“This is Bugei. Even if pictures are taken, video recorded and it is written down, this sort of mysterious aspect cannot be transmitted. The essential truth of bugei is that even if something is shown or the scrolls stolen, nothing will come of it. You can take pictures and notes, the truth is they will not be of much help. There is nothing but to go to a real teacher and train as he tells you.”
Masaaki Hatsumi “Togakure-ryu Ninpo Taijutsu”, translated by Don Roley.
I have come to the realization that the reason that video courses are so popular is because so many people, including those that sell them, have no idea of how deep bugei is. We have pre-conceived ideas about things like this, and they prevent many people from seeing just how complex even seemingly simple moves can be.
I, being an asshole, recently shared a video of someone doing a gun disarm and told my students that I would be going over techniques for dealing with a gun that wouldn’t get them killed like the version in the video. The guy I shared it from, Wyatt Wayne, sent me a nasty note saying that I should put up a video of my own showing how to deal with firearms.
This is what made me realize that not only was his understanding of bugei very shallow, but so is most of the world. The problems inherent in the video took almost a full class to go over. As the boss says in the quote at the top of the page, you just can’t fit real bugei into something like video.
Part of the problem with videos and such is that they treat things as techniques when this is an art. In Japanese, art is jutsu, or sometimes called sube. Techniques are waza. My first teacher in Japan described the differences between the two by pointing out that the Japanese word for surgery is shujutsu- hand art. As he put it, while most of us can look at a recipe and put it together as the directions tell us (Japanese men of his generation seem to take a perverse pride in their inability to cook), if something goes wrong during an operation you want the doctor to have more ability than just that of someone following direction. That is the difference between waza and jutsu.
And that is the fundamental aspect of combat. It is not a neat progression of things to do in order. Things change and you have to adapt to those changes based on the foundation of skill you have built up. As I have said in another blog, an omote-gyaku done by someone with six months experience is going to look different from someone with six years. (At least I would hope so.)
You can’t learn that sort of thing from video. You need a teacher.
The video of the gun disarm was fundamentally flawed. It lacked a lot of things, such as staying at the range that was best for the gunman, not controlling him, moving too much with the upper body, etc. But it is not like I could put together a video that covers all the aspects needed to make something like that work in a short video. Yet that is what people like Wyatt have come to expect. They aren’t even aware that there is a lot going on that build up the art.
The art (jutsu) should manifest itself in the technique (waza.) But we get obsessed with the technique and miss the art. The truth is, a lot of the art is unseen. This is why you need a teacher.
I have a couple terms I throw around a lot. One is, “Inherent but not obvious” and the other is “On deck.” The truth with a lot of techniques or kata (pre arranged forms) is that there is a lot of potential that is there, but isn’t activated at the start of training. You don’t know why you are doing things, you just do them. Later the teacher breaks things open and reveals things to you.
An example might be placing the hand near the other’s face so that it can quickly strike the eyes, throat or other targets in that area during a kata. You don’t actually strike your partner, but the potential is there. It is on deck and ready to launch if needed. But in the kata you don’t launch it, and as a result people tend to overlook it and maybe even move their hand so that the attack is no longer possible. But that potential attack is a vital part of the kata. It is the reason your partner doesn’t do certain things or it helps you react if he doesn’t go by the script. The attack is inherent in the kata and plays a role, but because it never gets off deck in the basic version, people miss it.
So it really isn’t being esoteric to say that what isn’t seen is sometimes more important than what is.
This is why the term ‘kata collector’ is such a dirty word in the Bujinkan. Kata are wonderful tools to learn the art. But they have to be trained in correctly under a real teacher. People put videos up of kata to teach them, not realizing that the form is dead.
Now, videos do have a use. They can jog memories, inspire and such. A lot of times I would come home from class and watch a video of the kata we had just learned to try to dig into the memory of it. I myself put out videos of things that people should look out for when training. I don’t hope to teach things like kata through them, that is impossible. Rather they are meant to open people’s eyes to things like dead vs live hands.
But real bugei can’t be transmitted completely by video. A teacher needs to be there to push you out of the comfort zone. There are stages to kata training, most only knowing the first part of going through the motions as exactly as possible. (Some of course jump straight into trying to deal with the ‘feeling’ and make up their own crap. But let us not talk about those idiots now.) After you get a general idea of how to move in the kata, the teacher then brings all the stuff on deck out and shows it in various ways. That hand in front of the face now becomes one of the things you use. Thus you become aware of the importance of it.
How is it conveyed? It depends. The best way in my experience is to go to a teacher week after week, year after year and interact with them. A good training partner is vital as well.
A story can kind of illustrate this. About ten years into my stay in Japan, my teacher commented that when I first arrived I had the nasty habit of keeping my guard low and exposing my face.
“I don’t remember you pointing that out to me,” I said.
“Oh, we just kept smacking you in the face until you learned to protect it,” he replied.
“That I remember.”
As funny as it sounds, it illustrates the importance of taiden, (body transmission) an expression coined by Masaaki Hatsumi. I didn’t learn to cover my head by being told. The conscious mind was not involved in the learning process and instead I didn’t think about things, I just picked up the habits. I have often been told that real learning doesn’t happen above the neck, but below it. You can see how videos and such target the head/mind instead of the body. This is why they can’t convey real bugei.
Based on my experience, I am convinced that true bugei has to be transmitted by bypassing the conscious mind and going directly to the nervous system (or something like it) in some way. We don’t think about how to ride a bike and if we did we would never be able to do it. Combat is not a solo act like cycling so we need a partner to input the lessons for us to follow. But while thinking can be a tool as we learn, the important lessons can’t be thought about, only reacted to and made habits.
When there are large groups, the teacher can’t punch everyone in the face, so it presents problems. Hatsumi used to just have a small class of long term students and I hear he sometimes wishes it had stayed that way. The products of that training are now the most skilled instructors on the planet. But now he has entire rooms full of people that he can’t personally interact with.
But he still has some interaction. He can look around the room and see certain trends we do.
I started to see this early on in the first year Shinden Fudo ryu was the theme. My teacher at the time (the one that smacked me in the face) had been tearing my old habits apart and building more correct ones and had recently been really stressing that after a kick you don’t just drop it, but you control where it lands. As was his style, he taught this by messing with the foot after a kick if he could, tripping us up.
One of the first kata of Shinden Fudo ryu is called Gekkan and involves a kick followed by a face plant. Because of my recent experiences of falling on the mat after a kick, I probably was better able to realize that when I looked around the room, a lot of people were just dropping their foot after the kick and then trying to do the face plant. In the kata, after the kick makes contact you use the power of your dropping weight by going straight to your knee and face planting them. But a large number of people were putting in the extra step and making it less efficient.
At this point, the boss started showing a lot of variations. One was doing the kick, and then kicking the legs before the foot hit the ground. Another was doing the kick and then going straight into moving it behind the guy for a take down, etc. The common theme was that you didn’t just drop the leg and instead used your body weight as you set it down somewhere.
I am convinced this is the reason why he teaches the way he does. He sees what we are doing and comes up with variations based on a common theme. He may do a kata, then show a way to reverse the kata. But I think the reversal illustrates a hole in what many of us are doing and that if we were aware that the reversal could be done we would close that hole.
The lesson is still not presented to us consciously. We don’t think about it, we just do it and pick it up on some level. Thinking about something can get in the way. When you are trying to avoid a crash in your car, you aren’t thinking about what you are doing with the pedals. The same is true when someone is trying to punch you in the face. You need to react based on the art, not what you decide to do after thinking about it.
But books, videos, etc can only target the head and mind. Without a teacher that sees you and pushes you in some way to react without thinking about it, you lose the vital aspect of bugei. You are trapped into thinking of nothing but technique and ignoring the art that they are built on. Those that put out videos to teach others techniques like gun disarms haven’t realized it yet. And of course, many others who don’t put out videos have no idea as well. We have been trained by our educational system to put importance on thinking, while not realizing that there is more than that when we are trying to do even simple tasks like drive a car or ride a bike.
This is why bugei is so deep and mysterious. It is a mystery because we don’t know what is going on. If we knew, if we just did everything with our heads, we could never learn it just as if we only relied on thought we could never ride a bike. We need taiden from a teacher. But more and more people are trying video-den or internet-den without realizing how that may forever limit us. This art deserves better.