Then What?

Budo, the Pursuit of Excellence, and the Goal of Practice

     There are many who take up Budo for the wrong reasons.  Often, especially for young men, it has something to do with wanting to be tough or the desire to be the “baddest man” in the neighborhood or something of a similar nature.  Many who do take up the Budo for this reason, however, find that it ends up giving them something much more than they had realized at first.  It not only gives them purpose, but it aids in killing the ego rather than building it up.

     In my last “regular job,” after I had retired from working in Engineering and before I took up my love of writing as a full-time profession, I worked at a non-profit with “at-risk” young men, ones who had been in some kind of trouble with the law or who had been incarcerated for one reason or another.  The non-profit I worked for helped them to find jobs in various sectors and then trained them in the skills needed to excel in those jobs.  For the most part, I found them to be relatively good humans—I believe in the inherent goodness of all God’s creatures—who had simply made some mistakes from hanging out with the wrong crowd or not having the male guidance they desperately needed in their adolescence.  I also had a few who struggled with anger issues and sometimes found themselves in brawls.  In some of the neighborhoods where they lived, these altercations could lead to more than just black eyes and bruised egos.  It could lead to their deaths from gun violence.  I went to one funeral that broke my heart completely and can still bring tears to my eyes when I think about it.  For the participants in our program with anger issues—assuming that they were willing to do it—I did something with them that those who don’t understand the Budo, or other martial ways, might find odd.  I took them to the dojo where I trained.  Those who did so went with the assumption that they would learn to fight.  They did.  But they also learned lessons much deeper, such as benevolence, respect, integrity, honor, loyalty, and self-control.  In the Budo, these are aspects that become embodied rather than simply “learned.”

     Unfortunately, there are those who take up martial arts and don’t learn these lessons.  There have always been those who, sad to say, take it up, and then continue to do it for years and perhaps even decades, just so they can be better fighters.  But as one of my first senseis used to remind us in class when I took up the Budo in the 1980s, “martial arts without philosophy and spirituality is nothing more than brutality.”  You see these kinds of martial practitioners in various competitive fighting arts.  When I fought in Kyokushin and full-contact JKA-style karate tournaments in the ‘90s, this was, unfortunately, a rather common sight.  Think Cobra Kai from the Karate Kid movies, and you understand the kind of karatekas I write about.  (I suppose this is also represented in the recent Cobra Kai television series, but I have never seen it, so I’m not sure.)

     Those who take up the Budo for these less-than-honorable reasons need to ask themselves a question.  Then what?  What if you do achieve your goal of being the “baddest dude” on the block?  What if you can dispatch a couple of guys at once in a bar fight with relative ease?  For those who manage to achieve goals such as this without honing the martial virtues are going to be dark individuals.  You don’t want to reach that point without having asked the question.  You don’t want to have to ask “now what?”  You want to keep the question of “then what?” in your mind from the beginning.

     In Japanese chambara films, the lone samurai hero might dispatch a few foes every morning before he gets around to eating breakfast.  Such samurai, and other budoka, rarely existed in real life.  The early Edo-era samurai Yagyu Munenori was one of the very few historical samurai who actually was such a man—as close as is humanly possible, at least.  A retainer to Tokugawa Ieyasu—the first of the Tokugawa shoguns who ushered in the Edo period and unified Japan after a couple centuries of civil war—Munenori once singlehandedly killed seven assassins who had infiltrated the Osaka stronghold.  It was such a masterful display of swordsmanship that one might think it a legend if there weren’t witnesses to it and historical validation.

     Munenori was a man who had reached the rarefied heights of which budoka throughout history have always sought.  And what did he see?  I don’t know.  No one does.  But I surmise that what he encountered was a darkness so bleak that he knew the Budo must include a philosophical cum spiritual component to balance out the savagery of being capable of dealing death with one’s skills.  You see this in the few writings that he left such as The Life-Giving Sword, and in the texts written by the Zen monk Takuan Soho to Munenori—The Inscrutable Subtlety of Immovable Wisdom and Notes on the Peerless Sword.

     Even though the spiritual is the goal, in order for your martial practice to become a spiritual one, you must focus on achieving physical perfection of your skills.  And it is a lifelong discipline, for you will never achieve complete perfection of your particular Way.  You can always improve even on the most basic moves.  Personally, I have focused on little other than the most basic techniques in over 40 years of practice.  You can spend your entire training lifetime in Karate attempting to perfect a backfist, reverse punch, a side kick, a roundhouse, a front kick, and various blocks.  Yes, I mean quite literally nothing else.  If you try to just acquire a lot of different techniques, you may end up with a wide range of moves that you can do but you will attain perfection in none of them.  The same is true if you just attempt to learn a lot of different martial arts rather than spending decades attempting to attain perfection in one.  Training in such a manner is what will lead you to spiritual excellence.

     It must be understood that the physical is used as a means to the ends, attaining the various minds (shin) of Budo—shoshin, fudoshin, mushin, zanshin, and, finally, senshin.  These various minds—shin can also be translated as heart or, perhaps better, heart/mind—become embodied in the physical techniques of the budoka.  Although it can’t truly be expressed in words, as much as I, and others, might attempt to do so, you know it when you see it.  Even those who don’t know anything about the Budo can recognize a practitioner who has attained senshin in his kata.  To attain it yourself, you simply train—it will come of its own accord and in its own time.

     It also helps to have a separate, daily spiritual practice, such as zazen.  Ideally, this should be a practice that you do first thing in the morning and last thing at night before going to bed.  If you can follow your morning zazen (or whatever practice that you do) with an immediate practice of Budo—even if it’s just doing a kata a couple of times—all the better.  You then must carry the mind of zazen with you throughout the day.  It does no good to have meditative practice that is cut off from daily life.  In that case, you might as well not do it at all.

     To keep all of this simplistic, the reason that many people take up Budo is in order to be happy.  Even the hope of attaining some sort of physical toughness or dominance over others is done in the thought that this will somehow make one happier.  If not “happiness,” then perhaps joy or peace of mind, or something similar.  Replace happiness with whatever term you wish.  Unfortunately, however, the thing that we believe will bring us peace rarely achieves that goal.

     There is a story from India that illustrates this point.  Once, there was a poor man from a rural village who had a dream.  In the dream at night, God came to him and told him that tomorrow he would meet a wandering monk who possessed a gem that would make him the wealthiest man in all of the land.  When he awoke, he thought it was just a dream, but that morning he encountered a sannyasi sitting under a tree in meditation when he went to work in the fields.  He walked up to the ascetic and asked him if he had a precious gem and, if so, would he give it to him?  The monk reached into his sack that carried all of his meager possessions.  “Do you mean this?” the sannyasi asked, procuring a diamond from his bag, the largest diamond the man had ever seen.  “You may have it if you wish.  I found it in the forest yesterday.”  He handed it to the villager.

     The villager was delighted.  He clutched the diamond tightly in his hand.  Unable to think about working, he went back home to hold the diamond as he thought about all of the riches it would bring him.  As the day wore on, something kept nagging at him and he couldn’t get it out of his mind.  At night, he held the gem tightly, but he couldn’t sleep at all.

     The next morning, he went back to the sannyasi, who was still sitting blissfully beneath the tree on the outskirts of the village.  “I don’t want this diamond anymore,” he told the ascetic.  “I want something else.”

     “What is that?” the sannyasi asked.

     “I wish for the inner peace that allowed you to give it away.”

     What is it that you want from your Budo practice?  What do you think your life will be like if you actually attain that goal?  Think long and hard about the answer.