I was spring-cleaning my drafts email box when I came across this. I believe I probably wrote it (it was undated) when I was not sure I would be able to log on to the blog from anywhere (I was wrong). So, with minimal cleanup, read on...
People who know me know that I take a cultural- and aesthetics-based approach to iai practice. This approach does not sit that well with some of my erstwhile colleagues, but that’s okay. It’s mutual. I don’t like their swaggering, I’m-a-warrior-and-I-kick-butt-with–a-sword (in a culture of guns) attitude. However, that does not mean that good technique does not have a place in our practice. But somehow, Americans, at least, think that’s odd. It can’t emphasize aesthetics and also be effective, can it?
We are a culture of dichotomy, with so many examples abounding it hardly makes sense to point them out. To be a Republican is to be a rabid libertarian. To be a Democrat is to be a bleeding-heart liberal. If it’s black, it can’t be white. There is no such thing as grey, or marbling, or gradation. If you are a Christian, you can’t be Jewish. Or Buddhist. And you CANNOT be nothing at all! I could go on, but no doubt you get the idea.
Many years ago I spent some time practicing with a group that used a martial art style as an aspect of meditation practice. The teacher was sincere about teaching the techniques, and a handful of students took him seriously, but the rest were simply lazy. After a couple of practices, it was driving me crazy; watching the few committed people doing all the work of the practice (taking care of the space and the equipment, tending to the head teacher on his visits, and so forth), while the majority just showed up, used the equipment and paid perfunctory attention to the teacher who had flown hundreds of miles to work with them, and went home. Finally, I said something to one of the senior, committed students. His reply was surprising: “They aren’t martial artists. They’re doing this for meditation. They don’t care about the technique.”
He could not have been more wrong in making such an excuse. Meditation is actually seriously hard work. It can take years of practice to begin to understand what you are doing in meditative practice, let alone to derive some sort of benefit from it. Anyone who says different is lying. Playing with a martial art form as some sort of prop to presumed meditative practice is ridiculous. On the up side in this particular case, the teacher was getting paid, and now and then some students took the practice seriously. But he faced criticism in the wider martial arts community for his lazy students and their poor technique.
If I claimed my practice was solely about culture and aesthetics and the students lazily sleepwalked through the forms, I would similarly not be taken seriously as a teacher, and my students would be mocked for their lack of technique. Even though, as John Donohue has pointed out, “martial arts” should be more accurately described as “martially-inspired arts,” a certain level of authenticity and excellence in technique is called for. After all, what good is your meditation if your technique for pursuing it is no good? And how can you get inside the head (however minimally) of someone from a time when swords were common objects in certain households without taking the technique seriously, as they once did?
Again, it’s a paradox that something so potentially deadly is also beautiful. It makes people uncomfortable, which is one of the reasons I like it.
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