when I am in the dojo.  I want to move with the same control over every bit of my action, with the same fine balance and controlled, relaxed power that I use when I am in the midst of a Shinto Muso Ryu or Shinto Hatakage Ryu kata.  I want to eliminate the unnecessary tension from my body and present the world with a presence that expresses and displays all that my budo is.

At a mental level, I want my everyday mind, my heijoshin 平常心, to be as relaxed as my body.  I don’t want to meet the world with a mind that is stiff with preconceived ideas and expectations,  rigid with assumptions of how things are.  I want a mind that is calm and peaceful as a forest stream.  I want there to be not a ripple the surface of my mind that will distort how I perceive the world.  My goal is to be as peaceful and calm in my readiness to greet the world as I am standing in tsune no kamae as I await the actions of my partner in the dojo.  

I don’t want to keep my budo in the dojo.  The dojo is where I practice what budo is.  Outside the dojo is where I actually perform it.  I know I’m not very good at it, but I try to express my budo in my everyday life.  Most of the time I don’t need the extreme level of readiness that I train at in the dojo, but there are times when even in everyday life I reach moments of intensity similar to the levels I reach when I am training in the dojo.  I’ve been in intense negotiations with people pounding on the table and trying to intimidate me.  I’ve had to deal with crying and screaming and yelling.  If I can draw upon my budo training at these times, and keep my mind calm and body relaxed, then my budo training is showing signs of success.  If I lose my temper, or become rigid with tension and stress and aggression, than my budo training hasn’t been successful yet, and I need to spend more time working on it.  

For me, what we do in the dojo is always practice, even the big demonstrations.  Budo only happens when I am outside the dojo, moving in the world.  It is in the world that I think of myself as a work of art.  In the dojo, The Rogue Scholar is entirely correct.  In the dojo, I am an artist, working to craft my heart, mind and body into something beautiful.  In the dojo I am working on learning to calm my mind, to respond as things really are rather than as I would like them to be.  I am training my body to stay relaxed under the pressure of having someone far more skilled than I am trying to hit me with a really big stick.  The dojo is the place to practice and refine, just as the ballet dancer practices and refines in the dance studio.

The difference between a classical Western artist and an artist of the Way is that the art of the Way is what we do all the time.  It’s how we sit down and how we talk to people and how we eat dinner and how we are gracious and gentle to someone who is verbally attacking us and how we walk down the street and how we eat breakfast and how we deal with that unpleasant fellow at work and how we treat our family even when we aren’t feeling very nice and the million other things we do throughout the day, every day.  Budo is the martial way, but it is only really budo when it informs and transforms every aspect of who we are and how we interact with the world.  If it doesn’t do that, then it’s not budo.  It may still be bu, martial, but it lacks the Way.  This is what I mean when I talk about being a work of art.  Since this is a Way, and not a destination, we are always works in process, but hopefully we become more refined and more polished with each day.

We go into the dojo to train.  What are we training? Our self.  We are using budo to train and refine and polish our self.  In the dojo we sculpt and and polish and refine ourselves.  Outside the dojo that incomplete work of art that is us is on display for the world to see and interact with.  The better the our budo, the more beautiful the mind and body we show to the world.  We are the artist and the artwork.

Creating a Work Of Art: Part 1

2 hours on a flower marble and my arms are about to fall off... let's hope the kiln gods are kind... I kinda don't think i nailed this one, but maybe... if you wonder why great marbles are worth the prices they are fetching, this is part of the reason... I can't tell you guys how much work I do that you never see... try... try again... tweak this... ponder a solution to that... try again... repeat as necessary... it truly is a journey through numerous processes to get things dialed in... great marbles and glass doesn't just happen... every single one of us has to put in the blood, sweat and tears... the best part is, once I dial something in, I get to start the grueling process all over again with something new my brain has conjured up... I don't need bondage in the bedroom, because I torture myself all day long in the shop... and I wouldn't have it any other way! LOL
Brent Graber

A friend showed me this quote, and my first thought was, this is how budo training should feel.  After all, the piece of art you are working on in the dojo is yourself.   What we are doing in the dojo is working on ourselves.  We are are refining and perfecting what we are.

Budo training is a process of both adding on, and taking away.  From the first day in the dojo, we are adding to ourselves by actively trying to learn new skills, ideas and ways of thinking.   We are creating a new, better self by adding skills and confidence, strengths and flexibility, and we are acquiring power.  When you learn a martial art, you are literally learning ways of power for dealing with the world.  Some budo, such as judo or aikido or karatedo are clearly about forms of power that can be immediately applied to the world around us if we wish, while others such as iaido or kyudo are more distant from the world outside the dojo.  They are all about the use and application of power.  

Each day in the dojo, especially in the early years of training, we are working to add to our store of techniques, our ways of dealing with physical conflict.  We have to work really hard to get the steps for the technique down, to overcome ingrained instincts and reactions and to train new instincts and new reactions in their place.  At the end of a good practice, the body should be sweating, sore, and exhausted from the work learning and polishing new skills.  The mind should be just as sore and exhausted from working on new ways of thinking, and from pushing itself to learn lessons that sometimes require giving up old ideas and beliefs so we can grow beyond them.

Early on we are learning to respond fluidly to a threatening situation rather than with blind instinct.  We learn to move out of the way of a strike calmly and smoothly, instead of flinching away.  We spend time learning proper footwork and posture for best moving out of the way, and then we practice putting our hands in the proper position for receiving the strike depending on how we want to deal with it.  This takes time and sweat.  It also takes restructuring how we see the world.   If we are used to being strong and unmoving and letting the world crash into us and standing against it’s force, we have to learn to be soft and pliant and let the things go flying past us.  On the other hand, if we are accustomed to ducking and avoiding conflict, we have to learn to be strong enough to stay close so that we can actively deal with the conflict.  

In the dojo, we should be constantly working on lessons like this.  And it should make us tired.  It should also prepare us to practice these lessons outside the dojo in the world where we live.  It is here that the practice is the most difficult.  We have all learned many lessons about how to act in the world.  Some of us are very good at letting the world crash into us without being moved, like a huge boulder on the seashore.  Some of us are good at diving out of the room or giving in at the first sign of conflict.  Others push too hard, or attack when it’s not necessary, or any of the other traits and strategies that can be taken to an extreme.

Training in the real world is really hard and takes a level of effort that can make training in the dojo seem easy.   These are the attempts that no one realizes you are making as you develop yourself.  So you’ve learned to get out of the way of the attack without fleeing or giving up your own position of strength in the dojo.  You are strong, but you’ve learned that you don’t have to meet every attack head on.  Or you are not strong, but you have learned that you don’t have to avoid conflict by fleeing, but that you can control how you move and where you go.  Now that you can do that in the dojo, can you do it in life?  When the office bully comes looking for a fight, and knows that you are always ready to stand unbending and give him one, can you flex enough to not meet him head on, but to let his arguments go rolling on past you without expending any more effort than it takes to step to the side?  Or, can you have the strength to stick around and not be driven away or simply acquiescing in order to get him to leave?  Can you learn to move to a position that he can’t easily attack, and to push back at his weakness?

This is the tough stuff, and this is the training that counts.  Because this is the training that applies every day at every level.  Conflict is all around us, at all different levels.  In budo we are learning to deal with conflict in the most fundamental way possible, with someone trying to hit us.  But it’s budo, bu-DO.  We are training ourselves for life, not just some sort of physical fight.  This is why it’s so hard.  We’ve got patterns and ways of doing things that we have learned, but one of the fundamental lessons of any Way is that we can always be better than we are now.  My teachers still train, they still work to polish their technique and themselves.  They haven’t stopped learning and improving themselves.  Just because Kiyama Sensei is 88 years old, don’t think that he is only teaching and not learning anymore, only training others to become better and not training himself.

We are working on perfecting ourselves and the lessons go on and on.  Once the strong and stiff has learned to be more flexible and mobile his training may circle back.  He may find himself working hard at learning to apply his strength as effectively as possible.  And the timid one may develop enough skill and confidence that he has to work on not deploying that skill every time, and sometimes just get out of the way and not connect with the conflict.

I spent the morning alone in the dojo today.  I’m trying to polish some techniques that require more patience and less speed.  Part of me always wants to fly through these techniques because, well, this is budo, combat, and if I don’t move fast, I’ll be defeated.  My teachers have shown me over and over though, that speed is not the key to great technique.  The point I am struggling with is that the key is not strength or speed.  The key is to do the right thing at the right time.  I’m work on being aware enough, calm enough, relaxed enough, and confident enough that I don’t rush in, but wait and fill the opening as it occurs.   I’m sweating through this, swinging the sword, swinging the staff, pushing my legs until they quiver with effort so that I can do this without effort.

Now I’m applying this same effort to being me.  There are things that I want to do better.  I want to interact with people in a better way.  I used to have a deep seated need to be right, even when being right was wrong thing to do.  I had to learn to let go of the argument, let the conflict fade away by not holding on to it.   This is something I’m still working on, though I believe I’ve gotten better at it over the years.  One of the lessons of budo is that you can lose by putting too many of your resources into one course of action.  You might even succeed in that action, but then lose because you don’t have any resources for anything else.  I have been working practicing and applying this lesson to myself, learning a new skill, and hopefully I am a better person, a nicer work of art to be around than I was.