From Bujinkan Santa Monica by Michael

The Search for the Ox, digital c-print photograph by Andrew Binkley

When I first studied the 十牛圖頌 ten ox herding pictures and poems, I recognized some of my own journey reflected in Bujinkan training. Maybe you will see yourself there as well.

The Ten Ox Herding pictures illustrate the stages of a Zen life in the quest toward enlightenment. In Zen the ox represents the mind which is at first wild and untamed, running from one thing to another. It is said that these stories are trying to express the inexpressible.

Hatsumi Sensei has a favorite teacup with these ten illustrations on it. As he sips his tea, he says he likes to reminisce about the "old days," and he tells us how we have the same ten stages in our journey through Budo: First dan through Tenth Dan.

This will be the first in a series of 10 posts.

Just as a man would tie to a post
A calf that should be tamed,
Even so here should one tie one's own mind
Tight to the object of mindfulness.

What does it mean to be a Shodan 初段 in the Bujinkan? Let's look at this first stage from the Oxherding perspective:

Woodblock print by 德力富吉郎 Tokuriki Tomikichirō

寻牛 The Search for the Bull

In the pasture of the world,
I endlessly push aside the tall
grasses in search of the bull.
Following unnamed rivers,
lost upon the interpenetrating
paths of distant mountains,
My strength failing and my vitality
exhausted, I cannot find the bull.
I only hear the locusts chirping
through the forest at night.

Somehow you find inspiration to start training in the Bujinkan. This may come from a feeling that you are missing something or a need to better yourself. Or maybe that your current training is lacking in some way.

This is known as 初発心 sho-hosshin or the first stirring of the heart.

This goes from first hearing about the Bujinkan all the way through learning your basics so that you start to glimpse that there is an essence to this art that lies beyond technique. These are the footprints you look for while training on the basics. You may not know where they lead, and they remain elusive.

You will be distracted by other styles and many things that are not even related to training. There is so much to absorb that your senses will be confused.

Traps at this stage are thinking you know what is good or bad training, striving to gain rank or prove something, fear that you cannot do things, and giving up the search before you know what you are searching for.

This stage is critical for finding an authentic teacher. You will find the teacher you deserve. If your mind is clouded by what you think is right, you will get a teacher who will only confirm and magnify your ill chosen path.

All of your training will be energetic and have a feeling of really going for it. You get bloody, bruised and sweaty but love the process.

You start to notice that no matter how much you train, there is always more. The Bujinkan seems to expand the more you learn. You never reach the place where you can say, "I've got this."  This can lead to a time of doubt where other paths become tempting. You want to find training that you can master and the Bujinkan rarely supplies this feeling.

After your strength and spirit are drained, you wonder, what now? Where can I go from here? How can I keep training and persevere? Can I even do this?

Every visit to the dojo feels like another wasted effort to learn anything. Frustration will rule your mind.

This is a very important passage in training. Reaching this place means you are ready to begin learning. That is why Shodan is beginner's level. You may recognize you are caught in your own conditioning and seek a way out through taijutsu.

You will feel you are nearing the end of this level when you sense that the ego's efforts to capture the essence of training are not enough.

Next we look at Bujinkan Nidan 弐段: Discovering the Footprints …

From Bujinkan Santa Monica by Michael

Memorial Cathedral for World Peace, Hiroshima. photo by scarletgreen

What is the point of Budo? Training in a martial art is a strange endeavor. You learn how to bruise, break, maim, and kill all in the name of peace and love for humanity. At least that's what most teachers would tell you. None ever admit to having a love for violence.

But most martial arts have their roots in violence that was either forced on them by lovers of war, or developed by those who loved war. True peace lovers would never train to do what we do, right? I don't know. I don't think it's that black and white.

武道 Budo means martial way. The character of Bu 武 is composed of three different kanji radicals two 二, shoot or spear 弋, and stop 止. So the essence of Bu is the way of stopping two people from shooting at each other or from fighting! Budo prevents or stops fighting among people. Martial arts are to promote harmony and act to stabilize society.

During the 1860's in Japan, a time marked by bloody infighting among various samurai factions, this meaning seemed lost.

For training to cut human flesh, men were forced to perform executions or to act as seconds for those condemned to commit seppuku. I guess this is how they learned to decapitate. It is said that if the trainee even grimaced or turned a little pale at the sight of the gore, he would fail the test.

They would then skewer the bloodied heads onto bamboo stakes and leave them near bridges with a note attesting to 天誅 Tenchuu or heaven's revenge.

The author Kan Shimozawa wrote about how they bragged of their bloody feats:

"Every day the men would go out and cross swords with the enemy. One corpsman claimed the blood of the man he had killed today splattered on the ridge of the adjacent house. Another said that the blood [of his victim] hadn't splattered beyond the white paneled wall. Still another boasted that the blood of the man he had cut down had reached the roof of the house."

One of the men's mistresses described their bloodlust:

"People would talk about whom they had killed today, and whom they were going to kill tomorrow. It was all so frightful."

One group of hit men even adopted the nickname 人斬 hito kiri which is like calling yourself "the beheaders".

Not all were so enamored of blood. Katsu Kaishū, founder of the Japanese navy said,

"I despise killing and have never killed a man. Take my sword for example. I used to keep it tied so tightly to the tsuba, that I couldn't draw the blade even if I had wanted to. I've always been resolved not to cut a person even if that person should cut me. I look at such a person as no more than a flea. If one lands on your shoulder, all it can do is bite a little. This causes nothing more than an itch, and has nothing to do with life."

I think that whether you have an affinity for violence and martial arts bring you some measure of peace, or you are a peace lover who wants to understand the other side, training taps into some very primal aspects of our dual natures. To be a whole complete human requires knowing the dark and light and gray.

So go ahead and learn how to bruise, break, maim, and kill… all the while embracing the understanding that our training leads us to a place of never needing to use these violent skills. If you have a good teacher they will show you the path from one to the other. Do not neglect the depths of real combat and violence with the power contained therein, nor the heights of love and peace and the great powers that arise from this stillness.…

From Bujinkan Santa Monica by Michael

正拳 photo by  *嘟嘟嘟*

I love it when I get to spar with a martial artist who has great conditioning. Not only is it a great test for me and what I think I know about martial arts, but I have a secret weapon in our Bujinkan taijutsu that allows me to defeat them even if they have superior conditioning. This weapon is the conditioning itself. I can use it to trap them.

In martial arts, sports, or combat training people strive to develop fast reflexes. Reflexes don't require conscious thought. In fact the action of a true reflex follows the reflex arc to create a near instantaneous response to stimuli.

This is an advantage in dangerous situations where there isn't time to think about your choices. You just pull your hand out of the fire. In our training we are not usually studying true hard-wired reflexes. Instead we are conditioning our muscles and bodies to develop responses that have proved effective in our training and in combat.

Some people call this muscle memory. Or another term is procedural memory. This is where you commit a specific action to memory by training it over and over. This repetition strengthens neural pathways allowing the brain to access these patterns more efficiently. A medical definition for this might be more like the word reflexive as opposed to reflex.

For the most part, this conditioning is useful and good. Unless you are facing a devious and thinking opponent who can turn it against you. Soke calls this 条件反射 joukenhansha which is a conditioned response. He spoke of this while talking about how you should not take ukemi. Which I wrote about here: Why Do You Take Ukemi? So How can this conditioning be turned against you?

Well a reflexive action is a habitual and unthinking behavior; or relating to or consisting of a reflex. It's the habitual and unthinking part that gets you. When I recognize these reflexive actions in your movements, whether they are offensive or defensive, I will seek to trigger them to set a trap.

It's easy to see this in action no matter the style. Test it out on any person (choose someone who will not seek revenge). Stand facing each other, but don't tell them what you are testing. No reach as fast as you can for their ear.

How do they react? People with no training at all act with pure reflex in a startle-flinch response. People who train in a specific style will reveal their training, which is reflexive. In the 1980s the US Army conducted experiments to discover that people can be startled into their favored, trained fighting stances, no matter what those stances were.

Then set a trap so that when they react with their reflexive conditioning again, you will defeat them. All you have to do is trigger that reaction by reaching for their ear. Or you can make some other feint, kyojitsu, or threatening motion.

Hatsumi Sensei says this is like Pavlov's dogs. And he says we all know how easily dogs are controlled by people. So we should not train ourselves to be conditioned like dogs. Don't design reflexive traps into your training program.…

From Paart Budo Buki by buki stolar

My dear Buyu's I have some time to finally finish my "live" kunai,  so here is some pictures for start,
…