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First of all, the Advent Challenge is over! Congratulations to everyone who stuck with it.
Traveling from martial arts school to martial arts school has a long and storied history and can effect our training on many levels.
For myself, when I am traveling, I try to find a taijiquan teacher who is compatible with the style I study. I find that it is a wholesome activity.
Most of my good habits go by the wayside when I am traveling and my normal routine is disrupted. I like to get out and meet new people and be exposed to perhaps new ideas.
Below is an excerpt from an excellent article that appeared at Kung Fu Tea about the Warrior Pilgrimage in Chinese and Japanese traditions. The full post may be read here.
Bear up under days of cold and heat,
withstand exposure to wind, rain, sleet.
Walk mountains and difficult
paths. Do not sleep under a roof; consider it fundamental to sleep out
in the open. Be patient with hunger and cold. Carry no money or food
provisions.
If there are unavoidable battles at a
destination, participate and achieve meritorious deeds. Be direct in
combat, let your deeds speak. Go alone to places frightening to the
common run of men; places where evil spirits congregate or where there
are bewitching foxes and poisonous snakes.
Become a criminal on purpose, be put in jail
and extricate yourself by your own wisdom, perseverance, character.
Consider your own position to be below that of farmers and make your
living by helping in the paddies and fields.
Bukoyo Shigen, 1603, “The Seven Austerities.”
...
The Warrior’s Pilgrimage
Not all travel is the same. When I mentioned my recent Shaolin
experience to a colleague he mused (mixing cultural metaphors) that by
walking into such a different school I had undertaken my own
Musha shugyō.
This Japanese term refers to a sort of “warrior’s pilgrimage” that was
performed by the Bushi and later Samurai. Their goals were diverse, but
typically included improving one’s technical skill through training,
developing mental and spiritual toughness, establishing a reputation as a
skilled warrior, and finding gainful employment with a local Daimyo.
While I am hardly a wandering swordsman, this struck me as in some
ways an apt metaphor for the sorts of travel that I see being undertaken
by some martial artists (and younger scholars) today. Indeed, there
seems to be a strong structural connection between training in an
embodied skill and the necessity of travel. My friend’s metaphor was
all the more intriguing as this tendency can also be seen across
cultures and time periods.
China has a long literary tradition of tales of wandering youxia in
both ancient literature and classic Ming and Qing era novels. Indeed,
during the Republic period it was a common refrain that a well-trained
martial artist with a sword on his back was free to walk from one side
of China to the other, a task that few others would dare to take up. In
a very real sense martial accomplishment was associated with geographic
freedom. Likewise, Western knight errantry was also well-established in
both the fabric of European feudalism as well as the region’s
literature. Still, it would be unwise to conflate all “martial
pilgrimages” under a single label as doing so could cause us to lose
sight of the importance of socio-economic marginality in these patterns,
or the role of the martial arts as a strategy for dealing with one’s
marginalization within society. Traditional modes of hand combat
functioned not only as a concrete qualification by which one might gain
certain sorts of employment, but also as an ideological construct
allowing one to find value, and even virtue, in difficult circumstances.
Or to draw on a more sociological terminology, they were means by which
marginal individuals might establish effective sub-cultures.
Let us begin by considering whether the journeys in question are
essentially circular in nature, or linear and non-repeating. When
analyzing a pattern of movement timing is often the critical element,
even more so than distance. Some types of travel are undertaken at
regular intervals, or with a regular group of companions. In my
academic life I might travel to the annual Martial Arts Studies meeting
on a yearly basis. Beyond that I see many of these same colleagues
either at smaller workshops or perhaps bump into them in large
disciplinary or area studies conferences. In any case, the defining
characteristic of these journeys is their regularity. The physical
location of the movable feast may change, but by design the food and
company is usually quite similar.
It is not difficult to imagine how these circuits of travel and
professional circulation might shape a new intellectual community.
Benedict Anderson has talked about the ways that shared literatures
(such as newspapers, or academic journals) and shared professional
experiences can lead to the emergence of “imaginary communities.” One
becomes a member of the Martial Arts Studies community (or any
professional specialization) in large part by joining this pattern of
physical travel and intellectual circulation. The journeys that we
undertake, and the stories that we tell about them, are powerful tools
in the creation of community.
Lauren Miller Griffith and Jonathan S. Marion, in their recent volume
Apprenticeship Pilgrimage: Developing Expertise through Travel and Training (Lexington
Books, 2018), remind us that these basic patterns are not unique to the
scholarly realm. Their ethnographic study of various ballroom dance and
martial arts communities reveals the many ways in which participation
in circuits of training workshops, tournaments, and regular visits with a
revered school or master, served to both create specific types of
embodied skills and status within these communities.
I quite like this book as it speaks to a set of conditions which are
increasingly prevalent within North American martial culture. The
much-discussed decline of the traditional martial arts means that fewer
towns and small cities will be able to support dedicated schools in any
given discipline. Further, even when a school exists within driving
distance, the declining population density of students within
traditional communities suggests that there will be fewer truly skilled
individuals to work with. Those with specific interests (a less common
style of martial art, or perhaps an interest in a specific lineage) are
increasingly likely to find themselves undertaking precisely the sorts
of journeys that Griffith and Marion describe in their quest for
embodied knowledge.
As useful as their description and framework is, it does not exhaust
the role that travel plays (and has played) within the martial arts.
The notion of pilgrimage as used in their text implies a degree of
circular repetition and regularity. Mircea Eliade might remind us that
even if an individual traveler only makes the journey to Mecca once in
their life, they are nevertheless imagining themselves as part of a vast
and unending circumbulation of a transcended world axis that gives
mundane life meaning. In more prosaic terms, one may return to a
martial art’s headquarters multiple times a year for “additional
training.” In some cases, this is important for maintaining one’s own
social status in the organization or teaching credentials. In such a
situation there is no need to imagine community as being defined by
shared journeys between the center and the peripheries. One will have
ample time to experience the texture of this reality for yourself.
This last pattern is something that many of us in the martial arts
will be familiar with. These types of travel are often very expensive,
not only in terms of direct costs but also foregone opportunities in
other areas of one’s professional or family life. The strength of the
communities that are forged through these pilgrimages comes in large
part of from the high barriers to entry which exist within such
organizations. Frequent and expensive travel can serve to ensure that
you are investing your time and resources into a group that is both
prosperous and full of individuals who have already publicly
demonstrated their dedication to the organization. In this case the
expense of the undertaking is a feature of this social system, and not a
bug.
The social scientific literature on
“strict
churches” suggests that this type of cost structure may function as an
important mechanism for dealing with the “free rider problem” in a
variety of social institutions. But again, this stability comes at the
cost of skewing the socio-economic make-up of a community towards those
who have both abundant resources and the privilege to invest them into
purely personal projects. The very nature of such travel is to exclude
those with fewer resources who might otherwise extract more from the
community than they contribute.
While an accurate description of a certain sort of “apprenticeship
pilgrimage” which we see in the West today, it is important to remember
that this pattern is also fairly new. Historically speaking, the
martial artists and warriors most likely to set out on such journeys
were typically more marginal individuals with the fewest resources to
contribute. More specifically, knight-entry was often a strategy
undertaken by those who were economically destitute and traveling across
the realm in search of employment.
Before we can go much further it may be necessary to stop and
consider Musha shugyō in greater historical detail. This turns out to be
a surprisingly complex task as, like so much else in the martial arts,
the term (and even the underlying images that accompany it) has been
frequently reinvented and reused to support a number of different
projects. Part of this can be seen in an ongoing conversation regarding
when, and if, the institution went into decline. Scholars who see the
practice of Musha shugyō as being closely associated with dueling and
feuding are more likely to see a decline after the beginning of the
Tokugawa period.
For them the true essence of Musha shugyō might be exemplified in the
ascetic (and violent) travels of Musashi Miyamoto, or the many other
young warriors looking to make a name for themselves from the Muromachi
period onward. They note that in a system where second sons could not
inherit their father’s feudal responsibilities, there was a strong
incentive for marginal youth from the warrior class to undertake these
journeys to build their reputations, and martial abilities, while
searching for gainful employment.
For such youth the conditions outlined in the opening quote might be
understood as giving social meaning or validation to the sorts of trials
that they were likely to face anyway. Many of them were undertaking
such a task precisely because they did not have money, warm clothing and
schools or friends to support them. Accepting temporary work as a
mercenary or farm laborer was not just an exercise in spiritual
discipline. It really was an economic necessity. And yet the norms that
surrounded this sort of martial travel (borrowed in large part from the
journeys of Buddhist monks) helped to contextualize and endow these
trials with a veneer of personal and social meaning.
In truth the warrior’s pilgrimage never really vanished during the
Tokugawa period, though like all other aspects of life in Japan, it came
to be regulated through a system of complex law and social norms about
the proper behavior of the wandering samurai (which again, makes a great
deal of sense if you are looking at these as extended job interviews.)
Students who tend to understand dueling and Musha shugyō as distinct
activities that only overlapped in certain times and places (and not
even totally then) are less likely to see the practice as having been
fundamentally threatened. From their less romantic perspective, the
high point of Musha shugyō may not have been reached until the final
decades of the Tokugawa era. The spread of various schools of fencing
using split bamboo Shina and protective armor led to an explosion of
interest in the practice as young martial artists from around the Japan
could now compete with each other in spirited matches in a new
generation of revitalized training halls.
Alexander
Bennet, drawing on the detailed diaries of Muta Bunnosuke Takaatsu
(1831-1890), a Saga warrior, describes one episode of martial pilgrimage
that took place between 1853 and 1855 (pp. 77-80). Gone were the
days of extreme deprivation described in the opening quotes. Young
warriors, and sometimes their more experienced elders who were being
awarded what amounted to a paid sabbatical by their Lords, would now be
provided with letters of introduction by home domains to the various
schools they intended to visit. Upon arriving in a city these
individuals would check into well-appointed inns that catered
specifically to the large numbers of swordsmen on the road undertaking
training pilgrimages. It is fascinating to realize that by the end of
the Tokugawa period the practice of Musha shugyō had become so popular
that extensive networks of infrastructure were necessary to support it!
Generally speaking, the local domain being visited would pick up the
tab for these lodgings, and representatives of the local schools would
come to greet new travelers and introduce them to the training halls.
Complex rules of etiquette were observed in these training sessions and
the traveling warriors were given official documents proving that they
had visited such and such a school, at such and such a date. Again, all
of this served an economic and social function. Young warriors
undertook such training to improve their employment prospects. More
experienced swordsmen sought to polish their reputations and expand
their social networks.
Nor was this the last time that the notion of the Musha shugyō would
be revived. During the Meiji period it was realized that circuits of
national martial pilgrimage might help to promote the notion of Japan as
a unified modern state with a shared national culture. Whereas these
journeys had previously served an economic function, and perhaps
contributed to the notion of the Samurai as a coherent social class,
this same basic pattern of travel could now be made to serve a new
purpose. Bennett even goes on to note that the idea of Musha shugyō was
once again resurrected by Japanese martial arts organizations in the
post-WWII era in an effort to spread and revive the traditional martial
arts through creating new networks of practitioners in the modern era.
All of this is a far cry from Mushashi Miyomoto’s many duels. Yet it
would be historically naïve to argue that the latter practices were
some-how degenerated or less legitimate simply because they served the
needs of their respective era. And in any case, it is interesting to
note that while the details of the practice changed, at heart martial
pilgrimages were always seen as a way of dealing with an excess of young
warriors who could not be immediately integrated into Japan’s feudal
structures.
Travel was also a critical means of advancement for young warriors in
other areas of the world. Europe’s young knights faced similar
dilemmas of underemployment as their Japanese counterparts. Those who
could not inherit a title or fief from their father often traveled
extensively seeking employment with a local baron, or attempting to get
noticed in the tournament circuit. By all accounts this was a tenuous
and stressful existence.
China differed from Japan and Europe in that it was not a feudal
society. Still, martial arts training was often seen as a critical
means of advancement for younger sons, or individuals from
underprivileged areas. Lacking an inheritance, it was often impossible
for these individuals (termed “bare sticks”) to find wives, or even a
place in a local social order based on landownership and family
lineage. Martial arts training offered one a chance to establish a
career in the military, as a security guard, a yaman runner, even as a
petty bandit. It was not uncommon for such individuals to spend the
agricultural seasons at home working in the fields, and on the off
months to engage in salt smuggling or some other “grey market” pursuit.
While the relationship between the martial arts and travel was not
institutionalized to the same extent that was seen in Japan, it was
never the less present in China as well. In a notably static agrarian
society, martial arts instructors and their students (along with actors,
soldiers and itinerant doctors) were unique in that they so often had
the ability to travel from place to place. This travel was sometimes an
economic necessity reflecting the geographically displaced nature of
many martial artists. Nevertheless, complex embodied skills were
acquired in these journeys, and stories were told that attempted to
establish a degree of social value in these experiences.
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