The Right amount of Violence

by Dave Lowry Black Belt Magazine 2003

I saw something that was rumoured to be an aikido demonstration the other day.  After issuing a rambling explanation of the mysterious forces that gave the practitioners their powers, the teacher held the microphone with one hand and threw his students with the other.  In another demo, a student threw an open-hand strike at a classmate's forehead, but because the defender was flustered, he allowed the force of the strike to peter out, and they both giggled.  Later, the teacher faced another student.  Both were armed with bokken, but their exchanges were so feeble that the wooden weapons barely clicked when they connected.

The saddest part was that he teacher and students seemed to believe they were doing a good job.  No doubt they'd been taught that this was a legitimate expression of the Japanese budo.  In their introduction, they mentioned kindness, etiquette and perseverance, all hallmarks of the budo and probably goals in their lives.  Unfortunately, they'll never reach those goals, at least not the way they were practicing their art.  They had no sense of nangyo - the impetus of hardship - which is sometimes translated as violence.

Just as excessively macho approaches to the martial way are dangerously biased toward the physical, some arts weigh too heavily on their intellectual or spiritual properties.  To understand why some violence is necessary in the budo, it helps to know a couple of terms that come from Buddhism.

Tariki and jiriki refer to ways in which the faithful can attain salvation.  In some forms of Buddhism, salvation comes through some miraculous event.  This is tariki.  In other forms, it comes through hard work.  This is jiriki, enlightment through effort, or "the hard way".

The budo have numerous examples of tariki and jiriki.  Ittosai Kagehisa, founder of the itto ryu of swordsmanship, secluded himself at a shrine in Kamakura, Japan, and trained day and night.  He starved himself and constantly prayed for divine intervention to learn the essence of the sword.  On the last evening of his stay, he was attacked from behind while training.  Ittosai whirled, deflecting the blade and killing the assailant  in one stroke.  He attributed the cut to the deities of the shrine and formed a school around the technique.

Another example involves aikido founder Morihei Uyeshiba.  A Japanese army kendo instructor challenged the young Uyeshiba to a friendly contest.  It got out of hand, and the instructor supposedly went full force with his sword, trying to hit his unarmed opponent.  After successfully avoiding the attacks, Uyeshiba claimed that he received a divine message about the true meaning of his art.

While both stories have and air of tariki about them, remember that they occurred after Ittosai and Uyeshiba had spent years training hard. One of the humorous messages in Eiji Yoshikawa's book about the life of Miyamoto Musashi tells how the young swordsman constantly searched for some mystical secret of mastery, not knowing that the real secrets don't come from the gods but through daily training.  The principles of the budo can't be mastered through transcendent illumination.  They are not tariki.  They are jiriki, and so the path to their perfection is one of nangyo-do, the way of hardship.

From training outside in severe weather to testing for rank, the budo are full of hardships that act as a sculptor's tools to chisel away the extraneous and create the character of the mature budoka.  But it's the most elemental of struggles, that of grappling with another person during conflict, which produces and essential facet of that character.  Your spirit is solidified by the threat of danger, the possibility of injury or death, and knowing that you may inflict that fate on another person.  While difficult and sometimes painful and frightening, no amount of philosophical pondering can take the place of these confrontations if you are ever to grasp the meaning of the budo.

Does that mean training in the martial way is an endless bloodbath?  No.  It means that, just as every from of the Japanese way helps refines character, so do the budo.  In chado, the way of tea, character is molded by aesthetic appreciation of beauty and form and by sometimes boring, sometimes challenging process of making tea under all sorts of circumstances.  In the budo, character is built in part through violence and struggle.  Without them, judo, karate-do and the like are no longer "martial", and wile they may be "ways" of some kind, they cannot be construed as martial ways.

I am not suggesting that your training is inadequate unless your dojo is strewn with broken bodies.  However, sprains, bloody noses, cut lips and other minor injuries are part of the journey. One question remain.  If violence is an accepted and expected part of training, how can you know whether your dojo is really a place for leaning the way or simply a glorified boxing gym?  In other words, what's the difference between a real dojo and a place that allows bullies and sadists to run free?  The difference lies in the word nangyo.  Nan is written with a character that mean "extremely difficult" or "bordering on the impossible".  Gyo refers to a "stage" in the training process.  It comes from a character that translates literally as "crossroads where many people come and go."  Gyo implies a step along the way, a process of becoming or going somewhere, and not a state of completion or a destination.  In the budo, violence isn't an end in itself. It isn't a goal worth pursuing for its own sake.  It's path to a higher stage.  With this in mind, you should be able to observe the activity at a traditional dojo and make the distinction easily.

Many boxers, professional wrestlers and full-contact fighters employ violence regularly in their lives.  But whatever their goals, they aren't budoka.  While we share a link with them because we are involved in fighting, our intents are markedly different.  For us, nangyo-do is part of a journey leading to something far beyond money or self-satisfaction.  Jigoro Kano described it well: "By training you in attacks and defenses, it refines your body and your soul and helps you make the spiritual essence of judo a part of your very being.  In this way, you are able to perfect yourself and create something of value to the world."