Budo: The Way of Change

 

Great day of training. It must have been 95F (35C) in the dojo, though.

I talk a lot about the benefits of budo. We go to the dojo and we sweat.  We work at improving some aspect of our skills every time we enter the dojo. It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been training or how old we are.  My iaido teacher, Kiyama Hiroshi, was still training in his 90’s. A friend of mine pushed himself to improve his jodo to challenge for 8th dan when he was 90.He didn’t make it to 8th dan, but he was pushing himself to improve until the day he died.

Budo, much like other Japanese arts such as chano yu and shodo, makes three assumptions about practice and us. First, that perfect technique can be imagined. Second, that we can always work to come closer to perfection. Third, that we’ll never achieve perfection, but that’s no excuse for not continuing to grow and improve.

All of the streams of thought that come together to form budo assume that human technique and character can, and should, continue to develop throughout one’s life. Confucius, Lao Zi, Zhuang Zi, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), all provided strands of thought and ideas to the cultural stew of China and Japan. All of them assumed that people could change, grow and improve at every stage of life.

The Zhuangzi is filled with stories that emphasize taking your time and learning things. The idea that learning and development never end is intrinsic to the all of the lines of thought in ancient China that used “way” 道 as a metaphor for their school of thought. There were a lot of them.

On the other hand, there is a common idea in Western thinking that we each have some sort of unchanging, immutable core or essence. I’ve heard many people say “I can’t change. That’s just the way I am.” or “I don’t like it, but that’s who I am.”  Once they finish high school or college, many people seem to think that they are done growing, changing and evolving as a person. Thankfully, there is no evidence to support any of this.

A curated selection of the best of the the Budo Bum

 

Everyone changes, every day. Whatever we experience changes us. Little things change us in little ways, and big things can be, as the saying goes, “life changing.” Life never stops working on us, changing us, molding us. We are not stone. We are soft flesh that changes and adapts to the stresses it experiences. An essential question is whether we are going to be active participants choosing how we change and what we become, or are we going to be passive recipients of whatever life does to us..

A central concept of the idea of a Way, michi or do 道 is that there is always another step to take, another bit of ourselves we can polish, a bit of our personality that we can improve, and that we can direct that change. This is true whether we are talking about Daoist thought or Confucian thought or something in between. The idea of a finished, unchanging human really doesn’t come up. 

Budo constantly reminds us that we aren’t finished growing, developing, improving. Rather than declaring that we can’t change, budo is a claxon calling out that we change whether we want to or not, and that we can direct that change if we choose.  Budo is about choosing to direct how we change instead of just letting the circumstances of life change us.

We are making the choice to take part in how life shapes us from the moment we enter the dojo, although I doubt many realize how much budo can influence who we become when we make the decision to start training. Good budo training should, and does, change us. Physically we get stronger, more flexible, improve our stamina and develop the ability to endure fierce training and even injuries. That’s the obvious stuff. More importantly, budo changes who we are. It should make us mentally tougher and intellectually more flexible. It should help us to be more open to new experiences and ideas. It should teach us that we can transform ourselves. It’s a cliche that budo training makes people more confident, but it’s also true of good budo training. You go to the dojo and you get used to people literally attacking you, and as time goes on, you’re not only okay with that, but you look forward to it. I don’t know anyone who started budo training because they enjoyed being attacked, but it doesn’t take very long before that sort of training, whether it is done through kata geiko or some sort of randori or free sparring, becomes something you look forward to with a smile.

Keiko, the formal term for budo practice in Japanese, is the highlight of my week. The time I spend in the dojo practicing and doing budo never tires my spirit. It exhausts my body, but my spirit always comes away refreshed, recharged, and ready to deal with all the stresses of life outside the dojo. Budo practice isn’t something we “play”. In Japanese you never use the verbs associated with play when talking about budo, and even judoka avoid words that emphasize the competitive and focus on terms like tanren 鍛錬, forging. Budo is about change; conscious, self-directed change.

The wonderful thing is that once we learn how to change ourselves in the dojo, we know how to do it outside the dojo as well. The discomfort we get used to while pushing ourselves in the dojo teaches us how to deal with discomfort outside the dojo. That’s one thing budo doesn’t eliminate - the discomfort of changing. Self-directed change is difficult and pushes us into places and situations that are anything but comfortable. I can remember being a pugnacious jerk, and dealing with disagreement and conflict as a win-lose scenario that I had to win. It took a lot of time in and out of the dojo to learn that just because there is conflict there doesn’t have to be a winner and loser.  There are lots of other ways to deal with conflict, and I’m grateful to my budo teachers that I learned something about conflict as something other than a zero-sum game.

Budo has a lot to teach us about life, how we can change and adapt to the world instead of letting the world change us. All the effort that we put into learning the techniques and skills of budo also teaches us how to direct an equal amount of effort into changing any aspect of ourselves that we wish to confront. The budo path has no end destination. We just keep working at it.

Special thanks to Deborah Klens-Bigman, PhD. for her editorial support and advice.

 

Growth And Change In Budo

 

I was talking with a student and teacher of classical Japanese martial arts, and the all too-common myth - that the teachers and students of these centuries-old ryuha practice exactly as their creators taught them in the first generation - came up.  We both laughed. It’s a compelling story, but it’s a myth - one that is dangerous for the students, and for the arts themselves. Whether you do something called a way ( “do” 道). An art (“jutsu” 術), or a style or school (“ryu” 流)、the story is the same.

These are all arts that have survived centuries of use and application. The thought that hundreds of years ago someone discovered a principle and created techniques for applying it that were perfectly formed and are still perfectly suited to the world they are in credits the founders with a level of genius that I cannot imagine. I can imagine them realizing principles that can be applied to an ever-changing environment, but I can’t stretch that to the founders also creating techniques that perfectly apply that principle no matter how the world has changed.

Principles don’t change. That’s the nature of principles. They are fundamental ways of understanding the world and how it operates. In budo, sometimes principles are expressed and learned through physical practice, such as that discovered by following the Shinto Muso Ryu directive “maruki wo motte suigetsu wo shire “丸木を持って水月を知れ””holding a round stick, know the solar plexus”. Others are clearly expressed philosophical concepts, such as Kano Jigoro Shihan’s “seiryoku zen’yo” 精力善用 (often translated as “maximum efficiency, minimum effort”), which is the short form for “seiryoku saizen katsuyo” 精力最善活用 “best use of energy”.Jigoro Kano, Mind Over Muscle, Kodansha, 2005). Usually shortened to “maximum efficiency minimum effort,” Kano’s maxim  refers to  a broader principle than just the physical technique. It’s about the best use and application of energy, mental and physical. These core principles of different arts haven’t changed since they were first expressed.

Principles, by their nature, are universal. If they can’t be applied universally, they aren’t principles. I can apply the principle implied by the jodo maxim maruki wo motte suigetsu wo shire in a variety of ways and situations. I can even apply this principle without a stick in judo randori, to pick an example outside of Shinto Muso Ryu. Kano Jigoro was an evangelist for the idea of seiryoku saizen katsuyo and its usefulness outside the constrained world of the dojo. He wrote extensively about the principle and why everyone should apply it, whether they practice judo or not. These principles haven’t changed since they were first understood.

 

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How they are applied and expressed changes all the time however.  Not because the principles change at all, but because the environment in which they are being applied changes. Judo is nearly 140 years old. Shinto Muso Ryu has been around for more than 400 years. For all of these arts, the world has changed dramatically since they were founded. The world of combat in Japan slowly changed as weapons and tactics evolved, and then was transformed by the introduction of firearms in the 1500’s, followed by the enforcement of peace by the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1603. Shinto Muso Ryu, essentially military police tactics, was born into the first years of unsteady peace during the Tokugawa Era. The samurai class was still on a war footing, with the Tokugawa victory only a few years earlier. Weapons of war and people skilled with them were everywhere.

A little over 250 years later the wearing of swords in public was banned. Clothing styles in Japan changed from traditional kimono and hakama to European dress. The tools of combat increased in number and power. People still study Kodokan Judo and Shinto Muso Ryu and other koryu arts. The arts are still seen as relevant to this age that would have been unimaginable when they were created. 

The people who study Kodokan Judo still practice many things that Kano Jigoro laid down as part of his art. They do a lot of things that he didn’t include in his pedagogy for the art. I find Kodokan Judo principles being applied not just in competitive matches with people wearing traditional dogi, but in no-gi matches and even professional MMA fights. More interesting to me is the way Kodokan Judo’s principles continue to be applied in and out of the dojo. It’s still seen as an effective form of physical education, and the principle of seiryoku zen’yo, along with the principle of yawara 柔 (softness, pliancy, flexibility, suppleness), is taught as having far more than just martial applications. The whole of Kodokan Judo manages to offer a very complete set of principles for interacting with the world physically and intellectually nearly 140 years after its founding. It hasn’t stopped growing and adapting. In addition to the official kata of Kodokan Judo, many practitioners develop their own, unofficial, kata to practice and explore the principles in situations that are not focused on in the official curriculum.

The proportion of waza practice versus randori practice versu kata practice is something judoka never stop arguing about, and every judo dojo has a different answer to what the proportions should be. I see people working out new techniques based on the classical principles, and practicing in new ways. It’s not uncommon now to see judoka train without dogi so they can prepare for no-gi tournaments. Do they stop doing judo because they take off their dogi and fight in competitions that aren’t using IJF rules? If you're applying judo principles it’s still judo, regardless of what you're wearing or what you’re doing. Judo is, after all, yawara. It’s soft and pliant. It can change its shape to fit the situation.

Shinto Muso Ryu reaches further back for its origin, another 270 odd years past Judo. The relevance of a stick that was intended to be used to subdue people with swords in a world of guns and IEDs is difficult to imagine, especially when you see the people studying it wearing clothes that have been out of date for centuries and practicing against people armed with swords. Relevant in the 21st century? It looks more like Live Action Role-Playing to most people. However, the principles haven’t changed, even if the practical applications have had to evolve. 

Throughout its history Shinto Muso Ryu’s students haven’t been afraid to add new lessons to the art. Kata were added steadily over the centuries, and tools were added to the practitioner’s kit. An art that started out with just a stick and a sword now teaches students to apply the principles to sticks of nearly any length, as well as chains (and in some lines even bayonet length blades!). The real principles about movement, timing, spacing and rhythm are still useful not just in combat situations, but everywhere in life. I’ve only been doing Shinto Muso Ryu for 28 years, but in that time I’ve watched teachers tweak kata and change what they emphasize. Looking back before my time, to the films that survive from the last 90 years or so, it’s clear that people have been tweaking and playing with the kata since long before I showed up. Considering all the recorded changes that have been made to Shinto Muso Ryu over the centuries, no one can seriously claim that they do Shinto Muso Ryu just like Muso Gonosuke Katsuyoshi did it.  It’s been changing and adapting from the day he started figuring it out for himself.

Budo practices are paths to follow, not fossils.  You have to adapt to the terrain. If you never change anything, and never learn anything beyond where the founder began, you would be preserving an artifact that has no relationship to the age you live in. I fully expect the arts I practice and teach to grow and change. The principles will still be there, but I sincerely hope my students learn new ways to train, new ways to teach the principles, and new ways to express the principles. Anything less than that is a discredit to everyone who has gone before us.

Budo Isn't About Technique

Budo is about traveling a path.  It’s not about being stuck in one place.  The road is always there, time is always moving and the world is always changing, even when we are still.  Budo is about maintaining balance and integrity (physical, mental and emotional) whether we are in movement or stillness, and having a calm, imperturbable center whatever is happening around us and however we are moving.

The world is dynamic, so attempts to remain perfectly still are doomed, rather like trying to stand perfectly still on a sailboat in a storm.  You can be stable, quiet and calm, but these must be within a dynamic world where you are constantly making adjustments, and sometimes your overall and ongoing stability is only maintained through large, dynamic movements on your part.

Budo is not static. A lot of people seem to think that great budo has already achieved perfection in some previous age. Whether it’s classical judo, or Ueshiba’s aikido, a great koryu like Takenouchi Ryu or Yagyu Shinkage Ryu, or one of the famous iai styles like Muso Jikiden Eishin Ryu or Muso Shinden Ryu, people craft an image of a budo that was perfect when the founder or great teacher lived, and that they are trying to recreate the perfection that is contained in the kata and teachings.

I’ve run into aikido practitioners who look back on Ueshiba or Shioda or Tomiki as having achieved budo perfection. For many years of my judo practice I felt that way about Mifune’s judo.  Among koryu budo people, the idea that the founder of their ryuha was the paragon of ideal budo is common.  The thought that there was one, perfect budo that we are trying to emulate or recreate is an attractive one.

It’s also a trap. Budo is a way, a path. In Japanese, the styles are called “ryu” 流. It comes from the word 流れる meaning “to flow, to stream, to run (as a river)”. The road we travel is always changing. Every step we take along the way takes us to a different place. Rivers and streams flow through space and time and are even more dynamic, transforming the world as they move through it.  Even if Ueshiba or Shioda or Tomiki or Mifune or Yagyu or Hayashizaki achieved budo perfection, it was perfect for that point in time and space.

Budo isn’t a technique or even a collection of techniques.  It’s a Way. As we travel the path, as the world moves through the ages, budo has to adapt to new times and places in which it is practiced.  What was great budo in one situation may be completely unsuited to another. The thing about any great budoka is that their budo is always fresh.  They don’t try to force the same response, the same solution, onto different situations. They apply the principles of their budo afresh to each situation.

Budo can only ever be perfect for the moment it’s expressed in. What made the great founders and teachers of budo truly great was not only their ability to manifest budo that perfectly suited the situations they found themselves in.  What made them great was that they could also pass along a way to learn the same principles that they applied.

Budo is something that is practiced without end. It’s a path that doesn’t stop. If we’re doing it right, we’re not really learning techniques. We’re learning the fundamental principles that make the myriad techniques work.  Great budoka reach up and find a way to manifest those principles in training, in conflict, and in life. The greatest figure out a way for others to learn to manifest those principles.

The ideal is that anyone can reach up and touch perfect budo. With practice, I’m convinced we can. That thing about budo being a path and a stream is important though. I think I may have touched perfect budo a few times over the decades I’ve been training. These are times when I somehow manage to perfectly express the principles of budo that I study and practice spontaneously in life.

It happens and then it’s past. It never lasts. For a moment you manage to express your budo perfectly. It’s not a continuous condition though. We reach that peak moment, and it passes. As we get better, so does the chance that we will touch that perfect budo. For judoka, the first time we come close to perfect judo is that day we’re standing there, staring down at some poor uke as we demand “Why did you jump! Don’t jump for me! I want to earn my throws!” The poor uke looks up at us and says something along the lines of “Jump? You buried me with that throw. There was no way I was stopping it!”  When we did that throw, the universe aligned in our favor. The timing and kuzushi were perfect. Uke had no choice and no chance to do anything but fly, and because the timing and kuzushi were perfect, it felt like we didn’t do anything. For a moment we touched perfect judo.

Unfortunately, those moments don’t last. As soon as the moment happens it’s over. Uke stands up, randori continues and uke feels like a boulder every time we try a technique. Nothing seems to work. Touching perfection is momentary, but those moments are wonderful and inspire everything else we do. Once we’ve touched perfection we want it again. Then we try to force it, and the more we try to force the further away perfection becomes.

Those moments of perfection feel incredible, but they are moments. We’re not perfect. We can’t maintain a state of perfection. Any time we touch perfection it’s wonderful and incredible and momentary. It doesn’t last. It can’t.

It is perfect in that instant, under those precise conditions. We express the principles of our art in a way that suits that moment. If we try to cling to it, whatever it was we were doing will cease to be appropriate as the moment passes and the situation changes. The goal of training is to become better and better at expressing the principles of what we study in a way that suits the moment.

The journey of life never ceases. Every step is new. The real lessons in budo are not static techniques, but the principles that animate the techniques. It’s ironic that the main way we learn budo is through repetition of prescribed exercises when the goal is to be able to spontaneously express the principles in any situation.

We practice a limited set of techniques and kata that are like the finger pointing at the moon in the story from Chuang Tzu. The finger points to the moon, but if you remain fixed upon the finger you’ll never see the moon. The techniques and kata are the finger pointing to the fundamental principles. If you cling tightly to exactly the way a past teacher did the kata, you’ll never get to the principles beyond the kata. If you insist there there is only one way to do a technique, you’ll miss the million other ways and situations that technique can be used to express the principle.  I have books of judo technique in which the entire book examines just one technique, but looks for as many ways to express that technique as possible. Each technique is animated by underlying principles. Our job is to figure out what the principles are and learn to apply them.

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If we only study the technique, it becomes a matter of chance that we will pick a technique that is perfectly appropriate for the moment. If we follow the direction of the techniques we study, we begin to understand principles, and when we follow the principles, the technique will develop naturally out of the action of the principles. No two techniques will ever be exactly the same when they flow from the principles, but they will be appropriate to the moment. It’s like the judoka in randori who does a beautiful throw, then comes off the mat and asks the spectators “What technique did I do?” The judoka was working with the flow of energy from her partner and worked something that smoothly flowed with that energy. Working with their partner’s energy and letting the principles guide her, she ends up with a technique based on the principle.

That’s the ideal. It doesn’t happen as often as any of us would like. If we cling to techniques it will never happen. Go into a situation with the intent to do a particular technique and you have to force the moment to fit the technique. Go in with principles of movement, balance and flow, and the moment will guide you to the appropriate technique.

The more we practice, the more we internalize the principles, the easier it is to touch perfection. We can never hold on to it, but we can learn to get out of our own way and let perfect budo happen more and more often. We progress along the Way one step at a time. We learn to breath and to walk. Then we start learning some techniques. It’s only when we begin to understand what animates the techniques and makes them effective that we get close enough to touch perfection from time to time.

Perfect budo is a constantly moving target though. What worked yesterday won’t work at all tomorrow. Each step along the Way takes us to a different place. Each morning we awake and the world has changed a little. We can’t force the world to stay still any more than we can force the sun to stop in the sky. If we cling to things as they were our budo cannot advance.

Each day we have to find new ways to apply the lessons of the Way that we learn from studying the kata. The better we get at it, the easier it is to adapt to the whirling of the world around us. A novice sailor leaps and tumbles and is thrown around the deck of the boat by the gyrations of the waves. A seasoned sailor calmly walks the same deck, adjusting to each shift and jump of the boat calmly and smoothly. A master can sit calmly meditating on the deck while the ship pitches wildly, adjusting with muscle changes so small no can see them. The master is calm when the seas are calm, and when the seas seem to be enraged.

The world keeps changing, but the principles don’t. Budo gives us a Way to continually adapt. Classical iaido ryuha would be worthless relics if their techniques were what they are really teaching. No one has carried swords like that in 150 years. The principles that classical ryuha teach haven’t changed though, and learning to express those principles in life is what gives classical ryuha their value.

Photo Copyright 2013 Peter Boylan

We don’t study techniques and kata in order to learn techniques and kata. We study techniques and kata to learn the principles that animate them. The conditions under which a judoka can do uchimata are limited. The conditions under which they can apply the principles of kuzushi, timing and movement that they learn from studying uchimata are endless.

When teachers talk about forgetting technique, this what they are getting at. The Way is infinite and no one can learn a separate technique for every set of conditions. Each place along the way, every new morning, presents new conditions. We have to learn to see beyond the techniques we study to the principles. Then we can apply the principles in ways that work with the conditions we have rather than try to find conditions that suit the technique we want to do.

Through great effort you might be able to hold your place in the world still and unchanging, but that won’t help. The world will continue changing around you. Even to stay still takes continuous adjustment, just like the master meditating on the deck of the ship. Walk the path. Learn the techniques. Transcend the techniques and learn the principles. Apply the principles and let the principles create new techniques to suit moment.

Change in Classical and Modern Martial Arts

The classical arts of Japan (pre-1868) have a very different structure from the modern arts. The classical arts are entirely defined by their kata. If you take something like Suio Ryu or Shinto Muso Ryu, they have a clearly defined set of kata. Changing the kata is frowned upon, not because innovation is bad, but because it's really difficult to find anything in the kata that has not been boiled down to the essence of effectiveness.

Most koryu (again, pre-1868 traditions) kata are paired kata, always practiced with a partner. The reasons for doing the kata a particular way become vividly clear in a bright black and blue manner if you try to change things. The attacking partner is an immediate check to see if what you are doing is effective or not. And when it's not, you may well end up with a beautiful bruise as proof. Recently a friend and I spent a morning working through some kata slowly. Each time we tried to change the kata, we discovered that the kata form was the strongest way of responding for both the shitachi and the uchitachi. Each time we tried something different the openings and weaknesses of the new positions were clear. After hundreds of year of practice and examination, our forebears in the system had worked out the most effective way for things to be done. Our lesson was to understand why they designed the kata as they did.

The practice of the kata define the koryu traditions. Nearly all of the lore and wisdom that generations of teachers have accumulated is in embedded in the kata. It's up to students to tease this knowledge out. One way to do that is with what my friend and I were doing. You deconstruct the kata, try different reactions and attacks at each juncture and see if they work, or as we discovered, why they don't work.

Traditional Japanese systems, koryu budo, generally have very specific and clear pedagogy. Shinto Muso Ryu has a clear set of 40+ jo kata, as well as 12 sword kata, 12 walking stick kata, 24 kusarigama kata, 30 jutte kata, and I've forgotten how many hojo kata. These are very clearly defined. It's extremely difficult for teacher who hasn't been training for decades to make changes, and the kata themselves make it difficult. As I discussed above, we couldn't find any weaknesses in the kata we were exploring. We just learned a lot of options that don't work as well those taught in the system already. With this kind of situation, there just aren't many opportunities for innovation.

The most common way koryu arts change is that someone develops a new kata to address some situation or condition that is not considered by the existing kata. In Shinto Muso Ryu for example, they developed some new kata at the end of the 19th century to make use of the walking sticks that had become popular at the time. This is a logical extension of the principles of the stick that is the main weapon in Shinto Muso Ryu to a shorter stick. They didn't change old kata, or get rid of anything. They developed a few new kata to teach an understanding of the ranges and uses of the shorter stick. Systems do change, but they do so very slowly. With koryu, those changes are usually minor additions to the system rather than revolutions in the way things are done.

People sometimes wonder why koryu systems don't have lots of sparring and tournaments like the modern arts of kendo, karatedo and judo. Surprisingly, this is not a new question. Groups have been arguing about the value of sparring type practice in Japan for over four hundred years. When Japan was at war with itself, which was most of the time from about 1300 through 1600, there were more than enough opportunities for people to test their ideas, techniques and skills, so the question didn’t come up. Once Tokugawa Ieyasu unified the country and removed the last possible source of revolution in 1615, those opportunities disappeared. Soon after that sparring and challenge matches started to appear. Arguments over the value of sparring compared with kata training began almost immediately, and have continued unabated to this day. Over the centuries though, the styles that emphasize sparring as a part of their training never demonstrated significantly better records in the many challenge matches. If the sparring faction had shown consistent success the other systems would have changed rather than lose.  The systems that emphasized kata weren’t losing, so there was no need to change. Kata remained the core of training because when done properly, it works.

Tournaments are a relatively recent phenomenon. Tournaments first showed up late in the 19th century once the Japan had reformed its government and sword teachers had no way to make a living. Some people started doing matches to entertain the public and try to support themselves as professional martial artists after traditional positions working for daimyo disappeared.. These didn't last long, but they contributed to the development of modern kendo. Modern kendo equipment dates back to that used for sparring and some challenges as early as the 17th century.

Sword demonstrations and prize matches during the Meiji Era (1868-1912) popularized and contributed to the creation of a sport form of kenjutsu done with shinai (bamboo swords). Similar matches for jujutsu schools contributed to the rise of Kodokan Judo. Kano's students won a number of noted victories and the Kodokan was invited to participate in inter-style matches by the Tokyo Police. The Kodokan did exceptionally well in most of these matches and earned an impressive reputation. These matches though also drove some significant changes in the Kodokan's curriculum.

Fusen Ryu is reported to have defeated a number of Judo representatives with strong ground techniques. At the time, Kano was not in favor of focusing on ground fighting because he felt it was a dangerous place to be in a street fight. However, these losses on the ground in public matches pushed him to develop a groundwork curriculum for Judo. One of the big surprises about this is the way he went about it. Contrary to the idea of martial schools jealously guarding their secrets, at this time at the end of the 19th century, people were much more open. Kano invited the head of Fusen Ryu to teach groundwork at the Kodokan Dojo, and he did. With the help of the head of a rival system, Kano significantly strengthened the Kodokan curriculum. Kano never became a huge fan of groundwork, always believing that staying on your feet was optimal in a fight, but the pressure of doing well in competitive matches drove him to adapt his art.

In addition, Kano changed from the classic menkyo, or licensing, system, and created the modern dan rank system based on competitive ability.  The koryu systems award licenses based on a persons level of understanding and mastery of the system, up to and including full mastery of the system.  Kano abandoned this system for one in which students were ranked according to competitive ability in matches.  If a student could defeat four other students of 1st dan level (commonly known as black belt) , then he was promoted to 2nd dan (black belt).  This resulted in tremendous changes in what is taught and how students train.  Anything that is not allowed in competitive matches is marginalized in training, even if it is effective in combative situations outside of training.  The focus narrowed to those techniques which are most effective in competition.  The up side of this focus is that it drives innovation and experimentation.  Judoka are constantly looking for innovative ways to win in competition and refining their techniques to make them more effective.  The down side is, as I describe above, that anything not useful in competition is largely ignored, even if it is highly effective in situations outside of competition.

Various pressures on competitive martial systems are still visible today. For the larger systems such as Judo and various Karate styles, two of the big pressures are popularity and money. In the last 15 years the International Judo Federation has been busy making numerous changes to the rules for competitive Judo matches in order to make Judo more television friendly to maintain popularity and keep it's place in the Olympics. The matches are seen as being too slow and difficult to follow, so changes were made to speed things up. In addition, there seems to be some reservations about how well people from other systems, such as wrestling and BJJ, do when they enter Judo tournaments. I have heard complaints that wrestlers and BJJ players use a lot of leg grabs and take downs that aren't classical Judo. The techniques work though. My feeling is that in Judo, we are reacting in the worst way possible to these challenges from wrestlers and BJJ players. Instead of inviting them into our dojo to learn from them, as Kano did, the IJF has chosen to ban the leg grabs and take downs from Judo competition. To me this only makes Judo weaker and less worthy of study.

In the Karate world, I see a lot of things in tournaments where combative functionality is not even considered. People invent kata that are flashy and athletic, but have nothing to do with the rich history and combative effectiveness of the Okinawan traditions. I have seen rules for weapons kata that require a certain number of weapons releases. This means that people are required to throw their weapon into the air! From a standpoint of combative functionality, this is ridiculous. However, to people who don't know better, this looks impressive. These Karate tournaments seem to be responding to a desire to be as popular as possible, rather than as effective as possible. It is a similar to what the IJF is doing make Judo more television friendly so the International Olympic Committee won't drop Judo from the Olympics like it tried to do with Wrestling a few years back. I won't even get into the silliness that is Olympic Tae Kwon Do.

Many of the modern arts are relatively easy to change because they are competition focused and committee governed, so changes in the rules will drive major changes in training. The koryu arts are deeply seated in kata that have been refined over centuries, and I can't really imagine any pressure big enough for them to make significant changes to their curriculums. Since the classical systems are not looking for rapid growth or tv money, they are under no pressure to change except that which they have always had; to adjust their systems to they remain relevant to the world around them. Judo and Karate both have strong depths of kata, well thought out and highly refined, but these traditional, effective and functional kata are often ignored in the race to perform well in competitions. The desire to do well in competition and to be visible on the world stage will continue to drive changes in these arts. I would love to see the pressure and focus of modern arts return to combative functionality, but I doubt that will happen when it is so easy to get caught up in the ego trap of popularity.

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.