Metsuke

A friend of mine was commenting on someone’s metsuke, and how she really wouldn’t want to cross it.  I’ve known a number of teachers like that.  My iai and jo teachers are particularly fierce.  Just their glance is enough to make any sensible person back up and rethink their options.  Their whole being seems to fill their eyes and their gaze.  

But what is “metsuke”　目付？　Checking in the Kenkyusha Online Dictionary gets you a meaning completely unrelated to the term’s use in budo practice.  There, it is “lower superintendent officer (in the feudal age)”.  Great, a profound budo term has its origins in a bureaucratic title from the feudal age.  Doe this mean it’s really about having a gaze like a low level bureaucrat?  I’m pretty sure that’s not the meaning we’re looking for.
The kanji that make up the term metsuke are 目and 付.  目is pronounced “may” in this case and 付 is pronounced “tsoo-kay”.  目 is the kanji for eye, while 付 is the kanji for to attach, to apply (and many other uses).  In this case, it is means something like “sticking eyes to ~” or “attaching your eyes to~”.  That’s what we get from the kanji.  The lesson we can take from this is that reading kanji and trying to understand the meaning without knowing the context won’t give you a useful meaning.

In practice, metsuke is really about what you’re looking at and how you’re doing the looking.  Kendo teachers are fond of the phrase enzan no metsuke 遠山の目付, which they use to describe how to fix your gaze in kendo.  The idea here is that when you look at something in the distance, you perceive things close by in your peripheral vision without focusing on them.  This counters the all too natural tendency to stare at your opponents weapon, or just as bad, your intended target.

Where you look is pretty fundamental.  We humans are exceptionally visual creatures, and for anything beyond the grappling range, seeing is our primary means of connecting with our adversary.  We have to connect with the whole of our adversary, not just the tip of their weapon, or our own.  Beginning students have a habit of staring at the part they think is going to hurt them, whether it is a hand, sword, staff or giant peanut butter spreader.  If they think that’s the thing that’s going to hurt them, they stare at it, and forget all about the person it’s connected to.  Do this, and what you are staring at will hurt you, because you won’t be able to respond in time to what your partner is doing to avoid getting hit.
If you’re looking at your partner’s eyes, you’re going to have the same problem, only worse.  Not only can’t you respond to what she is doing in time, but you can easily be led to even further weakness through eye feints and bluffs. If you’re staring at their eyes, you’ll react when they do something besides look back at your eyes.  The worst part is that staring at your partner’s eyes really won’t tell you anything about what they intend to do if they are any good at all. Kiyama Sensei has quite clearly corrected me on this point.  He says develop the strength and look your partner in the eye.

Enzan no metsuke is a good starting point for developing metsuke, but in the koryu budo I study, my teachers have pulled my metsuke in a lot closer than a distant mountain.  My teachers have me looking at a point a little above the bridge of my partners nose.  They are very clear that I am not to be looking in anyone’s eyes.  With this gaze, I can see my partners whole body at most distances, and I can sense intentions from subtle changes and shifts in posture.  I can respond to attacks without taking my gaze away from this point, so that I don’t become locked onto the attacking weapon, leaving me unaware of what’s coming next.  

This is important.  You can start out well but then have your focus stolen by movement or attack.  Even when the attack comes from an angle, you must maintain your focus on your whole partner and not let it slip away to something peripheral.  The video here is a good example.  While the weapon may come from straight ahead, the left or the right, both people maintain their focus on their partner.  The partner is the adversary and real source of danger.  The weapon is a tool and gains all of its direction from the wielder.  If our focus slips off the person wielding the weapon and gets stuck on the weapon we open ourselves up.  If we are following the weapon and we knock it to the side, we will follow the weapon to the side, leaving ourselves wide open to the opponent who is still in front of us.

It takes a tremendous practice, and often not a few bruises, to learn this focus.  Great practitioners have incredible focus.  You can almost feel the weight of their concentration on you when you face them.  This is what my friend was talking about.  I remember the feeling when I was first studying jodo and training with one of seniors, Kohashi Sensei.  Kohashi Sensei is a tiny woman, maybe 4’ 11 inches (148 cm).  She looks like someone’s kindly grandmother, at least until she picks up a weapon and prepares to attack you.  Then you become the focus of her entire being and the world is blocked out by the strength of her focus.  She is really, truly frightening, so much so that her metsuke becomes a weapon of its own.

Kohashi Sensei’s metsuke is exceptional, but all of the experienced budoka I have met have strong metsuke.  The power comes from their well-developed and practiced concentration.  You are the subject of their focus, and that focus is pure.  There is nothing distracting them.  There is no part of their mind that is wandering about wondering what they will have to drink after they have reduced you to a grease spot on the floor.  There isn’t even a part of their mind thinking about reducing you to a grease spot.  They aren’t thinking about their sword, or yours. They are purely focused on you, and you can feel this.  There is no room in them for distraction.

A person with a developed metsuke has a powerfully honed mental focus, and the strength of their gaze is an outer manifestation of this.  The focus and concentration of their gaze is a mirror for the focus and concentration of their mind.  They are seeing you as the only thing in their universe.  A person who has mastered their metsuke can shut out all the distractions around them and maintain focused concentration on just one thing.  As a student of budo, this regularly means that senior teachers are bringing all of this focus and experience to bear on you.

Over time, as you become proficient enough that you stop thinking about which foot goes where, and what is the proper stance for this situation, and you remember to breathe regularly without having to tell yourself to breath, you begin to be able to focus on your teacher.  To me, this is when you really start learning budo, when you can stop focusing on yourself, and start focusing on the conditions you are dealing with, without letting them overwhelm you.  It’s not something that comes full blown.  One day you’ll have it for half a kata, and then from time to time you’ll manage to hold your focus together through an entire kata.

Metsuke, and the underlying mental focus and concentration takes time to develop.  Without it though, you can never really be proficient at any form of budo, even if what you do doesn’t use the term.  I study metsuke everytime I go into the dojo.  I’m looking at what my teachers are doing, and what my juniors are doing, and trying to figure out how to improve my own.   I’ve also noticed that my peers, the people I started with, have improved their metsuke tremendously over the years.　I’m still in awe of the focus and intensity of some of my teachers.  

I’m particularly impressed by those who can project this intensity when doing iaido.  With no partner to provide a focal point, and no weapon actually attacking them, they have to generate 100% of the intensity and concentration from within.  This level of focus is something I’ve only recently come to think I am getting a handle on.  When I first started iai it was all I could manage to move my hands and feet at the same time and not stab myself with my own sword.  Now I’ve learned to visualize my adversary well enough to be able to bring some of the focus I have in paired arts to my solo iai practice.

It’s still a work in progress.  It’s very easy to start looking at your own weapon during iai, since it’s the only thing in your field of vision that’s moving.  Keeping focused on the adversary is always difficult, but when she only exists in your mind, it gets really difficult.  Watch people when they do budo, whether it is solo kata, paired kata, or some sort of sparring.  What do they do with their eyes?  Where are they looking?  Are they giving away control by looking at their opponent’s weapon or eyes?  Are they distracted by something else going on in the room?  Do their eyes move in coordination with their body (this is a tough one to describe.  I’ve done whole practices on this).  If they are doing solo kata, can you tell exactly where their adversary is from the way their eyes, body and weapon work together and focus?  If they are working with a partner, does the combination of their focused attention, body and weapon all come together to create a single barrier between them and their adversary.

Those are some points I’m working on for myself, and I always notice when I see video of myself.  I’m never completely satisfied with what I see in my own practice.   Some of them I get fairly consistently and some need a lot of work.  But that’s budo, and maybe a bit of mental metsuke as well.  

Budo, the Mental Side

People talk a lot about the physical technique of budo. Budo is obviously a physical art, with techniques designed to handle the very real and serious business of violence.  Depending on the martial art you could be learning striking, throwing, joint locking, or any of the myriad of weapons that are taught in the various martial arts.  Before one can use those techniques in a real way however, development of physical technique must be paired with development of mental technique.  If you mind is not properly prepared and ready, the technique will not be there.  You can’t be thinking too much about what you are doing, and you can’t blank and forget everything either.

Ironically, the mental state that is the goal in classical Japanese martial arts is mushin無心、most often translated as “no mind”.  Better writers and far greater martial artists have written numerous treatises on mushin, so I’ll just say that it is a calm, quiet mind that reflects what is around it without imposing assumptions.  Good practice will help develop this mental quality, but I would say that that mushin is much harder to develop than good technique, and frankly, much more useful.  Violence is a rare occurrence in the industrialized world, but we need our minds all the time.

This is the mental side of what is ostensibly a physical practice.  It’s also the head fake of good training practices.  When we start our training, we are so excited by the physical techniques, and so busy trying to master them, that we hardly notice that we are training our minds at the same time. The mind and the body are really one, so what is happening with one is always reflected in the other.  If we are training and forging our body, we are necessarily also training our mind.  The question, and what sets budo and other michi apart from mere sports, is “Does our training have effects beyond the dojo.”  The answer, certainly, is yes.  Martial artists and other teachers have been talking about this in Japan for hundreds of years.  Yagyu Munenori, Miyamoto Musashi, and Takuan Soho are just a few of the older, and greatest writers on the subject. 

When we train physical technique, whether it is kata or freeform, we strive to master our breathing and to keep our mind quiet and relaxed but as ready as our muscles have to be.  This is often hardly treated in regular practice, hidden within kata that we repeat and repeat until we no longer have to think about the physical movements.  (And if you think your art doesn’t include kata, what do you think those repetitions of structured exercises are?).  As we become more familiar with the movements, we strip away more and more physical input from them.  When we are first learning the motions, we stiffen and tense our whole body, activating muscles that have nothing to do with the motions being practiced.  As we train, we strip more and more of this excess input out of technique, becoming faster, more efficient and effective.  Each time we stop activating unnecessary muscles, we reduce counterproductive activity.  When we activate muscles that aren’t necessary, at best we waste energy and at worst we are actively working against ourselves, weakening the effect of the necessary muscles, causing unbalances in our posture, and ruining our technique.  Is it possible training could help us do that same thing mentally?  That we could learn to deactivate the unnecessary, wasteful parts of our minds?

Practicing recently, I was working on an iai kata that assumes 3 adversaries.  You have to move your attention from adversary to adversary without becoming stuck on any of them.  When I would allow my attention to stick to the middle adversary, the quality of my cuts to the sides became so bad I’m not sure they would raise bruises, much less actually cut.  Your attention has to be fluid, but not scattered.  In this particular kata, the three adversaries are ranged in front of you.  You approach with open attention, aware of all of them without strongly focusing on any one. The first cut and your attention go to the adversary on your right.  The next cut is to the adversary on your left, but while moving your attention from the right to the left, you must allow your focus to strike the adversary in the middle, to make him react to the possibility that you are coming for him and to allow you the chance to react if the middle adversary is able to attack you already. You can’t let your attention stick to him though.  It has to strike him and move on. This has to be accomplished in the time it takes to sweep your sword around to the left so that you can transfer your attention to the adversary there.  If you don’t get your attention moved, you won’t have ki-ken-tai icchi 気剣体　一致, or unified mind, body and sword (I know, I’m taking a liberty translating 気 as mind in this case, but if you have more effective translation, please share it).  If your attention sticks to any of the adversaries, the lack of focus in your mind is immediately reflected in your body.  

On this occasion, that means my cuts fell apart completely.  I swung the sword, but it was a poor imitation of the movement I should have been making.  The mind guides the body, and once my mind was tuned to something besides where it should have been focused, my body’s integration and technique collapsed.  Once the mind was no longer guiding the body, there was nothing to integrate my movement and make it effective.  The speed with which this was reflected from my body as my technique fell apart, back to my mind for the third cut, was amazing.  By the third cut my mind was completely rattled from the poor performance of the second cut and I probably would have been better off not even attempting it.  My mind was busy trying to reorganize my body structure and integration so I could make a good cut, but because it was focused on my body rather than on the project of cutting, my third cut was even less effective than the second. 

The next time through the kata I kept my focus moving.  As I swept the sword from the right to the left I let my gaze slam into the middle adversary but didn’t let it stop there.  When I swung the sword to the left my gaze and my mind were right there with my body and the sword, moving together.  When the cut was done I immediately moved my focus back to the middle adversary and the sword followed.  When I did the cut it was completely on my terms and fully integrated.  It felt great. The trick now is to keep that sort of mind and body integration all the time, not just when I’m swinging a sword.

When I’m training regularly the control of my breathing and the mental stillness that I strive for in the dojo become habits that I automatically reach for and use when I’m out of the dojo. I know that I’m calmer when I’m training regularly.  In the dojo I work to breath and stay calm while people are trying to throw me or to hit me with sticks.  In Judo if I don’t stay calm during randori I get winded quickly and find myself focusing on getting another breath rather than what my partner is trying to do.  In Jodo I have to stay calm and control my breathing or else I find myself trying to take a breath when I should be getting out of the way of someone who is trying to whack me in the head.  This is a fairly stressful environment in which to practice these things, but that’s good.  It means that when you are in a stressful environment outside of practice you’ll be accustomed to dealing with the stress.

The breathing practice and mental stillness that are required for effective budo are great things outside the dojo, just as much as being in good physical condition is.  We spend some time in our society teaching people how to hold their body and we value good physical posture and movement. We spend no time at all teaching people how to relax and control their mind and take effective metal postures. In the dojo, the mental “Do” side of practice is just as important as the physical training.  It may be more important, since we don’t have business chains all over the place offering to develop our mental strength and posture.  Practicing the calm, clear, placid, reflecting mind that is required of any “Do”, martial or otherwise, and that is especially important for effective responses in “Bu”, is also tremendously useful outside the dojo.  It’s wonderful to be able to remain calm and unruffled while everyone around you is losing control.  

When my focus fell apart during the kata, all it took was a breath to relax me and pull my focus and my body back together.  In the grand world outside the dojo, all it takes for me to pull my mind and body together and bring them into a relaxed, unified posture is a breath or two as well.  The most difficult thing sometimes is remembering to take that calming breath.  It’s easy to get lost in the emotion of argument, especially when someone is attacking you.  The longer I train though, the more likely I am to be more disturbed by a disorganized mind/body state than I am by the argument, even if I’m busy trying to defend myself from a verbal attack.  The great side benefit of this is that when someone is verbally attacking you, they want you to be intimidated. They will be looking for the physical cues of intimidation or of defense.  If you take that breath and relax your mind into your body, you become physically relaxed.  Once you are relaxed, you are in control of yourself, and you can choose how to respond.  If you are relaxed in mind and body, you can respond to the situation fluidly without getting stuck on any part of the interaction.  Being relaxed, you have the possibility of being confident in your response because you are choosing it, not just reacting.  You are relaxed and responding as you see fit, rather than being herded by someone who is expecting a tense, off-balance response.  Often this failure to react as expected to their script is all it takes to make a verbal aggressor back off.

This is one of the more extreme day-to-day applications of budo training, but the basic technique is available to a budo practitioner throughout life, whatever she is struggling with..  Tension and lack of focus attack all the time, usually without as clear a source as someone yelling at us.  The more we train, the more quickly and easily we can reintegrate our mind and bodies, relax them, release unnecessary tension and activity from our awareness and move forward to clearly respond to the world as it truly is, rather than as our tension filled minds would like to view it.

This may be the greatest benefit of budo training.  As we learn to relax our minds, we learn to release our preconceptions so we can see the world as it is, rather than as we think it is.  This is the mind like a calm, smooth pond.  It clearly and properly reflects the world around it without distorting anything.  If the pond is disturbed, it moves this way and that distorting the reflection of everything.  As we practice budo, we work to keep our bodies calm so that we can respond accurately and appropriately to anything our partner does.  As we do this, often without being aware of it, we are also training our minds to be calm like that pond so we can respond to anything appropriately without the activity of our own mind distorting our vision or our actions.  The first big step is when we can consciously recognize that we are upset need to relax, and we can choose to take that breath or two that is necessary to restore our calm, placid mind.  The next big step is when we take that breath before we are aware that we need it.  When we start doing that, we may be starting to master a portion of budo.

The Value of Bu and Do

I train in budo.  I admit it, I love budo training.  It’s fun.  It’s exciting.  It’s intense in a way that nothing else I do even comes close to.  I could happily spend a lot of time every day training.  Learning attacks and defenses from sword and staff and kusarigama and empty hand, and, and, and, I never seem to get my fill of training and learning.  Budo is great.  In addition, because it’s not a sport you play for amusement, but training in skills that can be applied in the world outside the dojo, I can easily recommend that everyone get some sort of budo training, whether it is their passion or not.  It’s a useful skill set to have.   

But how valuable is that skill set?  The value of “do” 道、is that it is a way of looking at the world, of approaching the world and the way we live in it.  The Taoists and  Buddhists have written quite a lot on the value of “Do” 道、so I want to look at the relative value of “bu” 武。　　In a society where physical conflict is rare, and the vast majority of people get through life without any training in budo, just how valuable is the “bu” half of budo?

If you have a job that places you in the line of physical conflict, of course budo training can be useful, but that sort of job is rare.  So, thankfully, are instances that might require physical responses in modern, industrialized societies, particularly when compared with pre-industrial periods.  But we do still have conflicts.  How we handle conflict has clearly gotten more peaceful over the centuries, but we still have conflicts.  And occasionally these conflicts become violent, so there is still a slim chance that someone might have a literal need for the skills learned through budo training.  Outside of a few, specialized professions though, that need is rare.

So for those of us who can’t get enough of budo practice, how valuable is it really to our lives?  What can it contribute?  The easy one is that budo practice can be great physical activity in an era when we spend more time sitting in front of screens than is healthy.  Unfortunately, this isn’t a very compelling reason to do budo, since there are lots of things that can provide physical activity.  Lots of them are much better overall forms of exercise than budo.

That brings us back to budo training for dealing with violence.  Even though violence is relatively rare, there plenty of reasons for training.  I want my daughters to learn effective “bu” even if they don’t ever embrace my love of budo.  I want to protect them by teaching them to protect themselves.  Many of the facets of budo training that are not directly violent can protect them.  They can certainly use the awareness and confidence that comes with budo training to avoid and handle potentially violent situations so they never become violent.

The above logic though forces me to face one aspect of the value of budo’s primary focus of dealing with violence.  Budo is valuable for what it can protect, not for any inherent value that it possesses. I value budo training for my family because I value my family, and not because I value budo.  I want my children to deal with the world from a position of confidence and personal security, and I think budo is one of the best tools to help them achieve that level of confidence and personal security.

And there it is.  Budo is a tool, not an end in itself.  Budo is valuable for what you can build with it and what it can defend.  Budo is not a beautiful house to be lived in.  Budo is the hammer and saw used to build the house.  Budo, like any “Do” 道　is a method for perfecting the practice of some particular activity, and through the proper practice of that activity, for helping to perfect the practitioners.  

“Bu” 武 alone is not much to practice.  In fact, it’s rather gruesome to spend a lot of time week after week studying ways to control, constrict, disarm, disable, cripple and kill your fellow man.  That’s what we do in budo practice.  It’s not beautiful, and if we are training ourselves honestly, we should not flinch from saying it publicly or to the mirror.   If we don’t start with an honest understanding of what we are doing, there is no way we can honestly value it.

I value a lot of things from my budo practice besides the physical conflict skills that are the foundation of the practice.  I value the understanding of physical limitations, both mine and a potential adversary’s, that make it nearly impossible for me to be physically intimidated in an office situation, even though people frequently try.  I admit it, I find it amusing when the office bully tries his tactics on me and gets confused when they utterly fail.

I appreciate the understanding of spacing that allows me to control distances between myself and people who might actually be dangerous.  If I understand the distances involved in violence, I can prevent it from happening by not allowing the spacing to develop that makes violence possible.  That’s a nice one.

Ultimately though, these are all applications of budo lessons using budo as a tool for protecting something else.  So this leads me to the question of what the proper value and place budo training should have in my life.  When I was in college, it filled huge sections of my life.  I spent hours every day at the dojo training.  I built my life around budo.  It was huge fun and I made friendships that still sustain me.  I know now that these friendships are much more important than the budo practice that nurtured them.  The dojo was like fertile ground where the friendships grew.

Budo is a fabulous tool for my life, both the “Bu” and “Do” portions, but it is a tool and I have to be careful to value it as such.  The dojo is a wonderful place for me, and there are few places where I am more comfortable and completely at ease than in a good dojo.  One of the lessons I’ve had to take away is that being comfortable and at ease is not how I want to be all the time though.  I have used the dojo as an escape and release from stress in my life, and it would be easier than I care to admit to hide in the dojo all time.  

That would require sacrificing things that I find valuable for themselves alone.  My family, my friends, the people I love.  These people are what makes budo such a valuable tool.  It’s great value comes from what it can do for them.  I have to remember that when I want to escape to the dojo every night.  When I go a few times a week, my training benefits everyone involved; me, my wife, my children, the rest of my family, my friends.  An appropriate amount of training is good for me physically and mentally.  I get a great, intense physical workout in the dojo.  It’s amazing how much and how fast you can convince yourself to move when someone is trying to throw you, choke you, or hit you with a stick.  I could get that exercise in a gym, but I like the efficiency of getting exercise and honing skills at the same time.

Then there are the mental benefits.  I’m calmer when I’m training regularly.  The breathing practice, and mental stillness that are required for effective budo are great things outside the dojo, just as much as being in good physical condition is.  We spend some time in our society teaching people how to hold their body and we value good physical posture.  While mental training that is part of the “Do” side of practice in the dojo is just as important as the physical training.  It may be more important, since we don’t have business chains all over the place offering to develop our mental strength and posture.  Practicing the calm, clear, placid, reflecting mind that is required of any “Do” and is especially important for effective responses in “Bu” is also wonderfully useful outside the dojo.

I love being in the dojo, and there are few places where I feel as comfortable and completely at ease as I do in the dojo.  I could easily spend my time escaping from all the pressures of life by spending every available minute in the dojo. If I start spending too much time in the dojo, and sacrificing quantity and quality of time with the people I love, I’m showing with my actions that I value budo over the people in my life.  I’m showing that I value the tool more than the relationships with wonderful people that it can help build and protect.  It’s nice to want to spend my time where I feel comfortable, but that excessively values the tool of budo and undervalues the rest of life.

Budo is wonderful.  It’s a part of life that I love.  It’s only a part of life though.  We have to value it appropriately.  If we allow our love of budo to let our practice take over our life and blot out many other difficult but wonderful things that are part of life, our budo is taking a place in our lives it doesn’t deserve.  I’ve seen people over value their practice and they pay the price in all the other aspects of life.  Budo is not life.  It is a tool for life.  It is a little “Do” pointing at the big Tao.  Don’t mistake the finger for the moon.

Update on training injured

An update on the ol’ knee.  Back in December of 2010 I bent my right knee roughly 45 degrees to the left.  I’ve been taking it easy and not pushing myself too hard.  I thought over the summer that it was pretty much healed.  It only took one regular judo practice to prove this was not true.  While I am fine for straight line movements, it turns out that any sort of lateral movement is both painful and a chance for my knee to collapse under me.  I decided I should do something sensible.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been visiting doctors and having x-rays and MRI’s taken to find out what is wrong with my knee.  Now I know.  I completely tore my anterior cruciate ligament, and I’ve partially torn the posterior cruciate ligament and the lateral collateral ligament.  The result is a very unstable knee that can’t take much lateral pressure at all.  If I think about it much, it’s rather scary.

Not so many years ago, this injury would have been the end of my budo career.  I can move in straight lines, but any sort of lateral movement is impossible right now, which makes most of the budo I do problematic.  It made me consider what it might mean to not practice budo anymore.  At first that was too scary a thought to touch upon very hard.  Budo and budo practice are important to my idea of who and what I am.  At first, the idea of not having budo as a part of my life was so frightening I found myself coming up with rationales for why that couldn’t happen.

Then I had to ask myself why did the idea of not doing budo anymore make me so anxious?  Budo is great.  I almost accept that as an a priori  truth that needs no support.  When I realized I was close to that level of devotion to it, I decided I needed to do some serious thinking about what budo is in my life.  If I can’t imagine life without budo, I’m probably putting too much emphasis on it, and I need to work at getting my life more balanced.

Budo, like any “do” 道、is a small way pointing its finger at the big Way 道　that the Taoists talk about.  But budo isn’t the Grand Way of the Universe.  It’s a small way that is approachable by a little guy like me.  I don’t imagine that I will ever be so wise that I really understand the Grand Way of the Universe, the Big Tao that Lao Tzu talks about in the Tao Te Ching　道徳経、but I do think I might be able to get a handle on a little way like budo.

I like budo training.  I really like it.  It’s one of the most absorbing things I do.  I can get lost in budo practice for hours at a time, and occasionally, when I’m really lucky, whole days.  Good budo challenges me at every level: physical, mental, and emotional.  It makes me look at things very closely, break them apart and see how things are connected.  Why it is that when my partner does X, the most suitable thing for me to do is Y.  It’s not just about how I move my body and what I do.  It’s about how what I do influences my partner and vice-versa.  It’s how I move in space and time and how I move with the people and things around me.  Do I go blundering into things, lurching from situation to situation, or do I move with awareness and sensitivity to my surroundings and what is happening beyond myself.

That’s the point where my little way, budo 武道, meets up with the big Way 道 of Lao Tzu.  I learn about living in the world and interacting with it through practicing budo.  I learn about how to move effectively, waiting for the right time to move, leveraging what my partner is doing to strengthen my actions, not overreaching, not overextending, and knowing when to pull back instead of blundering on the way I’m going.  These are lessons I really try to apply to my life outside the dojo.  I’m never sure how successful I am at applying them to life, but I’m trying.

But what is it about budo practice that is so great that I don’t want to imagine life without it?  The tough answer isn’t that budo practice is so great.  It’s not the epiphanies about living in the world that I get from practice.  It’s not the lessons about movement and stillness.  It’s not the lessons about timing and not moving before the moment is right.  It is about the rush of being able to handle myself and a weapon at a higher level than I move at on a normal day.  It is about the thrill of not getting injured and being able to handle it when someone attacks me without reservation.  It’s about having access to physical power that other people don’t have.  In other words, the parts of budo that I don’t want to imagine being without, are the outer shell of training that is all about my ego.

If I could never train again the way I am accustomed to training, I would not lose the deep lessons of training.  I would still be able to work on timing, stillness, movement, best action in the world.  I wouldn’t be able to work on being tougher and more dangerous.  I wouldn’t be able to practice with dangerous weapons or doing powerful empty hand techniques.  I would have to let go of that part of me that finds these things exciting and a rush and a boost to my ego.

As I thought about this, I realized that what I need to work on is getting rid of that part of my ego.  The injury to my knee is painful, but blessedly, it can be fixed.  If I don’t let go of my ego though, I can cause injury to the people I train with, as well as those I live and work with.  Looking back, the injury to my knee was partly driven by ego. I really wanted to prove I could throw my training partner.  Did I need to?  I could have gotten through the evening’s training without throwing him, and we both would have been fine.  Unfortunately, I really wanted to prove something to him and to myself, and it was something that didn’t need to be proven.  So I tried to set up a throw, and instead of letting it go when it didn’t work out, I pushed more effort into the throw.  My partner did a perfectly reasonable movement to stop the throw, and when I threw in still more effort, the thing that ended up giving was my knee.  

If my ego had not been involved, I doubt I would have pushed for that technique.  My ego was involved though, and it blinded me to the proper movement, positioning and timing.  My ego convinced me to try something that was clearly foolish and doomed to failure.  I’m glad it happened and I got injured there.  In the dojo, with good training partners is a good place to find out about your ego.  What if it had happened at home or at work or on the street?  At home I could have insisted on winning arguments and being right and in charge, harming my relationships with my family and friends.  At work I could push my views forward over better plans and advice to elevate myself amongst those I work with, and perhaps harmed others jobs and incomes with plans based on my ego rather than good timing and positioning in the market.  On the street perhaps my ego would have insisted on “defending” myself from someone and getting hurt or even killed, when a better solution might have cost me my wallet or just the a bit of ego as I let someone else have their way even though it might be wrong, rude and disrespectful.

The important bits of budo practice I can find in other places.  I can work on breathing and timing and presence and movement in a lot of activities that don’t involve combat practice.  If I can’t at least control my ego, or better still, let go of it, then maybe budo training isn’t the place for me to be right now.  That’s the powerful lesson coming from this injury.  My ego has gotten too big.  I need to work on cutting it down to size.  I’m finding this aspect a lot more painful and troublesome than any of the physical pain I’ve encountered in training.  

It’s easy to train the physical aspects of budo, but the mental side is more critical.  This where you learn not respond to threats and attacks that aren’t real threats.  I’ve learned that much about maai in the dojo.  There is a point where my partner is too far away to be able to reach me.  In these situations I can ignore the sword strike and focus on my partner because I know the sword is not going to touch me.  I don’t have to move unless I want to.  I’ve learned to await the real attack peacefully, without excess tension or excitement.  Then I move when it’s really appropriate to instead of whenever something appears to be threatening.  I’m trying to learn to apply that lesson to encounters outside the dojo.  This is tough.  Often what is being threatened is not me so much as my image of myself.  

This injury has forced me to face one part of that.  The threat of not being able to do budo is not a threat to me.  It’s a threat to my image of me.  Looking at it that way, the most difficult part becomes trying to drag my image of myself closer to whatever the reality is.  I enjoy budo immensely, but it’s not all I am.  Being really honest with myself is tough because it is so discomfiting.  I have to admit that, as much as I love budo, and as much as I try to define myself in budo terms, that’s only a small fraction of who I am, and I need to make room for imagining myself in other ways.

This doesn’t mean giving up budo, by any means.  It does mean admitting that a threat to my budo practice is not a threat to me.  It does mean balancing what I’m doing in budo with some other activities to make me a more complete person.  I know I’ll never be finished.  I will be a work in progress until there is nothing left that can be call “me”.   Budo is a part of that. Right now it’s a part I really love and enjoy.  But it’s not an essential part of my life or who I am.  I have to accept that and train with an awareness of this.  My budo is a small way, not the grand Way of the Universe.  If I remember that, I can learn a lot from it.  When I forget this, my ego swells and I can go off in all sorts of unhelpful directions.

My knee hurts.  And it’s really frustrating when I can’t do things I want to because I’m pretty sure my knee won’t support them.  I’ve got lots of other things to work on and think about though.  This knee injury isn’t the end of the world.  It’s a change, and a hurdle and problem.  One of the few things I think I’ve figured out about the big Tao is that change is constant, form is transitory.  This knee injury is a useful lesson, and it keeps on teaching.  My budo training will go on, but it will be different, and hopefully less ego driven. If I hadn’t gotten hurt, I might have been able to avoid this lesson, and that would have been worse than the injury.

I wonder what lessons I’ll learn from having my knee put back together?  This injury is definitely no fun. I'd much rather be physically whole, but I think I may have learned something valuable about myself in the process of dealing with this injury.  Now if I can just keep learning. It's not the end of my budo career, but it is the start of a new phase.   

Budo Then and Now

I was reading where someone was saying  they are working to preserve the spirit of budo as it had been 500 years ago.  That sounds nice on the surface, but when I think about it, I’m not so sure this is really a desirable thing.  Budo is a way, a path, a journey.  If we try to keep it exactly as it was, it is no longer a journey, and it loses its relevance to the present.

I can understand the urge to preserve a martial art without allowing anything to change the art and the tradition.  The people who created these arts were geniuses, and what they created has great value.  That value can be destroyed when people who lack sufficient depth of experience and understanding start playing around with the techniques and kata which make up the art.  It would be too easy to lose the core of a martial art by trying to constantly update it and make it attractive so as to compete with every new fad that comes along.  One look at what modern competitive judo has become will show what a mistake this path can be.

Kodokan Judo includes everything that can be included under these two fundamental principles: “Maximum efficiency, minimum effort” and “Mutual benefit and welfare”.   Competitive judo no longer has guiding principles.  It is about being popular, easy to understand and putting on a good show.  To these ends, the rules get rewritten based on whatever seems likely to increase the sport’s popularity this year.  In order to make competitive judo more popular, the International Judo Federation recently banned an entire range of throwing techniques.  No good explanation has been given by the International Judo Federation (IJF) for why they did this, but the strongest speculation seems to be that this will remove wrestling and modern BJJ elements from the sport.  Judo grew strong accepting challenges from other jujutsu styles and learning from defeats.  Modern judo is just running away from the challenges posed by other grappling systems, becoming weaker and less worthy of respect in the process.

Worse than this, in a recent press release, the IJF said that the new rules are “to promote beautiful and spectacular judo, where ippon becomes the ultimate goal again”.  Except that the aim of Judo is not scoring ippon (full point win) in a competition.  The aim of Judo is to develop an understanding of the principles of “mutual benefit and welfare” and “maximum efficiency with minimum effort”.  Those are the principles of Judo.  Modifying rules to make Judo more exciting for spectators but less effective in teaching the essential, foundational principles of Judo and making it a less effective martial art is a betrayal of the spirit of Judo.  This is chasing popularity for the sake of being popular.  It is also the destruction of Judo.  I predict that if Judo continues down this path, it will disappear in just a few generations as people switch to arts that remain effective and based on good principles.

If we only preserve budo as it was, without ever letting it change though, it becomes a museum piece.  Nice to look at, but not really something that belongs in our day to day lives.  In the past, budo systems were referred to as “ryu” 流.  This is a character that tells a lot about the nature of budo traditions.  Read “nagare” when it stands alone, means “stream, current, flow”.   This gives the idea that these teachings are flowing  through time.  Not static like a fossil, but alive, moving, changing, growing, as they pass through the years.  A great ryuha should not be weathered down and worn away by time like a rock, but it should grow mighty as water flows from a narrow stream in the highlands and gathers other streams into it and becomes a river.

Budo is a living way.  If we try to preserve it unchanged forever, it loses its value and relevance to the world around it.  Just as one’s individual understanding of Budo and its principles evolves as one grows in the art and deepens their understanding, Budo schools have to evolve and grow as the world they exist in changes.  This change can happen in variety of ways.  One of the most common is for a teacher to become dissatisfied with the art they are practicing to found a new art, which we can see around us abundantly in recent years.

Another possibility is for an art to actively grow and evolve, to remain suited to the world around it by making changes or additions that keep it up-to-date with the world.   An example of this is happening can be seen in the art of Shinto Muso Ryu.  Shinto Muso Ryu was founded on the use of a 128 cm staff, called a “jo”.  When the art was founded early in the 1600s, it was just the art of the staff versus the sword, with  some sword vs.  sword  techniques taught alongside,  so students could become proficient in the sword, both to better understand the art of the staff, and to understand the most common weapon in the world of Japan at that time, the sword.

As decades and centuries went by, the kata for jo were expanded to include more and more scenarios against the sword.  Over the decades, other weapons were added to the curriculum as well.  Jutte, a common police weapon in Tokugawa Japan, and the tying and binding art of hojojutsu  were added late in the 17th century as Shinto Muso Ryu became associated with the police force of the Kuroda-Han in southern Japan.  In the 19th century, a school of kusarigama (a short sickle with a ball and chain attached) was added to the curriculum, expanding the practitioners understanding of weapons and of longer spaces.  At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a period when walking sticks became quite fashionable, and since they were readily available, and similar to the core weapon of Shinto Muso Ryu, one of the senior practitioners developed a curriculum for the walking stick.  

Shinto Muso Ryu now offers a student the opportunity to learn weapons that function at a variety of ranges and that operate on principles of striking, cutting and flexibility.  The art has not stopped growing and adapting.  During the second half of the 20th century, a group of techniques for dealing with unarmed attackers who grab the jo were developed.  These have not been included in the official curriculum yet, but they are taught to students as kuden, or verbal tradition of the art.  I know that leaders of some lines of Shinto Muso Ryu are also developing additions to the art that they see as beneficial to their students.  The most common of these are iai forms, but it is perfectly reasonable to imagine a senior teacher deciding that Shinto Muso Ryu should also offer a set of empty hand techniques to go with the art’s weapons training.  It hasn’t happened yet, but Shinto Muso Ryu is only 400 years old.  There is lots of time for the art to continue to grow and adapt.

Living arts change, grow and adapt.  Dying arts have pieces of themselves worn away by time and are eventually forgotten.   This phenomena can be seen as well.  Some styles of iaido that once encompassed not only solo kata but also paired weapons work with multiple weapons have lost all or nearly all of their paired kata and they are down to just 1 weapon.  These are fading arts, because in losing their paired kata and many of their weapons, they don’t get just a smaller curriculum, they also lose a huge amount of knowledge about timing, spacing and combative distances.  You can’t learn how to judge spacing and timing from solo practice.  You also cannot learn to read a person’s body cues to understand what they will do next, or what lines of movement they have committed themselves to.  Without a variety of weapons, they are limited in understanding the distances necessary for a variety of weapons lengths and types.  It is possible that by letting these paired practices fade, they arts in question have lost the majority of their knowledge, utility and applicability to the world.  This can be seen in Judo as well.  The rule changes mentioned are the elimination of attacks and defenses.  The art is shrinking and losing some of its strength.  It is fading, and if this continues, it will die.

It’s possible for an art to revive, especially if there are multiple lines of transmission.  Then lines that have lost aspects can learn them anew from lines that have maintained their tradition.  This is tough though, and takes some brutal honesty on the part of the line looking to recover it’s full breadth and depth.  The leaders of such an art have to be willing to admit that their art is less than what it was, and could be, and go to someone else and humbly beg to be taught what has been forgotten.  That takes true humility, which is often especially difficult for someone who has become senior in an art.  

It has happened though.  Members of Kashima Shinto Ryu recognized that a part of their art had slipped away at some point and was no longer known.  However, they also knew of related arts that still taught similar practices to those they had lost.  Being more loyal to their art than to their own ego and status, the leaders of Kashima Shinto Ryu went humbly to one of these other arts and asked to learn what had been lost by previous leaders of their own art.  For all that you hear of jealously guarded secrets in the martial arts, there is a lot of openness also, and the leaders of the art approached by Kashima Shinto Ryu agreed to teach what had been lost.  By doing this, the leaders of Kashima Shinto Ryu strengthened their art and gave it new vitality.

There is no reason to assume that once an art has been around for a couple of generations in one form, that it can never change.  In truth, the opposite assumption should probably rule.  That once an art has been around for awhile, it will change.  The question then becomes “How much change is a good thing.”  I have to admit that I tend to think that less change is more successful.  Changes need time to be tried out and examined for robustness.  Those changes that aren’t robust enough should never be formally included in the art. If they do prove worthy over time, then they should certainly be included in the formal curriculum.  These changes and adaptations take time, decades rather than years, to become fully embedded into a living art.   

Most of the senior teachers in classical ryuha that I have met are extremely conservative about their art.  I used to suspect that they were ignoring the world around them striving to keep their art in the past.  As a spend more and more time training with them, my understanding and appreciation of their decisions grows.  They aren’t trying to make their arts wildly popular. They don’t want to be the next big thing.  The next big thing is always quickly replaced some other big thing.  They value their art and want it to be strong, with solid enough foundations that it will survive the changes around it and be able to absorb them instead of being broken by the changing world.  They do make changes.  As I look at classical ryuha, I see that they are adapting to the world.  They have changed the way they take on students and how they share their arts.  Many things are no longer hidden away in scrolls.  In some arts that have grown large enough, the art is presented in books and on professional videos!

It is the student’s responsibility for discovering how their art relates to the world they live in.  I once thought the teacher should show the student how it relates, but I’m realizing that I don’t live in quite the same world my students do, and I can’t make all the connections for them.  Each generation of students is responsible for understanding how their art is relevant to the world around them.  The world changes, but a koryu budo with solid principles will continue to be relevant without frequent changes, because what the ryuha is really teaching are the principles.  The techniques are just a means to that end.  Each generation has to do the work of learning the principles and applying them.  

I practice koryu budo.  I practice living arts.  I hope the arts my students practice will be subtly different than the arts I practice, as the art flows down through time, adds new knowledge and understanding, and adapts to new circumstances and challenges.