Koryu-wa koryu-nari
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When people become devoted to a martial art, they are doing so not at a single point in time but in a process that extends through time — the present moment, the memory they have of their training, and their expectations of the future.
Often very devoted practitioners cherish the first view they had of an art, when their inspiration and excitement was at its peak. But when they began training they were also rote beginners at the practice, so not well qualified to judge the art, or even their experience learning it. As they learn arts that have layers to them (Shinkage-ryū being one good example, but the argument is more general), they may experience some distress, especially after thinking they have understood or become proficient with a portion of its teachings, when a teacher introduces another level to training, or provides information that seems to go against the grain of what they were first taught. Much of modern culture prizes linear processes, quick or slow, but advancement nonetheless. Instead, in traditional martial arts, we often experience plateaus of understanding that can persist for a long time (sometimes, indefinitely) that would need to be processed in some way to move through and beyond to greater levels of skill.
A teacher has to judge when to show the student directly, when to prompt them indirectly, and when to simply watch and wait as the student struggles. Sometimes the student does not figure out how to swim — in the case of traditional swordsmanship one does not literally drown under such circumstances, but nevertheless the expereince can be stressful. Is the teacher simply not teaching? Do they not care about the student succeeding? Do they know something they will not share? Why are they indifferent to their student's suffering?
One perspective is that a practitioner should study under a teacher that shares their knowledge without reservation, but from the teacher's perspective they may indeed be doing so, only to have the student miss key details either by training with not enough attention (they think they 'know' the kata or principle) or intensity (they think they don't need to practice as much now they have reached a certain 'level' of training). Or their training is distracted by continued obligations they feel they have to other activities, but are irrelevant to their teacher (e.g., continuing to practice another martial arts). Or they are distracted within the group. They might think they should rework material for beginners they are mentoring, making it 'easier' for them to learn, or rework the curriculum of what they are learning to make it more 'common sense', thus destroying parts of its character they are in fact unaware of. The examples go on.
There are also teachers who cover up their limitations by pretending to know more than they do, and point to a myriad of reasons a student is not ready for more. This narrative can cut both ways.
Refining Structure, Posture & Movement
One specific example, in an art with layers to its practice, is when more sophisticated body mechanics are introduced to the practice.
A student who is a gifted athlete or naturally strong and agile might discount the refined body mechanics introduced in Asian martial arts if they have to that point excelled using their natural skill. They may be resistent to changes a teacher appears to be making, which are not changes to an art but instead revealing a more subtle manner in which the art can be practiced, once a person has some passing familiarity with it. The teacher is the same person the gifted student was excited to train with initially, but when the teacher introduces more sophisticated practices that challenge the very notion of natural strength and agility, the gifted student might be quite frustrated that their innate abilities (or cultivated, through western physical culture) are not good enough or being discounted. Especially if they view their teacher as not as strong or fast as agile as they are, due to age, injury, or some other factor.
The internal narrative or dialogue of a student of martial arts often assumes the teacher's skill is fixed and not changing over time. In reality, teachers themselves continue to train (at least the good ones do) and their understanding of arts mature and evolve. So, they are not the same people the student began training under. We train, we age, we teach, we take on new practices, sometimes let old practices go. It is not always the case that early students of a teacher are more fortunate, if the teacher's understanding has deepened over time. Each case will be unique. But as a teacher's understanding evolves, they very well can practice the same martial art with a new perspective, if they are aware of and preserve its guiding principles.
I mentioned the notion of nostalgia for early training. Maybe some practitioners feel the first way they trained was more authentic than later on, if a teacher has made some small modifications to how they practice an art. But if the teacher has a deeper understanding, those changes may be quite important to pay attention to, and not sometime to be quickly discounted. This becomes difficult in hierarchical structures, when senior students might see some newer students who pay close attention to their teacher progressing faster than they did. They might not only be paying closer attention, but also benefiting from a different, more refined model than was available when the teacher was not as good as they are now. Once people get into a specific habit of thinking and movement, they feel good about a certain way of doing things. They want to build on that knowledge, and in a linear fashion it is appealing then to learn more kata, get ranks, and ultimately feel like they approaching the end of an art.
Arts do not end with being awarded their final license.
I began by mentioning that the understanding of an art can have multiple layers of meaning. As but one example, the way I do introductory Jikishinkage-ryū practice twenty years after beginning training should not be the same as I did when I first trained and was being watched by my teacher. If it was, the intervening time and effort served no purpose. But, ideally, the current practice would still be Jikishinkage-ryū. Because I train in Shinkage-ryū outside of formal lineage, I have no further instruction, and in my case I walk a more dangerous path. There is a risk I am not doing Shinkage-ryū at all — but even without that specific challenge of my own circumstance, the Shinkage-ryū practiced at the school I trained at twenty years ago might not be the Shinkage-ryū today. I have been impressed how closely the kata we practiced match those from related (parent, sibling) groups in Japan, over thirty years after my teacher trained there, and when I see this in other groups — still, it is often the small details that are important.
My case is a bit unique, but I hope the above discussion has conveyed more general trends appropriate to more than one
tradition and practitioner. The approach I have taken has been to leverage theory from traditions where I am in formal lineage where I feel they are
compatible with my Japanese swordsmanship,
continue to consult with colleagues, and also
examine footage of lineal traditions to double check I am not doing things too materialy divergent from orthodox Jikishinkage-ryū when I work with others.
Starting from the kata and trying to deeply understand them, even outside
of a strong connection with others who train, at least one winds up a swordsman, if
not a teacher in any broadly impactful way. This is my particular case, which I am learning to
abide with, but I hope I have conveyed a bit of a sense of tradition (
Each will need to chart their own path.
Traditions, Their Sizes, and Their Goals
Students need to be held accountable. Too much of traditional martial arts training can feel like a social club that trains a bit each week and then gets lunch and talks about the past. I've written before about proper training intensity in older martial arts — my perspective has not substantially changed. Another point I would like to stress is that there is a lot that can be done with an art if we go beyond rote pattern practice.
One can have a well-defined and accepted lineage and still not be very good, for example if an art was never very good to begin with, lost too much of its curriculum or higher-level knowledge (the layers I allude to above) or was taught to too many people, who thus did not learn the art at a deep enough level to convey it forward properly. This I believe was the case in the past with some lines of Jikishinkage-ryū and more recently with lines of Shinto-ryū that have been taught to hundreds or thousands of people.
How did these arts become famous to begin with?
It is generally the case that high-level practitioners of martial arts, who developed and then were able to demonstrate martial skill (such as Matsumoto Bizen no Kami), developed a public reputation of their skill, and thus attracted many students, or several generations of students, so were both well known and influenced later traditions. Arts that are small and rare might not actually be very good on average – if they were excellent, they would have generally become well known. So, it is not always the rare or small predecessor art (e.g., the first people practicing a specific art) that would necessarily be the best exponents of the art, or the best exemplar of the art today. Instead, it may be more likely the most famous or well-known practitioners of the art, who had a chance to interact (both peacefully in exchanges of information, and combatively in matches, challenges, duels, or warfare) with other martial artists, that would potentially have the highest quality practice. The question is whether that practice survived to the same level of virtuosity.
Counter intuitively, arts generally start with a small curriculum based on key insights that distinguish them from the founder's previous training – they are not birthed fully grown as sogo-bujutsu addressing all modalities of combat. This is
despite the Japanese social construct of tenshin-shoden or shinden, "divine revelation", where a key insight is ascribed
to a mythological figure who is revealed during a time of austerity spent in sacred space or hermitage. In China,
there is a similar concept of ascribing the invention of an art to an interaction with a wandering monk or hermit, or mysterious teacher. Both stem from the influence of Confucian concepts, where old knowledge is prized, and innovation held often in some level of suspicion. So, traditionally, Dong Haichuan (
Regardless of origin, from the divine (a dream encounter with Takemizukachi-no-kami) to the profane (killing seventy five men in battle using a spear ), what of the evolution of a core teaching over time?
Core sets of teachings explaining or introducing or preparing practitioners for those key insights are typically put in place within a tradition over time, either by the founder of an art or his senior disciples when they pass what they have learned on. Teachers tend to add material over time: their own embellishments, their own deeper insights, material from other traditions they have studied, material to address the tactics of other groups they have encountered, material to explain the core insights of the founder or make them more easy to later apprehend. In times of peace, arts may grow considerably given the creative impulse teachers might have to develop new routines beyond any specific reason listed above, and the economics associated to running a school as a mercantile endeavor, charging for attendance and licenses.
Wise teachers may rework or remove teachings, without remorse, if the result better embodies the key insights that define their approach to combat.
The modality of pattern practice (kata) in traditional Japanese martial arts preserves social order. Whether one knows a particular set of kata, and has been awarded a written license referencing (cataloging) their knowledge of that set, provides a signifier of their social status with their group and a reference to how other groups might treat them. Simply teaching the core of an art to a gifted student and sending them along their way would disrupt social order dramatically as the student would be required to demonstrate their skill with steel against those who would not know how to treat them. This probably happened less and less as the Edo period wore on, as it was a time of great social stability, but let us not forget martial practice was severe and at times atavistic in times past, something far from the hobby it is today.
In any case, gifted students without license would quickly develop their own reputation or fade into anonymity, but in either case the teacher might be held accountable for their (potentially violent) actions. Thus we see entrance oaths, creeds, and pledges made to obey rules that are both about social character (avoiding gambling, womanizing, stealing) but also the relationship between the swordsman and other established groups (not teaching, discussing teachings, or duelling until allowed). In the case of savants such as Takeda Sokaku — in both the positive and negative connotation of the word — they too felt a need to establish lineage (e.g., Minamoto, Seiwa, etc.) and structure (e.g., awarding scrolls and licenses, even if they evolved over time). They did not teach in a vacuum where students did not have an expectation of the kata modality — and we see different groups preserving in pattern practice what may have been extemporaneous demonstrations of virtuosity, akin to learning to transcribe and play a Jazz solo by a great musician, while never allowing yourself to play one of your own.
However, regardless of the social milieu and how social groups such as ryuha interacted, we are faced with a small paradox. If the best arts become large due to the fame and attraction of their founders and arts that are large are not transmitted easily or properly to most of their students (due to regression to the mean, an attempt to make the arts more accessible to larger number of people, more limited access to fully licensed instructors as the number of branch schools and students grow, faulty instruction as junior students are asked to mentor new students too early, etc.) — how do we then determine what arts might be intact and of high quality, especially as we no longer engage in combat with swords, glaives, or spears?
A general answer may not be possible. It seems to me the fact that arts continue today in small groups with a limited number of teachers is not something that is sad (with the arts in danger of fading away) but instead appropriate to the difficulty of transmitting older ways of movement, thinking, and being in the current day.
What is sad is when those groups do not train with sufficient intensity to breathe life into what they have been entrusted with.
Efforts to reach many people (hundreds, thousands) driven by altruism (in the desire to share something that profoundly, positively, affected one's life) or egoism (a desire for hundreds or thousands of followers, along with veneration and transfer of wealth that typically implies) may degrade the level of skill found in the average exponent to the point where the art loses its essential character in an effort to be accessible.
Senior students who seek to be teachers studying an older art might still cut in a modern fashion if they practice kendo or iaido from a standard renmei, or throw using aikido body mechanics and insist it is "the same" as an older style of jujutsu they are attempting to learn, if they remain stuck in their obligations to their first martial arts. There are other examples, but I hope the general idea comes across that in a desire to seek out the best instruction, it may not be possible to synthesize instruction from multiple sources and reach a great level of skill. This is albeit more common in taijutsu than kobudo, but changing styles due to preference or circumstance does happen — many people have studied multiple koryu over time and struggle to analyze, synthesize, or discard portions of their life experience and self-identity (e.g., "I do Shinto-ryu" or "I practice Aiki"). As someone who has given up on several arts in my career, I know that leaving each one behind was a unique struggle with its own challenges.
In the end, you have pick a path.
I can provide lots of examples, but instead I would like to dive into one regarding Jikishinkage-ryū, which was quite small at its inception, but influenced more than one deep tradition over time, and grew in the late Edo period to a very large size, where some of its original character was very likely lost.
Meiji-era Jikishinkage-ryū
In the case of Jikishinkage-ryū, the lineage of the main line of was broken with Sakakibara Kenkichi. He had issued several upper level licenses in the art over time, but his chosen successor was killed in battle at the beginning of the Meiji period. Sakakibara's dojo was famous for sparring, but would only do traditional kata practice periodically, or at the very least emphasized it much less than they did shiai. Practices such as yawara and sojutsu were lost over time — telling, because Matsumoto Bizen no Kami was most famous as a spearman.
It is said by Ishigaki and others that Yamada Jirokichi had to go to another line, the Fujiwara-ha, to learn the upper level kata after Sakakibara's prassing. For all we know, much of what is done in what is called the mainline or standard line of Kashima-shinden Jikishinkage-ryū practice today might be drawn from that Fujiwara line and not Sakakibara's. I mention this because of the pride Jikishinkage-ryū practitioners take in referring back to famous kenshi such as Sakakibara, who was bodyguard of the last Tokugawa shogun and keeper of Edo castle.
Yamada's menkyo kaiden, according to Iwasa Minoru, was stamped by Sakakibara's widow after Sakakibara died. According to Ishigaki, the document has siddham characters towards it end reading kanman – a reference to intuition and fudoshin – used in the Fujiwara line instead of the siddham characters for A-Un used in the Odani line Sakakibara was part of. So, Yamada potentially copied from a Fujiwara example he found ( versus Sakakibara having drawn a license up for him but not stamping it due to illness or circumstance ). It may also be the case that Yamada never saw a menkyo-kaiden from Sakakibara or others in that line, as he would potentially have included the A-Un character choice on his own. Or, was it quiet homage to where he completed his training? We may never know, but if true, then in the strictest sense, the main line of Jikishinkage-ryū ended at that moment.
Yamada Jirokichi was known as a scholar of Kendo and well respected. I have found his 1927 book on Jikishinkage-ryū very useful. He wanted to increase the martial vigor of kendo instruction as it spread, and associated to his efforts and those of others, Hojo clubs were founded where kendoka would practice the foundational kata of Jikishinkage-ryū in order to develop what they felt was martial vigor.
But I wonder if the loud kiai and ibuki style breathing found in the main lines of Jikishinkage-ryū were actually a later invention, inspired by demonstrations becoming more common of Okinawan Karate-do such as Goju-ryu and Uechi-ryu that possess a hard style of qigong encoded in their sanshin kata. That might more easily explain some of the differences between contemporary Jikishinkage-ryū and other Shinkage-ryū more than Ogasawara's earlier time in China. From that influence I do think we find the encoding of Taoist cosmology and philosophy into the Jikishinkage-ryū kata, as well as the walking patterns and practices which are similar to basic training modalities found in other Northern Chinese martial arts. I have abandoned the ibuki breathing in my own practice, and cultivated breathing practices that are drawn from Indian traditions that map into Hojo very smoothly.
In doing so, am I violating the tradition or restoring it?
In many ways, my tutelage in Jikishinkage-ryū was incomplete. At the same time, I learned in a broader context of my teacher's study of Shinkage-ryū and I practice internal martial arts that have deeply affected my swordsmanship.
In my case, going back to the title of this essay, I am compelled to keep my teaching small, even if it is something both old and new — because it feels wrong to deprive people for the opportunity to connect with culture, group, and lineage were they to train elsewhere. And Jikishinkage-ryū itself may not be as whole as others, who maintain an air of culture, group, and lineage, would have us assume. If the lineage was broken long before I encountered it, that does not mean the efforts of teachers such as Kawashima, Ōnishi, Namiki and others was any less important. I am grateful to have received the limited knowledge I possess. It is my responsibility to take that knowledge as far as I am able in its expression within my own swordsmanship and also to not convey that understanding to a large number of people. That is why I have stopped teaching Jikishinkage-ryū to new students and plan only to work with a few people moving forward.