There is a euphemism in Eastern philosophy which goes, First you must empty your cup..., which is to say, empty your mind of pre-conceived notions when you set out to learn something new. And this is reasonable advice, as far as it goes. But often you find that some self-acclaimed authority or other requires you to empty your mind not only of preconceptions but also reasoned and well-documented historical perspective. And all too often not only those must be surrendered, but also both your reason and your common sense. If that is the case, then by empty your cup what they really are asking is that you empty out your brain pan. And this is carrying a useful anecdote too far by leagues.

With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, let me suggest that if your martial arts instructor requires that you (at least pretend) to believe in impossible things, you may have joined one of the many alive and thriving martial art cults. If in the same breath he requires that you also restrain from researching seeming impossibilities except through narrowly prescribed channels (namely himself and his teacher) then know for certain that you have. In that case you might want to search the ground at your feet and retrieve your common sense which you had (mistakenly or not) thrown out when last asked to empty your cup.

Does your martial arts teacher go on and on, ad nauseum, about how the samurai were so noble and honorable? Or how the Ninja were really more akin to freedom fighters nobly resisting unjust persecution by samurai? Or more impossibly yet, does he alternate between these two mutually contradictory interpretations from class to class? Does he then go on to forbid that you seek a wider, and better documented, interpretation elsewhere...on the Internet, say? I once had a teacher who routinely did all the above. Not only that but we were required to kneel while lending ear to these and many a similar obvious incongruity, sometimes for as long as half of the already short, 50-minute class sessions. Despite said instructor’s obvious technical prowess, these flights of romantic fantasy sorely leached any serious will to study (at least from me) for it required a student to blithely toss away rational objectivity when emptying out their cup.

If any of this sounds familiar, if your favored martial art requires you to practice half-an-hour every day at believing impossible things, then pick up any looking glass and go ask Alice, “What kind of value system am I paying to school myself in?” Or better yet, invest some time and a modicum of effort to research on-line records for yourself before investing any more of your precious self-esteem toward identifying with an historical fantasy. Doubtless, the ninja and samurai each had their merits. But neither was even half so pure of heart and mind as some of the more romanticly motivated martial arts instructors have convinced themselves was the case.

An even simpler test presents itself here. Ask your instructor if such free and indepenent research is encouraged. If he says, “No, that is not done because it dishonors our grandmaster!”, then you already have your answer. No mistake but that you have gone and bought your way into a martial arts cult.

Then if (when) you wisely choose to ignore injunctions against the employment of common sense, you won’t have too very long a search before good old Google shall burst your bubble. It turns out that Bushido, the much lauded Warrior Code of the Samurai, has distinct elements of fable to it...just as does the term chivalry here in the West. The truth, as always, is more complex. While some samurai did avocate an ethos, it was hardly universal. Those who did described their systems variously, and none gathered their system together under the umbrella term bushido. Carbon-14 datable scrolls of suitable antiquity bearing the kanji for bushido are not to be found.

First use of the term Bushido in the title of any book was Christianity and Bushido, 1894, by Uemura Maashisa which presented a thesis that Japanese should rely on Christianity just as in earlier times Bushi had relied on Confucianism. This concept was later detailed...expressly for the West, and in English...by Inazo Nitobe (1862-1933) in his now famous work entitled Bushido, first published in the year 1905.

Nitobe himself was a Quaker and trying to present Japanese warriorship in the same light as mythical Christian chivalry. This now-classic book was not even in Japanese translation until 1909. Thus, from an historical context, no single codification of Samurai ethics held universal sway. Samurai conduct, when guided at all, held to very generalized Confucian norms. And never prior to recent times were these referred to under the romantic heading of bushido.

The point to remember whenever you encounter the term Warrior Code under any guise whatsoever, is that at basis, a warrior is someone who earns their keep by an oath to commit murder unquestioningly upon total strangers at the behest of someone else whose only virtue, more likely than not, is their having come into wealth and/or power by one of two means: through a long carreer of similar murderous intent carried out by themselves; or by right of inheritance from someone who has. A warrior is someone who has bartered away their conscience. They have forsaken the gravest of individual responsibilies. They have agreed to let someone else choose for them when and when not to kill. Ask yourself with total objectivity, “How honorable, really, is that?”

There is an oft-quoted, variously translated, deliberately misinterpreted (by warrior minds) Zen saying: No self, no other, no action. It refers to the Buddhist doctrine of Emptiness as expounded by a famed Indian Mayahanist named Nagarjuna. I will get to its real meaning shortly. But first let us explore how the warrior mind twists this essentially benign doctrine into something wholly un-Dharmic. Here an officer says to his troops, “The self is but an illusion, Buddha says so. You do not truly exist, therefor you cannot truly die. Devote your life in honor to the will of the Emperor.” Then he further expounds, “The enemy does not truly exist. Therefor you cannot truly kill him. There is truly no action. Do this with no sense of self and no bad karma can result.” Now non-self and non-action are terms the foot soldier will have heard or read about all his life. And given no better interpretation he may even well believe it.

Know that some of the most horrendous atrocities of WW2 were committed under this deliberatly misguided interpretation of otherwise innocent philosophical introspection. To anyone who has troubled to read the original doctrine and its commentaries from their earliest expounders, such an interpretation is abhorrent. Those earliest of Zen mystics who first distilled their Dharmic insights for the Japanese mind into stark and pithy one-liners had no intention I am certain that they be used in support of cold-blooded murder.

Granted that actual samurai were long extinct when Japanese foot soldiers, following the direct orders of their officers, were unquestioningly bayonetting unarmed Chinese civilians by the uncounted thousands upon thousands. Yet it is hardly unreasonable to ask, where among the better-educated officer class directing these attrocities, and among the bureaucrats at home where Japanese newspapers regaled the public daily on the rising blood toll, all in terms of shining and glorious national pride...just where exactly, were all those great and noble families who yet today waive the banners of honored samurai heritage? Why were they silent, each and every one of them? And among those of samurai lineage, how many offered their own sword up to the carnage? Why is it that this very year the Emperor himself made it his duty to honor the tombs of convicted, Class A war criminals? I can answer my own question in just two words: selective memory.

This last-mentioined, most unworthy attribute is hardly the sole domain of one single culture alone. It is everywhere evident in at least some small degree, if not quite so recent that living persons must actively work to erase it from their own personal account of events. It is practically a requirement for modern warrior wannabes, those who would sanctify ancient warriorhood in order that they themselves might pretend to emulate it. Let us explore this notion of no self a little further in order to learn how ancient samurai, modern warrior wannabes (some few class A war criminals among them) work to achieve their twisted interpretation of Buddhist ethics.

To go on from here I must ask your license to expand upon those pithy Zen one-liners to the extent of some few paragraphs. I fear to gloss it over even worse than those described above with any fewer. In this it is not my aim to convert you all into Buddhists. Martial arts are not a proper forum for that. But wouldn’t you rather disagree with a thing for what it is rather than for what you wrongly misunderstand it to be? Thus I will here inject it as a mere illustration. Showing whence a moral distortion originates will aid to illustrate more cleary the involutions through which a once-benign ideal can be contorted so as to come out at right angles to what was intended. You doubtless have experience of how Western propagandists twist and braid logic. Read now of how Eastern ones do just exactly the same and to equally sinister result.

Know that non-self, sometimes called non-ego or even more commonly egolessness is a basic Buddhist concept. And there exist several prominent schools of thought on the topic. One of them explains that we, our selves are each composed, not of a central, indivisible entity, but rather of constituent parts. Our thoughts, feelings, words and deeds are some of those parts. And those things are mutable. Those parts come and go. They change all the time. Looked at a certain way, a process such as our self which is constantly evolving is not really a thing at all, but an event. Thing-ness represents stasis. Ego is an illusion if immutability. We feel our selves to be concrete entites. Yet we are not. By virtue of our constant changing, our constant swapping out of some of our parts (forgetting the old, learning anew) we undergo change. The sense of Ego (capitalized) is the feeling of concrete identity beyond all change. It is an illusion and therefor false. Thus in that sense truely there is no self...not our own self, and not the selves of myriad others. That is called the Consequense School inasmuch as our selves exist only as a consequence of our component ingredients of thought, word and deed.

Don£t like that theory? Not to worry, suffer to let me gloss over yet another. The Mind-Only school takes the tack that we never experience things directly. That because the senses report information second-hand, whereupon we interpret it all, our experience is at a considerable remove. In a sense, they are imagined second-hand and thus are not direct...that is to say, not truly real. The Western philosopher Plato expressed this same idea using the metaphor of experiencing reality only as shadows seen to pass upon a wall. Any who examine the actual process of seeing and/or memory from a biochemical persepctive cannot but admit how far removed our minds truly are from the events which we perceive in terms of information transfer and distortion. It is all the same idea. We experience nothing directly.

And there are finer derivations yet discussed among Buddhist scholars. In every case the main point is to illustrate that the self is a mutable concept. In Buddhist terms, mutability is a good thing. This very mutability represents the opportunity to grow, to become better (or worse) than we are at present, or have ever been in the past, and that there is no in-built limit upon that growth. It is the theoretical proof that everyone can become a Buddha. It is supposed to be a limitlessly enobling concept and by no means either nihlistic or demeaning. So the obvious point to be taken here is that no proper Buddhist scholar would propose upon any degree of philosophical hair-splitting, however fine, that persons are free either throw their own life away nor yet to take the lives of others. None would propose that no ill karma results from such activity. Karma grants no indulgences for the sake of dynastic continuity or geopolitical dominance. It would be an obvious absurdity.

Yet nevertheless some exist who do misinterpret Nagarjuna’s refined explanations just that way. The well-disciplined warrior mind is easily capable of truly amazing moral gymnastics together with his physical ones. All kinds of apparently self-sacrificing motivations will be offered in justification for these distortions. Yet know them every one for lies. How so? Simply examine the motivation of their leaders, all of which are quite mundane: military, political and economic gain. In short, nothing more than self-serving greed. Again ask yourself with total objectivity, “Just how Buddhist, really, is that?” Still inclined to cultivate a warrior mindset upon such an unworthy basis?

Mind that, although a practicing Buddhist myself, I do not here advocate on its behalf for required inclusion in any martial arts tradition whatever. On the contrary, I am against it. I labor to keep it out completely from the martial arts cirriculum where I teach. The other instructors and students all should rightly object were I to try. All I am wanting to put forth here is a thorough debunking of its wonton mis-indoctrination elsewhere. Even when addressing the topic of meditation in a martial arts setting, I am at pains to keep my own religious leanings out of it, as is proper.

In that vein, let me propose a wholly mundane reality check upon the misapplication of Emptiness doctrine discussed above. Let us play a round of reductio ad absurdum. Ponder the mathematical probability of their carrying their own doctrinal distortion to its most logical extreme. Do you suppose that at any time a Japanese general proposed to his troops that the Emperor might also be himself devoid of true existence? Any bets on the likelihood of that?

Most martial artists have a not-in-the-least unhealthy interest in all things martial, warriorhood included among them. They critically observe the past with a discerning historian’s eye and seek to draw out the good from the bad. Without any trace of romanticism they seek a broader understanding of the historical contexts under which various martial tradtions evolved. This is a beneficial broadening of one’s cultural horizons. A deluded romantic will, on the other hand, persue a similar endeavour, but filtering the information though the sieve of their preconceptions only suceed in narrowing them. These latter will amass a vast store of historically provable facts, but only such ones as serve their aim of elevating the ideal of warriorhood to the furthest extremes of nobility and possibly even mystical sainthood.

How then to judge the quality of one’s historical persuit? The difference is purely one of intention inasmuch as any knowledge is qualified by its application. The purely physical regimens, the combative techniques and methodolgies (particularly the weaponless sort) may safely be deemed as morally neutral grounds for objective study. As with any set of tools, it is the nature of their employment which distinguishes vice from virtue. Self-defense and protection of the innocent are the obvious moral high grounds from which to undertake such a study.

But some very few there are who pine away for a largely mythologized lost warrior heritage such as of ancient celts, the samurai, ninja or whoever (insert extinct warrior class here). Disillusioned with the true circumstances of their existence, the menial nature of some thoroughly unrewarding occupation, they quite naturally look for uplifting fullfillment elsewhere. Provided it remains a hobby, there is nothing to say against it. But for some it becomes an obsession. They lose their modern identity within an historical fantasy. It is the difference between someone with a keen interest in Napoleon and another who would like to have been Napoleon, or thinks of themself as an incarnation of Napoleon, or of Saigo Takamori, or whoever.

For these self-proclaimed modern-age votaries of ancient tradition the endeavor becomes a life-defining, quasi-spiritual vocation. Can this be in any degree less pathetic than to play dress-up gothic and dream the glories of vampirehood? A little, perhaps. But subscribing to an unsupportable counter-history falls into exactly that same class of emotional immaturity. On the Internet, one finds serious researchers into Japan’s authentic martial heritage, scholars and koryu practitioners alike, chortling at such laughable naievete, naming those who sucumb to it by such pejoratives as ninjacompoop. It is even made fun of in Japan. Should you care to be vastly ammused, I invite that you submit a search via Google: LINK

Once your own mirth is contained, I likewise invite you should picture this... Does not secretly desiring license to chop off peasant heads in response to a fit of pique over trifling discourtesies rate on a par, maturity-wise, with aspiring to drink the blood of your vampire minions and rule the night? Both classes of overlordship, one partly and the other wholly imaginary, share an exactly equivalent measure of genuine honor. Membership in each is, by definition, hereditary rather than merit-based. In the present tense these two equate with each other very precisely in their respective reality quotents...being that the devotee-aspirations of neither have any slightest chance whatsoever of personal realization in the here and now. Both equally share the status of present-day impossible things. Subscribe to either at the absolute peril of your own credibility.

So if these traditional martial values are unsuited to modern day practice, what sort are? How about Common Courtesy and Common Sense? Note as how I say courtesy and not respect. That is deliberate. Respect is a value-jugement and as such cannot be offered to everyone universally. Respect will come naturally when, where and if it is truly deserved. When some people go about demanding respect generally they are well satisfied with fear and count it of equal value. Even such persons as these you can offer courtesy without the least sacrifice of your ratiocination. Likewise, common sense has universal application.

Know that you have mastered fear when courtesy and common sense do not flee you in time of stress. I do not need to call forth esoteric doctrine to explain to you what these are. You already know. A good value system for martial arts can comprise itself of nothing but these two and the discipline never to cast them aside. Through mastery of these, care of the martial arts, both the individual and society can hardly fail to benefit. Neither warrior mindset nor yet any vows of fealty should be required. And certainly not belief in even one solitary impossible thing.

More lately arisen are lesser myths working to bolster neo-elitist self-esteem by obscuring an art’s extra-national origin and/or its major foreign influences. These put on a false mantle of having developed in greater isolation and purity than can be documented. Although a rather harmless delusion in that it does not promote the elevation of base greed, robber baron feudalism, bullying and violence into virtues approaching the highest degree of spiritual endeavour, can it be any the less absurd?

Why, after all, denegrate the proven effectiveness of a body of techniques by denying a track record of field tests in more than just a single arena? It seems to me that if move X originated, say, in China...then proceeded thence via Okinawa and Japan before entering into Korea, this is a praiseworthy stamp of aproval. Such traversals demonstrate a test track of many hazards. Were move X in some way deficient, it will by now have had at least the major bugs worked out. Nor would some further refinement accomplished locally do it harm.

The other side of that same coin is to connect wholly imaginary dots linking something relatively newer to something ancient, possibly even extinct, for the purpose of adorning that newer thing with the cache of either domestic origin or else hallowed antiquity. This ruse is clever enough that politicians, especially the more ruthless variety, have long employed it to further their dreams of world domination. All one ever need do is look to some golden age or event of the past in either one's own or an immediately preceding culture and construe an outwardly plausable linkeage. Both cultural and religious reformations of every age have played this same card so often and for so long that it affords scholars of antiquity entire careers unravelling truth from fiction. No few examples of both are wholly debunked now. Most such are outside the topic of martial arts, true. But parallels are obvious. The effect is cultish and rational minds will not want to buy into them.

We otherwise risk positioning ourselves as martial arts comic relief. Why assume the unlaudable role of Checkov from the first run of Star Trek? Recall how we in the audience would roll our eyes along with the Enterprise crew whenever Checkov would foist a Russian derivation upon all and sundry. How much more ridiculous yet would it have been if Uhura, Sulu or Spock had openly shared Checkov’s delusion? Falling prey to introverted nationalism is doubly ludicrous when you yourself hail from elsewhere.

Consider as how a martial art wholly without encounter against other styles would be an art wholly untested. Nor is anything ever so perfect as to transcend ongoing benefit from continuous application of the scientific method. Methodologies of any kind whatsoever that cease to progress and evolve are ones grown stagnant.

WIKI  The Rape of Nanking — Iris Chang
HTML  The Nanking Attrocities — S. Raines & J.P. Banas
HTML  Dependent Arising and Emptiness — Elizabeth Napper

HTML  Real or Fake? — Is Your Martial Arts School Legitimate? — Article by Wayne Muromoto
WIKI  McDojos & McDojangs — Is Your Martial Arts School a Diploma Mill?

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