The
Iaido Journal Feb 2006
The Skill of the Masters
copyright © 2006 Nicklaus Suino, all rights reserved
Excerpted from "Budo
Mind and Body: Training Secrets of the Japanese Martial Arts"
After a hard day of martial arts practice, while
enjoying a cold drink with training partners, we sometimes share
stories of the masters of old. These are stories of men and women
who were able to perform feats of martial skill that seem almost
magical to us today. The stories are an inspiration to train
harder, and they hint at what might be possible if we keep practicing
long enough. The images are so compelling that whole systems of
study have grown up around certain masters, men like Ueshiba Morihei,
the founder of aikido, who was said to be able to throw his students to
the ground with the strength of a single finger. Ueshiba could
casually drop two, three, or even ten attackers. At the same
time, there was more to the old master than mere physical skill.
Considered as an enlightened man, Ueshiba was known for such sayings as
"Love is the highest principle of the martial arts," and "To injure an
opponent is to injure yourself."
According to the stories, there was always something
about these masters that resonated beyond their great skill.
Mifune Kyuzo, perhaps the greatest technician ever to come out of the
Kodokan (the original judo institution), was known for the
softness of his techniques. He was able to defeat students twice
his size while barely seeming to expend any effort. People who
trained with him later said, "It was like fighting with an empty
jacket." Mifune was a great historian of the martial arts, and
developed theories of physical interaction that are still studied by
judoists.
There have been swordsmen in Japan's samurai history
who reached a point in their training where they were able to say, "I
cannot be defeated by anyone in the world." The legendary
Miyamoto Musashi and Yamaoka Tesshu each reportedly made this claim -
in different eras, of course - and nobody was ever able to prove them
wrong. Other swordsmen who engaged these men would face them and
be unable to detect any opening for an attack. Both men were
great artists with a brush, and Yamaoka was a preeminent statesman.
A similar story is told about a martial artist named
Matsumura Sokon, one of the pioneers of Okinawan karate. A
skilled opponent, determined to fight him, tried three times to mount
an attack, but each time was driven back by the sheer physical energy
emanating from Matsumura. The actual physical battle never took
place because Matsumura's challenger was unable to gather himself to
strike.
It would be easy to dismiss these stories as
legends, exaggerated by the admiration of students for their teachers
and by the passage of time, had I not witnessed similar feats by living
martial arts masters. These were not the kind of tricks you see
when you watch a martial arts movie; any well-motivated and talented
athlete could learn the spinning kicks and flips you see on film.
The feats I saw were impressive not so much as physical skills,
although such skills do require years of practice to master, but as
reflections of inner strength. If you saw these masters in
action, you wouldn't necessarily be impressed by a show of great
physical strength. Instead, their proficiency and presence would
cause you to think that something profound was taking place before you.
One living example of such modern masters is a man
named Sato Shizuya, a judo and jujutsu teacher. Like his own
teacher, Mifune Kyuzo, Mr. Sato has an uncanny ability to throw his
students around the mat like rag dolls. Further, when he does it,
he is relaxed, apparently thinking about something else. I know
that he hardly uses any physical strength because he used to toss me
around when I trained with him in Japan. I was thirty years old
at the time, and he was around sixty-two; this was over fourteen years
ago, and he is still a source of great energy and wisdom.
Another of my teachers, Yamaguchi Katsuo, is a
swordsman known around the world in martial arts circles. He
underwent treatment for stomach cancer in 1993, and is very elderly
now, but between 1988 and 1992, watching him perform formal exercises
with the sword was an almost religious experience. During
demonstrations in Japan, hundreds of swordsmen and women will perform
in groups of four or five at a time, and the audience often loses
interest after an hour or two, even when watching some of the most
famous swordsmen in the country. When Yamaguchi-Sensei began his
sword cuts, however, everyone was rapt. A calm would fall over
the audience and the air would become charged with a feeling of
reverence - and these were people quite used to seeing swordsmanship
demonstrations.
At a special event held at the American Embassy dojo
(martial arts hall) in Tokyo, a group of twenty-five or thirty North
American kids had a chance to see Yamaguchi-Sensei perform. These
kids were holy terrors; we worked hard to keep them busy and to tire
them out during their one-hour judo lesson each week, but they were
never quiet and never still. You can guess who was more exhausted
at the end of each class! Even this rambunctious group, however,
fell silent when the old master began to swing his sword. There
were absolutely entranced for the entire fifteen minutes of his
demonstration. The only sound they made was an occasional gasp
when his sword whooshed through the air.
The physical ability of all these men is indeed
impressive, but there is something more to them. They have a rare
presence, a kind of calm strength which some would say has a spiritual
source. Indeed, many of these men would themselves say that the
source of their unique skills is in the spiritual realm, and an
important part of Japanese martial arts philosophy is that students
learn to let nature, or "spirit," generate their techniques. Even
if one doesn't believe in such concepts, however, one can watch the
masters and see that they are extraordinarily focused, their movements
are very efficient, and that they radiate a quiet inner strength.
They express martial spirit in every motion, real martial spirit, not
the kind you pay to see in the movies.
How do they get to be so exceptional? This
question has fascinated martial arts students in the West ever since
students started returning from Japan with incredible stories of their
teachers and the legendary masters. Asian martial arts have
become widespread outside the Orient in the past sixty years, yet there
are very few Western teachers who merit the title "master" in the same
way as do the elder teachers I met in Japan. Even outside the
martial arts, Japan seems to have a surprisingly large number of these
calm, quiet, and deep older folks. There are some crucial
elements in the training and culture of the Japanese masters not easily
transplanted to foreign soil. What these enlightened people have
in common, at least those I have met, is that all were involved in one
of the traditional art forms of Japan, and had been involved in their
practice for at least of couple of decades. Besides the martial
arts, some of the well-known traditional arts are tea ceremony,
calligraphy, classical musical instruments (such as the shakuhachi, or
bamboo flute), and the practice of Zen.
While I lived in Japan, where so many people are
improving themselves through different types of traditional activities,
I began to believe that there must be some useful characteristics
shared by all these arts, particularly the different forms of budo (the
general Japanese term for martial arts). Maybe, I thought, it
would be possible to extract these characteristics and make them
available to those who wanted to become better martial artists.
In fact, in nearly four decades of practice, I have learned that most
of what once seemed mysterious or esoteric about budo is actually
fairly simple and practical. My teachers have shown me that the
principles of one martial art are usually found in the others as well.
All this suggests that the principles underlying
these different arts are common to an even wider variety of physical
arts, but since I am no expert in tea ceremony or traditional brush
painting, the descriptions and explanations in this book will center on
martial arts. Thoughtful readers could apply them to other areas of
life, however, and I encourage them to do so.
The real secret to becoming an expert in martial
arts is realizing that training is a process of self-discovery.
Further, it is a means of modifying one's personality to make oneself
healthier, more well-balanced, and more efficient. Outside of
Japan, this idea has for the most part been lost, and the budo forms
are typically taught as nothing more than specialized fighting
methods. This approach is wasteful, however, for in the short
term there are much more efficient ways to teach fighting than the
highly ritualized practice of traditional martial arts. Only when
an art is considered as a whole system, including its "internal"
aspects, can all the cultural content be justified. Ironically,
taking this larger view, the "excess baggage" of ritual and spiritual
components in these arts makes them better, more efficient tools for
personal cultivation even while complicating the process of learning
how to fight.
This apparent contradiction is not as troublesome a
problem for serious students of budo as it would seem, since there is
not much real need for most of us to learn how to fight. In
contemporary society, we have a much greater need for calm wisdom than
for efficient killing skills. The budo forms, having been created
or molded during a time when Japan was deciding that it had a similar
need for a higher sort of person, are ideally suited for developing
human beings with those characteristics.
This doesn't mean that everybody who reads this book
and tries to follow all the advice found in it is going to become a
great master or guru. To become really great at something
requires luck and talent, as well as the same long years of practice
that everybody must put in to become merely good. Following my
suggestions for learning a martial art should help you become better at
it. You will become more efficient at your chosen art, and
hopefully get more enjoyment out of it. If you keep at it long
enough, you should find that other areas of your life are improving,
too.
If you want to go further, however, if the spiritual
and philosophical accomplishments of the people I have described appeal
to you, then you will have to give serious thought to the deeper issues
that are raised here, and probably do a lot of other research as
well. As I advise in later chapters, students who want to become
great martial artists must read everything they can get their hands on,
train fanatically for an extended period of time, and reflect deeply on
the relationship between budo training and their lives.
Some material that relates to the inner aspects of
budo will be too esoteric from a few readers. I have tried to
present it in a straightforward manner, without too much religious or
spiritual content, for those who think such issues less
important. It is, however, well worth anyone's time to give
serious thought to those matters as well as the practical matters
inherent in martial arts training.
Real budo mastery is not for everyone. The
path is too hard for most people, and some of the rewards are less than
obvious. Traditional martial artists do not make a lot of money,
and there is little recognition of great budo practitioners, even in
Japan. Most who idolize martial arts teachers are needy people
who require a great deal of attention themselves.
If you want to find a path with heart, however, and
are sure that money and praise are not too important to you, budo may
be the right place to look. Even those who practice budo as a
hobby will realize many of its benefits. The rewards - better
health, increased confidence, calmness, and insight - are evident even
in the short term. The benefits of a lifetime of practice are
deeper than those more material rewards that come from common pursuits.
Once you start making progress along the martial
arts path, you will find that the things you learn allow you to prosper
in your work, your hobbies, and in relationships. You will find
that your ability to handle crisis improves, and that your satisfaction
with life increases. These improvements can be brought about if
you immerse yourself in the study of real budo and commit yourself
fully to the ideas found in it. The triumph which you may have
thought would come through defeating others, you will find comes
instead from learning to love the training itself, and from living
honestly, without self-delusion, in the real world.
The person to whom this book is most likely to
appeal is one who believes that, in some way, he or she could be a
little better, physically, mentally, or spiritually ("better" here
meaning closer to what one expects for oneself). Such a person
must believe that improvement is possible, and that success, in some
form, is worth striving for. He or she must believe in something
larger or more important than him or herself, such as the dojo, family,
God, or country, be willing to work to benefit that larger concept, and
to take satisfaction from doing that work every day.
The bottom line is that almost everybody wants to
make his or her life better in some way, and this book is both a
practical guide to one way of accomplishing this and an exhortation to
undertake the task with as much commitment as possible. Budo is a
pursuit that provides infinite opportunities for growth; it gives back
as much as you put into it. Even if you don't have five hours a
day or a lifetime to devote to practice, you can enjoy training and
reap some of its benefits. The simple key to realizing those
benefits is throwing yourself into practice with great enthusiasm.
This
article is an excerpt from "Budo Mind and Body" by Nicklaus
Suino. It is due to be shipped to bookstores on March 14, 2006,
and will be available from Amazon.com, Shambhala.com, and any
other purveyor of fine books.
Nicklaus Suino's website is artofjapaneseswordsmanship.com