Forging the Budo Kokoro
Developing the heart and mind for budo
I was talking with a martial arts colleague recently about how students develop and progress. He pointed out that a lot of students in koryu budo give up practice at around four or five years into practice. That is about the same time that students in judo and karate, for example, are getting their shodans and then dropping out. In gendai budo I often hear this blamed on goal completion—the student has achieved the goal of getting a black belt and their drive goes away. I’ve long thought the same, but seeing the same sort of dropout after the same length of time in koryu budo, where there are no black belts to get, makes me think the reason might be something else.
Students in both gendai and koryu arts are giving up around the time they start to have some technical competency. Getting to shodan is a great achievement, but I haven’t met many people who got to shodan and didn’t feel like they had barely scratched the surface of what there is to learn. More often they seem amazed at how little they really feel confident about and how much there is that they just don’t know. They’ve struggled to the top of a steep hill, only to realize that the mountains are just beginning.
A few people are discouraged by the realization and give up. Many more can’t seem to make the adjustment from training physical skills to learning the mental control and calmness that lead to psychological states like mushin (no mind) and heijoshin (normal mind). Acquiring these mental states is as much, if not more, of the journey at this point than is technical mastery. After four or five years, students should have reasonably solid command of the physical basics and techniques of the art. Judo has around 65 throws, five basic pins, and four or five strangles, and 3 three arm bars. You can learn all of that reasonably well in 4 four years. You won’t be great at all of it, but you’ll be familiar with all of it and have a few things you specialize in. This general pattern goes for any martial art. The techniques can be learned relatively quickly.
At this point, it’s not the techniques that get you to the next level though. To get to the next level you have to be able to stay calm (heijoshin), properly focused (zanshin), and clear of any presuppositions (mushin). (I realize that heijoshin, zanshin, and mushin are much more complex and subtle than these simple descriptions, but I hope they point in the right direction.) Once you’ve got the techniques down to the point that you can demonstrate them on request, the next steps up the mountain are all about being able to produce the technique that is appropriate for the circumstances as naturally as an image in a mirror adjusts to reflect the scene in front of it.
At shodan, most judo students are going into randori with an image of what they want to do in their mind. They are thinking about how they are going to apply their tokui waza, their favorite technique. Their adrenalin is pumping. They are planning to impose their ideas on their partner.
They are not out there calmly reflecting how the action develops and smoothly adapting to it.
Getting to the point where you can go into randori with that calm heijoshin and mushin mind, empty of assumptions, is tough. It is far more difficult than mastering techniques. Students have put in the time to learn the techniques. Next they have to put in the time to be able to produce them without anticipation in an improvisation so smooth that it can look choreographed. I believe it’s this difficult section of the mountain that defeats so many people. Often students don’t feel like they are making any progress for long stretches of time. They don’t realize that they need to grind away at some boring practice and go down in a lot of randori matches before the changes in their minds will start to show up in the dojo.
Achieving a great mental condition is at least as difficult as achieving a great physical condition. It doesn’t magically happen. You have to lay the foundation by ingraining the physical stuff so deeply that you don’t need to allocate any mental space to doing the techniques. Then you can start working on the higher level stuff. There are a number of things you need to learn and develop: complete comfort with being attacked, having an understanding of ma’ai so deep that you don’t blink when a sword tip swings through the space just in front of your nose, responses to change that happen without thinking about them.
You don’t do these things quickly. You have to grind away at it for a long time while making little visible progress. In Shinto Muso Ryu this means doing the paired technique practice and the kata over and over and over and over. Often you can’t feel any development while this is going on. You’re doing a lot of technical and kata practice, but you’re not getting much faster or stronger. You just keep repeating the same techniques and kata.
After what may seem like forever, you’ll realize that you can tell when an attack is going to reach you and when it won’t, and you stop moving for attacks you can tell won’t reach you. You’re happy to watch the sword go by, a finger’s width from your nose. You’ve developed your sense of ma’ai so much that you can sense when things will be even a tiny bit out of range. Then you stop tensing for attacks that will reach you. You’ve evaded so many attacks that any nerves or fears of being hit have worn away to nothing. When the attack comes in, you slip out of the way without a hint of nerves or concern, or even any thought. Finally, you start to reach the last step. One day you’re working with someone and they mix up the kata and do perform an unexpected attack. Instead of being upset or even realizing that the kata has been broken, you flow with the attack that comes and respond appropriately. You may not even realize that the kata was broken until after you’ve finished.
Now you’re getting somewhere. You’ve polished your techniques a bit, but more importantly, you’ve developed and polished your mental skills so your thinking mind isn’t slowing you down and getting in the way of your responses. You are calm and unruffled by even the most intense attacks. You respond seamlessly to whatever your partner does without having to think about what you should do. It happens naturally, without thought. You’re achieving heijoshin and mushin more and more often.
After you’ve mastered the techniques, it takes years more to get your mind to this level. I think it is this part of the journey, which isn’t visible on the outside and not even very clear on the inside, that causes so many people to give up. They’ve got the techniques, but they can’t seem to make them work like their teacher does. They’re putting in the hours practicing, but they’re not seeing the improvement they expect. No one tells them that what they are working on at this point isn’t physical, but mental. Maybe we should.
Special thanks to Jacques Vorves for editorial support.
I work to keep my content free. If you would like to help support me so I can continue this, please consider buying my a cup of coffee or purchasing one of my books.
I guess the most frustrating thing for a teacher is that the students "appear" to demonstrate their enthusiasm but quit usually prior to reaching shown.
I've found this to be true especially if the students are under 18.
Commercial dojo seem to just lower their standards and hand out rank just to survive financially but I'm only commenting on this from a gendai budo perspective.
Typo shown. Shodan