In the airline’s magazine I was flipping the pages when I stopped at an add presenting a beautiful Indian woman with a caption reading: “elegance is an attitude”. Immediately it made me feel happy!
Wherever you go you have to be aware of the connections between jissen (true life) and jissen (true fight). The world is our training ground and coincidences are there to teach us something.
We explained that yûgen is the invisible world rendered visible and that it is the Japanese word for elegance. We also discussed the word kamae as being more an attitude than a simple body posture.
This caption in a bujinkan understanding could be the following: “yûgen is kamae“. When your basics are assimilated and your body flow created, your attitude towards life becomes elegant. Elegance is not something you can ad by yourself; elegance is not omote, it is ura. It is something that is born from your being and that spreads around you like a perfume. There is no technique to learn it, elegance comes naturally when your attitude is correct.
The beauty of the bujinkan system is that through a long and strenuous training period you reach this level of elegance. You don’t do things because you want to but because you are true to yourself.
🙂
Shiro Kuma 