修証一等 Practice and enlightenment are one.

This calligraphy reads from right to left in the traditional manner. It says Shu Sho Itto and means "Practice and enlightenment are essentially the same". 

Shu means to study something with complete dedication. Sho means 'proof' or 'attainment'. You could think of shu as being the journey and sho as the goal.

The saying is from the founder of the Soto Zen sect Dogen Zenji. Soto Zen focuses on sitting meditation and a 'gradual' approach to Enlightenment rather than the 'sudden' approach of the Rinzai Sect. 

Rinzai Zen uses sitting meditation and also Koan practice where the student meditates on a kind of nonsensical riddle such as, "Two hands together make a clapping sound. What is the sound of one hand?" There are a lot of historical stories about Rinzai Zen students having a sudden realisation or awakening — satori or kensho —where they became enlightened to the nature of life, birth, death and everything.

Dogen believed that this approach was flawed and that such awakening moments were all well-and-good, but what do you do afterwards? For him, and for Soto Zen students still, the most important thing is to keep practicing, keep sitting in meditation. He believed that enlightenment was not separate from practice itself. That way you wouldn't accidentally become attached to the fact that you may have had an enlightenment experience and get a big head about it. 

He also believed that enlightenment was not something you had to search for and sweat over, or rather, searching and sweating were no guarantee of enlightenment. He taught that this right here is enlightenment, whatever you are doing or experiencing right now. But the only way most of us can ever perceive this is to sit in meditation. So just sit and don't worry about becoming enlightened. Eventually you will experience some benefits from meditation. Is it enlightenment? It doesn't matter, just keep practicing.

This is very like the way we should think of our kendo practice. We may win competitions or achieve high grades. Or we may not. Doesn't matter. The main thing is to keep practicing. Practice will help us to improve. Even when we think we are hopeless and want to give up, we don't need to worry about it if we keep training. Training itself is success. This is a very profound teaching. This is what "Shu sho itto" means.

The calligraphy

This tenugui is written in reisho, 隷書 or scribe script, one of the oldest styles of calligraphy. Reisho was developed in the Qin Dynasty (221 - 207 BC) for use by Chinese Government officials.  Reisho  characters are written slightly wider than normal script, and horizontal strokes have a characteristic bowed shape, with often an exaggerated tail on the right hand side. Also, all boxes must meet cleanly on each corner, with no obvious strokes sticking out like is usual for the more cursive styles of gyosho and sosho. The other big difference is that each stroke is started with a reverse movement, creating a small knob or serif. For example a vertical stroke, which are always made going top to bottom, should in the case of reisho always start with a short upwards movement.

_______________________________________________________________________________

The article was originally published on Dojo News, but I have moved it here as it fits better the purpose of this blog.

This calligraphy is (c) Ben Sheppard, all rights reserved. Please contact me if you wish to reproduce it in any way. ichibyoshi at gmail. So long as it is not for commercial purposes or is altered in any way, I can't see a problem. But I would like to know before it gets reposted anywhere. Thanks.

Stages of kihon

Kihon (基本) means the basic or fundamental practice of Kendo.  It is the ideal, perfect movement for each particular technique: the ideal men-uchi, kote-uchi, do-uchi, tsuki, suriage-men, etc, etc.

In Kendo we learn the fundamental way of doing things first. We don't say to people, "jump in, have a go and just see what the hell works." Kendo sensei are very careful to teach people what they see as the right way, which in the beginning is only one way. Later on as you get more experienced, you learn for yourself that there is more than one right way, but for beginners this is too confusing. So we stick to one correct way. Experience tells us that this is the fastest way to mastering Kendo.

But there are different levels of kihon practice. They range from practice by yourself, to practice against an attacking partner wearing armour with many stages in between.

All of these levels have slightly different roles to play and different levels of difficulty. What can be easily achieved in one will be more difficult in another. This article will look at the main ones.

Idealism versus realism

The basic principle behind these different levels is that the more you have interference from outside, the more difficult and "real" the practice becomes, but also the further your practice moves from the ideal or perfect movement. All the different stages advance in difficulty. They presume the student has to some extent perfected the previous stage. So there is the sense of progress, or advancing through stages of difficulty.

However it is important to remember that the student, in order to really improve, needs to keep returning to the most basic stages of practice regularly. So progress here does not imply moving forward and doing away with the old. It is not a straight line of progression but more like a spiral: improving by returning to the beginning.

Practice by yourself

This is the most fundamental practice. Doing suburi, with nothing but the air interfering with your technique, you can concentrate on how your body moves with the shinai. You could even include "image training" here, where you are simply imagining yourself practicing. That would be the most ideal of all! It is not as silly as it sounds, and has been proven to be very helpful. But it is certainly the least "realistic" kind of training.

With suburi, the shinai and your own body provide some interference, some challenge so that your movement is not perfect. This is what helps you to research and refine what is the best way for your body.

Practice against a partner holding a shinai, or against an uchikomi-dai

This kind of practice introduces a new element, a solid target. This in turn means you have to now practice your distance or ma-ai. A partner will allow you a realistic follow through, whereas an uchikomi-dai (hitting dummy of some kind) usually forces your follow through to be a bit shortened.

Against a shinai the action of striking is pretty uncomplicated, as the target area is large and generally held flat. Different opponents will offer slightly different heights and distance, which also introduces some interference to your ideal movement and forces you to research and adapt. But this practice is still fairly easy and not that much different to solo suburi.

Practice against a partner wearing bogu

The next kind of kihon training is against someone wearing bogu. Whether you are wearing bogu as well also has a big impact.

If you are not wearing bogu, the action of striking a non-moving opponent wearing bogu introduces a new factor to your kihon, the importance of tenouchi. Knowing how hard to strike, how to make the strike 'stick' to the target area without sliding off, keeping correct hasuji (flight path and angle of blade), all these things become essential. It is now that beginners often find their men cuts are not landing properly, or that they cannot accurately strike the datotsubui (target area) of the kote or do. Problems with kote cuts include hitting the opponent's tsuba (sword guard) or hitting their kobushi (fist). Problems with do include cutting the front of the do instead of the side, cuts sliding off the do, cutting the tare, and not judging ma-ai properly leading to reaching forwards.

Tenouchi allows your cuts to stick. Correct orientation of the whole body, especially the feet, allows you to cut the actual target area and not just parts of the bogu near to the target area. Regular practice of the other, more basic forms of kihon allows you to be able to launch your cuts without hesitation or pausing at the top of the backswing, cutting in one movement (ichibyoshi), and with confidence your cuts will reach their target.

Practicing kihon against an opponent in bogu provides huge interference to your ability to perform fundamental movements, and so forces you to examine and hone what you have learned.

Practice whilst wearing bogu

Beginners are placed in bogu progressively, which means in do and tare first. Then after some time in kote as well, then finally in men.

This seems to run against the wisdom of Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) which would assume that beginners are more in need of all-over protection. Indeed, legal advice to the Victorian Kendo Renmei has suggested that in a hypothetical damages claim for an injury sustained by a beginner in normal training, a judge would be unable to be convinced of any reason why a beginner should not wear full bogu from the first day, and therefore would find against the defendant (the Kendo instructor or association) in this instance.

However the prevailing wisdom from the point of view of Kendo instruction is that full bogu presents too much interference with the learning of basic, correct movement, in other words, kihon. Therefore do and tare are worn first because they present the least interference, adding only weight to the student's body but not hampering their movement. They also allow the beginner for the first time to receive cuts to the body and be struck on the do.

Next, the wearing of kote challenges the student's ability to handle the shinai properly and to keep a straight and accurate hasuji.

Finally, wearing men deprives the student of much of their peripheral vision and hearing, adds weight to the head which affects balance of the whole body, and finally may also be uncomfortable, hot or even claustrophobia-inducing. It is the ultimate test of a beginning student's grasp of kihon. Indeed the extent to which a student regresses after wearing men can usually be a measure of the steadiness of their training to that point. Those who are well-prepared through sufficient practice regress least.

So all of the 'interferences' of the preceding stages return with a vengeance, made worse by the disorientation provided by wearing the men. The good news is that in the majority of cases, this disorientation is temporary. Usually only a couple of training sessions. For any student who has more prolonged trouble, I would suggest their instructor needs to look at other factors: lack of preparation, a physical or psychological problem, or perhaps ill-fitting bogu.

Practice against a moving opponent

This is getting close to true ji-geiko (free sparring) in difficulty. A moving opponent might be a motodachi for uchikomigeiko showing the opening for basic cuts, or may be performing a simple attack so that the student can perform a counter-attacking technique (oji-waza).

A moving opponent in bogu closes off the opportunities for easy success in judging distance and accuracy. Opportunities are by definition momentary. They come and they go. The student has to begin to read his/her opponent's body movement and rhythm. Even in drills such as uchkomigeiko, where the motodachi's aim is to lead the student to success, the timing of the cut (hyoshi) becomes a factor. Practice against different opponents always presents new difficulties even when doing the one sequence of cuts, as all people move differently and have different body geometries.

Conclusion

This article has looked at the natural progression of difficulty in the practice of kihon, or fundamental techniques in Kendo. It has tried to show the logic behind this progression, both for the student and for the teacher of Kendo. The important thing to learn from this 'logic' is that one should try and always keep the feeling of the most ideal practice, even when in the midst of the most difficult and 'real' situations.

Mokuso and breathing

Last week I spoke at training about breathing during mokuso. This is a very important topic and you should think about this when you are not at training.

Anatomy of breathing

When we breathe normally, most of us use less than 50% of our total lung capacity. It is said that children under about 2 years of age use much more of their lung capacity every time they breathe, but that we lose that ability as we grow older.

Most of us breathe in a very shallow way, using just the top part of our lungs. When we are asleep or doing very heavy exercise we naturally breathe much deeper. When we yawn it is because our brains are a bit short of oxygen and yawning is the body's way of making us stop what we are doing and taking a very deep breath that fills our entire lungs.

thanks Wikipedia


The part of the body that helps us to breathe is the diaphragm (pronounced - "die-a-fram"), which is a thin sheet of muscle under the lungs. When the diaphragm contracts, it makes the space inside your chest grow larger, which in turn creates suction that draws air into your lungs. People who train to use their voices such as opera singers and stage actors learn how to control this muscle consciously. They learn how to breathe like little children again.

Breathing in mokuso

A simple way to start breathing from your diaphragm is to do what babies do. When you breathe in, push your stomach out. You will find that you take in a lot more air with not much more effort.

When you breathe out, do it quite slowly. The outward breath should last for at least twice as long as the breath in.

Make sure your face is relaxed and calm. Don't think about anything at all. Breathe in and out through your nose. Keep your back as straight as possible without straining.

How long should we do mokuso for?

Mokuso should be done long enough for everyone in the dojo to become calm, and a very deep silence to occur. The Dojo Captain should measure about three deep breaths before clapping to signal yamé. In clock time this might be between 20 and 40 seconds, however clock time really becomes irrelevant during meditation. A good mokuso won't be achieved if someone in the group is looking at the time! You know a deep silence has occured when the Dojo Captain claps and you get a little shock. You might even feel like you have no idea how long that mokuso was. 

Why should we breathe more deeply?

The reason it is good to take in more air is it fills your blood with oxygen. This helps to reduce how tired you get, helps you recover more quickly, and helps your brain to work more efficiently. It also helps to calm your mind, and with some practice, can actually change the way you think. Many people also believe it extends your life and keeps you healthy.

It is very hard to breathe like this all the time, so mokuso or meditation gives us the opportunity to concentrate on doing it deliberately.

It is still not very well understood by science, but meditation and breathing can enable people to do amazing things. I believe that it can help to increase our awareness to the point where it is possible to predict the future. Not a long way into the future, just half a second or so, but that's more than enough for kendo.


Other kinds of breathing

There is at least one other kind of breathing you can do during mokuso. This special breathing is designed to increase your ki (気). I mentioned it at training, however I won't go into detail here. If you want to know more, see me at training.

Zokin - cleaning the floor

We always clean/mop/polish the floor before training. This is partly because it is a big part of Japanese culture, but also because it is good exercise for the lower body and for balance.

Cleaning the floor by hand in such a careful way really helps you to feel like the dojo belongs to you and that the floor is very important. You literally and metaphorically become close to the floor!

When the local church youth group has had Friday pizza night and left ground in pineapple pieces and ham all over the floor (like there was this morning!) then a really good scrub is needed anyway.

Naoki Eiga used it as a way to go back to basics and reconstruct his kendo from scratch.


 

Start each training session slowly

Yesterday I observed that everyone went into their first kirikaeshi in a rush. As I mentioned to you all, this had the effect of ruining your kirikaeshi and possibly putting you in a negative frame of mind for the rest of training. Cuts and footwork were not synchronised, cuts were off target and generally the effect was that everyone's kirikaeshi looked terrible and left them feeling like their kendo was also terrible. This can be easily avoided.

It is important to start slowly, even if others around you are rushing.

When you are only training once a week (or less!), it is very important to get the basic movements correct before you attempt to do them fast, each and every time you start training. If you are training three times a week or more then you can start each training at full speed. But less than twice a week and you need to re-learn the movements briefly at the beginning of each training. By the end you will be back "up to speed", but at the beginning you will often be rusty.

In the beginning, do your cuts, and especially kirikaeshi, as slowly as you need to, in order that each and every cut lands on target and your whole body is moving in unison. This takes conscious effort, especially if others around you are going quickly. You will need to force yourself to slow down.

Slow versus sluggish
Going slowly on purpose is different to feeling sluggish. Sluggishness is when your mind wants to move quickly but your body doesn't seem to be responding.

Moving slowly, on the other hand, is when your intention is to move slowly. This is a good way of warming up a sluggish body. Don't try and go fast, but allow your body time to respond.

Slow versus fast technique
Sometimes we feel good in our bodies, and yet our technique seems to be worse than normal. This is also when starting slowly can help. The phrase Shingitaiitchi (心技体一致) means "mind, technique and body as one". So it means getting the technique, the energy in your body and your intention all to match up. If any one of those things is lacking, if one is racing ahead of the other two, then nothing will work. After you have integrated the three aspects together you will be able to speed up your overall movement.

Practice at home
If you practice at home, you improve the rate at which you develop skills at training. Even though you have no training partner, doing suburi or even just footwork drills can help enormously. Then when you are back in the dojo, things will flow much better for you.

Perfect practice makes perfect
It's true. Don't practice mediocre technique. It just means you are training to become mediocre. Make sure when you are doing things over and over that they are the best you know how to do. Even if you are not sure what's wrong, you should ask if you feel like your technique is not working as it should. Check yourself regularly. Imitate the people whose kendo you admire. Aim for the ultimate swordsmanship. That's the way to develop your kendo.

Kendo and geometry: are we robots?

A geometrical explanation of arc from Wikipedia

I've mentioned this before at training and it may be difficult to grasp at first hearing, so I'll explain it here again for those curious.




The body doesn't like geometry


Most martial arts popular today are unarmed arts. They focus on one fighter using their body against an opponent to gain advantage. This means that it is two human bodies clashing. The human body is an organic, flexible thing, with precise ways it can move and precise ways it can't move. Understanding the difference is very important in arts like Aikido, Judo, Jujutsu and so on. Throws and locks involve one fighter wrapping (part of) their body around the opponent to unbalance or subdue.

In short, there are no absolutely straight lines. Unarmed fighters might talk about the "line of attack" but this is an abstract or imaginary concept like chushin. It is never a completely straight line. The human body doesn't ever fit a completely straight line.

Kendo, of course, is different.

We still have our bodies, which are human and flexible and hate straight lines. But we have our sword, which is perfectly straight, and this is where all the difficulty in kendo begins.


The geometry of kendo


For any attack to function properly in kendo, we have to move the sword according to its nature, not ours. We must think in terms of geometry, in lines, planes and arcs. This applies to both shinai, which is straight when seen from any angle, as well as bokuto and Nihonto (real sword), which are curved in side view but straight when seen from the top or bottom.

The sword will only cut if it moves through the air perfectly straight. Any wobbles or wavering will mean the sword will either not cut properly or will bounce off the target. With the shinai this is seen when the cut slides off or glances the target area. For the cut to "stick", the downswing has to be geometrically straight, moving through a two dimensional plane. Actually it helps to think of the sword itself as a flat, two dimensional object, like a piece of paper, rather than a three dimensional object, which of course it is.


Making theory work


This is fairly easy to understand in theory, but much harder to put into practice. Even experienced kenshi can have difficulty with making every cut land properly. The reason for this is our bodies. We move in three dimensions very easily: up, down, sideways, in and out, around and around, often all at once! Our elbows are simple hinges that move in only two dimensions, but they are connected to shoulders that are ball-and-socket joints, so our arms can move in almost any direction.

But to be able to cut effectively with a sword the way we do in kendo, it would almost be better to have shoulders that were simple hinges which only allowed our arms to move up and down.

To be able to move in this mechanical way takes a lot of muscular training. In kendo, we call this kind of training suburi. It is only through lots of suburi that you can train your three dimensional, flexible body to move in a two-dimensional, robotic way.

Speaking of which, have a look at this video of a kendo robot built by a South Korean University. You might get a better idea of how the human body moves by watching the way the robot's arms and shoulders have been made.







It's not bad at kendo, but it does make the beginner's mistake of using too much right hand!


What about the rest of the body?


It's not just about the arms. Your feet have to get you into the right position and your spine should always be vertical, no matter which direction you cut is moving. These are important principles in kendo.

Another important principle is that the cut should nearly always be done so that your hands finish with a feeling of coming towards your centre of gravity, in other words, your hara. It is a fact of human biomechanics that while it is possible to train your body to do almost anything you like, certain movements are naturally easier and more stable. Try drawing a straight line on a piece of paper. Draw the line coming towards you. Draw another starting close and moving away from you. Which was straighter? Which part of the line wobbled most? I'll bet the line coming toward you was straighter, and the closer your hand was to your body, the less it wobbled.

This same principle works with the cut. The more we can keep our hands moving directly in front of our body, the more stable and controlled our movements will be.


But I don't want to be a robot!

I'm not saying robots would make better kenshi, they wouldn't. But some parts of kendo technique need to be practiced over and over until they are as consistent as a robot would do them. And this practice doesn't stop because our whole lives we need to keep our muscles trained. But when they are well-trained, we can move in amazing ways, using both the body's flexibility and its stiffness for our purpose.

Watch this video below of Indian classical dancer Savitha Sastry from the Bharatanatyam tradition. Particularly watch how she moves from 1:40 onwards. She is always balanced. She can make incredibly beautiful shapes with her arms and legs: sometimes straight and sometimes curved. The extent to which she can bend her wrists would have taken years of flexibility training. She can move her arms to an exact angle and then perform another move before returning her arms to that exact angle again without checking herself. She can accelerate, decelerate, balance, glide or stop on a dime. She makes unnatural movements look strangely natural and yet we can't really work out how she has done it, because her smile makes us think she is using no effort.

My point is Ms Sastry's training would have been just as rigorous and robotic as ours, probably more so. But the effect is far from that of a robot. It has simply allowed her to do things that no person can do naturally. And yet when she does, you can't see the effort so it looks like she's making it up on the spot.

If you can do kendo like this, then you can be my teacher. Seriously.

The 2011 Tour de France from a Kendo perspective

Cadel dodges spectators on the Alpe d'Huez stage of the 2011 Tour de France

It was very exciting to watch Cadel become the first Australian to win the Tour de France. In the hundred years of the race only two non-Europeans have ever won the race and both of them were Americans. It is a massive achievement.

There have been some parallels between the way Cadel won and what we aim for in Kendo. He was gracious and humble in victory, just like a Kenshi. He did what was required to win and nothing more. And he saw the precise moment when he needed to act and he acted decisively, throwing everything into it and holding nothing back.

For those of you who didn't watch the race or don't know about it, the Tour de France is three weeks of cycling around France with each day representing one "stage": a distance of anywhere between 50 and 200km, through all kinds of terrain. Some stages are short and run as time trials, with each rider starting at three minute intervals and trying to clock the fastest time for the course. Other stages are much longer as the race travels around the French countryside. There is much riding through mountains where the smaller riders generally have the advantage. And then there are many flatter stretches where the big, powerful riders can take over. Racers compete as part of a team, and each team has a lead rider, who is the one all other members of the team are helping to win. A team member who is not the lead rider will never try and challenge for first place, but rather they will work together with their teammates to prevent other teams' lead riders from beating theirs.

At every stage the rider with the most points based on their time so far is awarded the "Yellow Jersey". Very often the rider with the Yellow Jersey is not the same rider who is the winner of a particular stage, but they are the most consistently fast overall. There are other special jerseys representing those who are currently in the lead in different divisions (white for best young rider, green for best sprinter and white with red polka dots for best climber or "King of the Mountain"). But the Yellow Jersey is the one everyone wants.

Throughout the 2011 Tour de France, Cadel never wore the Yellow Jersey. But he was never further back than third place. Then, on the third last day, on the stage to Alpe d'Huez, Cadel saw some of his rivals stage a breakaway. This is where a rider puts on a sudden and sustained burst of speed in the hope of creating such a gap that they can maintain the lead until the end of the stage. Sometimes this leads to victory and sometimes it just leads to exhaustion. It takes a lot of courage, stamina, and knowing your own body as well as the course to stage a successful breakaway.

When his rivals took off, Cadel was left at the front of the 'Peloton'. The Peloton is the name for the main group of riders and it sticks together a bit like a large flock of birds. The reason for this is that it is much easier to ride behind someone else, than it is to ride by yourself. The lead riders carry you along in their slipstream.

Cadel drags the Peloton up the mountain

When Cadel saw the others charge off into the distance, he was wary of wasting effort to chase them down by himself. He waited to see what the rest of the Peloton would do. Everyone just kept to the same pace as if they were happy to let the breakaway group go. This was where Cadel realised he had to act. In his head he did the calculations about the next two days: tomorrow would be a 42 km timetrial and the day after a slow day where the owner of the Yellow Jersey would, by tradition, remain unchallenged all the way into Paris and the finish line. In other words, Cadel knew that if didn't have the Yellow Jersey by the end of the timetrial he could not win. And he knew that there was a limit to how much time he would be able to make up over a 42 km time trial. If his big rival Andy Schleck put on too much of a lead today, he would never catch him tomorrow. Now was the time he had to give chase, and he would do it by himself if necessary.

Which is what he did. He led the Peloton for more than 15 minutes up through the mountains and managed to keep Schleck's lead down to 57 seconds. Being in front meant he was using far more energy than everyone else, and 15 minutes at top speed riding up a mountain is hard at the best of times. But he had to risk exhausting himself if he was to stay in with a chance. Looking back, this was the moment where his victory was set up. This 15 minutes would prove decisive.

The second last, and most decisive day came and Cadel still wasn't in the Yellow Jersey. He would let someone else have the honour and psychological advantage of wearing it. Perhaps being in yellow would give Schleck the edge in the time trial. But Cadel had timed his run well. In not needing to own the Yellow Jersey, Cadel had not overdone it. He used as much effort as he needed to stay in the top three, now second place, and in doing so had left something in reserve. The time trial would be where he would spend everything he had been saving for the last three weeks.

In the end Cadel not only caught up to Schleck's lead but overtook it by a minute or so. He was so fast that he finished the time-trial with the second fastest time, and finished the day being awarded the Yellow Jersey. That meant so long as he stayed on his bike all the way into Paris, he was the winner.

It's nice to have the Yellow Jersey during the Tour de France, but there's only one day where it really matters who wears it and that's the last day. Cadel let others mind it until he needed it, then he made it his.

Humility, no wasted effort, seizing the opportunity: that's Kendo.

The last stage, the ride into Paris, is traditionally a relaxed affair. Cadel enjoys champagne during the race—how French!