Tradition and rigidity

A couple of weeks ago, I had the all-too-rare pleasure of practicing jodo with some friends and colleagues at a dojo some distance away.  Everyone was in street clothes except for myself and one other person.  The space was a training room at a gym on an army base rather than a traditional dojo.  Earlier, I had been told I did not need to "dress out" for the practice.

"Yes I do," I replied.  I did not want to embarrass my hosts, however, so I added that I had a four-hour drive home afterward, and preferred not to wear clothes I had been sweating heavily in all the way back.  But that was only part of the reason.  I "dressed out" because for me, it is not right to practice in street clothes. 

Why not?  Well, good question.  As an iaidoka, the keikogi-hakama-obi combination is actually important for wearing a sword.  Just for yucks, try wearing one with contemporary clothing sometime.  The sword simply does not want to cooperate very well when stuffed into a leather trouser belt.  And if you're me, you're not even wearing a belt, which makes it simply impossible.  But for jodo, it's true; one never needs to thrust a sword into a belt, only a bokuto; and when you do, it's controlled enough in the kata that it does not need to find that comfortable place above your hip that a well-placed obi will provide.  Moreover, bokuto are lighter than real or practice swords, so the extra support of the hakama himo are not necessary either.  Still, I got dressed.  Beyond automotive hygiene, the reason I got dressed was simply tradition.

I have had people not familiar with our keikogi-hakama-obi combination ask me about my outfit.  One person, a TKD teacher, even went so far as to reason out that my opponents could not see my leg movements when my lower limbs were clad in the wide, pleated trousers, thereby conferring some sort of tactical advantage.  No, I replied.  We wear this outfit because that is what Edo period samurai actually wore.  It is the most practical outfit to wear for putting a sword (or swords) in your belt.  No other reason.

But, practicality aside, it is a tradition, as in practicing a traditional martial art.  I "dress out" because it shows respect for my teachers and the history of my art form.

At the same time, and to a certain extent, in deference to my colleagues for whom dressing out is optional, I have to take note that there are times when tradition can become a simple, rote repetition, or a rigid, invariable habit.  People who study traditional martial arts get hit with this criticism all the time: our practice is rigid, outdated, impractical; there is too much attention to minute, meaningless detail, and not enough to the substance of technique.   There are certainly examples all the time when attention to detail overwhelms substance.  One large, degree-granting organization will fail people who test simply for making mistakes in the required bowing and etiquette attached to their style.  I think the reasons are that (1) the judges are looking for attention to detail generally, and not observing the minutiae of etiquette suggests a sloppy training regimen; (2) they want to judge everyone by the same criteria, so one must do one's best to follow every prescribed detail; and (3) (maybe most important to them) minutely observing the same protocols adds to group cohesion and upholds the importance of the group identity in general. 

I am not being critical, just observational.  Is it possible to be polite to people without minutely adhering to a prescribed ritual?  Absolutely.  Just not there.  And to be honest, I have never belonged to that organization for the simple reason (and I am echoing my teacher in this regard) that I regard the substance of practice as being more important.  For my teacher there were other, political considerations as well, but that is my take.  That at some point I have to draw the line between minute attention to detail and the substance of training, because one can get lost in the minutiae and lose sight of the important stuff.  On the other hand, I am traditional in the sense of wanting to pay homage to my forebears in the art, and certainly I would never get rid of etiquette or bowing in the dojo, ever.  Especially in a weapons dojo, mutual respect is paramount, or practice quickly becomes impossible. 

But that rigidity thing.  Traditional kata is very exacting.  Put your foot here, draw now, cut like that.  Block this cut, come in for a tsuki with the jo, push the opponent away, swing the jo towards his eyes.  The potential for the prescribed movements being the end point of kata training is ever-present, and I know some very good practitioners who do excellent kata, but have a great deal of difficulty thinking outside the box. 

That goes for other art forms as well.  My husband is a modern artist, and we occasionally engage in rather lively discussions regarding classical versus modern art.  To him, classical art is rigid and confining, whereas modern art is more expressive.  Leaving aside the obvious flaws in modern art (overcommercialization comes immediately to mind), I point out that it is possible to learn a classical art and yet be able to express oneself through it.  Eventually in these discussions, we invariably find out we are really talking about the same thing, just in different ways.

Somewhere amid my stacks of DVDs I have an old video (transferred from film) of Nakayama Hakudo, the last soke of MSR.  My teacher first showed this film to me when I visited his home one time.  "Look at this, I'll bet you've never seen anything like this before," he said, a little mischievously.  In it, Hakudo sensei, who was obviously a very old man at this point, performs MSR kata.  First, he does the kata in a way that is more-or-less as a practitioner would recognize it.  Then, following, he performs a variation on the kata that can only be described as playful.  I could see, looking at these variations, that Hakudo Sensei was truly a 20th century master of a living art form.  He took the kata, played with it, expanded it, then went on to something else.  His kata was neither rigid nor dull. 

It's difficult to describe my reaction - I came to understand many things about my teacher, and our practice, by watching this film.  It was like someone hit me over the head.  I began to understand answers to some of the questions I had about specific kata and their meaning, but, more importantly, it impressed upon me that kata is not an end in itself, but a taking-off point for applying techniques in whatever situation was at hand (even if it was a community hall stage). 

But my final thought after seeing the film for the first time was that Hakudo Sensei would probably fail a grading test with all the fun he was having.    

In an earlier post, I described the playing of traditional noh flute and how learning to improvise was actually a part of the tradition.  It is certainly possibly to limit training in the flute to set pieces; but the practice will not be nearly as rich as embracing the entire tradition.  But the safe pit of rigidity is always there.  It's safe, because as long as you do exactly as your teacher did, you literally can't put a foot wrong.  No one can criticize what you are doing because you are doing exactly what you were taught.   In the old days, people who trained in weapons arts quickly got over the rigidity thing, because they were actually engaging in life-or-death training and anyone who favored rigidity was not going to last long in an encounter.  Even in traditional arts, like ink painting, if a student wanted to get out from under the shadow of his master, he had to develop his own way of interpreting the world. 

This is not easy stuff.  It's great to insist on the perfect dojo space, the proper stage, the exact same setup that your teacher had.  Do the kata or the dance exactly as you were taught.  Make the line on the paper exactly the same as before.  Adapting or changing  what you've spent so many years learning is a lot like stepping off a cliff; and, in fact, some people actually fall off, and turn what they have learned into something unrecognizable.  Sometimes it's brilliant; but sometimes it's simply a mess.  The very tricky part is, staying in a tradition, learning its rules, techniques and conventions, and then being able to push past the rules to where the real substance of the practice is for you.  Scary. Exhilarating.  Brilliant.