The Way of Action

Zen Budo and the Path of Striving for Achievement

     “Decay is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.” ~the final words of the Buddha

     “The image of Buddhism has gone through quite a lot of change over the years. Nowadays people don't tend to associate Buddhism with striving so much as with peace and withdrawal, with being rather than doing. Whatever would old Shakyamuni think of that? 

     “Buddha pointed out that things are impermanent and you might take it from that that he was suggesting that it is futile wasting effort on things that are not going to last. However, the original moral was probably just the opposite. Buddha put a new spin on the idea of karma, remember. Karma had been taken to mean that you are what you are because of what you did in your last life so there is nothing you can do about it. This logic underpinned the caste system and it still does. This was a story about how nothing changes. Buddha came along and said that actually karma is about change; that it is about the fact that if you want to do something about the caste system or anything else that you think is less than honourable, then you can. Striving would be pointless if things were permanent. Impermanence gives the possibility of freedom and emancipation and makes striving worthwhile.” ~from the book Not Everything is Impermanent: Zen Therapy and Amidist Teachings by David Brazier

     I began with the two quotes above because they help to set in motion what I want to discuss in this essay, and that is how the philosophy of Budo Zen is a path of action.  Budo uses Zen, if it even uses it at all—Zen, as I’ve written about elsewhere, was actually not commonly practiced among various budoka throughout history, and despite its image in popular culture, was most certainly not the religion of the samurai or other classical Japanese warriors—as a means to attain the goals of Budo.  This is in contrast to modern, pacifist Zen where Zen is seen as a means of not attaining anything, but is, rather, a way of letting go of all striving.  The problem with this modernist interpretation is that it doesn’t actually align with Zen (or other forms of Buddhism) throughout history, so perhaps this essay will be of some interest to you if it is Zen that you practice but not Budo.  Nonetheless, I must admit that this is written specifically for those who practice Budo or another martial way and are pursuing their goals of improving themselves as martial practitioners.

     I can understand, and I’m sympathetic towards, the modern view of Zen as a path of letting go rather than striving.  But I would have never seen it in that light when I was a teenager and practiced zazen in the traditional Karate dojo of my adolescence.  At the dojo, it was clearly used as a means to help us become better budoka, and any other use would have been seen as wasteful and wouldn’t have even been understood by my senseis.  That was back in the mid ‘80s.  However, I took up zazen with renewed interest and determination in the early part of this century.  Since I first started training in martial arts more than 40 years ago, I had always been interested in it and other concomitant Japanese philosophies that were associated with the Budo.  But around 25 years ago, I was in a very difficult marriage and was going through a lot of painful experiences—physical, mental, and emotional—and I was looking for something that would assuage the pain.  I started reading more and more Zen and other Buddhist books, and reinvigorated my practice of zazen.  Sometime in those years—I can’t remember the exact source (I read, on average, a book every day or two so forgive my lack of memory)—I read a quote that went something like this: “The key to attaining peace and happiness is to accept your life as it is and detach from the need for it to be any different.”  At that time, it was just what I needed to hear (or read, in this case).  Part of my issue was the emotional toil my life was taking on my mental health through always striving like hell to change things.  But my life was only getting worse, and so I needed to hear that it was okay to simply let go of things and rest in the inherent, natural peace found in the present moment.  But that letting go practice that was so needed at first eventually became an impediment to my progress over the years.  Instead of working on my personal issues that were at the root of my suffering, I was using zazen as a means of (what is now termed) “spiritual bypassing.”  I was using it much like a drug addict uses substances to avoid coming to terms with his pain.  Interestingly enough, eventually I also started to develop some addiction problems.  I mean, why bother with the physical practice of zazen when you can just pop a pill to help you forget?  Of course, that wasn’t helped by the fact that I had multiple herniated discs and my spine doctor’s solution was to prescribe me as much oxycontin as I wanted, but that is not the point of this particular essay, I mention it so that you will understand that simply “letting go” is not the answer when you need to face your problems head on rather than avoiding them.

     All of this is not to say, obviously, that you shouldn’t take up the path of Zen or practice the undeniably powerful practice of zazen.  For Budo practitioners, they can be invaluable aids to achieving our goals, so I want to look at practices that transform Budo Zen practice from a way of being to a path of doing.  With that preamble out of the way, let’s look at a few principles of Budo Zen that can aid us in the Way of Action.

Let Go of What Needs to be Let Go of

     Learning to let go is important.  But you need to learn what to let go of and what you need to hold on to.  You need to know the thoughts that must be let go of and the ones that should be cultivated.  You need a practice that allows you to let go of what is unnecessary or even harmful but one that allows you to cultivate that which is necessary.

     Let’s start with thoughts.  Thoughts of themselves are neutral, in the sense that they are neither good or bad.  But thoughts lead to actions, both directly and indirectly.  The thoughts that you constantly harbor will eventually manifest as the life you live.  If you are always thinking negative, pessimistic, angry, or depressive thoughts, your life will tend toward those very things, so it’s important to think of the good.  On the other hand, if you cultivate thoughts of love, compassion, joy, equanimity, and so forth—in other words, thoughts of the good—then your life will begin to embody those very qualities.

     Many times, we think about things that we regret.  We constantly turn over in our minds the people, circumstances, and events that we wish were different.  We do this without even realizing that we are doing it.  When such thoughts come into your mind, do your best to acknowledge the thought and then let it go.  This is a constant practice.  It is one that we must practice from the time we wake up until we go to bed at night.  If you have never paid attention to this aspect of your mind, then be patient with yourself.  Slowly, you will get better at recognizing when negative thoughts enter your mind and improve being able to let them go.

     One of the best times to practice the letting go of thoughts is when you are driving.  Every day, or almost every day, you have to drive to and from work.  Outside of that, you have other times where you must run errands, so the vast majority of us spend a good deal of time in our vehicles.  If you have a long commute, then don’t see it as a detriment, but, rather, see it as an extended period of time to pay attention to your thoughts.  Don’t put on the radio or listen to a podcast or book or anything else.  Rather, drive in silence and notice where your mind goes.  As soon as a thought comes up, let it go.  You may be surprised just how much your mind is churning out thoughts that don’t do you any good.

     You will also need to practice letting go of thoughts while you are training, whether it's in the dojo and you are actually doing your martial practice or whether it’s on the meditation cushion.  It helps if you have a daily practice of zazen that you both start and end your day with.  As soon as you awake in the morning and before your mind starts its constant thought churning, sit on your zafu and zabuton and simply pay attention to your breathing and your posture.  Nothing else is needed.  Don’t try to stop thoughts.  That’s impossible, anyway.  Just notice when they come up, let them go, and return to your posture and breathing.  Doing this first thing in the morning will better allow you to notice your thoughts throughout the day.  Ending your day in the same way will allow you to sleep better and more deeply, and will keep the mind’s thought-making machine from whirring incessantly.  Often, the only time that people get a break from their “monkey mind” is in deep sleep, which is the reason that many people enjoy sleep so much.  It finally gives their mind a much-needed rest, but if you can practice the letting go of thoughts in the waking state, you can reach a point where the Mind of deep, dreamless sleep is with you all the time.

     Let go of the past.  It is gone, never to be repeated, anyway, so why cling to it?  Let go of the future.  It is not yet here.  But the future is important, and yours can be a better one if you focus on the present moment.

     Letting go also has a physical component to it, as well.  Once you have practiced a martial way for many years, you must also learn to let go during your training, particularly in kumite.  Once you have practiced the basics tens of thousands of times (or more!), a technique should arise spontaneously when facing an opponent.  Outside of sparring, in kata, for example, you should reach a point where you just do the kata, or, perhaps better put, the kata does itself.  This is mushin or No-Mind mind.  In this way, letting go is an expression of the Zen concept of emptiness or shunyata.

     Shunyata should not be thought of as emptiness in the way it is often thought of in the West, as meaninglessness or, worse, some form of nihilism.  Perhaps better translations would be openness or spaciousness.  It’s a joyful, open, spacious, and free state of being and ease where we no longer cling to the notion of “self” or “ego.”  Egolessness is another translation that is often used, and this is fine as long as we don’t think of a substantive “self” that is still present when ego drops away.

     You can see mushin expressed in a skilled budoka who has attained shunyata and is capable of expressing it in his technique.  It is rare in today’s watered-down martial art scene but not entirely lost—there are still skilled martial practitioners who can demonstrate it.  To reach that level, constant training is important, which brings us to our next principle.

Focus on the Training Itself

     Letting go is, in many ways, nothing more than the first step that then allows you to achieve your goals.  In Budo, you would never be able to progress if you stayed stuck in the past.  When you begin martial training, you are not going to be very good.  Your technique is going to suck, you are going to lack flexibility, power, dexterity, and the other components needed to improve.  You don’t focus on how bad you are and instead focus on improving your skills.  As your skills do improve, it impels you to train more, longer, and with greater focus.  No matter how good you are or become, you will always want to improve.  If you stayed at the letting go stage, this would never occur.

     You don’t improve, however, by constantly thinking about the future.  You improve by focusing on the training that is occurring in the present moment.  Where you are at now is where you are at.  I know that sounds obvious, but as I’ve written in various weight training essays, many lifters seem to miss the obvious.  Martial practitioners do, as well.  There is, in fact, much overlap between martial artists and lifters.  The process of improving is almost identical in both.

     The only person that you are truly “competing” against is yourself.  You are not anybody else,  You are you.  You will never see through someone else’s eyes or live through someone else’s mind.  Only yours.  So, focus on your training, not that of others.  Now, you should have more advanced practitioners that you look up to and who you admire.  Hopefully, your sensei is one of them.  If he’s not, find another one.  If there is a particular martial artist that you admire, then you should aspire to be able to do what he can do, to have your technique become as smooth and as crisp as his.  But, outside of that, you shouldn’t focus on anyone else’s training.

     Many martial practitioners treat their art as nothing more than a hobby, and, in doing so, they often spend too much time watching videos of other martial artists on YouTube (or other such places) or looking at posts on Facebook or Instagram.  It is something that they enjoy looking at, reading about, studying and whatnot but they don’t spend enough time actually training.  And when they do train, they are more concerned with acquiring more knowledge, learning new katas or techniques, instead of perfecting what they already know.

     Train.  Focus on the training that you are doing.  Focus on improving your skills.  Concentrate on getting really good at the basics.  Do this and the results will come.

     Your training, your practice is the goal.  In Zen Budo, this is known as mushotoku, no profit and no personal gain.  No split between you and the world, between self and object, between me and you.  In Zen terms, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form.”

     Ironically, when our training itself is the goal, instead of some achievement in the future, this is what allows you to achieve your future goals.  The best results are produced by not focusing on results.  It seems paradoxical, which it is, but it is one of the keys to becoming a truly great martial artist.

Embrace Change

     The term in Zen Budo is mujo, constant change, mutability, and the transient nature of all of phenomenal reality.  This is the life that we live in.  But the truth is that we don’t embrace it.  More often than not, we either ignore it or we do all we can so that things don’t change.  We don’t like growing older.  We want our relationships to stay the same.  We don’t want our hair to grow gray and silver.  We wish to be capable of maintaining our speed and flexibility so that our martial skills are constantly improving.  But this isn’t the nature of reality.

     As budokas, we should work on constant improvement.  That’s what this essay is about.  But we must also see things clearly.  In fact, we could sum up Zen by saying that it’s a practice that allows us to see things as they are not how we want them to be.  Clear seeing alleviates suffering, which is the ultimate goal to be attained.  After all, the Buddha Shakyamuni said that, ultimately, his teaching had one goal: the end of suffering.

     As martial practitioners, we should not ignore our bodies.  We should take care of it the best we can.  I know quite a few martial artists my age who don’t train any more, or do very little, because they didn’t bother to take care of their bodies when they were younger.  They got fat and out of shape because they didn’t give their bodies the proper nutrition and they didn’t do enough cardiovascular activities to supplement their martial training.  So, we should take care of our bodies to the best of our abilities.  We should control what we can control and let go of that which we cannot.  Because, deny it as we might, our bodies are not really our own.  They do what they want to do.  We can just take care of it as best we can.

     When we see the transience of things and embrace change, we will practice our Budo with the right mindset.  We will practice it as a means of spiritual change and as a philosophy to guide our lives.  No matter how “good” we get, as we age we will lose our speed, strength, flexibility, and power.  There are martial artists who quit because they no longer have those physical capabilities to the same degree as they once had.  That is sad.  There are a myriad of reasons to continue to train in the martial ways as you get older.  In fact, losing your physicality can be a good thing.  Instead of just being a better “fighter,” you can focus on cultivating stillness, peace of mind, joy, and a mind of awakening.  Those are the spiritual facets we should strive to achieve in the first place.  Concentrate on those goals in your Budo and strive with diligence until the very end.