Great Waves

Traditional and Non-Traditional Zazen as Training for Budo

     In the early days of the Meiji era there lived a well-known wrestler called O-nami, Great Waves. O-nami was immensely strong and knew the art of wrestling. In his private bouts he defeated even his teacher, but in public he was so bashful that his own pupils threw him.

     O-nami felt he should go to a Zen master for help. Hakuju, a wandering teacher, was stopping in a little temple nearby, so O-nami went to see him and told him of his trouble. 

     “Great Waves is your name,” the teacher advised, “so stay in this temple tonight. Imagine that you are those billows. You are no longer a wrestler who is afraid. You are those huge waves sweeping everything before them, swallowing all in their path. Do this and you will be the greatest wrestler in the land.”

     The teacher retired. O-nami sat in meditation trying to imagine himself as waves. He thought of many different things. Then gradually he turned more and more to the feeling of the waves. As the night advanced the waves became larger and larger. They swept away the flowers in their vases. Even the Buddha in the shrine was inundated. Before dawn the temple was nothing but the ebb and flow of an immense sea.

     In the morning the teacher found O-nami meditating, a faint smile on his face. He patted the wrestler’s shoulder. “Now nothing can disturb you,” he said. “You are those waves. You will sweep everything before you.”

     The same day O-nami entered the wrestling contests and won. After that, no one in Japan was able to defeat him.*

     We may think that using zazen—the word may sound exotic but it means nothing more than sitting meditation—for purposes other than a spiritual pursuit is a modern phenomena.  Purists—I confess to counting myself amongst them at times—may bemoan the fact that meditation is used these days as nothing more than a means of combating stress, helping us to deal with anxiety, or improving performance in the workplace.  Companies wouldn’t offer mindfulness courses to their employees, after all, if it didn’t make them more effective and efficient workers.  But as we can see from the story of Great Waves, it has long been used in Japan and other parts of Asia as a way to improve one’s martial abilities.

     Of course, the Meiji Era of Japan is relatively modern considering the country's martial and Zen history that stretches back over a thousand years ago.  The Meiji period lasted from 1868 to 1912.  Nonetheless, hundreds of years before that there were samurai and other martial practitioners who used zazen as a means of accelerating their Budo training.  Writings from such historical samurai luminaries as Miyamoto Musashi, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Yagyu Munenori, and Issai Chozanshi attest to this.

     The story above, at first, reminded me of the Zen of the Edo-era samurai Suzuki Shosan, who created his own form of Zen sometimes referred to as “Fudo Zen.”  In it, you meditated on a fierce protector deity such as Fudo Myoo in order to gain power from the deity and, therefore, improve your performance in battle, not to mention your chance of actually coming through it without getting killed.  In many ways, the practice given to Great Waves was a form of Fudo zazen.  (If you want to read more about Suzuki Shosan, and his particularly unique methods of Zen and Budo practice, then click on THIS essay.)

     I then began to ponder how budokas—those of us who seriously practice the Budo path—have long used zazen as a method, not for attainment of the Way, but as an efficacious means of improving one’s Budo.  Interestingly enough, however, it is then that the practice of Budo itself becomes the means for attainment of the Way, of what is traditionally termed “enlightenment.”  Kensho, or satori, is attained on the mat, during a kata, or in that moment of kumite when body and mind fall away, leaving only no-thought, no-mind.  It might seem odd to those who are simply zennists, and not Budo zennists.  After all, one might reason, why not go directly toward no-mind Mind while you are sitting in meditation, instead of using meditation as a method for attainment of That at some other time in the future?  The question is, after all, valid.  I think the answer, though, is a simple one.  The Budo practitioner who also does zazen is exactly that: a Budo practitioner and not, strictly speaking, a spiritual practitioner.  If one is a true budoka, then this is the way it must be, for one who is a budoka can not be anything different.

     None of this is to say that you shouldn’t practice zazen in its “traditional” manner.  I certainly do.  Most of the time, my zazen is that of shikantaza or susokukan, “just sitting” or “breath counting” respectively.  (If you want to read more details on those methods, read my essay “Zazen and the Budoka.”)  But you can do both.

     If you are interested in zazen, then you should practice at least once a day in a “traditional” manner, in the morning or in the evening, for 20 to 30 minutes at a sitting.  Even better would be if you could do both, though the most important thing is to be able to consistently sit zazen.  If you know you can sit for 20 minutes in the evening, after dinner or before bed, and you won’t miss a session, but you know that you probably will miss a morning sitting, at least here or there, then you should simply stick with one evening sit.  But in addition to that traditional zazen sitting, you could sit one additional time, even if it’s for a shorter period, where you use a visualization technique—such as the one used by Great Wave—or some other method, such as an affirmation, to improve your martial practice.

     You don’t even have to sit in the zazen posture to do this.  When I was a competitive powerlifter, any time that I had a meet approaching, I would begin a visualization practice at the same time that I started my “pre-meet” training cycle, usually 8 weeks before a meet.  For those 8 weeks before the competition, I would lie in bed before drifting off to sleep and see myself making all of my powerlifts.  I would feel myself lifting the weights that I wanted to do at the meets, breaking PRs and winning “best lifter” at whatever competition I was entering.  I did this every single night, without fail.  When meet day approached, my subconscious knew that I would make all of my lifts and win my weight class.  I think, in all of my years of powerlifting, I came in 2nd place one time.  My point being that the visualization worked.

     Before being a competitive powerlifter, I competed in quite a bit of martial arts competitions, both kumite and forms.  When it came to forms competition—or kata in Budo vernacular—I would do the exact same visualization method.  (It’s the reason I knew it would work once I switched to powerlifting.)  I would lie in bed at night, visualize myself doing my kata with perfect technique and immaculate—no pun intended—form, and winning the kata category.  I did occasionally lose a competition, but not much, and I always “placed.”  I can’t think of a single martial arts tournament where I failed to do so.

     I’m more of a Budo traditionalist these days, and I do Budo, particularly kata, for the simple sake of doing Budo, and not for trophies or “glory,” or any of the other ego-ridden reasons that I formerly competed.  Nonetheless, visualization zazen is still a valid practice for me.  Perhaps, in some ways, even more valid, as I get older and my body can’t handle continuously rigorous practice.  Because my mind can handle it.  No matter how my body feels, I can still visualize my technique—kicks, punches, blocks, katas—with ease.  In doing so, my mind doesn’t seem to “know” the difference between the “real” training and the “unreal” visualization.  My “motor memory” still stays sharp even if I do slightly less physical training.

     Having written the last few paragraphs, keep in mind as well that there is nothing inherently “wrong” with letting the traditional methods of zazen be the meditation that aids your practice, rather than visualization or affirmations.  This is exactly how Musashi and Munenori treated their zazen.  For a simple, and simple-to-understand method, doing susokukan will make you more at-ease, calm, will lower your blood pressure, your heart rate, and will teach you how to breathe properly into your tanden.  Once you have practiced for just a few weeks on the cushion, assuming your practice is consistent, you will be able to allow this sense of pervading at ease to carry over to your Budo training.  Obviously, remaining calm and filled with peace has benefits when you’re sparring in the dojo or performing kata in front of others.

     To return to how I began this essay, the greatest “carryover” benefit to your Budo training is that, eventually, the Budo itself becomes the means of attaining the Way.  Seemingly out of the blue, during a moment in kumite or after simply throwing a “basic” punch, body and mind fall away, leaving you with simple thisness.  Your kata becomes the koan and, in a manner that you can’t explain but you most certainly know, the answer to the sound of one hand clapping arrives in your body-mind like a thunder clap.  It makes sense.  After all, when you read the many tales of ancient (or even modern) Zen masters attaining enlightenment, it rarely happens on the meditation cushion.  Rather, it arrives when one stubs his toe, or hears the temple bell, or is struck with a keisaku.  There’s no reason, then, that it can’t happen when you block a punch.

*From the Book “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings” by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki