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...

Achieve Fantastic Results in Martial Arts by Utilizing the Maxims of the Founder of Matsubayashi-Ryu Karate Do: A “Modern” Application Shoshin Nagamine seated in Zazen (Zen Meditation). One of the earliest books that I bought as a young karate-ka was Shoshin Nagamine’s “The Essence of Okinawan Karate-Do.”  For those of you that don’t know—or only “know” because of the title of this essay—Shoshin Nagamine was the founder of an “offshoot” of Shorin-Ryu karate that he called Matsubayashi-Ryu .  But most modern martial artists probably know him—if they even know him at all—from the aforementioned book.  As I said, I bought this book when I was probably 11 or 12 years old (which means in the early to mid 1980s) at a store called “Bookland”—that’s right, kids, once-upon-a-time there were these things called “malls” that actually had relatively small bookstores inside of them.  (The other one in our local mall was called “Walden Books.”)  By the way, I at the time had...

 Empty Your Cup “We’re so full of ideas about who we are, there’s no space left to realize our true nature.  Zazen is where we begin to empty the cup.” ~Dennis Genpo Merzel Zen master Dogen wrote about shoshin, or "beginner's mind," in his masterwork "Shobogenzo." (painting of Dogen courtesy Wikimedia) This is often the first lesson received when one takes up Zen or Budo.  It should also be the last. But what does it mean to “empty your cup”?  There is an oft-told story that you have probably heard before.  It’s so popular—maybe even “cliche” is the best word—that I remember hearing/seeing this story in the ‘80s when it was adapted as part of the story in the low-budget, straight-to-video martial arts movie No Retreat, No Surrender .  This movie has become something of a “cult” favorite (there is even a “Rifftrax” version of it).   The main character played by Kurt McKinney even learns his “empty your cup” lesson from the ghost of Bruce Lee, who is tra...