Category: Thoughts on Budo

Focus & Reach your Goals


Ooty Golf course India

When you train you often forget the goal you are trying to reach and you lose your focus. Whether you are on the tatami or outside the dôjô, this is the quality of your focus and what you live that gives you the solution.

Do not believe the waza, they are only there to channel an idea in order to decipher the feeling that is not written. Focusing on each moment of your life guarantees success.  Do not try to achieve a result as you would project your intention into a non defined future. On the contrary focus on the instant like in nakaima (middle of now) and you will be adaptable to any change happening in the instant. If you are doing a technique, you are actually seeing your victory that has not happened yet. Your tamashii (spirit, soul) is the tool allowing you to use your saino (ability) level to its best, in the utsuwa in which you are caught.

This permanent focusing of the total being (body and mind) by the use of saino konki renders possible the reaching of your goals whatever they are. The goal is not important per se but it will, like a waza, bring to your understanding, things that are not obvious at first sight.

Remember our art is to “render the invisible visible”. This is how we must see Life. And when you are able to do that, in and outside the dôjô, you are living into the rokkon shôjô.

Happiness is the only things that matter. 🙂

Bô Seminar (part1) Update


We finished the three levels of kukishin bô today. And we will do the keiko sabaki gata next week-end. Each time I go through the bô jutsu levels I am amazed by the insight we can get from them. I understand why bô jutsu was a ryû in itself. We also did all the kaeshi waza for each one of the 27 techniques! I can’t wait to see the rushes for these new dvds. 🙂

Bô: Kûkan & Distance


Distance is power

Bô jutsu is one of the key to enter the kûkan as it gives access to distance. Too often in training we  are trapped by the form (waza) and do not dwell enough into the feeling (kankaku). When sensei introduced us to the “cycle of weapons” in 1993, many bujinkan members were surprised as bô jutsu did not seem to be “ninja” enough to them.

But bô jutsu was only an excuse to excel. Bujinkan is footwork. When we train the bô, the technique traps our brain and our movements follow a “1, 2, 3” sequence. After repeating those forms long enough, something fresh comes out of them. Through mechanical repetition the brain frees itself and a natural movement is created only because footwork adds itself to a new understanding of distance.

In one of the bujinkan schools, it says: “ahead lies paradise” meaning that in a fight you get protected by entering the distance to the opponent. By accepting the encounter, you actually enable yourself to be safe and free in your actions. This knowledge of how to distance yourself correctly is the first thing you learn with the use of  long weapons. This freedom has created a kûkan of which you were not aware of before. Through the study of bô jutsu you are now able to enter this kûkan and bring your taijutsu up to a new dimension.

Weapons are our best teachers. We move our bodies and we now learn to do it with an artifical extension offering new possibilities.

Bô jutsu is not “ninja“? maybe not, but our skills improve a lot through this type of study. We understand now distance and angles in a wider sense and can play freely with a new created space.

Maybe this is why divinities are often represented with a long staff. 🙂

Kukishin Bô Jutsu Shoden


old bô jutsu drawing by hokusai

Did you ever notice that the three levels of bô jutsu from the kukishin represented the three levels of the ten chi jin?

Did you ever notice that in the shoden no kata you had 3 groups of 3 techniques? Each name of technique begins with the name of a kamae followed by the principle hidden within each one of the groups. 

Those principles can be written in different ways, I offer here three possible meanings.

The first group deals with kangi which can have the same meaning of ” intuition, sixth sense” (gi means waza = technique). kan (勘)

The second group is gogi and can have the meaning of go(shin), “defense”. Go (護).

The third group is kôki and can have the meaning of “achievement, success”. Kô (功).

If we add those three meanings we get the idea the the first level of the kukishin bô is to develop our intuition to defend ourselves in order to find success”.

Funnily, the last technique (the ninth) of the level look like a mix of all the waza studied in the level. If not in the form at least in the feeling.

The last technique is called tenchijin… 🙂

Elegance is an Attitude


What can you add?

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.

🙂

Indian Touchdown


With Shiva and Nandita in Japan

I arrived yesterday in Bangalore for a long Bô jutsu seminar after a long flight. The monsoon is announced and humidity is rising. Hot trainings in perspective.

On the dvd front, Shiva told me that the new buki waza dvds are ready. I’m bringing them back with me so check budomart regularly.

Here we will train a lot and record the whole bô jutsu, gyokko ryû shoden, and mutô dori.

I keep you informed in the following days.  🙂

Imagination


Napoleon Bonaparte

The greatest power we learn in training in the bujinkan is to develop the power of our imagination. This is the kaitatsu explained in a previous article.

Napoléon said that: “Imagination rules the world” and if it was true for him it is definitely true for us too.

The bujinkan seen as an educative system is helping us to get rid of our preconceived ideas and to find new ones. Often when I meet a bujinkan student in  a seminar I am amazed that first he (or she) never heard about the Ten chi Jin Ryaku no Maki created by Hatsumi sensei and second that his (or her) vision of the art has nothing to do with the reality of training in Japan. This is never the fault of the student nor of his teacher but of the teacher of his teacher who often joined the bujinkan after many years of gendai budô. These first teachers  never ever reconsidered their previous knowledge to adapt it to the new set of rules. This lack of foundation explains the poor level of imagination in the bujinkan. The bujinkan will transform you if you train the basics properly.

Through these foundations, you will develop the power of your imagination and become an artist able to rule the world.

Be happy (imagine)

I need your help


new logo?

Dear buyu,

Solkan Europe, the company offering http://www.budomart.com, has been using the same logo since the last Paris Taikai I organized for sensei in France in May 1997.

After 13 years it  is about time to renew the look of my company so I am redesigning the  www.budomart.com website.

I am looking for a new logo for Solkan Europe and I would like to ask for your feedback on this.

On the left is one logo that I was given today, please help me so that I can make up my mind.

Do you like it or not?

Thank you,

Arnaud Cousergue

Stars & Galaxies


http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/wfpc/arp_148-browse.jpg
collision between two galaxies

The concept developed recently by sensei of a photon colliding a speck of stardust to illustrate that we should render the invisible visaible made me think of galaxies and budô.

In space stars are often seen as regrouped by men as a given shape (big dipper, cassiopea, betelgeuse etc). But this apparent “regrouping” is only visible from our point of view in the universe; the location of Earth in space. If we were able to go a few thousands parsecs away from our actual location, these groups would not exist at all! It is only our vision of things that make us see them as a given recognizable pattern in the natural chaos of space. Our perception is wrong, it is omote not ura.

If we consider the galaxies which are real natural entities and not a human mental construction, we can make a parallel together with the encounter between the attacker(s) and the defender.

In Budô our techniques can be seen as equivalent as these artificial regrouping of stars made by humans. They are not connected naturally.  Back to space this fake connection  is real when it comes to galaxies. And even more when they are colliding.

On the mats uke and tori are like two different galaxies.

In both cases (galaxies, opponents), the connection/collision is not wanted and the outside observer cannot fathom what particular consequences will stem from the encounter. By keeping the connection with the environment, by applying En no kirinai (do not sever the connection) everything move in the best possible way.

Galaxies cross the universe without intention (as far as I know) and our taijutsu must follow (flow?) the same path. Having no preconceived ideas, you move naturally and bring the techniques to life to the better outcome.

Don’t think, react in adapting your flow to the moment.

Be happy 🙂

Eyes no Eyes


Eye or no eye?

Some people say: “don’t lose eye contact”, “don’t look at the opponent”, “watch him carefully”, “ignore him”. All is true and all is wrong.

My feeling is that within the yoroi kumiuchi sphere the only “living thing” is the eyes of the opponent. If you want to receive the flow of his intentions you have to connect to him through the eyes.

This is another way of understanding “kanjin kaname” which then could translate as: “through the eye I can  see through his spirit”.

🙂