Budo

My good friend recently started a new blog chronicling his journey in his study of aikido. Check it out in the links under "Budo." What he has to say is useful to martial artists of every color and stripe. I recommend that my students check it out regularly and encourage my friend to post with more regularity.

Anyway, his post really got me thinking. What is the purpose of the martial arts? Is it to fight or is it's true purpose the refinement of character? It's the Budo vs. Bujutsu question. Truth of the matter, I'm not very interested in Budo. Let me take a moment and talk about definitions. "Bu" means "martial." "Do" means "way" or "path." It's interchangeable with "tao" and is in fact the same character in Chinese as opposed to Japanese. "Jutsu" (or jitsu) means "art" so martial arts would properly be called "bujutsu" in Japanese and "wu shu" in Chinese. "Budo" on the other hand means "martial way" or "martial path."

Why is this linguistic distinction important? I'm not sure that it necessarily is. It's a good place to start, however, in working on your own personal reasons for studying the art. As for myself, I came to the arts as a sport. I didn't need lessons in fighting per se. I was always a good fighter stacking up well against boys my age and a bit older. I liked the respect that my ability to fight earned me. I liked being treated like a grown man at 14 simply because I could kick a grown man's ass. I was a judoka and a good one but my fights usually involved my fists and not my skill at grappling. Judo was my sport (as was kendo) and I kept them quite separate from my fighting life.

Somewhere along the line, this changed. I think it was when I moved to the mainland-- the Bay Area specifically. Say what you want, the ability to fight here doesn't hold as much weight as it did in Hawaii. It gained me no respect which I found unnerving. It was also at this time that I discovered aikido. I read a book that talked about aikido and I thought, "Yes! This is what I'm looking for!" So I sought out the author and became one of his students. We had a serious falling out but I still consider him my greatest teacher having taught me pretty much everything of value in my life. Anyway, I was absolutely enthralled. I couldn't stop practicing. I never stopped thinking about it. I would drive any distance, sacrifice anything, if I thought someone could give me an answer to this thing called "aiki."

The problem was that my training partners were almost always middle aged people of questionable athletic ability. They may have understood aikido better than I did but by strength and sheer athletic ability, none of them could beat me in a fight. For some reason, that mattered to me back then. I tried and tried. I even sought aikido from rougher teachers like Toshishiro Obata who taught more of an aikiutsu variant. None of them had the answer I was looking for.

So I left aikido and went to study Jeet Kune Do. All of a sudden, a new world was opened to me. Jeet Kune Do was more to my liking-- taking almost an Aristotlean approach to MA-- categorizing them and putting them each in their place. The problem with Jeet Kune Do was that most of the people who studied it treated it as a shortcut to MA proficiency. They didn't have the the hard core background in a traditional martial art so instead of freeing someone from their confines, it just created sloppy martial artists. Think of JKD (different from Jun Fan Gung Fu) as a skeleton or an outline. If you hope to get the most benefit out of it, you must flesh out the arts. So instead of just a couple of functional traps, I went and actually studied Wing Chun. Instead of a couple of kicks and punches, I went and studied Muay Thai. To augment my grappling skills, learned Brazilian Jujutsu. Martial arts was finally beginning to make sense to me.

Muay Thai was the art that finally did it for me. Everything changed when I got into the ring. I guess I needed to prove to myself that I could hold my own against another trained fighter. Most of the streetfights I had gotten into were woefully unsatisfying. They all ended much too quickly and I was always left with a sense that it was more luck than anything. I wanted something where I could accurately gauge my skill against another trained man. Having settled that in my head, I finally understood the archaic aikido training method. I never really got it before because I was too caught up in my own insecurity to see it. Now that I was comfortable with my ability to fight, I could focus on the lessons aikido had to teach.

Do I think one art is necessarily any better than any other? No, I don't. What separates the arts are their training methods. What holds the Japanese arts back is a training method that is hopelessly mired in the past. In my class, we have a specific format which I found to be effective- technique, drills and functional training. Whatever technqiue we learn, we drill and then practice it in a combat format. Aikido would be better served if it adopted this structure.

But what did I learn? I learned that "aiki" is just the manner in which you perform your technique. I can do any art and perform their techniques with "aiki" just as I've seen many aikidoka practice the form of "aiki" with none of the aiki feeling. So what's the point? I'll get more into that in future posts. I don't have an answer right now.