ninpo secrets book by shoto tanemura and masaaki

As we passed our tests Sensei said “Congratulations to Doron.” To Doron and not us because Doron had proven himself by letting his students become independent and face the challenges he himself faced only a few years before. At the first Tai-Kai outside Japan, in 1987, when four of us, students of Doron Navon from Israel, passed our 5th Dan tests, Hatsumi Sensei demonstrated very clearly, that the test was not our own but our teacher’s. A teacher is measured by his students and only by them. Only when a beginner demonstrates that he has learned something from us, then can we truly say, that we were his teachers. Teaching is one of the most difficult tasks we face in the Martial Arts. Next we go even further to Bujinkan Hachidan 八段: Both Bull and Self Transcended In your reverie, you are still tied to those experiences.

Even though you no longer need the whip and the halter, or the tools and exercises of the dojo, you are left observing these. This dreamlike quality of training can carry you for a long time. As you notice these things, you realize you are not them and they are not you.

You observe this relationship: uke and tori teacher and student training and dojo body and gi hands and bokken. Just like the stream is also water, or stars are also night sky- so students are their study. The fabric of training itself is the students and the art. So with nothing left to do, what is the point of training? You realize that what you were seeking in training is within you already, but also without. It feels like once you have grasped the essential nature of training, there is nothing left to do. It is amusing to find your body repeating whatever the class is working on, while your heart is not in it. Observing their movement and the movement of others and feeling like it is wasted effort. People sometimes find themselves in the dojo going through the motions. With this direct experience of the essence of training, everything else is a distraction. All of the exercises, all of the kata, all of the drills… they feel like useless effort in the face of the pure moonlight. There clouds may gather again.Īt this point in training we may start to wonder at how pointless all of the work we did up till now has been. The bull is gone but through your direct experience all that is left is you observing and feeling. Only direct experience remains.Īnd, your consciousness remains, observing. This aspect of training becomes pure experience and is beyond words. This is often symbolized in Japanese art and poetry as the pure white moonlight moving apart the clouds until there are no longer clouds and the whole world is bathed in this purity. What you are left with is only the essential, true training.Įven better than this, you may enter into another dimension of training where the true self doesn’t even make an appearance at all. It disappears little by little until it is gone. If this process was pursued with pure intent, the self that was doing the seeking falls away. Through all the stages of finding, following, catching, taming, and riding the ox, we have been seeking the true essential nature of training and of ourselves. We no longer attempt to manipulate training to serve the purpose of our ego. Comfortable in our own taijutsu and in our dojo, whatever ambitions we had attached to training or rank are abandoned. Woodblock print by 德力富吉郎 Tokuriki Tomikichirō On reaching seventh dan we may find that we have forgotten the ox. You may find them useful no matter what your rank is:īujinkan Shodan 初段: Searching for the Bullīujinkan Nidan 弐段: Discovering the Footprintsīujinkan Rokudan 六段: Riding the Bull Home If you haven’t read my other posts in this series, please check them out.

These pictures describe the seekers journey to enlightenment. Hatsumi Sensei describes the journey of a Bujinkan student through the Dan ranks as being akin to the Ten Oxherding pictures in Zen Buddhism. The Ox Transcended, digital c-print photograph by Andrew Binkley

Ninpo secrets book by shoto tanemura and masaaki