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.