Our son, at five, has become concerned with death. How long will we live? When we die, we cannot breathe. When the time comes for us to die, let’s escape, maybe to China, or America. In the bath he suddenly throws his arms around my neck, and presses his face into mine, sobbing. He does not want me to die. If I die, he will be lonely and sad. When you die, you cannot move. I agree, and tell him if he dies I will be lonely and sad, too. This is the truest truth I know.

white cluster amaryllis

In the pre-dawn dark
our son at my bedside, puts
my hand to his face

I feel my own father’s hand
on my own face, and on back

history, filled with this love —

白曼珠沙華

夜明け前
息子が来てて
枕辺に

我の手顔に
付けて、自分の

父の手も
顔に感じて
永遠に

父もその父
息子もその子

歴史、この
愛でいっぱい

“On whatever the path, do not be sad about parting ways …

… Along the way, have no bad feelings towards death,” Musashi writes in the Dokkōdō. These are by far the hardest of his admonitions for me to follow.

A recent online discussion I was involved in centered on the somewhat strange fact that there seems to be no real agreement about how the Japanese name for Japan – 日本 – should properly be pronounced: nihon or nippon. I have my own fairly strong ideas on that, which I’ll spare you here, but what the discussion really got me thinking  about more was another, more traditional name for the country: 大和, read as “Yamato” but comprised of the characters 大 dai, ō-  – “great” – and 和 wa, nago-, nagi-…  meaning “harmony, reconciliation”.

“Yamato” 大和 (left) and “Musashi” 武蔵 (right), by calligrapher Nagayama Taijun

The second character (in its original form 倭) was long used by the ancient Chinese and Korean dynasties to refer to the country of Japan, and the “newer” (but still very old) form is still used today as a shorthand for “Japanese”, particularly in regard to the traditional culture of Japan. Traditional Japanese cuisine is called 和食, or “harmonious food/meal”, for example, and the serene, minimal, tatami-matted room is known as a 和室 washitsu – “harmonious room”.

washitsu 和室

The concept of wa as it relates to interpersonal relationships in a group/collectively-oriented society is fairly familiar, I suspect; the sports writer Robert Whiting explored its relationship to baseball in his best-selling book You Gotta Have Wa, and the idea has been quite thoroughly analyzed in the corporate sphere since the days of Japan’s bubble, when it looked like Japanese corporations were set to take over the world and everyone was scrambling to figure out what they were doing differently. In its most basic form, the harmony of the group automatically takes precedence over any one individual’s wishes, leading to a strong desire to avoid most confrontation or open disagreement.

A deeper harmony 

However, there is another, broader (or one might say deeper) aspect to the idea of wa, especially as it relates to traditional Japanese arts and culture, and one which I think is even more worthy of emulation, and that is the sense of wa as harmonization with the natural world: a “reconciliation”, if you will, with the world around us, which as a species we so often seek to dominate by bludgeoning it into submission.

Some similar ideas have relatively recently begun to take root (or re-emerge) in the West, as well, although not necessarily due to the influence of traditional Japanese culture: for example, there has been a move back towards local, seasonal foods. In the West, the impetus for this seems to be mainly economic and health-related; in traditional Japanese culture, on the other hand, it is primarily aesthetic and, one might say, spiritual. The traditional Japanese chef must feel “in tune” with the fluctuation of the seasons, and understand the unique periods of ripeness for each culinary element. There can be no forcing; the chef must work with what nature can be coaxed into providing, and tries to do as much as possible with the simple, basic flavors therein.

washoku 和食

Japanese gardens, although carefully cultivated, are manipulated artfully in such a way as to harmonize with the natural features already present, and moreover, to maintain an appearance of thorough naturalness.

Although modern Japanese culture has to a large extent gotten away from a lot of these ideas, there still remains a great deal of attention to the rhythms of nature in the passing of the seasons; the equinoxes, for example, are national holidays, and a great deal is made of the seasonal blossoming of flowers (particularly the Japanese cherry, but also others) and other cyclical natural phenomena, as well as great fanfare over the arrival of seasonal delicacies.

This idea that the arts and culture should be harmonized with the fundamental principles of the of the natural world extends also to the martial arts.  Musashi writes frequently about ri  (理・利): the universal principles of nature.  The rhythms of nature and the “rhythms of battle” are to him one and the same thing:

…in all things there is rhythm…  The rhythms of the world are expressed in such things as the Way of Dance and the rhythms of wind and string musicians; in all these, there is a harmonized and peaceful rhythm.  Moving over to the Ways of the Martial Arts, the shot of a bow, the firing of a gun, and the riding of a horse all have rhythms and timings. In all skills and abilities, rhythm is a thing that should not be ignored. Furthermore, there is also rhythm in that which is empty.

 

In the career of a warrior, there is a rhythm to rising in service to one’s master, and a rhythm to falling from favor, a rhythm to things going as expected and a rhythm to the unexpected happening.  Or, in the Way of Business, there is a rhythm to becoming wealthy, and a rhythm to wealth disappearing; in every Way there are different rhythms.  In all things, the rhythms in which they thrive, and the rhythms in which they decline – you should carefully discern these.

Flow, don’t force

A word in Japanese meaning “forced” (also used to mean “impossible”) is muri 無理 (“no principle”) – something that goes against the natural principles, or flow of things. The real key to our success – as individuals, as societies, as a species – lies in our ability to avoid this and instead go with nature and its principles, harmonizing with both the people and the natural world around us. This idea of “great harmony” intrinsic to the Zen-influenced traditional Japanese culture is the one that I think most of us around the world could benefit most from better understanding, and emulating.

A friend shared this post from Business Insider. It’s good, a nice little encapsulation of the real reason for our martial training: Calm. Centeredness. Grace under pressure. 不動心 (fudōshin: “immovable” [i.e. imperturbable] mind/spirit). Not just in combat or self-defense, but in all of daily life, as well.

It reminded me immediately of this calligraphy by Musashi:

Besides being one of the most renowned swordsmen of all time, Miyamoto Musashi was also an accomplished artist and calligrapher, and in this, his most famous piece of calligraphy, he similarly encapsulates the meaning of the martial Way, but much more economically.

The two bold characters at the top read 戦気 sen-ki, or “battle spirit”/ “the spirit of battle”. Their bold, slashing strokes are the very embodiment of the clash of swordsmen’s bodies in combat.

But below, in a softer, more flowing script, Musashi has included a line from the Chinese poet 白居易 Bái Jūyì (Po Chü-i):

「寒流帯月澄如鏡」
“The cold stream
holds the moon,
[in its] clarity
[it is] like a mirror.”

(Literally: “cold flow, belts moon, clear, like a mirror”)

The cold stream, although flowing, holds the reflection of the moon clearly, and placidly. This, Musashi seems to be telling us, is the true “spirit for battle”: in the midst of furious conflict, utter calm: flowing, unattached.

This, I believe, is the true meaning of our training. We strive to become able to maintain this inner stillness – in the chaos of combat, or the upheavals of our day-to-day existence.

We sometimes talk about feeling “centered” in daily life as a synonym for being focused, balanced. And with good reason: physical posture/balance and mental/emotional states have been shown to be intimately related.  In martial arts the importance of finding your physical center – of balance, of gravity – is often stressed as a fundamental element of technique. But exactly why and how to find that center, and what to do with it, is often left unclear. Continue reading →

In any undertaking, your footwork is vitally important.

Writing on “Using the Feet”, in the Water section of  The Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi says that as a warrior, you should “tread firmly on your heels.” Later he derides  “bouncing”, “flying”, “creeping”, and other unnatural types of footwork propounded by other schools of swordsmanship.

The reason for all this attention to the feet becomes clearer when we realize that Musashi was a seasoned, six-time veteran of the battlefield, writing in a time of relative peace, when swordsmanship was shifting away from open warfare to an emphasis on single contests and rarefied training-hall teaching. These styles of footwork may have seemed effective under the constraints of the dojo and single-opponent matches, but they are inappropriate for real-world combat, where the terrain, number of opponents, and other variables are less predictable. We can see this in modern-day karate* and kendo practice as well, with their bouncing and sliding footwork, none of which is practicable in rough terrain.

So the reason for these admonitions from a battlefield perspective is clear. But as always when reading Musashi, we must remember to not only read the literal combative applications but also to “having one thing, know ten thousand .” The idea of skittish footwork also translates to unfocused activity of all kinds and “an attitude of waiting”. Having “flying feet” is the same as jumping into things rashly. “When you land there is a feeling of fixedness,” writes Musashi, and surely this is true of jumping into other situations as well: there is often the feeling of having gotten oneself stuck in the situation. And then: “There cannot be said to be any advantage in jumping around again and again.” We all know (and some of us may be) people who jump around from one thing to another, getting “stuck” and jumping haphazardly into the next thing.

For my own, part for a long time I have struggled with the opposite bad habit: that of “creeping feet” — a tendency to proceed very hesitantly, even after having effectively made up my mind on a course of action. This has almost inevitably led to limited success. The times in my life that I have been most successful have been those when, while not acting rashly, I quickly came to decisions and acted boldly and firmly on them, “taking the initiative.” When you do this, everything changes. Continue reading →