The Five Rings

I won’t pretend that I fully understood everything that I read in The Five Rings. To truly understand Shinmen Musashi’s writings I think you would have to have walked in his shoes, living his life during his era and cultural times. His propensity for duelling in order to advance his art is something of a product of his times. Winning sixty encounters is no small feat, so we can infer that the skills he had worked at a high level.

What resonated with me was that he walked his own path, and came up with his own principles and conclusions. I like his phrase ‘thus with the virtue of strategy I practice many arts and abilities – all things with no teacher’.

I also like his thoughts on The Way of Strategy and how he expanded his vision beyond technique and the walls of the training hall. You can see a hint of disdain in his words. ‘Strategy is the craft of the warrior..... Recently there have been people getting on in the world as strategists, but they are usually just sword fencers..... The true value of sword fencing cannot be seen within the confines of sword fencing technique..... If we look at the world we see arts for sale. Men use equipment to sell their own selves. As if with the nut and flower, the nut has become less than the flower. In this kind of Way of Strategy, both those teaching and learning the Way are concerned with colouring and showing off their technique, trying to hasten the bloom of the flower. They speak of “This Dojo” and “That Dojo”. They are looking for profit. Someone once said “Immature strategy is the cause of grief”. That was a true saying.’

I read that the nut or bulb represents the student and the flower represents the technique. How many students of the arts over the centuries have become fixated on the movements and shapes of the techniques of their style? In truth it is the disease of the martial arts but the economic reality is that it attracts students likes moths to a flame.

Exponents of the arts tend to break everything down to static moments and some of the commentary people make on this book tends to do the same and focuses on the concepts related to his duelling against a single opponent. There is a point being missed. Here was a person who was famous for using two swords against multiple opponents. There is no time in that situation for assessing the finer points of swordsmanship; it is about moving and surviving, and I doubt whether he could ever truly assess what he did in those situations as the mind is extremely busy on other things at the time.

‘Everything can collapse. Houses, bodies, and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged..... In single combat, the enemy sometimes loses timing and collapses..... You must utterly cut the enemy down so that he does not recover his position’.  Here he describes what I call pressure. Against multiple attackers you look at pressure somewhat differently. It is the act of being fully energised and applying that to create effect, which creates the pressure on your opponents and which causes (hopefully) the collapse of their intentions towards you. In a multiple opponent situation your goal is to energise and get to an exit, not defeat your opponent.

‘In large scale strategy it is important to cause loss of balance. Attack without warning where the enemy is not expecting it, and while his spirit is undecided follow up your advantage and, having the lead, defeat him’.  This strategy will serve you well against multiple opponents. Why would you let the opponents know that the fight has actually begun. If you are outnumbered then it makes little sense to follow a social set of rules, waiting for each party to get its signals in sync so that the fight can now begin.

‘Whenever you cross swords with an enemy you must not think of cutting him either strongly or weakly; just think of cutting and killing him. Be intent on killing the enemy. Do not try to cut strongly and, of course, do not think of cutting weakly. You should only be concerned with killing the enemy’.  I guess this focus probably kept him alive in his environment so it was somewhat of a survival strategy for him. When I was a student of a senior level, my teacher taught me the concept of elimination, which I failed to grasp at the time. It was interesting that I eventually came to realise that I actually had to eliminate the problem in front of me, rather than the person, if I was to fit the concept within my philosophy of survival. Getting rid of the problem greatly expands the options available to you and you can stop focusing on the opponent in front of you. It is these kinds of realisations that can open a new world of strategies for defense against multiple attackers.

‘Some schools maintain that the eyes should be fixed on the enemy’s long sword. Some schools fix the eye on the hands. Some fix the eyes on the face, and some fix the eyes on the feet, and so on. If you fix the eyes on these places your spirit can become confused, and your strategy thwarted..... In the Way of strategy, when you have fought many times you will easily be able to appraise the speed and position of the enemy’s sword, and having mastery of the Way you will see the weight of his spirit. In strategy, fixing the eyes means gazing at the man’s heart’.  There are simple concepts being expressed here such as don’t get focused on the wrong things, use peripheral vision to avoid getting trapped by your central vision etc. There is also a more sophisticated understanding relating to the assessment of the person in front of you which will resonate with exponents who have a lot of battle experience.

If you set aside weapons for a moment, then fighting multiple opponents requires you to adjust your understanding of how vision can be used in the arts. The pursuit of full energisation requires the rapid transitioning between darkness and light as a moment of real time is experienced in darkness and then a moment of vision occurs in which to take a snapshot, and so on. I realise that fighting with a weapon requires a different approach, as a weapon creates and defines a limitation in your ability to move. When you have a weapon you simply cannot transition rapidly enough and therefore you cannot become fully energised. Of course if you are facing a skilled opponent with a sword and you are even more skilled with the same weapon then I imagine you are happy to have a sword of your own.

‘What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. It is not included in man’s knowledge. Of course the void is nothingness. By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void. People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment..... Enact strategy broadly, correctly and openly. Then you will come to think of things in a wide sense and, taking the void as the Way, you will see the Way as void. In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness’.  As I said at the beginning - I won’t pretend that I fully understood everything that I read in The Five Rings. He had his own vision, which was his truth in the martial arts. Philosophy is an integral part of the martial arts and it expresses our truths as we believe them.

My own philosophy in the arts focuses on freedom and its relationship with survival. I realised many years ago that philosophically, life and death have to travel together, they are only separated by the thinnest of boundaries, and together you have good reason to fight for life. Even this relates to freedom – freedom from the fear of possible outcomes. I hate to think where my art would have ended up if I had somehow missed the concept of freedom. For certain I would have failed to grasp many of the concepts that can be successfully applied against multiple attackers.

The Art of War

What do the writings of Sun Tzu (and associated commentary) have to offer the average martial arts exponent?

In my formative years in the arts, a lot of my students and contemporaries were talking about The Art of War and people would ask me if I had read it. To be honest I had not even glanced at it until very recently. It’s a book about the handling of armies, stratagems of large scale warfare, etc.

One thing I admit it does have in terms of appeal – it has a brilliant title. 

Wedging

One of the keys to defending yourself against multiple attackers is freedom, and even students that are new to the martial arts can keep moving towards an exit as long as they do not get caught up resisting their opponent's actions.

When an individual struggles against one of the attackers resistance, the most common posture you see displayed is the wedge. You can think of a person in terms of being represented by an "E" where their spine is the vertical part of the "E" and the 3 horizontal lines are equal velocity lines from the arms, mid-region, and feet.

When all three velocity vectors are not maintained in alignment then your forward progression will stall and your available energy will decline. The ineffectual "E" is easily identified by a slowing of the foot work and the bending in the mid region, which indicates stalling. When the bending of the mid-region occurs, the body begins to look more like a wedge.

No matter how hard you have trained to strengthen the mid region on its own, it is still the weakest area if you bend. It is always the weakest link in the chain. If you lose mid region coordination it will weaken all other movements of the body.

In battle, the wedged person usually struggles with the opponent and stops moving altogether.  The wedging reaction in a group attack is disastrous, because your progress is slowing and so the rest of the group has gained time to focus on you. You are then easy pickings for the group.

This has implications for when you try to strike members of the group, which many exponents have never fully considered. Attempting to strike one of the attackers slows you down, which makes you more vulnerable to the rest of the groups actions. The body as the weapon is the solution to this dilemma but it requires full energisation.

Training Differently

To get improved results for your defense capability against multiple opponents you need to approach your training differently. The key to getting real improvements for your group encounter work is to ensure your weapons do not dominate your actions.

You have to reprogram your coordination so that your legwork drives your actions as this is the first step to achieving full energisation. You need to ensure your coordination and your mind does not revert to a focus on your strikes, kicks, etc. when you encounter resistance from your opponent/s.

The lower half and top half of the body have to be able to keep working effectively together under resistance and be able to transfer some of your mass effect to your opponent without locking up your body. Core training has two parts i.e. with resistance from an opponent and without resistance.

In terms of weapons you have your mass effect but you also have reflex actions and to sharpen your tools you should train the forearms and hands so that they will react when you are in real time.

The Mind and Body

Multiple attackers as compared to a single opponent can demonstrate how the mind and body coordination is different for ‘flight’ compared to ‘fight’.

A survival situation where you are running away from the danger as quickly as possible is commonly described as flight. Your legwork dominates the situation and the mind is focused on such things as keeping your balance, staying on your feet, maintaining the ability to move as quickly as possible, etc. You get a sense of it when you run down a steep hill.

Against a group attack you essentially want to imitate a ‘flight’ response and deal with obstacles using reflex behaviour that your training has made more effective. It is all about generating energy through accelerated behaviour and affecting the opponents using your mass effect. Your progression is always to the exit where safety can be found.

A battle against a single opponent is generally described as a fight but it is not the type of fight you have in a survival situation where you are acting in desperation to save your life. A typical fight is more of a socially driven encounter.

In a fight your mind switches between attack and defense. When you are in attack mode, your mind is on your weapons e.g. your hands, feet, elbows, knees etc. as well as the targets on your opponent e.g. their head, legs, etc. When you are in defense mode, your mind is your opponents weapons and on protecting the obvious targets on your own body.

One way of summarising the above is that in a fight against a single opponent your mind is on weapons, both yours and your opponents, whereas in a group attack your mind is on the exit to the situation. Against multiple attackers your mind and body coordination is focused on your accelerated system and the snapshots of where you are going.

The problem people face in a group attack is that as soon as they come up against the resistance of a group member, their mind switches to a single opponent mode where it focuses on weapons. Flight mode and the associated energisation is then lost to the individual.

What is needed is a reprogramming of the mind so that you don’t switch to behaviour that focuses on weapons whenever you encounter resistance from an opponent. This is one of the keys to mastering attacks by multiple opponents.