Yamada Ippūsai Munenori

An excerpt from the chapter on Jikishinkage-ryū in my book Mikkyō, Zen, and Daoist Sources in Shinkage-ryū.

Jikishinkage-ryū in the Gekiken Sōdan

Mikami Genryū’s Gekiken sōdan (1790) gives Jikishinkage-ryū a single short entry (Mikami Genryū 1790), in kan 1 on NDL image 092 (printed page 百六十四 / 164). It sits between the Hikita Kage-ryū (疋田陰流) note and the Yagyū (神影柳生流) section.

“Item. The school called Jikishinkage-ryū (直心影流) was originally Shinkage-ryū (新影流); it is not known who first added the characters jikishin (直心; ‘upright/direct mind’) to style it so. In recent times the man who has made this school renowned is one Naganuma Shirōzaemon (長沼四郎左衛門), [residing] before the Nishiza Hachiman (西座八幡) in Edo. A master of the recent age, he has very many disciples and was reckoned the foremost in the eastern capital; among his disciples, too, many are outstanding. Even now one Naganuma Eizō (長沼栄蔵), perhaps his son, teaches it. Others who propagate this school are Itō Shōzaemon (伊藤庄左衛門) and Naganuma Shōbee (長沼正兵衛), among others; this Shōbee now lives at Shiba Kanasugi (芝金杉) and is said to be skilled. In Hizen Saga (肥前佐賀) the school flourishes, where Shiwa Kizaemon (志和喜左衛門), Mizumachi Hanji (水町半次) and others teach — Hanji reputed the most accomplished of them.”¹²

The passage is a dating anchor — the author (writing the preface) treats the Naganuma line as “recent/present” (近來, 今も), with Shōbee (正兵衛) active at Shiba Kanasugi and the son teaching “even now,” which brackets the Edo Naganuma sub-line as living transmission at that date. And it corroborates the Hizen Saga branch by name independently. This is consistent with the line undergoing a major revision during the time of Yamada Ippūsai.

Yamada Heizaemon Mitsunori

Yamada Heizaemon Mitsunori (Ippūsai) (山田平左衛門光徳(一風斎), 1638–1718) studied Jikishin Seitō-ryū as a youth until a time when he was injured. Thereafter, he began a study of Edo Yagyū Shinkage-ryū heihō in the Unchū-ryū faction. In Enpō 2 (延宝２年) (1674), at age thirty-six he returned to his first training under Takahashi Danjōzaemon-no-jō Minamoto Shigeharu (高橋彈正左衛門尉源重治), later named Jikishinsai (直心齋). At age forty-eight in Jōkyō 3 (貞享3年) (1686), Yamada was granted the tekiden inka from Jikishinsai and eventually inherited that line of practice.

Below I provide some context for this thinly attested figure, despite his prominence in the history of Jikishinkage-ryū, and provide a hypothesis on one way in which we can regard Jikishinkage-ryū practice.

From Jikishinsai to Ippūsai

The Bujutsu ryūsoroku (武術流祖録, 1843) has a full entry (image 81):

kanji

直心影流　山田平左衞門光德 元祿年中の人而號二一風齋一、從二高橋彈正左衞門重治一習二直心正繼流刀術一究二妙祕一、重治直心正統的傳之印狀を以附二屬于光德一、改二流名一號二直心影流一、其門最多也、三男長沼四郎左衞門國郷自レ幼好二刀術一、從レ父習練有レ年、終悟二奧旨一居二東武西久保一大鳴、從遊士若干、末流多二諸州一、子孫繼二箕裘之藝一不レ墜二家聲一、

with Kakikudashi:

“A man of the Genroku years, styled Ippūsai. He followed Takahashi Danjōzaemon Shigeharu, learned the Jikishin Seikei-ryū (直心正繼流) sword art and fathomed its subtle secrets. Shigeharu, by means of the Jikishin Seitō tekiden certificate, conferred [it] upon Mitsunori; the school name was changed and styled Jikishinkage-ryū. His following was the most numerous. His third son, Naganuma Shirōzaemon Kunisato, loved the sword art from childhood and trained under his father for years; in the end he awakened to the inner purport, lived at Nishikubo in Edo (東武西久保) and became greatly renowned. A number of gentlemen followed him, and the branch lines are many in the provinces. His descendants continue the hereditary art (箕裘の芸) and have not let the family’s name fall.”³

There is kanji variation in the Jikishin Seikei-ryū (直心正繼流), alternatively using tō (統). The text also asserts twice over that Naganuma Kunisato was Mitsunori’s third son and trained under his father. This would put the founding of the Naganuma family line effectively one generation prior, with Yamada Ippūsai.

Here also only Takahashi is listed as Ippūsai’s teacher. This work is going to lengths recording other men’s cross-school training freely elsewhere — 安丸仲右衛門 “studied the Yagyū Shinkage sword art”,⁴ 夏見族之助 “studied Yagyū Shinkage-ryū and fathomed its subtleties”,⁵ 若名主計 “studied the sword art of the Yagyū-ryū”.⁶

The accompanying 直心影流略系 (image 82) runs from Matsumoto Masamoto (鹿島神流之元祖; “founding ancestor of the Kashima divine school”), to Kamiizumi Hidetsuna, to Ogasawara Nagaharu (from Okuyama Kimishige, 後入唐; “later went to Tang China”), to Kamiya Masamitsu (伝心斎; 改眞新陰流、神則心也; “changed [the name] Shin Shinkage-ryū; shin is precisely shin”), to Takahashi Shigeharu, then Yamada Mitsunori. The compiler records a renaming act for four consecutive generations — Kamiizumi 神陰 to 新陰, Ogasawara 神影 to 眞新陰, Kamiya to 〔直心?〕 with the gloss 神則心也, Takahashi to 直心正統流 — and records none for Yamada.

With Kamiya Denshinsai is stated 神則心也. This is a mid-nineteenth-century attestation of the 神-to-心 substitution as a phonic identity — “shin is precisely shin” — attesting to the use of homophones for the first character similar to the broader Shinkage-ryū practice found in other lines of the art.

The Yamada box carries only surname and tsūshō, while Takahashi’s naming rationale is given explicitly: “because the lineages had become numerous and the branches confused, [he] therefore styled it Jikishin Seitō-ryū”.⁷ The passage continues: “Shigeharu, by means of the Jikishin Seitō tekiden certificate, conferred [it] upon Mitsunori; the school name was changed and styled Jikishinkage-ryū.”⁸

One thing jumps to a careful reader’s attention. Syntactically, the renaming clause carries no restated subject. Classical Japanese and kanbun both permit subject-drop with continuity from the preceding clause, so the default reading carries Shigeharu forward as agent. But the intervening 于光德 (“upon Mitsunori”) makes Mitsunori an available antecedent, and nothing in the sentence forces a choice.

The renaming therefore attaches to the conferral event rather than to either man — it reads as something that happened at the moment of transmission, not as an act attributed to a named individual. This is a slight divergence from traditional accounts that Yamada renamed the art himself – it is not clear from this 1843 witness whether he or Jikishinsai did so. It may very well be that Jikishinsai provided Ippūsai with that name to refer to his teaching. At that time, each generation founded their own art, or changed its name. It is later, with the Naganuma family line, that we see the name Jikishinkage-ryū stabilize – this is also around the time its lineage is driven back to the famous warrior Matsumoto Bizen no Kami.

Not all sources agree. The Gekiken sōdan, compiled the same year, says somewhat opposite in kind: “it is not known who first added the characters jikishin (直心; ‘upright/direct mind’) to style it so.”⁹ Its author Mikami does not know who added 直心. So two 1843 compilations disagree not merely on the answer but on whether the question is answerable. That is a divergence in the mid-nineteenth-century record, which strengthens the case that the attribution question was already unsettled well before the modern scholarship took it up.

Technical Evolution

If we look at the content of Ippūsai’s Jikishinkage-ryū mokuroku, by his time the enpi, kūka excerpts and tengushō kata are discarded, being replaced with the set of fourteen kata titled Tō no kata.

The bulk of the koto and gokui cited by Ippūsai are those of the Edo line of Yagyū Shinkage-ryū, as preserved in Unchū-ryū and can be found in the work above as well as the Tsuki no Sho. Either at the time Jikishin Seitō-ryū was very close to Unchū-ryū in its core content or the two merged in Ippūsai’s teaching, at least at the level of principle.

I believe a line of Edo Yagyū Shinkage-ryū instead passed through Yamada Ippūsai into a revision of the Jikishin Seitō-ryū of Jikishinsai and then became what we call Jikishinkage-ryū today. Naganuma Kunisato then changed from viewing Jikishinsai as the ryūso to asserting a longer continuous (rather than reformed) lineage, back to Matsumoto Bizen no Kami.

In Jikishin Seitō-ryū transmission of Takahashi Danjōzaemon to Yamada Heizaemon in Enpō 7 (1679), we see the arrangement hassō, ittō-ryōdan, utten-saten, chōtan-ichimi. They are followed by enren-toren (圓連 刀連) and tairen (体連), which are noted as being conveyed by oral transmission. This shows an example of enren listed directly after chōtan-ichimi, but it does not mean that it was the fifth kata of the set we practice today called hōjō, just that it was adjacent in the curriculum in that grouping of three.¹⁰

This may be why Yamada chose the name Jikishinkage-ryū – as an expression of the influence his Yagyū practice had on his development. The choice of Jiki as a prefix then is a political statement that survives to the current day, regarding their line as the ‘true’ or ‘correct’ Shinkage-ryū.

This was later obscured by Naganuma Kunisato placing great emphasis on the historical figure of Matsumoto Bizen no Kami as a founder, replacing the accepted history of the bulk of Shinkage-ryū coming through Kamiizumi Ise no Kami from the Aisu Kage-ryū he studied. This was likely done to contrast Naganuma’s practice with both the surviving Owari line of Yagyū and factions of the Edo Yagyū Shinkage-ryū after Ippūsai’s passing.

This may have been motivated by the revisions Ippūsai and Naganuma made to the art’s foundational practice. Ippūsai with Naganuma had substantially reworked the curriculum he learned, merging two lines of the art and in the process discarding much of the earlier Unchū-ryū (Yagyū Shinkage-ryū) kata such as Kūka, Enpi and Tengushō. Without that technical content being transmitted, it was more suitable to point towards the Ogasawara, Okuyama, Denshinsai, Jikishinsai line and impute another founder than Kamiizumi Ise no Kami.

In essence, he did not return to his earlier tradition so much as take it up again in order to continue a line of his own, at a time when Yagyū was only passed down by hereditary means (or via adoption). Receiving final licensure after decades of absence reads closer to a master choosing to designate someone as their inheritor, versus a continued practice that maintained all of what was present at its inception. However, we should not discount the twelve years Ippūsai spent with Jikishinsai in his elder years – it remains an open question how large Jikishinsai’s school was and the exact nature of Ippūsai’s later training.

Jikishinkage-ryū then would actually date from between 1690 and 1718, during the interval after Takahashi Danjōzaemon Shigeharu (高橋弾正 左衛門重治) Jikishinsai has passed and before Ippūsai passed the art on to Naganuma Kunisato Shirozaemon. The subsequent line we inherit today then dates not to the imputing of Matsumoto Bizen no Kami as its founder, but to the moment Naganuma made that choice.

From Ippūsai’s time onward, the shuji shuriken focus on Unchū-ryū would be subordinated to a Zen emphasis in Jikishinkage-ryū that lasted through the twentieth century, as evidenced by the writings of the Rinzai teacher Ōmori Sōgen (Ōmori Sōgen (大森曹玄), n.d.).

Reikenden

In examining the Tsuki no Shō and the opening passages quoting Kamiizumi on his founding summary relating to divine inspiration, we find mention of deities including Mañjuśrī and Marīcī. Kamiizumi’s founding document has two distinct statements — Mañjuśrī’s sword is the fountainhead; Marīcī takes it as her secret art. In addition, Kamiizumi states “I fathomed the innermost sources of the various schools and, drawing out the wondrous from the Kage current in particular, named it Shinkage-ryū”¹¹ – his Shinkage-ryū is an extraction from Kage-ryū.

This is precisely what Karukome in his analysis deploys against the Jikishinkage-ryū densho tradition, which denies the Aisu Ikōsai connection: the founder says in his own hand what the later writings of Naganuma Kunisato denies on his behalf.

This is continued on the kata/koto level in Naganuma’s commentary on menkage (面影; the reflected image) and matsukaze (松風; pine wind) — one school (Jiki) arguing with its own documentary record stemming from the same source (Yagyū) and more specifically, developing a narrative in counterpoint to the prominent Edo line of Yagyū, flowing from Munefuyu that Yamada Heizaemon himself practiced. That is a political framing and one can be excused for coming to the conclusion that Naganuma Kunisato doth protest too much: the Jikishinkage-ryū he inherited from Yamada Heizaemon is not as separate from Edo Yagyū as he presents it to be. However, Naganuma’s commentary — “In the Yagyū tradition, the mind-set of the reflection appearing in the sunlight is good; on our side, attaching ‘no-reflection’ to oneself, one strikes in”¹² — places praise on the Yagyū approach, reinforcing that in practical terms during Naganuma’s lifetime, the two lines were related.

A Mixture of Influences

What Naganuma learned was likely a mixture of Yamada’s early learning from Jikishinsai and Edo Yagyū material. That is one potential reason why he takes care to distinguish his line from the Kage-ryū history shared by Edo Yagyū. The removal of Aisu as a lineage influence is hardened in later writings (切紙聞書之辨書 from 1806):

“A certain person says that one Aisu Ikō (愛洲惟孝), at the Udo cave in Kyūshū, received a numinous dream and attained heihō of himself, and that Kamiizumi obtained that transmission — to say so is wrong.”¹³

This is around the time Jikishinkage-ryū has introduced the use of bōgu and began to emphasize shiai and could be related to anxiety around appearing to (and actually) innovate, in a Confucian culture where older knowledge is valued. This is a continuation of the claim of orthodoxy on the part of Jikishinkage-ryū. Jikishinsai (高橋弾正左衛門重治) named his line Jikishin Seitō-ryū (直心正統流) — 正統, orthodox transmission — and Karukome dates his activity from Kan’ei (寛永) to Genroku (元禄) with the menjō (免状; license) at 天和3 (1683). In terms of Kunisato’s writing, the Jikishinkage-ryū mokuroku kudensho (直心影流目録口伝書; 1764) does not mention Aisu at all. Matsumoto Bizen no Kami to Kamiizumi. There is no mention of Kūka, Enpi, Tengushō or the other early Shinkage-ryū teachings outside of the Hōjō kata that overlap with Sangakuen, and Menkage. Sangaku is not mentioned, but Shinmyōken is, with Fudō bonji.

In the late 18th century, Naganuma Kunisato rejects Aisu as the source of Shinkage-ryū and instead places emphasis on Kamiizumi’s Shintō-ryū influence, declaring Kamiizumi’s teacher to be Matsumoto Bizen no Kami. This name is written as Sugimoto until the time of Yamada Jirōkichi, who developed an accepted thesis on Sugimoto being read more plausibly as Matsumoto. What Jikishinkage-ryū’s origin-myth actually does is displace the founder upstream — Matsumoto Bizen at Kashima, divine revelation, reiken (霊剣) to hōjō (法定) — and deny Aisu Ikōsai, against Kamiizumi’s own attestation, quoted above, that Shinkage-ryū does not exist without Kage-ryū.¹⁴ Over time it also supplants the shuji shuriken mikkyō aspects with a more abstract concept of reikenden instead.

Karukome’s Table 1-12 (表 1-12) collates the Jikishin Seitō-ryū heihō mokuroku (直心正統流兵法目録) — Genroku 7 (元禄7年; 1694), given by Yamada Mitsunori to Yamada Jinnosuke — against the 1856 Ogawa mokuroku. The Jikishin Seitō-ryū (直心正統流) gokui (極意) column reads:¹⁵

Two dates attach to this document. Karukome’s n. 224: “Before the colophon that Mitsunori wrote, there is seen another colophon, said to have been given by Takahashi Danjōzaemon Shigeharu to Yamada Heizaemon Mitsunori in Enpō 7 (1679)”¹⁶ — Takahashi conferred it on Ippūsai in 1679. And the colophon derives its content from Kamiya Denshinsai’s mokuroku, i.e. from before c. 1663.

Ippūsai was seventy in 1708, so born c. 1639. He received this mokuroku, with seikōsui (西江水; West River water) in it, at about forty — from his own teacher, its colophon attributing the content to his teacher’s teacher. That attribution is probably not the whole story for seikōsui. It is not in the 1670 catalogue Ogasawara awarded to Kobayashi Ichirōemon, nor do the early students of Sekishūsai carry it; its earliest Jikishinkage-ryū witnesses are the Heihō zakki (composed 1686; the surviving witness is Ippūsai’s own 1708 copy) and densho like this one, whose colophons claim derivation from Kamiya Denshinsai’s mokuroku but were likely amended by Ippūsai. The most probable source is Ippūsai’s own study under the Edo line of Yagyū, founded by Mitsuyoshi and continued through Munefuyu, whose Seikōsui no koto makes it the house’s capstone gokui. Ippūsai is known to have imported the kodachi and habiki material from Edo Yagyū training, so the conduit already existed: Mitsuyoshi was the Edo heir, and the kuden ran through Munefuyu’s line, which is the Edo Yagyū Ippūsai encountered. The densho’s own commentary on the kata menkage names the Yagyū house (柳生公) and positions Jikishinkage-ryū against it (see the menkage entry below) — direct evidence that this recension family was formed in conscious contact with Yagyū doctrine.

Ogasawara’s list contains suigetsu (水月; water-moon), shuji (種子; seed-syllable) and shinmyōken (神妙剣; divine-subtle sword) — the Kamiizumi triad from p. 69 of the Tsuki no Shō, shuji shuriken, suigetsu and shinmyōken (手字手利剣・水月・神妙剣) — but not seikōsui. The Yagyū arrangement (Sano Katsuhisa 1915) is the founder’s three with seikōsui as a supernumerary, named in Mitsuyoshi’s generation; the 1670 catalogue shows the founder’s three without it, which fits a later transfer of seikōsui into Jikishinkage-ryū through Ippūsai rather than a shared early horizon.

Ogasawara’s 1670 catalogue is the Shin-no-shinkage-ryū heihō mokuroku (真之心陰流兵法目録), a Kanbun 10 (1670) issuance from Ogasawara Genshin Yoshiharu (小笠原玄信義晴) to Kobayashi Ichirōemon, held in the Fujita Seiko Bunko at the Odawara City Library. (Ogasawara Genshin Yoshiharu 1670) It contains a teaching called ensō (圓相; the circle), then enpi (圓飛; here written with 圓/”circle” rather than the usual 燕/”swallow”) of Kage-ryū, and Kamiizumi’s sangaku (參學; the three studies) with explicit mention of ittō-ryōdan (一刀両断; one-cut severing), uten-saten (右轉左轉; right-turn left-turn) and chōtan-ichimi (長短一味; long-and-short, one flavor).

It follows with a unique topic: gorin-kaku (五輪擱; “to set aside the five rings”). This may be a variant of the Shinkage-ryū teaching of gokan-itsu-ken (五関一劔; five-barriers-one-sword) but could refer to moving beyond the gorin or godai phenomenology.

Several kata from kūka are presented, including kaboku (和ト; harmony), hishō (秘勝; secret victory) and yaegaki (八重垣; the eightfold fence). Then marobashi is found written as 丸橋 (marubashi; round bridge). This is in contrast to Yagyū line writings that keep that teaching private — eliding it from texts, or writing it only with the single graph 転 (ten; turning) — similar to the nanatachi set.

Three further details from the Ogasawara catalogues sharpen this. A single gokui gloss can be traced across the transmission intact: “not going, not returning, not abiding”,¹⁷ which sits on ensō (圓相; the circle) in Ogasawara’s 1670 catalogue and continues in later densho as commentary, reappears — as 権体勇〔不行不帰不止〕 — in the 1694 Jikishin Seitō mokuroku quoted above: a concrete Ogasawara-to-Jikishinsai thread for one teaching. The 1670 list also carries Tengushō as tengu-shū (天狗集; the tengu collection), the name used in the Kyūshū lines of Shinkage-ryū — the Hikita line among them — for its tengu material, corresponding with the idea of Ogasawara and Hikita interacting (through a common teacher and possibly later in life);¹⁸ and the Ogasawara inka-maki — kept apart from the mokuroku — preserves a training method for marubashi (丸橋), a teaching that later mokuroku omit; both are marks of contact between the Ogasawara and Hikita transmissions.

According to Karukome, the Naganuma line writes 円橋; Fujikawa-ha writes 丸橋. Both sets are five kata, but the order of 2–4 differs and the fifth is named differently. In the Naganuma line, Hisho san specifies “shidachi the short sword, uchitachi the long sword”¹⁹ — shidachi takes the kodachi. In Fujikawa-ha, uchitachi holds the kodachi and shidachi the tachi. In the Naganuma line, shidachi strikes the tachi down with his own kodachi (e.g. 1st kata: “about when the opposing tachi would land, strike that tachi down”²⁰). In Yamada’s account nothing is struck down: uchitachi lowers his kissaki with kiai to suppress shidachi’s seigan — “uchitachi, in accordance with the interval, turns the sword-point leftward and level and, with kiai, presses down shidachi’s seigan and drops the sword-point”²¹ — and shidachi lowers his own point “with neither excess nor deficiency”²² out of 無想 (non-thinking).²³

Hisho ichi gives the etymology at length: the founder Sugimoto (杉本) vs Matsumoto Bizen-no-kami (松本備前守) — during a hundred-day pilgrimage came to a stream spanned by “a single bridge of round timber”.²⁴ A blind man probed the bridge briefly with his staff, then held it crosswise and crossed “smoothly, on ki alone”.²⁵ Bizen-no-kami built the kata from that impression.

The pedagogical content follows from the image “I will abandon my ego and work with single-minded determination”²⁶ a self-discarded, executed in a single breath, action — with the caution that an immature practitioner cannot perform it. The light touch of the kodachi tip against the tachi is glossed explicitly as “the feeling of a staff touching a bridge”,²⁷ after which one crosses with resolute spirit, ikki (一気).

The Shinkage canon is four sets — Enpi (燕飛), Sangaku (三学), Kūka (九箇) and Tengushō (天狗抄) — as in Kamiizumi’s Kage-mokuroku (影目録; 1566). If Kunisato’s 1764 kudensho carries none of them, then by 1764 Jikishinkage-ryū had not mixed the Shinkage kata curriculum with Yagyū material, but in fact replaced it. This continues a trend. Tengushō is not present in the 1800 mokuroku copy. In the 1670 mokuroku Ogasawara issued, Enpi is still found (written 圓飛) and three of the Sangaku-en kata: ittō-ryōdan, uten-saten and chōtan-ichimi (一刀両断・右転左転・長短一味), without the first and frame-setting Hassō. In 1679/1694 mokuroku issued from Jikishinsai to Ippūsai, Hassō appears as Hassō Happa (八相・発破) and Enpi seems to have been replaced with enren, tōren and tairen (圓連・刀連・体連).

Kunisato in 1764 adds ryūbi, menkage, teppa, matsukaze, hayafune and kyokushaku (龍尾・面影・鉄破・松風・早船・曲尺) — the tō no kata (十之形; an alternate writing of the older 韜之形) — and the Kashima myth. Before that time, founders are named one per generation. Jikishinsai lists Kamiya Denshinsai (神谷伝心斎) as the founder. This is an important point. The process of evolution from Shinkage-ryū kata as taught by Kamiizumi changed in the 17th century in what later became Jikishinkage-ryū, with Kamiya:

1. Kamiya (c. 1663): discards the inherited canon, declares himself founder of a reformed art. The gokui (極意) including bonji, kōmyōken (功妙剣), shinmyōken (心妙剣), ken-tai-yū (権体勇), seikōsui (西江水), sōtai (惣体), kōjō gokui (口上極意) — is what he keeps.
2. Takahashi to Ippūsai (1679–1708): transmit that reduced curriculum intact; Ippūsai’s Yagyū years contribute at the practical level (kodachi, habiki, and whatever the technical comparanda finally support) but do not introduce the gokui vocabulary.
3. Kunisato (1764): adds the Ten Forms and the Kashima origin — supplying, a century later, an ancient authority for a break that had happened at stage 1 and a training method that was new at stage 2.

The myth is doing legitimation work; it is legitimating Kamiya’s rupture, not Ippūsai’s borrowing. Which is why it names Matsumoto — to establish priority, one needs a founder older than the line they have severed themselves from.

What is eventually preserved in common with Yagyū is found in the kuden: shinmyōken, seikōsui, sōjaku, kodachi, habiki, carried back by Yamada Ippūsai from his years in the Edo Yagyū line. The Kashima founder-myth, which derives the Hōjō from Matsumoto Bizen’s divine reiken, is the legitimation this restructuring required — not of a borrowing, but of a replacement.

By 1764 Jikishinkage-ryū had replaced the Shinkage kata canon entirely: Enpi, Sangaku, Kūka and Tengushō are absent from Kunisato’s mokuroku-kudensho, which retains only the Hōjō — four-fifths of the Sangaku-en set, renamed — supplemented by Kunisato’s own Ten Forms.

The Hōjō (法定) four are ittō-ryōdan (一刀両断), zantei-settetsu (斬釘截鉄; “cutting nails, severing iron”), 左右転化 / uten-saten (右転左転) and chōtan-ichimi (長短一味) — four of the five Sangaku-en no tachi (三学円之太刀; the fifth, hankai-hankō (半開半向; “half-open, half-facing”), dropped). Hōjō is not merely “overlapping” with Sangaku-en; it is a four-fifths subset of it, extracted, renamed as a set, and installed as the school’s foundational form. Everything else — Enpi, Kūka, Tengushō, and the Sangaku rubric itself — is gone.

The Kyushu densho examined in the previous chapter suggest why. There a set is transmitted as a public series plus a concealed increment that completes it — Enpi as six plus two, Tengushō as eight plus one — and the increment travels separately from the named set. The same mechanism bears on Sangaku (三学). Kamiizumi’s five kata reduce to three at Ogasawara and at Takahashi; if the Sangaku-en likewise carried a concealed pair, the “reduction” is loss of the increment and not arbitrary pruning. It is Jikishinkage-ryū lore that one Sangaku-en kata was moved into the tō no kata (thus lightly concealed by being displaced into a later practice), though this later reframing is not as clean as the earlier structure Kamiizumi imposed. On this reading Kamiya did not merely discard the canon: he took the omote of one set and made it the whole, which is precisely what a line that had lost the oku would do.

Karukome’s kata tables show that one cannot determine whether Ogasawara’s 圓飛 denotes the six-form set plus the two, or only the first sword. The ambiguity is diagnostic: the appendix travels concealed, so a receiving line can inherit the name without the explicit increment. In the Fujikawa-ha of Jikishinkage-ryū, however, the final fifth kata set of marubashi is silent. In Jikishinkage-ryū we instead find five circles manifested:

1. ensō (円相; circular form), the foundational suburi practice
2. the ritual johanen (上半円; upper semicircle) and gehanen (下半円; lower semicircle) contained in Hōjō practice
3. the last enren (圓連) kata in the tō no kata, which has two parts
4. Enkai (圓快), repeated in kodachi and marubashi
5. the final kata set, and the final kata within the set, shadowing the name: marubashi (圓橋).

I think this is an echo of the earlier Shinkage-ryū concealment structure, but focused on the circular imagery of marubashi and ensō instead of the kuji. And where Taisha-ryū chants the Manura gāthā before practice, Jikishinkage-ryū recites the Hōjōken kokoro-e shō, which performs a similar function, albeit in what is likely an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century adopted Shintō register.

This serves to explain why Yagyū fingerprints show up in the upper-level portions of the mokuroku (seikōsui’s okidokoro (置所; placing-place) and kikai-tanden (気海丹田; the lower dantian), the in/yō (陰/陽) stance logic, the two-shaku definition of sōjaku (相尺; equal measure)) rather than in form-names. Also, it helps explain the densho notes. The matsukaze (松風) commentary — “‘Enkuhai / Enpi’ (円飛/燕飛) was formerly written ‘Saruhi’ (猿飛), it is said. Ogasawara Genshinsai (小笠原源信斎) 〔…〕”²⁸ — is an attestation that the school knows the Enpi/Saruhi name and its Ogasawara transmission, and glosses its own matsukaze against it.

That is not a school preserving Enpi; it is a school explaining what its own form stands in place of it. Same with menkage explaining itself against the practice of the Yagyū house (柳生公), but in the case of enpi, they have discarded a practice that Ogasawara had maintained. So, this is not simply a distinguishing between two Shinkage factions in Edo, but instead a more radical break.

The 円/圓 spelling of enpi in this line is consciously chosen, not a mere graphic variant of 燕飛: the Harigaya-line inka scroll glosses it under “On Enpi Hassō” as “the en of enpi is the en of endonkai (円頓戒), meaning to be perfectly and completely furnished” — binding the form-name to the Tendai perfect-sudden precepts, and through them to Aisu Kage-ryū and Shugendō, as discussed in Volume I.

The founder legend derives the Hōjō from Matsumoto’s Kashima revelation and provides a provenance (albeit mythical) for the form-set that replaced the Shinkage canon. A school that has discarded Enpi, Sangaku, Kūka, and Tengushō cannot claim to transmit Kamiizumi’s forms — so it needs its own forms to have an origin older and higher than Kamiizumi. Kashima, Takemikazuchi, the reiken (霊剣) vision, and Matsumoto as ryūso (流祖; founder) supply precisely that, and they supply it for the Hōjō in particular.

The myth legitimates discontinuity of form, not concealment of borrowing. And that is why it appears with Kunisato — the generation that finished the replacement (adding the Ten Forms) and changed the training method (bōgu, shinai) — rather than with Ippūsai, who did the borrowing but at a level requiring no legitimation.

At the same time, all mention of mikkyō and shugendō, aside from the Fudō bonji associated to the shinmyōken teaching, are from this point on either made private or lost. It appears that in Jikishinkage-ryū writings Marishiten has taken on a narrative and charismatic function (a dream granted sword, and avatar epithet, a founder’s invocation), where in the Shugendō corpus she maintains an operational register (mudras, anointment of armor, etc.).

Reiken (霊剣) is then found instead as a named Jikishinkage-ryū teaching with its own commentarial literature (佐藤郡兵衛『霊剣傳解』1819; 藤川整斎『霊剣略解』1857). In 『霊剣略解』 (Fujikawa Seisai, 1857) we find a doctrinal definition:

“Not only blades — spear, halberd, bow, gun, every weapon is a dead thing (死物); when a person wields them they become living things (活物); if he fails to make them living, the finest blade is still a dead thing. The way to make it living is nothing else: transfer one’s own spirit (精神) into the weapon; ki transfers to ki.”²⁹

In this school then the concept of reiken (霊剣) is that of the weapon made living by the spirit being transferred into it — not a magically blessed or anointed sword. There is also a reading of reiken as on the level of origin myths. The founder legend (as in 『直心影流極意教授図解』 1901 and 『直心影流伝書集』 1909) has Matsumoto/Sugimoto Bizen-no-kami granted “the wondrous art of the divinely transmitted reiken”³⁰ in a divine dream after a seven-night Kashima vigil; testing it with a bokutō cut from the sakaki (榊; Cleyera japonica) before the shrine, “mind, ki, and sword became one”.³¹ And crucially: “from this reiken the hōjō sword-lines were born.”³²

Rei (霊) carries numinous coloring from the revelation-narrative, but the content it names is the mind-ki-sword unity that the 19th-century commentaries gloss as spirit-transfer but is more akin to infusion or empowerment. This has a Daoist tone, with a focus on ki versus gongen or kami. The dead-thing/living-thing (死物/活物) logic remains however a close structural parallel to Yagyū’s setsunintō/katsujinken (殺人刀/活人剣; killing sword / life-giving sword) — same living/dead (活/死) opposition, applied to the weapon rather than to the opponent. In contrast, the term tenken (天劔/天剣) is not found in Karukome’s dissertation, while reiken occurs twenty-one times. The concept of a heavenly sword (天劔) is a Yagyū-side variant, not common to the parallel (or merged) Jikishinkage lines of practice.

End Notes