The hōjō (法定) of Jiki Shinkage-ryū is built on the five phases and the four seasons. It seems fitting to set down what twenty years of training have come to mean to me in that same order — beginning, as the year does, in wood, and ending in the still water of winter.
Wood
In 2004, visiting the Dewa Sanzan (出羽三山) of Yamagata — Gassan Dai Jinja (月山大神社) on Mt. Haguro, and the temples below it — I decided to commit myself fully to the classical and traditional arts. Much of my earliest writing here concerned that single transition: turning toward the cultivation of internal skill. As I learned more of Bāguà, Xíngyì, and Tàijíquán, I increasingly thought about the relation between aiki and internal training.
I began learning classical weapons of China and Japan around same time. Chief among them was an unofficial line of Kashima-shinden Jiki Shinkage-ryū maintained at the Hōbyōkan, following the teachings of Namiki Yasushi and Itō Masayuki. I used this site to contrast older arts like Shintō-ryū and Shinkage-ryū](/shugyo/gogyo-exegesis.html) with modern methods, while I continued katageiko 形稽古, analyzed kata in a process I called kuzushi 崩し, and pressure-tested the result through tameshi-ai (驗試合).
In doing so my practice came increasingly under the influence of the internal arts I was learning in the lineage of Yang Yuting, Ma Gui and Han Muxia, through disciples of Wang Peisheng who lead Yin Cheng Gong Fa, specificially my teacher Zhang Yun who leads its North American branch.
The defining feature of my kenpō (劍法) over time became the integration of internal principles:
- I constrained my kiai to vocalizations more like those of the internal arts — flowing from a movement, or aligned with it, rather than driving it.
- I stopped forcing breath to coincide with each action, and instead kept it relaxed and steady, drawing on the reverse breathing of Tàijíquán rather than the ibuki of aun kokyū.
The aim was a connected body that integrates force into each action while staying relaxed and able to change suddenly. I practice this as a form of shugyō (修行), mindful austerity, emphasizing the Daoist aspects of the art — the complementarity of yin and yang, the five phases — and drawing on esoteric Buddhism and Shugendō.
A seed, though, proves nothing in the ground. An unorthodox practice, assembled from more than one source and missing much of its formal transmission, can only be answered for under pressure.
Fire
The late Donn Draeger concluded shiai was too dangerous in koryū, and that view was adopted by many of his Shindō Musō-ryū students, including David Hall. But knowing that Jiki Shinkage-ryū favored shiai in the Ōdani-ha, I decided to embrace the practice. I wound up able to apply Jiki Shinkage-ryū methods in dramatically different ways than I first imagined, but the path was a difficult one to travel.
I pressure tested my approach with other koryū (古流; classical school) practitioners, in HEMA gatherings and competition, and to a lesser-extent with the people I mentored. What the pressure revealed was instructive. Under duress I reached for Chinese methods far more than anything else — no surprise. That is my primary training interest.
Among the Japanese methods I had actually embodied, I could attack well with Jiki Shinkage-ryū, but at first I was far more limited in how I could react with it. I found myself drawing tactically on methods from Yagyū — the suriage (摺り上げ; rising deflection) and kaeshi (返し; counter) common to both lines of Shinkage-ryū — even though Yagyū was the approach in which I was least experienced, learning portions of its curriculum to better contextualize my Jiki, not replace it. This seemed to confirm my teacher’s view that the formal kata as preserved today do not contain enough explicit exchange to stand alone as a complete set of tactics.
Katori Shintō-ryū, the koryū I had trained in longest, was hardly of use at all.
The clearest lesson came later, watching the people I mentor in Jiki Shinkage-ryū practice. Conducting jigeiko (地稽古; free practice) recently, I noticed that under stress each of them reverted to a mode of movement I had not been trying to cultivate in them. One, with a background in pugilism, was cutting upward from too far away with too small a motion — throwing an uppercut rather than cutting up. Another launched powerful attacks, but from the Italian longsword high guard Posta di Donna, over the shoulder, rather than a Shinkage-ryū hassō (八相); the speed and power were real, but they were not something he had learned from me. A newer practitioner, schooled in the German longsword of Liechtenauer and Meyer and shaped by point-sparring, darted in and out, abandoning advantage rather than pressing it. Under pressure, each of us expressed what resonated with our own body, mind, and spirit.
There is an older memory the fire calls up. At times of extreme intensity, earlier in my career, there were moments when time seemed to slow and awareness to float, and I could strike or throw with impunity — often doing something intuitive I had never explicitly learned, as if the other were not moving at all. They were the closest thing I know to the flow state the pyschologist M. Csíkszentmihályi studied. But they were rare, fleeting, and never available on demand.
The crucible exposes what is missing and what is essential. It does not tell you what those things are. For that I had to go back to the texts.
Earth
What is the ground from which these traditions arise? How best should those insights be encoded in one’s practice? How can we return to the inspiration of the great artists of the past?
One does not need a vast syllabus to accomplish the above — instead one should think deeply about a smaller number of concepts. One might expect having more forms means you are better in some way or know more about kenjutsu. Older kata were likely shorter because they directly encoded a few distinguishing ideas. But people embellish, obscure, and rearrange things from generation to generation. Better arts may paradoxically may have less material in terms of kata because their principles are more directly or efficiently encoded in the practices they maintain. Older kata might be more transparent rather than obscured.
For example, the 108 shinai kata of Yagyū Shinkage-ryū are a preparatory and explanatory set, and important to Yagyū pedagogy, but one can have a robust practice only practicing the older historical sets of kata. Kamiizumi Ise no Kami certainly did not need them to obtain his own realizations.
In terms of having a succinct curriculum, Jiki Shinkage-ryū may have been an over achiever. Because the teaching shifted to sparring and explanation, just doing the surviving kata today, as is, without sparring or explanation, is probably not enough. That’s why teachers of the art sometimes want other tactics to explore. In my case, reintroducing jigeiko and conducting tameshi-ai resolved that challenge.
Writing my book on the art, I worked from historical records annotated by advanced practitioners and held in Japanese libraries, and from twentieth-century books by Yamada Jirokichi, Iwasa Minoru, and Ishigaki Yasuzo. What I found settled a question rather than opening one.
I had carried an instinct that the gokui (極意) of an art were secrets — hidden things withheld - that I later abandoned. I have since come to think of them instead as essences: the driving principles of an art, ideally discovered by a practitioner moving deeper into kata, reflection, solo work, and exchange, as much as conferred. Reading the literature, I saw how much of Chinese martial thought was already present in Jiki Shinkage-ryū by the seventeenth century. Some of the Daoist teachings common today to Tàijíquán are listed plainly in the mokuroku (目録; catalogue scroll of transmission). The story that Ogasawara went to China for fifteen years and returned with a single secret (called hassun no nobagane 八寸の延金) was over simplified; the overlap with Chinese martial theory is structural, woven through the art, not locked in one lost teaching.
That discovery gave me the courage to stop keeping my kenjutsu isolated, like a museum piece, and to embed it instead in the larger framework of my internal practice. I do not think I have made a new art. I think I have restored what I was taught toward something closer to what it may once have been. Studying the gokui academically has both freed and isolated me: I no longer perform the introductory kata and basics quite as the orthodox lines do, and so I cannot easily rejoin one. The one inner principle we did dwell on at length was marobashi (転) — the capstone, related closely to the marobashi of Yagyū Shinkage-ryū, which my teacher had also studied for many years.
I collected this understanding in a small book, for anyone who wants the longer account:
The Truth of the Calm Spirit: The Practice of Shinkage-ryū Heihō as Taoist Internal Alchemy, M. Raugas, 2025.
Once a practice has been integrated, the unavoidable question is what of it should be passed on, and to whom — a question that the loss of my teacher reframed entirely.
Metal
My kenjutsu teacher, David Hall, died last year. He was one of the most knowledgable westerners to study kobudō (古武道; classical martial ways) and also one of the most well-adjusted, an island of sanity in what can too often be an unhealthy pastime. Much of this writing since 2025 has been a way of grappling with that loss, and with what my path forward should be.
I have come to be cautious about teaching, and about being too quick to accept the first chance to share a skill. To share a practice is not to repeat, through the fog of memory, the gross pattern of what was once done to you; your own instructor was exercising discernment as he taught, and the pattern without the discernment does not arrive at the same place. My most successful experience as a novice teacher was also my earliest — reworking, with a former student from my New York years, the Aikidō and Kempō we had practiced, into something half external and half internal. It began as mentorship and ended as collaboration between peers. I have not managed to repeat it, and I suspect that is because I was then teaching from the ground I knew best and carried the least emotional weight, which is not the same as teaching what I am most qualified to teach.
Later I taught the internal arts not to present myself as a teacher but simply to keep training. Being an ordinary person and not a master, I could offer only a partial view of what they promise. When I visit a senior Tàijí colleague and watch the quality of movement in him and his students, I know I was right to step back from thinking of myself as an exemplar.
Watching my own kenjutsu students revert under pressure, I first took it as something to correct. I have come to read it differently. The hōjō is widely thought to forge strong basics and the capacity to generate and withstand great psychological pressure; what I was seeing may have been exactly that at work, not a failure of transmission. Each of us remained what we had begun as — amplified. There is a limit, then, to what one person can hand to another. It is all right to remain hidden. Not everyone needs to be a teacher.
Having cut away the wish to be an exemplar, and the hope of normalizing my practice within an orthodox line, what was left was solitary work, and silence.
Water
This is the phase I now spend most of my time in. In solo practice I do not try to reconstruct the long kata of Jiki Shinkage-ryū alone — that art needs a partner, because so much of it turns on kage (影 or 陰), shadow and substance. Instead I drill a few essential movements and work my internal principles into them, letting the selection settle, as the old phrase has it, deep in the tendons, sinews, and bones. This is my version of ri, transcendence — converging toward the center of a circle, reaching as near the origin as I can. It is also what I mean when I say I practice as shugyō.
Something in this has changed my swordsmanship more than any kata could. As I free-spar, I find I can stay relaxed and still move with full combative intent, and in doing so I seem to have far more time — I notice movements closer to their inception and answer them more efficiently. The fleeting flow I once met only at extreme intensity, and never on command, my internal practice has let me hold at depth, for longer, across a wider range of circumstances. This, I think, is what marobashi means on the psychological level. It is not a gift of the kata.
I have stopped trying to normalize all this. I still practice the kata of Jiki Shinkage-ryū and try to cultivate its spirit, but I draw a clear line between my own work and the efforts of those who hold formal lineage. I maintain a personal practice, not a new line of transmission, and I call it Gassankan Heihō — using the character 館 rather than 流 — a selection of historical Jiki Shinkage-ryū kata practiced alongside free sparring: something old and something new. The two men I have worked with since 2018 now perform hōjō and tō-no-kata as well as I do, and understand what kodachi (小太刀; short sword) should be; I have handed the class I ran to their leadership. Each person has to come to their own core practice. A teacher cannot do that for them.
The phrase hyakuren jitoku (百錬自得) means that through a great deal of practice you can better understand yourself. I am grateful for the opportunity to know myself a little better for having trained. Over time, I more strongly feel that each person needs to walk their own path and come to their own decisions about where and how best to train. Looking out from the veranda of the Nigatsu-dō, above Tōdaiji in Nara, I came to the realization that I had completed the journey that started in Dewa twenty some odd years ago.</p>
Looking out from the veranda of the Nigatsu-dō, above Tōdaiji in Nara, I understood that I had finished the journey that began in Dewa some twenty years before. The final level of Jiki Shinkage-ryū, marobashi, is silent. I am discovering that marobashi is enough — and it is time for me to embrace that silence as a path.
For me, having broken and repaired my practice, it is the precious metal of the internal arts that holds the fragments together. As with kintsugi, the mended vessel is not larger, and not fundamentally other than it was; it has only acquired a new beauty in the lines of repair, and a way of catching the light.
Kū / Shiki (空・識)
The historical and philological side of this work — the documentary research into the gokui, the lineage, and the texts — I have kept separate, so the personal narrative is not weighed down by the apparatus. It lives in a companion post on the gokui of Jiki Shinkage-ryū and, at length, in the book cited above. This essay is its embodied counterpart.
End Notes
- My kenjutsu teacher, David Hall, taught principally Shindō Musō-ryū jō and devoted much of his later work to comparing lines of transmission of Yagyū Shinkage-ryū; Jiki Shinkage-ryū was the first kenjutsu he had learned and remained an adjunct to his dōjō. His discipline in not pressing the art into speculation is part of what I hope to keep faith with.
- The line I learned descends from the practice maintained at the Hōbyōkan, in the teaching of Namiki Yasushi and Itō Masayuki.
- At Lonin League a small number of HEMA practitioners maintain a study of these older methods as an adjunct to their other pursuits. My students continue formal Jiki Shinkage-ryū katageiko in the manner I taught them. I am not a member of a kenjutsu ryūha (流派; school, tradition) or dōjō (道場); I place priority on my practice of the Chinese internal arts, where I train within a formal lineage. Those interested in my approach to kenjutsu can reach out to Jiki at Lonin.