Practicing Taijiquan

At Thoughts on Tai Chi, there was a very nice post on how one should approach practicing the taijiquan form. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

I don’t teach much nowadays for various reasons, but years ago, when I was teaching a group, I was always a bit reluctant to correct students’ postures. Sometimes I did, if a student was lazy or unfocused, but I didn’t really try to show them the exact alignment as “this is how the posture should be.”

Many teachers walk around correcting their students as they do their form, or they let them stop in a posture and walk around them. However, none of my teachers had that habit. I do know a few who do it though. Poor students, I would say — because those teachers aren’t the best practitioners themselves.

The thing is, you need to feel from within—through your own body and experience. Tai Chi, as I’ve stated elsewhere on this blog, is about self-awareness and body-awareness. If you try to adjust your postures according to someone else’s standard, or to how you assume the postures should look, you’re already making a fundamental mistake: you’re approaching your art from the outside in.

But then—how do you learn to feel what is correct? This is the crux of the matter. The problem is, it’s easy to fool yourself—to think you’re balanced, sunk, and relaxed. But is it real sinking? Are you truly relaxed enough?

This is where push hands and other partner exercises come in. They help you feel the real standards of relaxation and balance—because a training partner will challenge your alignment, your structure, and your ability to stay relaxed under pressure. You need to be challenged in many ways and receive input from different directions to truly feel what’s right, and why.

And this is where function can help guide your progress. Even when it comes to Tai Chi forms, there are general standards of alignment—such as the angles at which each posture is strongest. But again, you need to learn how to feel these things—through context and through function.

One of my teachers—the one I respected most—summed it up beautifully. He compared Tai Chi practice and practitioners to sculptures and teapots. A sculpture has shape and form that allow it to stand upright without falling—that’s the only function its balance serves. A teapot, on the other hand, must be usable. You should be able to hold it when it’s hot, lift it when full, and pour from it without spilling. Its shape and balance must serve a purpose.

In the same way, your posture in Tai Chi must be functional. It’s not about looking right—it’s about working right.

Enter the Dojo

At BudoJ ourneyMan, there was an interesting post about the difference between a gym and a dojo. An excerpt is below. The full article may be read here.

I don’t write this post lightly; this has been churning around in my head for some time now, a kind of gadfly burrowing into my brain, so please bear with me as I lay out my argument.

How it works with youngsters.

The best place to start is to consider how we attempt to introduce our kids to activities that may enrich their lives and open whole new worlds to them.

Opportunities for youngsters are presented like a buffet laid out before them by well-intentioned parents. The thinking tends to be; throw all these ‘opportunities’ at the wall and see which one sticks. A messy spaghetti smorgasbord of gym classes, hockey clubs, tennis, gymnastics, dance classes, football, etc, etc. Surely little Jenny or Johnny will find the one activity that floats their boat and allows their talents to rise?

It’s what all responsible parents do; the first steps towards the potential for human fulfilment.

For adults?

I don’t think that stops at childhood. Autonomous adults who no longer have their parent’s well-intended regime imposed upon them reach working age often find themselves searching around for that special ‘something’ that ticks all the boxes, frequently without any real idea of what those boxes are.

As an adult, if you decide to ‘take a class’ in martial arts, is it just that? Identical to taking an aerobics or yoga class?

You turn up, you pay your money, the instructor, with customer service at the back of his/her mind, greets you with a smile. Then, you might be flushed with initial excitement at the novelty (for it may well be novelty you are seeking?) and then just fade away and move on to something else.

The sad thing is that consumer culture has certain inevitable sets of rules and expectations; it’s all designed for you to dip in and dip out. Why should martial arts be any different?

Maybe there is more going on – things that don’t align with the consumer mindset?

If you decide to become involved with a traditional Japanese martial art, the system that you might have ‘dipped your toe into’ could easily be a different beast altogether. In this scenario it is possible that other priorities come to the fore that don’t fit easily with the buyer’s market of the aerobics or yoga classes.

To my mind, this begs the questions which are at the crux of where I am coming from; are you a consumer or a devotee? Are you a customer or a custodian? There is a difference.

For consumers, the aerobics/yoga classes are transactional arrangements. The instructor standing in front of you offers a service that you might want to avail yourself of, at least for a while, a bit like taste testing different cheeses at a newly-discovered deli. You are the buyer sampling the wares; the shopkeeper is hoping that you are going to become a dedicated customer.

However, underpinning the traditional martial arts there is the consideration of a timeline that not only reaches back into the past but also towards a theoretical future. Is it perhaps too extreme to describe this as the elephant in the room?

This is where Memes come in… to explain.

Martial arts as ‘Memes’, the Richard Dawkins version (not the coopted word that the Internet seems to have stolen).

Just to explain. In 1976 Richard Dawkins in his book, ‘The Selfish Gene’ coined the word ‘meme’ to mean how a concept, idea or system is spread (gene-like) generationally by imitation or tradition. This can include religion, philosophy, or even skills-based knowledge, of which I would include the older schools of the martial arts.

To get into the details and the structures of the martial arts, the ones that are passed down generationally; you could say that these traditions/memes can be gifted with blessings, or blighted by curses. To explain what those are is at the root of my argument here.

The blessings.

The accumulated practical knowledge acquired across the generations creates a storehouse of wisdom and experience that is hard-won. If these positive attributes originate from the ‘down and dirty’ skills of hardened battlefield veterans then their wisdom is immeasurably valuable to future generations.

Add to that, if they are passed through the hands of truly enlightened and experienced torch-bearers, who can systemise and supercharge these experiences in a way that can be handed down to a dedicated and eager body of students, then what you have is a stream/tradition/ryuha that has genuine value.

It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that some of these older traditions cannot really be used as ‘the art of war’, particularly the ones involving antiquated weaponry; but, there is a greater depth involved, one that adds immeasurable value beyond mere mechanical practicality. Within the discipline lays a whole catalogue of principles, ethics, philosophies and the vehicle for human fulfilment.

 This is the upside – this is what happens when things are going well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Great Wave

Over at The Budo Journeyman, there was an article about one of the greatest Japanese artists, Hokusai Katsushika. Below is an excerpt. The full post, with some of Hokusai's greatest works, may be read here.

19^th century European painters have more than their fair share of Bohemians, wild boys (and girls), eccentrics and geniuses; but you don’t tend to think about that with the Japanese. Let me tell you, they are definitely there.

Hokusai was, in his generation, the best of the best. In fact, his sparkling and dramatic artworks have continued to ripple through time; very much like his iconic ‘Great Wave off Kanagawa’ (1831).

Hokusai Katsushika (1760 – 1849) lived a full, if not eccentric, life. The development of his artwork and continued influence moved diverse western artists like; Van Gogh and Monet. But his inspiration and very modern ways of working didn’t happen in a vacuum. It is said that very early on when he was beginning to cut his teeth as an artist he was exposed to French and Dutch copperplate engravings. I am certain that his experimentation with distance and perspective came out of the European tradition.

This is why the ‘Great Wave’ is so famous. Observe the way that mount Fuji viewed through the eye of the wave is diminished and shrunken under the massive movement of the water that appears to engulf it; the panicking boatmen there as a device for further scale references. The subtext is about the comparison of these various entities in size and distance. The earthbound Fuji is humbled by the might of a dramatic moving body of water; the ocean gets its revenge; Nature shakes her skirts.

 Note in ‘Great Wave’ the repeated major and minor spirals; the smaller ones as kinds of ‘claws’ in the water.

 

 

 

The Most Basic of Basics

Over at the Budo Bum blog, there is an excellent post on the most basic of basics, upon which all of our practices are founded. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

Practice started without doing any kata. We didn’t even do kihon waza (basic techniques). I’ve long joked that the only things I really teach are how to breathe and how to walk. We haven’t been doing too much with this in practice lately because right now all of my students have been with me for at least a couple of years, and they’ve been through the breathing and walking stuff a few times. Lately though, I’ve been working on some new ideas.

I had a conversation with a Shinto Muso Ryu teacher last year that is rolling through my head like a snowball down a mountainside in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. We were talking about getting your arms aligned properly. He had some exercises he’d discovered in an interesting little book about improving your health and budo by swinging your arms properly. What he described and showed me aligned nicely with some things I was beginning to understand in my iaido practice about aligning the hands and shoulders. I’ve been playing with this since then.

I started out by trying to put my arms in good alignment. This was difficult, and as soon as I stopped thinking about it, my arms would roll back to where they normally sat. The point of this is not really about the arms though. The arms are just signalers for how well aligned the body’s central structure is. I started making progress when I stopped trying to get my arms to align with my centerline and swing straight, and instead dug back along the muscle chain. The real progress occurred when I started playing with the position of my shoulder blades. As soon as I moved those back and down, my arms and hands fell into alignment.

I’ve spent a lot of time as a jodo and iaido teacher trying to fix my students hand and arm positions. It’s been frustrating because I haven’t had much success in fixing things this way. I’d show people where their hands and arms should be, and they’d mimic the position for a while, but the next practice I’d be correcting the same thing. Then I started looking at the basics of movements.

When we move our hands, the movement isn’t based in our hands. We usually think of the arms moving the hands around. What I have realized (and forgive me taking so long to figure this out) is that all movement has a base, a foundation, and if that foundation is off, all movements originating there will be off. The base from which the arms move is the upper back; the spine, the scapulas, and the muscles connecting them. When I looked at my students, I realized that even when they put their arms in the right place, they weren’t getting them in place the right way. They were moving their arms around below their shoulders without changing the base that supports their arms. Those bases were all over the place, which explained why students couldn’t keep their arms in the right places without conscious effort.

I stopped trying to correct students' hand positions, and started working on changing the way they hold their upper backs. As soon as they focused on the position of their shoulder blades relative to their spine, their hands and arms magically corrected themselves. I noticed that if their backs were correct, they couldn’t hold their arms wrong. Once they fixed the movement's base, incorrect movement became difficult, and the correct movement became easy.

Whenyou follow the muscle chains far enough, you end up in the ball of the foot. I’ve understood that proper stance is important, but I’m just beginning to understand that it is almost everything. All the muscle chains, all the body’s structures, originate with the feet. Nothing can be correct if the feet aren’t right. So now I’m working on kihon for how to stand, and I’m thinking I haven’t done nearly enough work with my students on just standing, much less walking. I’m rebuilding my own structure from the ball of my foot up, and all sorts of interesting things are happening.

The kihon for jodo and iai are seemingly simple: swinging the sword, swinging the jo, blocking, receiving attacks, redirecting the opponent’s weapon. These are taught in the kihon waza. There are even more basic elements though, such as: How do you hold the sword? How do you hold the jo? How do you raise your arms? How do you breathe? How do you stand? These are just assumed in practice.

On this day we didn’t assume them. Practicing kihon cuts and strikes assumes that you are standing correctly, breathing correctly, and walking correctly. I’ve discovered it helps to break out these most fundamental of fundamentals and work on them without all the confusing and distracting activity that’s going on when doing kihon waza. Just standing in a proper, efficient, powerful structure takes a lot of mental focus and effort at first. We have all sorts of bad habits when it comes to posture, structure, and breathing. All of these have to be fixed before we can advance to the subtle and challenging art of holding the sword and the jo properly.

 

 

Regarding Aikido

 

You may find this video interesting.

 

The Russian Martial Art

At Ellis Amdur's Kogen Budo blog, there is a guest post by Spyridon Katsigiannis about what he teaches; what he refers to as The Russian Martial Art. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

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After the release of my book, Hidden In Plain Sight, I began corresponding with Spyridon Katsigiannis (Spyros). He was then living in Sweden, teaching physical culture. He later returned to Greece, and we began to meet regularly, during my biasnnual trips there. He taught me some kettlebell technique, and we informally began an exchange in our various training methodologies to develop greater abilities to use the body in martial arts practice. We were becoming close friends, something I find increasingly rare as I get older, and it was a personal loss to me, as well as his many students, when he suddenly died of a heart attack. The only blessing is that, at the moment of his death, he was with one of his closest students, whom he had brought up, so to speak, into manhood. He did not die alone.

Spyros’s martial arts training started with Chinese martial arts. If I recall correctly, he trained in Hung Gar kung fu, did tournament fighting, and then became a coach. He lost interest in fighting and martial arts, per se, in his early thirties, but became very interested in Russian Martial Arts, interested in it more for physical culture.

In going through some old correspondence, I found some emails containing Spyros’ thoughts on the Russian Martial Art (his term). I’ve done my best to compile them here. I wish he was still alive – a thoughtful man, a strong man. Even in this brief excerpt, one can see that he was researching modern training methodologies, trying to integrate them in his own personal training and those of his physical culture students. Unfortunately, this is all the correspondence I have – conversations with him were so information-rich. 

Spyros on using kettlebell training to increase punching power.

Spyros working principle within Systema

Grip-power lift

Five years ago I took up Russian Martial Art (RMA: both Ryabko-Vasiliev Systema and Alexander Retuinskih‘s Systema ROSS) because I found that a universal language of hand-to-hand combat was not only present there, but also articulated in detail. To my understanding, RMA is a meta-system of distilled scientific martial knowledge, which is divided in two main bodies: one is comprised of the bio-mechanical and neurophysiological principles that allow one to manipulate one’s opponent, by gaining relative superiority through a mechanically advantageous position. I believe this is akin to today’s mainstream martial arts, from jūdō and Brazilian jiujitsu to aikidō. The second body of knowledge is comprised by a great number of solo training methods designed towards the goal of using the body most efficiently and generating great amount of power.
These solo training methods include:

• A series of range-of-motion exercises for all joints of the body. The goal of these is increased range of motion (which translates to greater power generation from a purely mechanical perspective), increased coordination and sophistication of movement, plus utilization of the arthrokinetic reflex (discovered in 1956, it was found that something done to a joint can reflexively cause muscle activation or inhibition).
• A series of “wave” movement patterns for the whole body that teach successive joint recruitment, which results in greater power generation through the utilization of stored elastic energy in the connective tissues of the body.
• A series of “floorwork” exercises (various rolls and crawling movements), which although useful when one wants to absorb the force caused by a fall during training,  are performed continuously, in order for the practitioner to understand how to take advantage of momentum and inertia and ultimately achieve the integration of breathing, body alignment and movement.
• A number of exercises for the development of short, explosive power (that remind me a lot of the Fa Li exercises in Yiquan).

What is most interesting regarding the RMA solo training methods is that they are not specific to one art: according to Alexander Retuinskih, they have been also used to enhance the performance of the athletes of the national boxing and ice hockey teams of the USSR. Both bodies of knowledge in RMA (one regarding what I do to my opponent, the other regarding how I use my own body) can be unified under the same dogma which is basically the following:

• “Breathing controls intention – Structure (alignment) creates opportunity – Movement equals ability”.
• Out of this dogma, the practitioner strives for the integration of his breathing-structure-movement while at the same time tries to disintegrate the opponent’s breathing-structure-movement.

Personally I find most exciting the fact that this Russian approach to training can be wholly explained and described within the context of a rational Western scientific tradition, free of ambiguous terms and cultural connotations, which means that the the method can be reliably taught and the results can be consistently reproduced. Sadly, there seems to be a number of RMA instructors that try to cloud this scientifically-based and structured approach through references to Russia’s glorious past and religious overtones. They tend to gather a great number of students are eager to believe in instructors with mystical powers.

 

 

The Development of Nakada Shin Ryu Jujutsu in Europe

Over at Ellis Amdur's excellent Kogen Budo blog, there is a guest post that looks at Nakada Shin Ryu Jujutsu. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.

 

Pre-War Jiujitsu in Europe

Before the second world war, jiujitsu was taught as an independent system throughout Europe. [1] There was no influence from arts like karate or aikidō; furthermore, jiujitsu was different and separate from jūdō. This jiujitsu may have been a bit stiff, and probably relied more on strength than we are led to believe when we read the books and newspaper articles from that period, but its practice still developed formidable fighters, who fought matches against boxers, wrestlers and sometimes just plain street fighters. Some of these matches were organized, while others were unruly affairs, the result of an impromptu challenge during what was intended to be a demonstration of the art. Jiujitsu had to prove its mettle and the record shows that it did.

Post-War Jiujitsu in Europe

After the second world war, jiujitsu waned in popularity. It had to compete with others arts like jūdō, karate, aikidō, taekwondo, kung-fu, to name just a few. And frankly, jiujitsu did not do so well against these more sophisticated, complete martial art forms, both in terms of popularity and effectiveness. This was not only the situation in my country, the Netherlands, but the same could be seen in countries throughout Europe. Jiujitsu became marginalized.

The old-timers mostly kept to themselves, training in small clubs, teaching the techniques that were now deemed old-fashioned and outdated. Others, who wanted to modernize jiujitsu, created systems with extensive curricula, and standardized methods of teaching and examination. It was not unusual for some teachers to train a bit in karate or aikidō, and add some elements of these arts to their jiujitsu. Their focus was on creating a system that could be taught over a several years period with a uniform curriculum, and a grading system equal to jūdō. What emerged was a form of European jiujitsu that had a lot of one-technique pattern drills. On the plus side, thanks to the efforts of those modern minded teachers, jiujitsu became more popular again and the numbers of practitioners increased. On the other hand, these changes often diminished the self-protection value of jiujitsu in a serious way, and thus altering the essence of the art.

My Own Path

I started training jiujitsu at the age of fourteen, in 1975. My first instructor of both jiujitsu and jūdō was Johan van der Bruggen, who had trained under Nakada Taiji, in Surabaya, Indonesia. Based on what he taught, our best guess is that Nakada was a student of Tenjin Shinyō-ryū (天神真楊流); he is not listed as a yudansha at the Kodokan. There were actually a surprising number of  Tenjin Shinyō-ryū practitioners who settled in a number of areas throughout the world in the late 19th century and early 20th century, founding independent schools that shared much the same curricula: something very similar to early jūdō, along with various kata practices as well.  Van der Bruggen also studied with Koizumi Gunji and Kawaishi Mikinosuke, well-known pioneers of European jūdō. Van der Bruggen used Kawaishi’s system of teaching jūdō.

In 1987, I began training in Kano-ryū jiujitsu with Tony Hughes, a student of James Hipkiss. Hipkiss was a student of Koizumi Gunji (and to a lesser degree, Abbe Kenshiro). He was dissatisfied with the increasingly sportive direction of postwar jūdō, and attempted to preserve the jiujitsu and jūdō he had learned from Koizumi as one art.

After a few years, I began training in Shinkage-ryū jūjutsu (真蔭流), from Archibald Johnson. Shinkage-ryū is one of the most widely used appellations among Japanese martial arts. This particular ryūha, created in the Meiji period, was founded by Imaizumi Hachiro (今泉八郎). Imaizumi studied Sekiguchi Shinshin-ryū jūjutsu (関口新心流) and Kusunoki-ryū kenpō (楠流拳法) from Imaizumi Ryūsetsusai Tomoaki, later taking his teacher’s family name. He later studied Tenjin Shinyō-ryū under Iso Mataemon and Araki-ryū bōjutsu & torite from Taiboku Kuranosuke (大木蔵之進), a vassal from Iyo-Matsuyama province. In 1883, Imaizumi became a police instructor in Shitaya, Tokyo. He founded the Enbukan dōjō. He died in 1906. The Shinkage-ryū that Johnson taught was a typical Meiji era jūjutsu, mostly stand-up arms-length grappling, with take-downs rather than jūdō type throws, and locks and pins.

After establishing my own dōjō, I continued to seize the opportunity to train in other systems. Most notably, I attended many seminars with Henry Schubert, from Germany, who had lived in Japan for a considerable time, and fortuitously, lived right down the street from the Inoue family, the headmasters of Fusen-ryū jūjutsu. He studied extensively with them and after returning to Germany, adhered to what Inoue sensei told him, enthusiastically spreading what he had learned.

Not for everyone

After these many decades of training, my own jiujitsu developed into something different, almost by its own will. It is not a style I “created;” rather, it “came into being.” It is a combination of all the older forms I’d learned, most notably the Shinkage-ryū and Fusen-ryū, as well as Kano-ryū.

One more encounter had a very significant effect on the development of my current practice. Some years ago, Ellis Amdur came to Holland to teach a very intense week of Araki-ryū torite-kogusoku. One thing he said really stayed with me: “Araki-ryū is one kata.” Although I never became his formal student, these words inspired me to rework everything I had learned. During his visit, Amdur sensei rather informally taught one set of five brutally simple kata from the Araki-ryū torite curriculum, entitled Gohō no Dan. He later gave me permission to use this set as I saw fit. Thus, a small portion of Araki-ryū, filtered through our own perspective, is part of our curriculum. We distilled all of this down into five kata for jiujitsu, each of them rich in content and information, informed also by my experience as a jūdōka.

After training for some thirty years, it became apparent to me that what we did had become different from other schools of jiujitsu. I decided to name the style after my first teacher’s school and since he had already passed, asked his son (his legal heir) for permission to do so. He graciously granted me permission. I wished to pay full respect to my first teachers, who gave me the physical grounding upon which everything since was built. Therefore, I named my current school, Nakada Shin-ryū.

The ultimate question, though, is this: Does it work against a resisting opponent? I’ve taught this compact system to Security Liaison Officers, and others who need effective techniques at close range, and they report that it has been very useful to them in the course of their work. We have only a few people training, all of them long-time practitioners of budō. We are not to be found on the internet nor do we advertise. Our training is not for everyone. It is not because the training is overly tough nor is the system is very difficult to learn. It is not for everyone because it is boring. When one trains in the essence of an art, stripping away everything that is not necessary, you are left with very little material to work with. That is difficult for a lot of people: for most, I dare say. On the other hand, it makes a few of us very happy. Besides that, since we train for the real world, we have to be practical, and thus we get by with only a few kata.

Five kata for jiujitsu may not seem like much, but with all the variations possible on several levels, there is still quite a lot to train. Besides jiujitsu, we have a few iai kata as well as kata for tantō (single edged dagger). The kata provide structure and context, and they each contain rudimentary techniques. Having said that, the kata contain a lot more than is obvious at first sight.

 

 

Budo and Optimal Movement

A good article at The Budo Bum regarding optimal movement and Budo practice. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.  

I saw someone on reddit saying that the footwork in Kendo feels unnatural. My immediate reaction was “Of course it feels unnatural, it’s budo.” Budo isn’t natural. Budo is about doing everything in the optimal way. Budo is about letting go of the things we’ve learned naturally and refining ourselves.

“Natural” gets used a lot in 21st century marketing. So many things are marketed as “All Natural” that you’d be forgiven for thinking that “natural = good health.” Natural just means that humans haven’t manipulated something. Natural doesn’t have any positive or negative connotations. All-natural honey tastes wonderful. All-natural rattlesnake venom will kill you quite naturally. Mother Nature isn’t a gentle lady, and you shouldn’t assume that “natural = good.” Until the 20th century, the majority of children didn’t make it past childhood, and more than 1 woman in 100 died in childbirth. Look at the animal kingdom, pick any species, and you’ll see that the vast majority of offspring die before they can mature. This is “natural.”

We learn to breathe, stand, walk, and run, naturally. If the natural way of doing these things was the best way, musicians and athletes wouldn’t spend years learning to breathe properly. If the way we naturally stand was good for us, Feldenkrais and Alexander Technique teachers wouldn’t have jobs. If the way we walk and run was naturally optimal, there wouldn’t be any track coaches.

There is nothing natural about using a sword well, about throwing opponents smoothly and effortlessly, about hitting someone’s face with your fist in a way that damages them but doesn’t break the delicate bones in your hand, about taking a little jutte and handling a guy with a sword. These are not natural acts. Budo seeks to optimize what nature has given us in both mind and body. We train in budo not to be natural, but to make the optimal seem natural.

 The first lessons in budo, I suspect in any ryuha, are techniques but are also about learning to use your body properly. I teach new students how to walk and how to breathe. They think they are learning to hold a sword or staff, learning how to throw someone, or learning the footwork to a kata. They aren’t really learning any of these things at this point. They are learning to use their bodies properly. Students usually take a year or more to overcome enough of the bad habits they picked up naturally to be able to start learning to hold a weapon properly, or even walk without throwing themselves off-balance with every step.

They’ve learned to use their bodies naturally, and what they’ve learned is all wrong for budo. They grip things with their thumb and index finger, because it feels natural. They sway side-to-side and bounce up-and-down when they walk. These are natural habits. Only once they stop reflexively gripping with their index fingers and throwing their bodies off-balance with each step they take will they truly start to learn to hold a weapon or move through a kata.

Optimal budo comes from the optimal use of the body. To get there you have to start with the fundamentals. What’s more fundamental than breathing? Optimal breathing is a learned skill. Just ask a trained vocalist or flute player. Developing great breathing skills takes time and effort. Classical budo ryuha all have pretty firm ideas about how to develop a great martial artist in their tradition. There are specific techniques and kata that are studied in specific order so that the student develops that unnaturally optimized body and mind that make their budo powerful and adaptable.

The flip side of learning to do things well, is learning to not do things that don’t need to be done. One of the key things in optimizing the budo body and mind is getting rid of everything that is unnecessary. Unnecessary movement, tension, and mental noise all have to go. Unnecessary movements create openings and opportunities that a good opponent will make use of. Unnecessary tension slows you down and makes it harder to move and respond to what is happening. Unnecessary mental noise stops you from realizing what your opponent is doing until it is much too late to do anything about it. There are many reasons the great martial artists throughout Japanese history spent time repeatedly talking about mushin 無心 or “no mind”.

Water and Martial Arts

Below is an excerpt from a post at The Okinawan Empty Hand blog on water as a metaphor in martial arts (and beyond). The full post may be read here.

Mizu no tetsugaku [水の哲学] by CEJames & Alfonz Ingram

Here are some quotes related to the concept of water:

1. Bruce Lee on Adaptability:

“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless—like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

2. Laozi on Softness and Strength (Dao De Jing, Chapter 78):

“Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.”

3. Miyamoto Musashi on Strategy and Fluidity:

“With water as the basis, the spirit becomes like water. Water adopts the shape of its receptacle; it is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea.” (The Book of Five Rings)

4. Okinawan Karate and Muchimi:

“Like water, muchimi allows fluid yet weighted movement. Heavy, yet light; firm, yet soft. One moment yielding, the next crashing with force.”

5. The Zen Mind and Flow:

“When the mind is still, it reflects like a calm pond. When disturbed, it is like a rushing river—thoughts tumbling endlessly. Mastery is finding peace in both.”

6. Wu De and Water’s Ethics:

“A virtuous fighter flows like water—seeking the low ground, never contesting strength with strength, yet always finding a path.”

7. Seijaku and the Depths of Water:

“Stillness is not the absence of movement but the depth of water before the wave rises.”

8. Shibui and Water’s Aesthetic:

“Like the quiet stream that carves mountains, true refinement in karate is deep, unpretentious, and effortlessly effective.”

Each of these quotes ties into your exploration of martial arts, philosophy, and self-defense, using water as a metaphor for adaptability, softness, power, and depth.

Here are more quotes reflecting the philosophy of water in relation to martial arts, self-defense, and life:

9. Chuang Tzu on Water and the Mind:

“The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep. Thus, he can overcome all things without harm.”

10. Issai Chozanshi on Martial Arts and Flow:

“Water, though weak, is never broken. It does not resist; it moves around obstacles and yet wears down mountains over time.”

11. Bodhidharma on Stillness and Flow:

“A disturbed mind is like turbulent water—unclear and chaotic. Let it settle, and clarity returns.”

12. On Ma (Interval) and Water’s Flow:

“Water does not force its way; it moves at its own rhythm. The space between attacks is not empty but flowing like the current of a river.”

13. Fudōshin (Immovable Mind) and the Ocean:

“The ocean is unshaken by the wind; its depths remain still though the surface rages. In battle, be as the ocean—calm in the storm.”

14. Chinkuchi and the Compression of Water:

“Like a crashing wave, the true strike comes not from mere motion but from compression, release, and flow.”

15. Gamaku and the Swell of the Tide:

“Power rises from the waist like the swell of the tide—subtle, fluid, and overwhelming when unleashed.”

16. Shugyō and Water’s Persistence:

“A single drop of water seems weak, but given time, it will carve stone. So too does relentless training shape the martial artist.”

17. The Dragon as Water Incarnate:

“The dragon moves like water—twisting, coiling, flowing without resistance. Its power is hidden, yet immeasurable.”

18. Mushin and the Nature of Water:

“Water does not think; it simply moves. Do not be bound by form, nor by thought—just act, as water does.”

19. Zandaka and Water Retained:

“A cup filled to the brim spills with the slightest touch; true balance is found in leaving space, like a reservoir that never overflows.”

20. Improvisation in Self-Defense and Water’s Nature:

“Water never hesitates—it finds a path instantly, whether trickling through cracks or flooding over obstacles. Adapt like water, and you will never be trapped.”

Each of these speaks to a different aspect of martial philosophy—fluidity, adaptability, stillness, power, and persistence—making water one of the most profound metaphors in martial arts and life.