Gogyō Exegesis

兵法は平法なり

From 2005 to 2015, I actively trained in a heterodox line of Katori Shintō-ryū maintained at Capital Aikikai. I was introduced to what at the time was a small study group there by Bob Galeone, my teacher in Gao Lineage Bagua. Over the years, I learned a large portion of the curriculum they taught and received their first rank, called mokuroku. After my mokuroku, our group lead was deployed to Afghanistan and I continued to train, but missed having regular instruction.

Eventually I began training in Kashima-shinden Jikishinkage-ryū on the recommendation of a long-time budō colleague of mine, who was learning Yagyu Shinkage-ryū at the Hōbyōkan. I wanted to learn Jikishinkage-ryū because I was intrigued by its connections to Chinese martial arts (albeit in the early 17th century), interested in practicing a sword art that influenced Sokaku Takeda (since I had practiced Aikidō inspired goshin-jutsu for a long time) and was curious about what sword arts associated to Katori's sister shrine in Kashima were like.

Jikishinkage-ryū was an arduous practice and brought its own benefits to my distance, posture, timing, stability and power. A side-effect of this exposure, however, is that the more I practiced Jikishinkage-ryū, the more I questioned Katori Shintō-ryū. At first I thought this productive, having more than one perspective on budō can be useful. Eventually I realized I could not do both arts, at least not in terms of the obligations one must maintain to multiple groups. This essay is about that process.

I now in live in an orthodox Katori nexus of sorts, with the U.S. hombu dojo of the main line of the art not far away from where I live, but I have decided to stick with Jikishinkage-ryū kenjutsu, even though training logistically is difficult. I had to adapt to my new environment, with a priority on solo practice and sparring, instead of being in a teaching or learning role, until I could find people to work with who were interested in that particular gloss of Shinkage-ryū.

I stopped training at Capital Katori not because it was heterodox (the Jikishinkage-ryū I learned was as part of an unofficial practice) but because I found the two approaches divergent and I felt Jikishinkage ryū to ultimately be better suited for me. I got to the point where I couldn't easily "turn off" the Jiki influence on my movement and attitude when I was doing Katori. So, with limited time, I wanted to focus on the art better suited to both my body and my personality.

In Katori, a primacy was placed on speed. While in initial phases of training precision and ma-ai was emphasized, many practitioners over time in their quest for speed, practicing kata faster than their skill would allow, lost a sense of timing (hyoshi) and advantage (sen) and center line. So much focus is placed on these latter ideas in Jikishinkage-ryū that I was unable to simply turn that part of my training off. By simply not yielding when a partner failed to take center line, the progression of the kata could be slowed or stopped — which would be normal in many styles, but in Katori, long introductory kata are strung together and meant to be done in a fluid stream. Skilled practitioners (there are several in the group, especially the early kiyoshi and students who trained or train in Japan) could adapt smoothly. So, I knew in principle the pedagogy had a sound core, but others got flustered and confused, so in practice it was faltering.

I began to question the wisdom of walking two paths simultaneously, attempting to learn two separate classical arts as well as the Chinese Internal martial arts.

At first, I thought maybe I could keep a Shintō-ryū practice going, not worry about becoming a teacher and just practice the kata at my own speed. I stopped going to formal classes and only attended the open mat sessions where people could train on kata at their own pace. After I moved to Seattle, I continued to practice parts of Katori Shintō-ryū on my own (it has a rather large curriculum), but I did not attempt to connect with a suriving line of the art.

I instead practiced what I knew of Shintō-ryū with a Jiki feel to it and felt it improved my example of the art. Over time I realized while Shintō-ryū was quite interesting, I didn’t really need it in order to have a complete approach to kenjutsu. Being exposed to Shintō-ryū has its benefits, from the perspective of understanding some of the components of swordsmanship that Shinkage-ryū attempts to counter or encode the essence of, depending on one’s perspective on the art. But I am not sure that benefit implied I should spent time on Shintō-ryū when I could be practicing Shinkage-ryū or Bagua or Taiji instead.

More and more I began thinking in terms of a single way of cutting, a single way of movement. You can only cut once.

I believe one should cultivate a practice that is not insufficient and not superfluous. So, a long story to explain why now, in Seattle, not far from a major nexus of Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū in the United States and far from others who practice Jikishinkage-ryū, I still can only do so much and feel I preserve a sense of integrity about my practice.

Still, I have to admit, Katori can be very exciting to watch. The speed. The agility. Sights to behold. Jiki, in contrast, is strange to look at and listen to and probably does not appeal to many people. It is also quite austere — there are fewer waza than in other arts, so you really need to break the kata and explore them to figure out what to do with the art. But, at the same time, it changes you, like other internal martial arts.

Because it is more constrained in what it is doing and focused on stability and sudden power, I found the Xingyi and Taiji I was learning in Yin Cheng Gong Fa very helpful in my practice of Jiki. But that help was about how I held my posture and walked, as opposed to changing anything in the angles or tactics or timing of the art. Our line of Jikishinkage-ryū had already made some small changes to the walking and postures based on several people's practice of Taijiquan. The late Kato-sensei also practiced Taijiquan and thought it was important to practice Taijiquan if you did Jiki in order to balance out the art. Some of the postures we practice are done with with hips facing forward and forward weighted as in Taijiquan instead of open to the side. So, the art has changed slightly, even in the last forty years. Aside from those small changes, I believe that Jikishinkage-ryū contains a form of hard internal neigong, possibly not as explicit as in Chinese internal arts but ultimately compatible with six harmonies (liu he) and other concepts.

When I cut men in Jiki, it is very similar for me to the piquan I practice from Xingyi Quan. For certain, doing Xingyi and Taiji has improved my Jikishinkage-ryū. I also think Jikishinkage-ryū can be a stand in for the kind of basic stance and posture training people assume already exists in students when they walk in the door to learn internal martial arts.

Five Teachings

Others have made different choices, taking their practice of TSKSR far. Was something missing in my own understanding?

Take as an example, the set of kata called gogyō no tachi and consider the meaning of the names of the kata and the postures. The name as written means "five teachings" and there are indeed, five kata, but when heard, is it a homophone for "five elements" from Taoism? If so, there is a puzzle, as uchidachi (senior) and shidachi (junior) have the same stance in each of the kata to begin, so it seems to violate on the surface (omote) level the basic idea of yin and yang. Is that a mistake, a misinterpretation, or a riddle to be solved?

I believe the latter.

On the surface, because the gogyō no tachi start out of balance like that, overly symmetric, it provokes a sudden attack. Maybe uchidachi is supposed to capture that moment of kuzushi, where nothing is possible and all things are possible and interrupt the opponent. That might be sen sen no sen. Shidachi has to recover, suddenly and engage. That might be sen no sen. Maybe you then need to go back and play with different timing, as idealized by the shichijo no tachi (i.e., go no sen, sen no sen, sen sen no sen) — seven teachings, taught in three kata. Cryptic indeed.

Jikishinkage-ryū is very different from Shintō-ryū but is not lacking in hidden meaning. That being said, in JSKR's foundational kata, directly modeled after five element theory in Taoism, the kata start with kamae that are balanced in terms of yin and yang. There is a very direct relationship between each of the five major kamae (postures) and an element and how to chose a kamae based on what an opponent presents. However, maybe that is too literal for Shintō-ryū. Gogyō no tachi are not foundational kata, but an advanced set focusing on unarmored dueling that is also supposed to inform the first set of kata, adding a layer of meaning to them.

Maybe it is the case that the gogyō no tachi each symbolize a different element (metal, water, wood, fire, earth), but in a more subtle way. Their names do not help decode this (mitsu, yotsu, in, sha, hotsu) very easily. Instead of five element (wuxing) theory, consider for a moment that the gogyō no tachi might be driven by the idea of Fudo Myo-o and the Four Heavenly Kings or Shitteno (四天王), who are sometimes arranged in mandala at the cardinal directions with Fudo Myo-o at the center. Katori is heavily influenced by Shingon, a tantric form of Buddhism that includes some Taoist ideas. Dave Hall has written an excellent book on their specific veneration of The Buddhist Goddess Marishiten. The last kata of the gogyō no tachi begins in a posture (kamae) with the sword held in front of the body, vertically, much as Fudo does in common depictions.

Realization or distraction?

Maybe without the Shingon ideas, Shintō-ryū does not make sense. Maybe that is why people who become advanced often abandon, struggle with, or change the art. One of my former mentors infuses his Katori with elements of Taijiquan, as best he is able, and finds the experience rewarding. Maybe he is on the right track, but maybe his answer is not unique:

• What would my Katori look like, were I still to practice it in earnest?
• Would I be able to do any better?

I think if Katori is missing a key to decode it, then it is quite natural to either push one's natural skill as much as one can (maybe it all is ultimately just about speed, as disappointing as that conclusion might be), or fill in the container or vessel of the art with other teachings, because there is something wrong with the art without the inner layer of meaning.

Why could that be the case?

Maybe there is a protection mechanism built into the structure of the art. Maybe there are kuden (oral teachings) beyond the gokui (secrets) of the art, revealed only to a few. Or maybe there are kata called gokui X or gokui Y, but the true gokui are actually radically different from what one expects.

Consider the number of people (hundreds? thousands?) practicing the art today, most at a distance, with infrequent access to teachers and a language barrier besides. How does one wrestle with the kabbalah of the art under those circumstances?

It is dangerous in martial arts to become overly self-referential in one's training. If you practice inside a closed ecosystem and never stress what you are doing, how will you understand your limitations and the limitations of your tactics and how to distinguish between them? Without that knowledge, it is hard to continue to grow past a certain journeyman level of skill. Traditionally, the role of the senior (e.g., uchitachi) is to provide this critical feedback, but when on one's own, after gaining a measure of skill, how to self-evaluate becomes extremely important. This is why what we call classics in Chinese martial arts are important — to provide a connection to the inspiration of the founder of an art, so that the art can be living inside of you, possessing you fully, instead of a dim echo of the original insight, lost through the caverns of time.

For those whose focus is Shintō-ryū, I think independent research is very important to delve deeper into the art, beyond the surface level of the kata. Ellis Amdur's research on Shintō-ryū is illuminating — highlighting extant lines of the art not commonly known of which may have preserved more (or different aspects of) the art. I think advanced practitioners are not wrong to fill in Shintō-ryū with their own perspective, now that they are teachers. Maybe I also was right to largely abandon it, because I was not sure I could fix it, based on what I felt in the experience of practicing the art.

To answer the question I raised above about my own training, I still practice the kata of Shintō-ryū sometimes, but do them with much more of a Shinkage-ryū feel to them. After all, even if I know kata from several arts, in a single moment, I can only cut a single way and need to do so without hesitation. Mixing and matching arts and frames of mind won't work under duress. For me. I know some shape shifters for whom this is possible, but they are unique individuals who have much more experience than I.

This is all a long way to say that on one hand, it is okay to take the time to learn deep approaches to armed and unarmed combat and serve within the rules of a group in doing so, but one should eventually also be willing to explore the approaches you believe to have mastered in some kind of stress tested environment. Starting within a group is a start, but being willing to face others is important. The only things a person loses in doing so are the preconceived notions of their skill.

Doesn't that free you, instead of harm you?

I agree that we can't actually practice battlefield kenjutsu in the modern age, but we at least can get feedback on our own skill in progressively aggressive sparring. Doing this cannot be something done at scale — once there is too large of a community involved, there will be regression to the mean and approaches will evolve to win at specific instantiations of rules governing any set up of matches. Witness kendo, or Olympic fencing. I am not advocating that progression, but instead a willingness to work hard and experiment.

However, the idea of stress testing is a double-edged sword. It is also dangerous to become overly distracted with competing approaches to the point where you train in so many different approaches, you are effectively no longer training at all, because the efforts are not aligned and cancel each other out as opposed to balancing or reinforcing one another. Training runs a danger of becoming irrelevant if you spend too much time switching approaches, running from shiny object to shiny object. This is where teachers can be helpful, pointing out how to approach an opponent using a different methodology, from one's own practice.

It is fair to require a practitioner obtain a level of skill before sparring freely inside a group or with colleagues who practice other martial arts. Traditionally, this was upon receipt of a menkyo, or license, suggesting a level of skill had been obtained in an art. However, today, these certifications are much harder to come by, both due to the amount of time hobbyists are able to practice and the commoditization of martial arts in terms of their forms or kata. Saying someone has completed training gives them the freedom to exist on their own and implies to at least some extent, a loss of control of their behavior.

• How many people, excited about the accomplishment they have obtained, think to continue to benefit from the wisdom of more seasoned travelers on their path?
• How many instead think they are truly complete?
• How many of those have stress-tested their approach and know the strengths and limitations of their practice?

Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū is one of the most respected Japanese koryū. It might be shocking to read a critical analysis like this one, which may conclude there are problems with the art. Current members of TSKSR would not be wrong to ascribe the problems I describe to where I trained, versus their orthodox transmissions of the art. I have been impressed with the limited demonstrations I have seen in person of mainline TSKSR. [1]

In this essay, I have stayed away from some of the common criticisms of Shintō-ryū, that have been made generically over the years in the kobudō community. Some include:

1. The long kata provide endurance but can limit zanshin and kime in many practitioners.
2. Because ma-ai is increased for safety or to hide techniques practitioners can have difficulty adapting to actually apply technique.
3. The kata are practiced at a speed that is impractical for use with a real sword.
4. The flowing nature of the kata cause the roles of uchidachi and shidachi to blend, making it difficult for students to understand what are the tactics of the art and what are the teaching actions.

Leaving those problems aside, which I found my practice of Jikishinkage-ryū addressed (even if it led me to be unsatisfied by actually going back to the far, fast, light practice of Katori Shintō-ryū), I still wonder what Shintō-ryū actually was, once upon a time. I do not think it is as unchanged as the holders and maintainers of the art would like us to imagine. We seem to be able to answer the question, in different ways, of what Shintō-ryū could be. Maybe that will have to be enough. It helped for me to learn Empi no Tachi from Shinkage-ryū, as that is a capstone kata Kamiizumi Ise no Kami developed to summarize the essence of Shintō-ryū for his students. Practicing that set of kata gave me another lens with which to evaluate the art, albeit one likely clouded by the passage of time, both lines of practice having diverged over hundreds of years. I for one am grateful for having learned a portion of the art, even at a surface level and glad that people have not given up the struggle of understanding and mastery.

Suigetsu

If you practice more than one approach, what is the common theme that transcends the individual arts? How do the strategies align or diverge between different arts? It is all well and good to do the kata of each art correctly. One can probably succeed in doing that well enough, so that only master level practitioners can notice the influence (or contamination) of different themes. The leitmotif of Shintō-ryū in my Shinkage-ryū. Kaito affecting nagashi. Furi in turn affecting makiuchi.

• Is one the ura to the other's omote?
• How do they reinforce one another?
• How do they cancel?
• Can they be in balance?
• Should one be abandoned?
• Retained?
• Transformed?

Internal arts an excellent case study. For a long time I have been critical of the over simplification of identifying the dialectic of internal/external with good/bad or high-level/low-level in martial arts. There can be poor practitioners of taijiquan just as there can be good practitioners of tantui. But moving beyond that, a question is how to integrate practices into other arts, either to replace what may have been lost, or improve one's expression of the art. Doing so as a student may yield benefits (e.g., in the case of people adding body and breath training methods to their Aikidō or Daito-ryū, when Ueshiba and Takeda likely used those methods in their own development) or cause harm to the art (e.g., attempting to do Katori with ideas drawn from Taiji and keeping the rapid furtive pace and large distance between uchi and shi, when those facets of Katori are in conflict with Taiji principles). A question to keep in mind and I think often ignored, is whether by adding to a practice, you diverge so much you are no longer doing the art. The ability to shape shift mentally, keeping the body development you have (you have one body) but organizing your movement in line with a single art at a single time, may allow you to continue to advance in each practice separately, but it is a hard road to walk. If you are senior enough to be a teacher, you can simply change what you teach.

If not:

• How long can you exist inside the confines of the structure (physical, mental, social) presented you?
• Do you go off on your own?
• When?
• What do you gain by doing so?
• What do you lose?

Another question is how to know what is compatible with ideas drawn from other sources. If, for example, reverse breathing practices are added to your art, does it change the way you cut? A glance at Jikishinkage-ryū versus Kashima Shintō-ryū says very much so; closer still, compare the former to Yagyu Shinkage-ryū, especially where a large number of shinai gekko kata are practiced with a very light implement. In the same spirit, compare Kashima Shintō-ryū to modern variants of Katori Shintō-ryū — the latter having preserved possibly more sets of kata (iai, bo, naginata, yari) but evolved to place a priority on celerity, to the point of using a bokuto that is no longer representative of a sword, weighing half as much (e.g., 600g vs 1300g). How does that aesthetic choice affect the movements and assumptions of its practitioners?

I myself am in the process of striving and focusing. Striving forward to get a deeper understanding of the arts I have chosen to focus on and focusing the teachings I practice. They each have intrinsic value but in an instant, I repeat for the the third time: you can only cut once. You do not get to pick Shintō-ryū or Shinkage-ryū or Jikishinkage-ryū. For me, internal martial arts is the core of my practice, so only what I am able to align with those ideas should survive the process above. All of this requires looking past individual technique and dedicating to a small set of paths.

I am impressed with the precision and dedication of the small groups of dedicated martial artists I have encountered in the Pacific Northwest. I appreciated the detail and soft precision of the arts and the dedication of their practitioners and the raw ferocity with which some of my friends practice. This instills in me is a desire to improve my own practice and make sure I am doing neijia as correctly as possible and getting the full benefit I can from the instruction I have received. Mastering what I have been shown is challenging, but I feel the rewards are clear. It has been a long journey, with no lack of adversity, but my view of martial arts is completely different than it was ten years ago. The more I train, the more I realize the current limits of my skill but also the continued path I need to walk in order to progress.

The more I practice Shinkage-ryū, the less I miss having people to train with in Katori Shintō-ryū. While it can be a deep practice and I found it at times very rewarding, Jikishinkage-ryū feels more and more complete to me as I continue to examine its depths. Maybe if I understood better the Shingon elements of Shintō-ryū, as I allude to above, I would better understand the rationale behind some of the kata. [2]

End Notes

1. This was in the early 2000s.

   I first saw TSKSR demonstrated at the same enbu in St Louis where I first met Ellis Amdur in person, and it was quite the privelege to be able to see arts (Katori Shintō-ryū, Araki-ryū, Buko-ryū, etc.) I had only read about previously. This was before YouTube and before I later joined Capital Katori. I was still practicing goshin-jutsu I had learned in NYC. I had only previously seen Yagyu Shinkage-ryū (first when training under Kato Kazuo of NY Yagyukai in the mid 1990's) and Shindō Muso-ryū jo.

   When I see enbu from the main line students in the US (e.g., related to the annual Seattle Japan Festival or at an annual cherry blossom festival in St. Louis), they are quite excellent, far better than what I encountered on average in many of my Capital Katori colleagues, and in many ways much better than what I was able to achieve with the art.

   That weekend was fateful for me, as Ellis asked me what was next for me, and I told him I had always wanted to learn bagua when I felt my taijutsu was solid enough. Because of that conversation, and the introductions Ellis made, I began training in internal martial arts.

2. I was excited to get a copy of Sugino's book titled Katori Shintō-ryū Kyohan from 1941, which has been recently translated into English. It is very interesting in that is very explicitly an instruction manual, speaking to the art very directly and benefiting from the input of several instructors of the art in its compilation. It also provides a window into the art as practiced before the end of World War II and I recommend it highly.