Optimal Budo

 

I saw someone on reddit saying that the footwork in Kendo feels unnatural. My immediate reaction was “Of course it feels unnatural, it’s budo.” Budo isn’t natural. Budo is about doing everything in the optimal way. Budo is about letting go of the things we’ve learned naturally and refining ourselves.

“Natural” gets used a lot in 21st century marketing. So many things are marketed as “All Natural” that you’d be forgiven for thinking that “natural = good health.” Natural just means that humans haven’t manipulated something. Natural doesn’t have any positive or negative connotations. All-natural honey tastes wonderful. All-natural rattlesnake venom will kill you quite naturally. Mother Nature isn’t a gentle lady, and you shouldn’t assume that “natural = good.” Until the 20th century, the majority of children didn’t make it past childhood, and more than 1 woman in 100 died in childbirth. Look at the animal kingdom, pick any species, and you’ll see that the vast majority of offspring die before they can mature. This is “natural.”

We learn to breathe, stand, walk, and run, naturally. If the natural way of doing these things was the best way, musicians and athletes wouldn’t spend years learning to breathe properly. If the way we naturally stand was good for us, Feldenkrais and Alexander Technique teachers wouldn’t have jobs. If the way we walk and run was naturally optimal, there wouldn’t be any track coaches.

There is nothing natural about using a sword well, about throwing opponents smoothly and effortlessly, about hitting someone’s face with your fist in a way that damages them but doesn’t break the delicate bones in your hand, about taking a little jutte and handling a guy with a sword. These are not natural acts. Budo seeks to optimize what nature has given us in both mind and body. We train in budo not to be natural, but to make the optimal seem natural.

 The first lessons in budo, I suspect in any ryuha, are techniques but are also about learning to use your body properly. I teach new students how to walk and how to breathe. They think they are learning to hold a sword or staff, learning how to throw someone, or learning the footwork to a kata. They aren’t really learning any of these things at this point. They are learning to use their bodies properly. Students usually take a year or more to overcome enough of the bad habits they picked up naturally to be able to start learning to hold a weapon properly, or even walk without throwing themselves off-balance with every step.

They’ve learned to use their bodies naturally, and what they’ve learned is all wrong for budo. They grip things with their thumb and index finger, because it feels natural. They sway side-to-side and bounce up-and-down when they walk. These are natural habits. Only once they stop reflexively gripping with their index fingers and throwing their bodies off-balance with each step they take will they truly start to learn to hold a weapon or move through a kata.

Optimal budo comes from the optimal use of the body. To get there you have to start with the fundamentals. What’s more fundamental than breathing? Optimal breathing is a learned skill. Just ask a trained vocalist or flute player. Developing great breathing skills takes time and effort. Classical budo ryuha all have pretty firm ideas about how to develop a great martial artist in their tradition. There are specific techniques and kata that are studied in specific order so that the student develops that unnaturally optimized body and mind that make their budo powerful and adaptable.

The flip side of learning to do things well, is learning to not do things that don’t need to be done. One of the key things in optimizing the budo body and mind is getting rid of everything that is unnecessary. Unnecessary movement, tension, and mental noise all have to go. Unnecessary movements create openings and opportunities that a good opponent will make use of. Unnecessary tension slows you down and makes it harder to move and respond to what is happening. Unnecessary mental noise stops you from realizing what your opponent is doing until it is much too late to do anything about it. There are many reasons the great martial artists throughout Japanese history spent time repeatedly talking about mushin 無心 or “no mind”.

Swinging a sword or throwing someone is hard work when you first start out. It would wear me out. As you train under a good teacher, two things are likely to happen. Yes, you are likely to get stronger from the training. More importantly, your movements will become more efficient and you will use less effort to swing the sword or throw your partner. You will hear your teacher make ridiculous statements like “The sword wants to cut. Let it.” How is the sword going to cut if you don’t power it? The more you learn, the less you are driving the cut, and to your surprise, the more the sword is doing the cutting for you. You are optimizing your movement. You are using just the muscles needed, and no more. Very small women throw very large men with little effort. I’m not talking about the woman applying a joint lock and the guy jumping into a breakfall to save his joint, I mean she takes him into the air herself, adds her power, and physically throws him to the ground. This isn’t because the woman is stronger, it’s because she is efficient. She isn’t using her back to lift him. She has stripped all the unnecessary effort and movement out of her action so that all of her power smoothly moves him through the air and to an abrupt meeting with the ground.

Optimal use of weapons is subtle. I used to think my hikiotoshi uchi was good because I could smash the sword out of my partner’s hands. I was strong and I was smashing their weapons. Eventually my teachers got it through my skull that this wasn’t good technique. FIrst, it wasn’t efficient. I was putting far too much effort into the swings for the effect I was getting. On top of that, by putting all my strength into the strike, I was destroying my own stability and creating openings that could easily be counterattacked.

I’m a slow learner, but once I realized that my teachers were getting more power with less effort than I was, I slowed down, emptied my tea cup, and started learning hikiotoshi uchi from the beginning. I spent a lot of time just watching my teacher and other seniors. I learned to better coordinate my movement and my breath. I discovered that the proper angles and alignment are more important than either strength or speed. Then I really practiced hikiotoshi uchi for the first time. What I had been doing before that was swinging a stick, but it wasn’t the hikiotoshi uchi of Shinto Muso Ryu that my teacher did; it was closer to “Huck smash!” than to any real technique.

I was beginning to learn optimal movement.

I worked to take out all the unnecessary muscle activation, to be soft rather than stiff. To be precise and efficient in my application of power. Over time, my technique became softer and more powerful, while I expended less effort. This was particularly embarrassing for someone who had spent as much time reading the Tao Te Ching and doing Kodokan Judo as I had, but my technique began to move in the direction of optimal.

I’ll never have perfect technique; no one does. That doesn’t stop me from working to improve my technique every time I touch a weapon. Efficiency and precision beat raw power. One of my first iaido teachers, Suda Sensei, would do kendo randori with high school students who had been training in kendo for 10-15 years. They were strong and quick as only 18 year olds can be, and yet he shut them right down. His technique wasn’t fast. It wasn’t muscular. It wasn’t stiff. His shinai flowed, filling openings almost before they were created. His technique was precise, the kissaki always exactly where it should be, and it was efficient, using only as much power as necessary. Did I mention that Suda Sensei was in his 80s at the time? He hadn’t had the strength or speed to challenge these young men physically in decades, but he didn’t need it. His kendo was so close to optimal that he could drive them off the floor and there was nothing they could do about it.

Suda Sensei practiced to improve every time he touched a shinai, even in his 80s. Look at the video link below of Mifune Kyuzo of the Kodokan doing judo in his 60s and 70s. This is as close to optimal technique as I think you can find. Light, flexible, flowing, smooth, and precise.

It’s not natural. It’s better than natural. It’s optimal.

Thank you to Deborah Klens-Bigman Ph.D., for using her editor’s knife and cutting a lot of stuff out of this that needed to be cut.