Martial arts and Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, have a long relationship, but the nature of that relationship — its limitations and potential — is misunderstood. A fully developed Buddhist martial art does not exist and likely never has. But the potential for a genuine Buddhist martial art does exist now.
It is the intentional application of the principles of Bodhisattva action that has been missing from martial arts practice. There is good reason that these principles have generally not been a part of traditional Asian martial arts, given the cultural setting in which the Asian martial arts arose. But because of the way our modern culture has developed, this can change. To have a vigorous, relevant martial arts practice, it is necessary for us to make this happen.
I was interested in Buddhism when I was very young, and I was interested in martial arts, too. I trained with a dozen martial arts groups over the years. Trained with some great athletes and lots of sincere people. I saw people meditating in some of these settings. But other than ‘calming your mind,’ I never saw much connection between spiritual aspiration and martial skill.
After some exploring, I found the karate of Shoshin Nagamine. He was the founder of a branch of Shorin Ryu, a traditional Okinawan style. I trained in his style for a few years, and then I went to see him.
As Okinawa’s Chief of Police during the chaotic years after World War II, he was one of the pioneers of the public practice of karate, making it available to anyone who wanted to improve his life.
In the years after he retired from police service, he became well known as a karate teacher. Before his death in 1997 at 90 years old he was named a Japanese national treasure.
When I first met him, he was still teaching. In the alcove at the front of his dojo in Okinawa hangs a scroll with the words Ken Zen Ichi Nyo – Karate and Zen as One.
His approach to Zen practice was strong, but it had the same emphasis that you encounter everywhere that Japanese martial arts and Zen meditation are mingled.
In Buddhism the ultimate example of the perfection of being is a Buddha. That is, a being who is entirely free from suffering and entirely engaged in showing the path to Buddhahood to other beings.
A Bodhisattva is a being who is on the path to Buddhahood. That path is consists of saving beings from suffering and protecting them from harm.
In order to have the skill, wisdom and the energy to accomplish their mission, Bodhisattvas engage in Bodhisattva action, called the six perfections of wisdom.
The six perfections include the perfection of generosity, the perfection of moral and ethical conduct, the perfection of not getting angry, the perfection of joyful effort in doing good, the perfection of meditation, and the perfection of wisdom. They are “perfections” instead of ordinary actions, because they are done with insight into the nature of reality, and not with selfish or ignorant motives.
To complete their mission to get out of suffering themselves and to save all beings, Bodhisattvas accumulate merit and wisdom through their actions. Without one or the other of these, their efforts will be incomplete.
The accumulation of merit refers to what we do to take care of others. The accumulation of wisdom refers to our insight, achieved through deep meditative concentration, into the nature of reality – the way things actually work. It is this understanding that frees us from suffering ourselves, and enables us to be effective in helping others. The emphasis of Buddhist practice in martial arts has been exclusively on the wisdom side. The assumption is that the merit side, motivation by compassion, will somehow take care of itself. It doesn’t.
Zen practice in martial arts emphasizes the development of Samadhi – the ability to place one’s mind on an object of attention and leave it there, with clarity and stability, for as long as you want. It is essential in advanced practice of martial arts. But traditionally, Bodhisattva action, the compassion side of the equation, has not been a part of the curriculum.
Understand this: Bodhisattva action is not something external to martial arts that I would like to see added. It is something very much at the heart of martial arts that has been neglected. It is what distinguishes a warrior from a gangster.
You can see the compassionate action of a warrior in what the firefighters and police officers did in New York on September 11, 2001. They ran into the burning buildings to save people. They were not forced to go. They ran in. Ask police officers and firefighters why they did it that day, and they will tell you it’s the same reason they do it every time, as a matter of course throughout their careers. They will say, It’s what we do. It is what they get paid for.
They know that it is an honor to take care of people who need help. It is what makes life matter, makes life worth living. It elevates the condition of their lives, makes them honorable in their own eyes; it is an honor they share. It is extraordinary. Yet it is the attitude you find in public servants all over the country.
The reason you find it so often is not because every police officer or firefighter lives up to the ideal every moment, but because at least in these professions, service and courage are still considered virtues. These values are not added on top of their training. They are built in.
This is a kind of Bodhisattva action. This sense of purpose and valor is what needs to be restored to modern martial arts.
Let me give you another example, with important implications for Zen training in a martial arts context. It is a modern take on a kind of pre-modern martial Bodhisattva. I am using the word Bodhisattva not in the strictly technical Buddhist sense, but to describe someone whose life is dedicated to serving and saving beings.
In the classic film “The Seven Samurai,” directed by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, there is a single scene, at the heart of the film, where Kurosawa shows us his understanding of heroism, service and the warrior ideal.
You can see in the story that both dimensions – merit and wisdom – are highly developed in the leader of this small group of warriors.
As the scene begins, we see that some poor farmers from a little village are being harassed, robbed, and humiliated by a raiding gang. The villagers will be killed if they can’t come up with some kind of payoff for the gang. The villagers feel the only way out of this extortion is to hire some samurai – professional soldiers – to defend them.
It’s a time of civil unrest in Japan, the 16th century, a big battle has just ended, and there are many unemployed samurai available for hire. But every time the poor villagers try to hire a samurai, they have to admit that all they have to pay is a small bag of rice. The samurai they are trying to hire are offended by this tiny offer and tell them to get lost.
Finally they meet one man who listens carefully to their story. He was once employed by a rich lord, but now in light of the hard times, he is willing to work for peanuts. His bearing is strong and dignified. He understands that a samurai’s job is to protect and serve his employer. If his employer happens to be a bunch of poor nobodies, well, that’s life. He accepts their offer.
His first task is to recruit a handful of samurai to help in the mission. He devises a test of their character and their skill.
He takes a seat on the floor in the center of a room, facing the door. He is visible through the open doorway from the busy street outside where many unemployed samurai are walking by.
He stations his young assistant just inside the threshold of the room, invisible to anyone approaching the door from the street. The young assistant holds a wooden sword, a bokken, above his head ready to strike down on the head of whoever enters.
The older samurai sitting there in the center of the room gestures to a strong young guy who happens to come walking by. The guy comes over, and as he enters, the young assistant brings the bokken crashing down on the entering samurai’s head.
Only a parry at the last second kept this young samurai’s head from splitting open. Furious at the trick, the young samurai curses these two and heads off.
The older samurai remains seated, still visible from the street.
Another, better dressed samurai comes walking down the street. As before, the older samurai gestures to this fellow to come in. The fellow approaches. As he crosses the threshold, the bokken comes slashing down toward him, but before it can hit him, he deftly parries and steps back, muttering, angry that he has to deal with this kind of affront. The older samurai waves him away.
A minute later, a third samurai comes walking down the street. His bearing, strong and dignified, shows he is well trained.
The older samurai catches his eye and gestures to him to come into the room. The young assistant with the bokken is again standing hidden behind the threshold, ready to strike.
The third samurai approaches the doorway, but before he enters, he stops, sensing the presence of someone just inside. He looks at the older samurai, and a little smile crosses his face, as if to say hey, what’s with the guy hidden behind the door?
Seeing this reaction, the older samurai seated there gets up, delighted, bows to this third samurai, calls the young assistant away from the door, and invites the third samurai in. He has found his first qualified recruit.
The older samurai feels compassion for the poor villagers and knows his path is one of service, not status or reward. He is a skillful leader who knows what to look for in his warriors, and who knows that the selection of your team is half the battle.
The three samurai that he tested represent three levels of accomplishment in martial skill.
The first man, the one who parries at the last second, is a good technician and can react quickly. The second can sense the intention of the attack before it is physically executed and can pre-empt the strike with one of his own. The third, in a state of awareness beyond thought, hishiryo, can grasp the whole situation, not just perceiving it from a limited subjective point of view, but globally.
Because of this, he can sense the hidden potential in the moment. He is not caught in conflict initiated by the opponent, but foils it without opposition and without having to act consciously. That is very advanced martial arts attainment. It represents what is nearly the ultimate use of Samadhi in martial arts.
This Samadhi may be attained as a result of participating in Zen Buddhist practice. But while it makes use of techniques that have been developed in Buddhism, these techniques may not be used to attain the Buddhist objectives of saving beings from suffering and the direct perception of the nature of reality.
In the story, this may be exactly how they are using the techniques. In modern martial arts, where purpose has been separated from training, this ethos needs to be recovered.
Mahayana Buddhism — the northern Asian Buddhist traditions of Tibet, China and Japan that use the ideal of the Bodhisattva to define their objectives and their methods of achieving them — requires three elements to be present in the mind stream of a practitioner in order to be consistent with Buddhist goals.
First, practitioners must have renunciation. That is, they must understand what kinds of action will be helpful and which kinds will be harmful, and then act on that understanding.
Second, they must attain bodhicitta — the wholehearted wish to save all beings.
And third, they must aim to have correct view: undistorted insight into the nature of reality itself.
These aspirations may be present in seed form in the motivations of people who are practicing martial arts, but they do not have a chance to grow, because the support for them is missing from their training.
To understand why the ideal of Bodhisattva action has been neglected in martial arts training, we can look at the early history of the modern Asian martial arts, in the early 19th century in China.
Business was booming. As goods were accumulated and stored, they needed to be guarded. That is where the growth of public martial arts began. Before then, martial arts were closely held traditions, secret knowledge preserved by feudal families.
There were some dedicated and gifted individuals sponsored by leading families, or living in monasteries or hermitages, who applied Taoist exercises to martial practices. For example, they used physical exercises and imagery to direct the flow of energy through the body, or used herbs and other substances to transform the body’s natural potential.
They undertook these practices to become invincible, to break through stone walls, to uproot trees, to become invulnerable to blades and bullets; some made super human efforts to harmonize their body and mind and pierce the veil of the phenomenal world; some trained for the sake of victory in an impending battle, some for longevity and health, or for all these reasons. Some virtuosi achieved their goals and taught the secrets they learned.
The exceptional practices of these few adepts were the ones recorded in stories we hear about great Asian martial artists, but these people were rare.
Most martial artists in those days were young men moving from the countryside into the cities and seaports. They wanted to learn a few things that would help keep them alive while they were guarding a caravan on the road or a warehouse in a port filled with strangers who were more than likely tough, drunk, and armed.
These young men went to established martial arts teachers for training. Sometimes teachers were hired by companies or rich families to train their guards. Sometimes the young men, through family connections, were sent to study at the home of a teacher who taught privately, in the old style.
Often they picked up a little here and a little there, practiced together and traded techniques, and after a while a talented fighter and leader would develop an approach and a following of his own.
Not all the martial artists in 19th Century China were highly cultivated or well trained, or even interested in becoming those things. It is true that some degree of Samadhi is not only an advantage in martial arts, it is a necessity. If a punch comes toward your nose and you are distracted by how you feel about the punch, you are in trouble.
If you are easily distracted by outer stimulation, or inner events like fear, hope, hatred, or planned technical responses, you are in trouble. If your mind seeps outside the present moment — if you anticipate the results of your next move, if you dwell on a solid punch you just landed, or an opportunity you missed, even for a fraction of a second — you get smashed. Samadhi is developed in training, with or without meditation, with or without calling it Samadhi.
This capacity for sustained focused attention is important in martial arts, just as it is in playing music or chess, flying a plane or any other demanding activity. It is associated with Buddhist training, especially because it is emphasized in Zen Buddhism, which was for centuries the official religion of the military government of Japan, but it is not necessarily a spiritual achievement.
Our style of karate, the style I learned through Shoshin Nagamine, is called Shorin Ryu. The name is intended to draw a connection to one of the three main streams of Chinese martial arts, and trace its roots to the Shaolin Temple in Honan province.
The Shaolin Temple is associated with the Indian Buddhist master Bodhidharma. He is not only the legendary founder of our stream of martial arts, he is the first patriarch of Chinese Zen. It may be that the exalted image of this great teacher was appropriated by martial artists to lend depth and credibility to what they were doing. But maybe there is more.
We do know that the northern Shaolin White Crane style of kung fu, the ancestor of Nagamine’s Shorin Ryu, was practiced in Fuchow, the Chinese port frequented by Okinawan ships making the trip to the mainland. That is where many of the Okinawans learned their martial arts.
During the growth of Chinese commerce and the opening up of public training in martial arts, from the 1790’s to the Japanese conquest of Okinawa in the 1870’s, empty hand martial skill still was a requisite for all commercial sailors including the Okinawans, so the connection to Shaolin was cultural; whether there was a spiritual significance for those people is not written down.
In a truly Buddhist practice of the martial arts, we do have a port of departure from our cultural disaster: a disaster in which our technological power is deployed in the service of desire and anger, threatening everyone. It makes decent people feel vulnerable. To thugs. To riots. To aimlessness, loneliness and hurry. To sickness, old age, and death.
To create a Buddhist martial art, we will have to import parts of the Buddha’s teaching which have not been emphasized in martial arts, but are present there in seed form. This new approach will make martial arts stronger, not weaker, and more practical and purposeful, not just a hobby or a cover for uninitiated wannabes.
A number of the members of our karate dojo and Zen meditation group took the Buddhist vows of moral and ethical conduct, and practice these vows daily. Partly they vow to observe to the ten prohibitions: not killing, not stealing, not lying, not engaging in sexual misconduct, not using intoxicants, not gossiping, not using harsh and divisive speech, not being greedy, not being angry, and not having wrong views.
These prohibitions have a particular function. They are restraints on the ignorant behaviors which cause us to suffer. If we take these vows seriously – not just take them – they provide a kind of spiritual kata or ideal form to which we can continually aspire, and which will guide us toward a life that is decent and strong.
Following these ten prohibitions allows disturbance to subside. It gives us the peace we need to cultivate genuine Samadhi – not just the practical application of focus to our worldly tasks but a deeper meditative state, with senses withdrawn from contact with the outer world, and our mind settled way down. This gives us access to the wisdom aspect of the Mahayana path.
The other half of the Mahayana path, the side of Bodhisattva action, is also necessary for us to attain the complete fulfillment of the Bodhisattva ideal.
It is addressed in the other six of the sixteen vows that Zen practitioners take:
To take refuge in the Buddha, the Buddha’s teaching and in the community of fellow practitioners. That is, to renounce dependence upon things that will not support us, and to turn to where we can get what we really need.
To do good, to avoid evil and to do good for the sake of all beings. This is the Mahayana vow of Bodhisattva action.
Putting people under pressure skillfully so they develop is what a teacher does. That demand, though not always pleasant, is kind. Teaching them that no matter how skillful we become we can only fulfill our humanity through service to others, is essential.
To make a truly Buddhist martial art – powerful, disciplined and focused on saving beings from harm – is the way ahead. |