On Researching Gokui

In researching Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryū kenjutsu, I have examined its history, kata, and principles. For this I used both historical records, annotated by advanced practitioners of the art and held publicly in libraries in Japan, and Japanese books from the twentieth century, including those by Yamada Jirōkichi, Iwasa Minoru, and Ishigaki Yasuzo.

Ishigaki’s Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryū Gokui Denkai [鹿島神伝直心影流極意伝開] has the word gokui in its title; it details many of the art’s surviving writings and describes aspects of these inner principles.

People often assume that the higher-level principles, or gokui, of a surviving ryūha are private to each school. Their detailed explanations may well be, but historically these topics were listed in densho precisely so that the central authorities could inspect them — in essence, to attest that the group was not teaching anything that threatened the Shogunate.

Kuden, or oral teachings, sometimes go beyond the written gokui, unlocking the realizations needed to recreate, or come as close as possible to, the inspiration of an art’s founders — especially when the founding experience, or its explanation, involves philosophical, religious, or abstract language inspired by vision, trance, or dream.

In the case of Jikishinkage-ryū, Yamada Jirōkichi catalogued its teachings in an effort to preserve the tradition. Because the art had a number of practitioners of high social standing at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, there was great interest in it toward the end of the nineteenth century, and its emphasis on shiai contributed in part to the development of modern kendō.

Ishigaki inherited a family line of Jikishinkage-ryū that had stopped training some time after the Second World War. He wrote a book gathering its historical documents, poems, and comments on gokui, to assert the importance of his family’s line. Invoking gokui can also be a way of claiming dominance or priority in matters of faction or succession.

But what are gokui?

From one perspective, these organizing principles should inform and reinforce the training one is already doing, letting one see it more deeply and opening a window onto the art’s full realization — its practice at the highest level of skill.

If one trains kata properly but without explicit instruction in the gokui — say, under a middle-level instructor — can one still reach a very high level of skill? Or, lacking that context, will one’s practice not only miss certain fundamental elements but also be limited in how far it can go, confined to what the kata explicitly contain?

Paradoxically, consider modern swordsmen who have strong fundamentals and kata, are healthy and fit, and regularly stress-test their approach. They may be better off in combat than people who hold a system’s full set of teachings (both omote and ura) but do not train with enough intensity.

In researching Shinkage-ryū documents and history, I became familiar with several concepts important to Jikishinkage-ryū that I had not been taught. The classes I attended focused heavily on repeating formal kata and comparing them with related arts, not on the art’s own formal writings.

Am I better off for having done this research? Has it improved my swordsmanship? Did I have any realizations along the way? Was I surprised by the gokui I found described in the texts, or were they, in retrospect, obvious?

Reading these books showed me how much of the Chinese martial arts was already present in Jikishinkage-ryū in the seventeenth century. The common story — that Ogasawara spent fifteen years in China and came back with one ‘gokui’ that no one knew about or has seen since — is false: Daoist teachings common today to Tàijíquán and other arts are listed explicitly in the Jikishinkage-ryū mokuroku. I found strong overlap between some of Jikishinkage-ryū’s central principles and those of the Chinese internal martial arts, which is not entirely surprising, given Ogasawara’s travels. The work gave me the courage not to keep my kenjutsu isolated, like a museum piece, but to embed it in the larger framework of my internal martial arts practice.

Does being taught the gokui, or even knowing what they are, make one a better martial artist? Different, yes. Better, maybe. In one sense, you cannot say you practice an art if you do not know its rationale. But knowing the gokui intellectually is not enough: your practice can still be at a low level if you misunderstand the essential teachings, draw the wrong conclusions, or lack the proper foundations.

The gokui of Jikishinkage-ryū are very abstract, which I think means they ultimately hold a great deal of content; one cannot read a book and ‘get’ them. The explanations I give are only one interpretation, and my writing on them is mostly about their philosophical and religious context, not explicit technique.

In the mokuroku of Naganuma Kunisato’s line (1764, and its copies of 1768 and 1800) the gokui are Kōmyōken and Shinmyōken, paired under Fudō’s seed syllables, then Ki-ate, Ken-tai-yū, Seikōsui, Sōtai-no-shime, Kōjō Gokui and Furyū-no-katsu, followed by Jūaku, the ten evils (1768 and 1800 mokuroku). Other lists differ: the 1800 copy also names Kihatsu, and Marubashi (alt., Maruhashi) appears in Ogasawara’s 1670 catalogue but is dropped from the later mokuroku (Yamada Ippūsai (opens in a new tab)).

A person might learn gokui from more than one teacher. Yamada Jirōkichi supposedly had to learn the Kōjō (oral teachings) from Saitō Akinobu rather than Sakakibara Kenkichi — teachings that may also have carried the kodachi and habiki practices, the ura of Hōjō. Ishigaki, writing from the Nomi-ha, turns the point into a charge: that Yamada mistook Fujikawa-ha papers received from Saitō for Sakakibara’s teaching (1800 mokuroku). But had he learned Marubashi before that? The others? Are they taught in order? Do they stand independently of one another?

I have come to see that they are related, and that they build on and inform not only the kata but the art’s core tactics (called koto, “matters”, or katsu, “victories”), which precede the gokui in the historical mokuroku.

The koto are more practical and less philosophical, but I suspect each gokui is a concrete teaching that changes one’s perspective on the art. Having learned only kata, and not all of the koto or gokui directly, is an important gap in my training. Marubashi is the final kata set and, where the older lists name it, a capstone. We did spend much time on it, as it relates closely to marobashi in Yagyū Shinkage-ryū, which my teacher also studied for many years, consulting practitioners from several related lines of transmission. If the other gokui build up to Marubashi, and we focused on it and can use it in our swordsmanship, are we truly at a loss?

That is the case of having some of the gokui and still trying to practice an art fully, or at least at a high level. There is another extreme: receiving the gokui or kuden too early may actually harm one’s training and progress. A student might grasp the art’s ultimate purpose yet fall behind their contemporaries in technical execution if they do not receive enough direct instruction in the fine details of kata.

It is dangerous to ignore upper-level teaching, but it is also a problem when one’s physical practice is lacking and one tries to compensate too much with intellect. This may be the pitfall people attributed to the so-called ‘vacant’ schools of kenjutsu in the Edo period.

Being told a kuden does not magically fix everything, or make up for a lack of athleticism or of regular, intense training with peers. If we are too isolated, we may get stuck without knowing it; and if we never do shiai, our skill may not grow as it otherwise would.

I also believe people need to work together to keep these arts alive. Too often, because of the sectarian nature of practice and schisms within arts and groups, they are unwilling to. This is compounded by training infrequently, at a distance, without close access to feedback and correction. Students who live near a strong dōjō will progress faster, for a variety of reasons.¹

In the historical Jikishinkage-ryū mokuroku, we see earlier esoteric Buddhist and Daoist influences downplayed over the course of the Edo period. This happened around the time the lineage was revised to make Matsumoto Bizen no Kami its founder and the art was renamed to include Kashima-shinden, making divine inspiration from the Shintō deity Takemikazuchi (建御雷) an important part of its identity.

In writing about the koto and gokui, I relate what was written, put it in a little context, and then set down my own thoughts. My skill at Jikishinkage-ryū kata did not improve from that exercise. Instead, I began to think more deeply about what I already knew.

I think of gokui as the essence of a thing, or its essential part, not as some secret or hidden idea. Ishigaki puts the later gokui of Jikishinkage-ryū — ki-ate, the five gokui that follow it and the ten evils — in much the same terms: they are a “sword outside the sword” (kengai no ken 剣外の剣), admonitions on the bearing of a swordsman for those about to receive the mokuroku (1800 mokuroku). To me, gokui are about connecting to the original or peak understanding of an art, rather than to one’s immediate teacher. Interpretations of gokui likely shift over time, despite everyone’s best efforts: society, language, and context are very different now from five hundred years ago, and a single word or phrase can be much harder to understand outside its original circumstances.

I have described them this way:

“The Gokui (極意; inner essence) are the driving principles of an art, closely held in confidence, as they are meant to both inform the art to those who have reached a certain level of initiation but also ideally are discovered by practitioners as they move deeper and deeper into the practice of kata, intense reflection and solo training, and martial exchange.”

Some Jikishinkage-ryū gokui, such as Marubashi and Shinmyōken, are shared with other lines of practice and have been written about elsewhere, and matters like kiri otoshi are found in other arts. The commentary holds enough to write a section on each. The ten evils, admonitions to avoid, are now found in several lines of kenjutsu. But none of these are kata or waza. I think it is easy to get trapped in kata, because our minds like to count and look at patterns.

A 1978 budō studies paper by Okada Kazuo 岡田一男 of Kokugakuin University, “Yagyū Shinkage-ryū Genryū-kō” (柳生新陰流源流考), in Budōgaku Kenkyū vol. 10 no. 3, argued that Yagyū Jūbei’s “three steps” (san no kazu) teaching — in which the logic of receiving and responding is the logic of ten (rolling or turning) — is fundamentally the same principle as Jikishinkage-ryū’s Marubashi.

Since aspects of the gokui are discussed in the literature, we can at least follow what these swordsmen-authors describe. That makes the subject richer and more interesting, even without having been taught all of the koto or gokui of Jikishinkage-ryū.

I mentioned that an art’s gokui might change over time. Karukome Yoshitaka 軽米克尊 of Tenri University, in his 2020 monograph Jikishinkage-ryū no Kenkyū [直心影流の研究] (Kokusho Kankōkai), compares Jikishin Seitō-ryū (直心正統流) mokuroku with later Jikishinkage-ryū mokuroku and shows that Naganuma Kunisato (長沼国郷) added several items 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 not found in Yamada Heizaemon Mitsunori’s Heihō Zakki (兵法雑記) but appear in Naganuma Kunisato’s Jikishinkage-ryū Mokuroku Kuden-sho [直心影流目録口伝書], suggesting they were Kunisato’s own additions to the curriculum.

Some patterns that cut across kata may indeed be specific gokui — Marubashi is one — so if you properly understand the patterns underneath the kata, you will always be doing that art and will have its essence, whether or not you can describe it.

In some ways, gokui are the art: its essence, the whole point of it. Kata come in several kinds: some map directly onto these essential matters, and others are designed to bring someone to the point of understanding them. It is not a simple equation in which adding the gokui makes you better; you need the gokui to be doing the art at all. But it may also be that the many layers of kata built up over the years served as a means of social control.

Better arts may paradoxically have less kata, because their principles are encoded more directly or efficiently in the pattern practice they keep. Older kata may be more transparent rather than obscured. The 108 shinai kata of Yagyū Shinkage-ryū, for example, are a preparatory and explanatory set, important to Yagyū pedagogy, but one can have a robust practice with only the older historical sets. Kamiizumi Ise no Kami certainly did not need them for his own realizations.

In terms of a succinct curriculum, Jikishinkage-ryū may have been an overachiever. Because its teaching shifted to sparring and explanation, practicing the surviving kata today as they are, without sparring or explanation, is probably not enough. That is why teachers of the art sometimes look for other tactics to explore.

When I first trained, it was suggested that I keep up Katori Shintō-ryū so that I would have a robust set of tactics to reflect on as I learned more of Jikishinkage-ryū. We used to call Jikishinkage-ryū a finishing school of sorts, giving the kenshi who entered Sakakibara’s dōjō stronger basics, a better mindset, and experience in sparring. That may well have been true. But it may be incomplete for modern practitioners who are not already advanced kenshi when they begin training.

It is a bit counterintuitive, since one might expect that having more forms means being better, or knowing more about kenjutsu. But people tend to make things up as time goes on. Many kata were probably short originally because they encoded a few distinguishing ideas directly; later generations embellished, obscured, or rearranged them.

By paring down kata and looking for patterns across them, we are essentially making our own gokui. These might even closely match an art’s historical gokui — that is hard to know for certain, so it is important to go back to the sources to check your understanding. In principle, the more closely your operating system matches that of masters like Kamiizumi, the better a swordsman you will be. How to know this outside the realm of vision, trance, or dream mentioned above is unclear.

If gokui are the essential principles — the driving principles of the art — kuden may be the explanations that help unlock the kata and the gokui.

An example from an art I once studied: in Shintō-ryū there are no blocks, only cuts. You will hear people say that “every cut is a lie.” So whenever the swords clack in a kata, you know something else is supposed to happen. Katori Shintō-ryū is encoded that way. If you never take the time to decode the kata, and practice them differently from how they are first encoded, you may never reach the point you are meant to arrive at.

The gokui shichijo no kata, learned later in the art’s progression, encode this structure more explicitly (the blades almost never clash), so perhaps once you learn the shichijo you should go back and practice all the earlier kata that way. Most people don’t. Too often they fixate on how quick the shichijo kata are and try to mimic that light feeling everywhere — that might be a mistake.²

Even when someone receives an upper-level license in a particular approach, it does not necessarily mean they know all the gokui well. It may simply mean the teacher has finished teaching them, having imparted all of their knowledge, or what they consider ‘enough’ for the student to go the rest of the way.

High-level practitioners may need to continue their own research. Conversely, one reason we sometimes see people with high ranks on paper who are not very good may be that they take their training only so far, and do not look past what they were shown. Perhaps the worst thing that can happen to you is being told you are a master.

Still, some brave souls keep refining their practice and working very hard at it, even many decades in.

That means their art changes over time. Ideally, their efforts accord with the principles they learned, and they are mindful when adding new ones. Too radical an evolution risks leaving students — if you have begun teaching — unable to follow.

People who train with a teacher whose practice is converging on its ultimate expression, so that things change less rapidly, may have an advantage over earlier students. There may be a disruptive period when you are shifting to a different body organization from the one you were first taught, or to a different mental model of practice. Some people may be unwilling or unable to follow you. That is their loss — not every student can follow a teacher on their journey.

Gokui matter because, if they are respected, an advanced practitioner’s changes stay within the same approach. Change the gokui too much and you have invented a new style — one that, in today’s world, will never be fully tested.

So, to return to the questions I began with: am I better off for having done this research? Studying writings about the gokui of Jikishinkage-ryū has changed my perspective on kenjutsu. Early Jikishinkage-ryū was once much closer to the principles I have since learned from Chinese internal martial arts, and seeing that has improved my kenjutsu substantially — even though, as I said, my skill at the kata themselves did not increase from the exercise.

It has also given me the confidence to change some foundational aspects of practice, and that now makes it difficult to interact with the Japanese Jikishinkage-ryū community. I no longer practice the introductory kata or basics quite the way they do, so I cannot easily join another group. Studying gokui academically has both freed and isolated me.

I do not think I have made a new art. I have instead restored what I learned to something closer to what it may once have been, in some ways. This has not made me a better budōka, but it has made my kenjutsu better.

Some gokui remain obscure to me. Seikōsui (西江水; “swallowing the West River [in one gulp]”) comes from a Chan kōan, and what it has to do with swordsmanship is not obvious on its face. The Jikishinkage-ryū densho tie it to where the mind is placed (okidokoro 置所) and to the lower dantian (kikai-tanden 気海丹田), Yagyū fingerprints that probably entered the school with Yamada Ippūsai (Yamada Ippūsai (opens in a new tab)). I can also relate it to the idea in Tàijíquán of “swallowing” an opponent’s force, which may bear on the school’s approach to go no sen — or may be a distraction.

Viewed as a whole, including its upper-level writings and its increasingly austere physical practice, Jikishinkage-ryū is an art that draws a mixture of internal and external principles from both Daoism and Buddhism, Zen and Mikkyō alike, into a unified approach to kenjutsu: outwardly constrained and refined, but concealing in the shadows of its practice a depth that can be explored over a lifetime.

There is more work to be done in analyzing these traditions and relating them to one another. As cursive-script documents become more accessible to researchers outside Japan, I hope we can build a more coherent picture of the early formalization of Japanese weapons and grappling arts — in particular, restoring the narrative of Chinese influence on them, after a long period in which they were presented as uniquely Japanese, an expression of Yamato-damashii (大和魂), and in which Zen teachers and institutions took part in the ultra-nationalism that shaped the official literature.

All practice begins and ends with rei (禮; etiquette), and Hōjō is an extreme form of just that, in both its outward and its hidden variations. The Hōjō ken kokoro-e sho (法定劔心得書) of Namiki Yasushi, recited before the kata the line I practice, says the same: heihō is not simply combative, but something that unites heaven and earth. It is this aspect we seek when we treat Shinkage-ryū as a method of self-cultivation — a return to a pure, direct, clear and calm heart and mind. Whatever else can be said, the four seasons and the rise and fall of yin and yang will continue, long after we are all gone.

A final thought and admonition. This research has made me very cautious about the limits of my current understanding. I believe that on the whole I have improved my kenjutsu by embracing internal martial arts principles; I feel this is quite compatible with Jikishinkage-ryū, but it makes my practice unorthodox. I am grateful for the instruction I received, and for the patience shown me as I first struggled to train in several approaches. Now that my practice has coalesced into a single mindset, part of me feels it is important to keep wandering up the mountain path of shugyō, even if I struggle at times as I do. We end, as they may also have, at the beginning.

End Notes