C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

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 i...

Essays and Thoughts on The Dokkodo Part 6 Be Detached from Desire Your Entire Life Statue of Musashi and Kojiro in battle. (public domain) This passage seems a little odd when first we read it.  It's odd because, well, didn't Musashi desire  to be a good samurai?  Isn't it desire  that pushed Musashi to want  to be a great swordsman in the first place? But this saying isn't quite what it seems.  Roshi Richard Collins, author of No Fear Zen , has this to say: "The word for desire here, yokushin , suggests specifically selfish wishes, lusts, or cupidity, that greediness for physical pleasure or material accumulation that resists control."  In other words, you are to be detached from those things which prevent you from practicing budo.  Your desire  should be for attaining deeper and broader martial skills, not money or fame or to even be a fighter (as opposed to a martial artist).  Of course, just because one calls himself a martial artist...