In Search of Fudoshin
by Alex Meehan, Bujinkan Shidoshi

Addressing the role of the spirit in martial training is always tricky. For a start, the word ‘spirit’ itself can mean quite different things to different people. For some, it has distinctly religious overtones, while others use it to describe a sort of energetic life force.

In Japanese budo too, spirit is defined in a number of different ways. In the Bujinkan Dojo, it has been my experience that Hatsumi Soke often talks of the need for a strong spirit, or fudoshin, in fighting. This is a pragmatic approach to the subject.

After all, it is a fundamental truth of conflict that you must have a strong spirit to prevail. It doesn’t matter how good your technique is, if there is no spiritual strength or willpower behind it, you can’t expect to win. It is also a fundamental truth that you don’t need to study budo to have this strength - plenty of people who have never set foot in a dojo have it. Our concern however should be how can we cultivate this spirit through our study of budo.

With this in mind, I’d like to relate an anecdote. One evening after training, one of the people who trains with me asked what shikin haramitsu daikomyo means – a good question as all members of the dojo recite this phrase at the beginning and end of every class. I explained that, to the best of my understanding, the phrase is a mix of old Japanese and ancient sanskrit, and that the shinzen rei – the act of bowing, clapping and ‘chanting’ that we do in class - is a mix of some basic Shinto practices as well as ancient spiritual practice.

The literal translation of the phrase is difficult, and far beyond my limited Japanese skills. As I understand it, it means something along the lines of “sincerity, compassion, naturally devoting oneself to obeying nature - by continually searching for all of these a great light (daikomyo) can appear.”

In effect when we bow to the kamidana – the spirit shelf – and the kamiza – the spirit seat (the small wooden temple) – in the dojo, what we are doing is in essence asking the Shinto martial deities that are associated with our Japanese traditions to watch over training and provide us with guidance and protection. While this is where the shinzen rei comes from, in my opinion its meaning is largely up to each individual to decide.

If, like me, you are not a follower of Shinto, then it serves to remind me of the ‘sacredness’ of training time and of the importance of the spirit in training. We are forging spirit when we train, and as I live a secular life, I find relevance in a ritualised reminder that I am not merely a physical being – but also a spiritual one as well.

I made an effort to explain that despite coming from a religious background, this practice can happily be totally separate from religion – nobody should ever think that there is any religious undertone to this ritual. If you are a devout Christian, you could easily direct your intention towards God, and likewise for practitioners of Judaism, Islam and any other religion. At the other extreme of the belief spectrum, if you are a confirmed atheist, then you could merely consider it to be quaint symbolism, the purpose of which is to signify the start and end of training. Again, the meaning is largely up to each of us to decide – these actions only have the power and relevance we give them, at least in my eyes.

Fast forward an hour or two to the usual after-training discussion in a local pub, and I found myself talking about how I believe spirituality is important in martial arts training. However, for the practitioner, particularly the newer one, this can be a confusing statement. There are no classes in 'spirituality' in the Bujinkan, we don’t sit around meditating and in fact we very rarely even mention it.

However, stick around for long enough and you’ll hear phrases like fudoshin (immoveable spirit) and even references to how important a strong spirit is in shinken gata (real sword techniques, literally real fighting techniques). But you could train for quite a long time and not actually receive any instruction in how to attain fudoshin or any realistic idea how your movements might be applied in shinken gata.

So if it’s so important to grow a strong spirit, yet you are not taught how, how are you meant to acquire this spiritual strength? It’s quite a conundrum, isn’t it?

Most things in Bujinkan budo in my experience are enormously pragmatic. When you start training, there are lots and lots of things to learn and many of them appear to be highly stylised – to exist for the sake of existing rather than being useful. ‘In Bujinkan, we punch like this, we kick like this, we take up this stance etc’, however over time you can come to realise that there is a good reason for everything and there is virtually nothing in this martial art that needs to be taken in the form of dogma.

Even if you can’t immediately see what the purpose of an aspect of training is, it almost certainly has one. However, part of training is learning to accept that it is a learning process, and that truths emerge through our own learning. Bad teachers teach too much, not too little – they give everything away when what serves the student best is to provide pointers that allow the student to make leaps of understanding themselves.

These become dearly won gems of learning, and have more meaning than if the teacher had explained the problem fully in advance. So we can see that sometimes the process of learning is also the goal of the learning process – in a real sense the path is the destination. Spiritual training exists in this place as well.

To help illustrate this, I would like to present a ‘sanshin’ of three tangible areas of training where spiritual learning takes place, often without the awareness of the student.

Gambatte Kudasai! – Keep going!

Sensei often uses the phrase gambatte kudasai which I understand to mean ‘please continue’ or ‘keep going’ in relation to training. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem too profound, but the ability to motivate yourself to continue with a path of action when it’s not the easy option is actually a profound and difficult to embrace teaching.

Martial arts training should of course be enjoyable, but equally, it comes with its own challenges. Sometimes you don’t really feel like getting off the couch on a cold winter’s evening and heading out into the rain to go training. While we can happily accept that we enjoy training as a pastime, sometimes training itself isn’t enjoyable. It can be painful, humbling, sometimes humiliating and is often exhausting.

After the initial novelty wears off, the beginner can sometimes find it difficult to motivate themselves to persist in an activity in which they don’t feel skilful, don’t feel as if they are making progress and in fact don’t feel as if they can understand what’s going on.

This also doesn’t stop when you are no longer a beginner – the same sensations will be familiar to people with dan grades, shidoshi grades and probably shihan grades as well. In addition to this, anyone who spends any time in martial arts training will be familiar with the ‘peaks and troughs’ syndrome – where you sometimes feel like you can train hard for weeks or months at a time without making any progress in becoming any more skilful.

At times like this, it’s very easy to question your own commitment to training. Why are you putting yourself through this? The solution to these sensations is really to continue training, to ride out the storm of inactivity. The only difference between the experienced practitioner and the beginner in this regard is that the experienced budoka will probably have been through enough peaks and troughs in the past to know that this is a transitory state, and that if you sit it out, it will pass.

Embracing the beginner’s mind

There is no doubt in my mind that strength of character and will comes from persevering through adversity, and the ability to make a decision that you want something badly enough to continue even when much of the strength of your conviction abandons you is a key part of training. This is particularly true today, when so much of our society is geared towards giving us easy options and when working hard for what we want is not as valued as an ideal as it once was.

Closely connected to Hatsumi Sensei’s maxim of Gambatte Kudasai is the attitude of ongoing learning and self improvement that all budoka must maintain a commitment to. This is something that martial artists training for extended periods of time can often overlook, but which is actually a significant factor in identifying how budoka are different from the general public.

To summarise this, budoka are engaged in an attitude of life-long learning that is often quite alien to the majority of the population. After school or college, most people settle into working and living their lives and sometimes never challenge their preconceived ideas about life, other people and the world at all.

They can lose the ability to apply significant self-criticism and the willingness to take correction. Instead, they tend to solidify the ways they think and become resistant to change. This is of course, not true of everyone –different people experience this to greater or lesser degrees.

However, it’s extremely difficult to progress in martial arts if you can’t get past your own ego. Egos are useful things – everyone has one and they can serve to motivate us and it’s not possible to become good at martial arts, or anything else, without one. However, it should serve us – we should not serve it.

The ability to continually learn over the course of your life requires a willingness to be critical of yourself. One time-honoured method of progressing in skill in budo is to identify your own weak points and eliminate them one by one. To do this you must be ruthlessly honest with yourself and this is something that can be uncomfortable. Do you think of yourself as primarily a teacher or a student? This mindset is sometimes known as the ‘beginner’s mind’.

Shin-shin Shin Gan

The goal of this is to understand the maxim Shin-shin Shin Gan. This phrase means, as I understand it, ‘mind and eyes of god’ and refers to one of the highest level of understanding a budoka can have. In his essay the Essence of Ninjutsu, Toshitsugu Takamatsu Sensei wrote:

“If a seasoned master of the fighting arts sincerely pursues the essence of ninjutsu, devoid of the influence of the ego’s desires, he will progressively come to realize the ultimate secret for becoming invincible. This ultimate essential secret is the attainment of the knowledge of shin-shin shin gan, or the mind and eyes of the divine.”

What this means, in my interpretation, is that the ideal warrior is one who is motivated by his own judgement, unclouded by the interpretations of others. Can we see past our own pre conceived ideas?

Briefly put, you can say that there are three views of the world (or of any particular event, situation or relationship) encountered by any one person – there is the way we see it, informed by our own personalities, prejudices, previous experiences etc, there is the way others see it, informed by their own world views and finally there is the way it actually is.

The teaching Shin-shin Shin Gan seems to me be quite an important one – learning to be able to see past your own perceptions, to analyse your perceptions of your perceptions and finally to gain an understanding of the actual significance of an event or interaction.

While this may seem difficult to understand and unwieldy, it really comes down to being able to accurately judge for yourself what’s happening around you. If you can’t understand this, then you can be easily manipulated by others. Nagato Sensei, in his essay in Alex Esteve’s excellent book, says “I have to question the innate aptitude as a martial artist of anyone who only realises what is happening when told by those around them.”

It seems to me this teaching is alive in this sentence. However, this idea functions on both an internal and external level. Of most relevance to this discussion is the way it works on a personal level - you must embrace this idea if you are to have an honest idea of your own abilities, strengths and shortcomings. This is particularly important in our art where we don't have external validation of our ranks - it's up to each of us to keep their worth. This is a real challenge.

By examining these three ideas together – that of keeping going, that of embracing the beginner’s heart and finally that of acquiring an accurate overall view of ourselves and the world around us – we can see how both the teachings of budo spirituality and philosophy are alive in the Bujinkan.

These aren’t abstract ideas, separate from the practitioner’s everyday life, but rather are pragmatic ideas and self evident truths. This is where I think many of the tangible non-physical benefits that martial arts training can provide originate from. While we don't spend time meditating, we do have a system that provides for educating our spirits as it does our bodies and mind.

Part of my motivation to write this is to examine specifically the benefits to the average person of training in martial arts like those taught in the Bujinkan Dojo. It seems obvious that the martial arts are primarily concerned with fighting, and there are many members of the Bujinkan Dojo who use the skills they practice in their everyday lives on a regular basis.

It is important to state that it is the physical skills of self protection that provide the bedrock of what is studied in Hatsumi Sensei’s budo. However, there are other less tangible benefits to be enjoyed from taijutsu training. It’s my suggestion that many of these benefits involve spiritual aspects of training.

However far from being obscure esoteric practices far removed from everyday life, the spiritual training I’m talking about manifests itself in things like self discipline, increased focus in our lives, strength of will and personal development. These methods of obtaining these qualities are quite literally hidden in plain view of each us, but it is up to each of us to embrace them.

END NOTE: It’s time for the obligatory disclaimer: I can’t stress strongly enough that the ideas and comments in this article are my own personal ideas. They are informed by my study in the Bujinkan Dojo, but should not be taken for official dogma. Please accept my apologies for any mistakes or misleading comments I may have made, albeit unknowingly – Alex Meehan.

Alex Meehanis a licensed Shidoshi and runs the Bujinkan Meehan Dojo in Dublin, Ireland. Alex can be reached via email at alex@bujinkan.ie or visit his website at www.happobiken.com.