Notes on the Gokui of Jiki Shinkage-ryū
These notes collect the documentary side of my research into the gokui (極意) of Kashima-shinden Jiki Shinkage-ryū. The personal and reflective account is given separately; the fuller treatment is in my book, The Truth of the Calm Spirit: The Practice of Shinkage-ryū Heihō as Taoist Internal Alchemy (M. Raugas, 2025).
What the gokui were, and were for
People often assume that the higher principles, or gokui, of a surviving ryūha are private to each school. Their detailed explanations frequently were. But historically the gokui were listed in densho precisely so that they could, on occasion, be inspected by the central authorities — in effect, to attest that a group was not teaching anything that might threaten the Shogunate. Alongside the written gokui sat kuden, oral teachings that could go further, unlocking the realizations needed to approach the founders’ original inspiration, especially where that inspiration was couched in philosophical, religious, or visionary language.
The word also carried a polemical use. To name the gokui could be a way of asserting dominance or priority in a matter of faction or succession. Ishigaki Yasuzo, who inherited a line of Jiki Shinkage-ryū practice (from the Odani-ha to the Nomi-ha) that had stopped training some time after the Second World War, gathered his family’s documents, poems, and commentary into Kashima Shinden Jiki Shinkage-ryū Gokui Denkai (鹿島神伝直心影流極意伝開) in part to assert the standing of that line. The book is, for all that, a valuable record of much of the surviving writing of the art.
Cataloguing and the rise of shiai
Yamada Jirokichi catalogued the teachings of the art in an effort to preserve the tradition. Because Jiki Shinkage-ryū had a number of practitioners of high social standing at the close of the Tokugawa period, there was considerable interest in it toward the end of the nineteenth century. The art’s emphasis on shiai contributed, in part, to the development of modern kendo. The transmission of advanced material ran heavily through guided drills and pointing-out instructions on topics called koto (事) or katsu (かつ) — material that a curriculum of formal kata alone does not preserve.
Evidence of change over time
The gokui of an art are not fixed across the centuries, and the Jiki Shinkage-ryū literature shows this directly.
Karukome Yoshitaka (軽米克尊) of Tenri University, in his 2020 monograph Jiki Shinkage-ryū no Kenkyū (直心影流の研究, Kokusho Kankōkai), compares the mokuroku of Jikishin Seitō-ryū (直心正統流) with later Jiki Shinkage-ryū mokuroku and shows that several items were added by Naganuma Kunisato (長沼国郷) when the school took its current name. Sōjaku no Koto (相尺之事), Tome Sandan no Koto (留三段之事), Kiri Otoshi no Koto (切落之事), and Ginmi no Koto (吟味之事) are absent from Yamada Heiemon Mitsunori’s Heihō Zakki (兵法雑記) but appear in Naganuma’s Jiki Shinkage-ryū Mokuroku Kuden-sho (直心影流目録口伝書), which suggests they represent Naganuma’s own innovations to the curriculum.
The same period saw a broader reframing. The lineage was revised to place Matsumoto Bizen no Kami as founder, and the art was renamed to include “Kashima-shinden,” asserting divine inspiration from the Shintō deity Takemikazuchi (建御雷) as part of its identity. Over the Edo period the earlier esoteric Buddhist and Daoist influences were progressively downplayed.
[ The history section of my own account was later expanded on the basis of an additional densho by Ogawa Yashichi from 1800. ]
Marubashi and the shared inheritance
Some of the gokui of Jiki Shinkage-ryū are common to more than one line of Shinkage-ryū and have been discussed elsewhere — Marubashi and Shinmyōken among them, with matters such as kiri otoshi also found across several arts in different sections of their surviving densho.
A 1978 study by Okada Kazuo (岡田一男) of Kokugakuin University, “Yagyū Shinkage-ryū Genryū-kō” (柳生新陰流源流考, Budōgaku Kenkyū 10:3, 1978), argued that the “three steps” teaching (san no kazu) attributed to Yagyū Jūbei — in which the logic of receiving and responding is the logic of ten, rolling or turning — is fundamentally the same principle as Jiki Shinkage-ryū’s Marubashi.
That the art’s central principles recur in related lines is consistent with the structural overlap between early Shinkage-ryū and Chinese martial theory, rather than with any single hidden transmission.
End Notes
- An example from Shintō-ryū are the gokui shichijō — seven “essential articles,” presented in Katori Shintō-ryū as three kata each expressing a different initiative (sente). The kata are intended to teach seven gokui, which are named in the academic scholarship on Shintō-ryū, but one cannot recover the gokui simply by watching or learning the physical kata.
- The ten evils to be avoided, now found as admonitions in several lines of kenjutsu practice, sit at the end of the historical mokuroku before the capstone.
