I found this article to be a prevalent tool for training.
It is often said in the martial arts that the more important thing is not your ability to fight in a real situation but to fight your Self. It may be true at the philosophical level.
But there may be another reality. I am often surprised to see my own students being unable to do the “right thing”. Their move is not correct, timing is wrong, distance is wrong.
One reason for that is that they are following a sequence that has just been taught: 1, 2, 3, and 4. They do not do the movement they repeat a sequence of movements. Students always copy their teacher. Copying is not moving, monkeys copy, carbon paper copy but they are not like the originals. To be successful one has to be moving with his own movements. This is why we have to repeat constantly basics such as Kamae, Ukemi, Kihon Happo and Sanshin no Kata.
But even if you repeat these basics at each class something is missing. Above the movements lies The Correct Movement. And this Correct Movement is beyond your grasp. Rene Descartes, a French philosopher in the 17th century wrote a book called “A Discourse on Method” in which he gives a methodology to understand things that are not understandable.
It comes in four parts:
First. Never believe something is true before you have acquired an inner knowledge of it, avoid haste and preconceived ideas, give everything a thorough analysis so that this truth becomes true reality in your mind.
Second. For each problem to solve cut it into as many elementary bits as necessary so that the problem becomes easier to solve.
Third. Put your thoughts into a logical order, beginning with the simplest elements that are easy to grasp and ending with the hardest, so that your thinking process is able to build himself step by step gradually to allow you to understand properly the whole problem.
Fourth. Have a global vision and understanding of the problem to be sure not to forget any other possibility of setting it correctly.
If you follow these four rules in your training (they can also be applied in your life) your basics will evolve and your Taijutsu will improve dramatically. But you will still be missing the spirit, the breathing (spiritus in Latin means to breathe). You will end up with a sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, better than the previous one but a sequence.
This “spirit” is the thing that is above your grasp. This is what makes Sensei’s movements look perfect. This “spirit” is what you are missing. Descartes’ methodology can help you find a technical solution but it will not give you the “spirit” for it.
Following the Rationalism of Descartes you will be able to deal with things and objects but not with life itself. To illustrate this, let us take an example.
You have a bag full of marbles and want to know how many marbles of each color you have in your bag. The concept of “bag of marbles” is easy to get. But this concept does not give you the knowledge of what is exactly inside the bag. So you empty the bag on the table and you see three blue marbles, two yellow marbles and three green marbles. Having done that you know what you have 1 bag + 3 blue marbles + 2 yellow marbles + 3 green marbles. When you put them back into the bag you have the knowledge of what is inside the bag (8 marbles of three colors).
So far this is how you deal with Bujinkan techniques. At the Taihen level (physical training) you copy a bag of marbles. At the Kuden level (experience) you know the parts making the movement possible. But where is the spirit? If you do not go beyond this point you will not get the “spirit”, in other terms you will still miss the essence of the movement (no breathing, no movement). Your movement will be better but it will be again a sequence 1, 2, 3, 4.
The spirit is in life, the method is good for things that are inanimate not for human being. Take a human being, alive. Cut the head, the arms, the legs, take out all the organs and ask the best surgeon on earth to put everything back in place, you end up with a dead human being. You don’t have what made him alive at the beginning. So how can you put this “life” or this “breathing” into your movements and forget forever those sequences?
The answer is to stop fighting yourself!
You are often fighting someone like you. When you are training, what you see is yourself. You imagine that your opponent is a carbon copy of yourself. You do not listen to his requirements. You try to fight someone just like you, not understanding that your Uke can be younger or older; that Uke can be taller or smaller; that Uke can have larger or smaller body movements. In other words when you train you do not fight Uke, you fight another yourself.
You do the same with Hatsumi Sensei. When you watch him in a technique you see yourself do the movement. You think that by copying his movement it can be yours. This is not true!
“Stop fighting yourself” can be understood as “stop thinking yourself as the reference point for everything”. Accept Uke in your movements. If you train seriously with the basics and if you see Uke as being him and not you, you will get the proper distance and the proper timing. Your Taijutsu will adjust itself naturally to Uke’s movements and “life” will appear naturally in your movements.
After the Taihen level (mechanics), the Kuden level (experience) you will reach the Shinden level (inner understanding). A new Sanshin no Kata for your evolution!
By the way, the Japanese word for this concept of “spiritus” could be “Shin” or “Kokoro”. Keep training hard.
