Early on, Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645), perhaps Japan's greatest martial artist, was complaining about the commercialization of the discipline. Even the implements of the martial arts were being proffered as merchandise, items for sale. Likewise the swordsman thinks of himself as something to be sold. "Technique is made into display, one talks of this dojo or that dojo, teaching this Way or that Way, in an attempt to gain some benefit."
Others felt the same. One of them, Niwa Jurozaemon Tadaaki (1659-1741), a samurai of the Sekiyado fief, wrote his cautionary treatise -- the "Tengu Geijutsuron," here for the first time translated. He wrote it under the pen name Issai Chozanshi. In this "sermon," he offered no advice at all on maneuvers, strategies or techniques.
Rather, the adept is advised on the need for an internalization of the necessary spirit. He is not to be distracted by efficacy of technique, or any supposed superiority of one school over another. Here, as the translator of this attractive work puts it, "the goal is not technical proficiency, but transformation."
In the afterword to his short but important work, Niwa said that since he himself was not a swordsman, only a wordsmith, he decided to put what he called his "playful discussion" into the mouth of a demon -- and not just any old demon but rather that specific trickster and quick-change artist, the tengu.
These shape-shifters often took the form of big birds, with beaked faces, feathered wings and heavy talons, and their human form often had long noses -- indicating both an avian heritage and an addiction to arrogance. It was this untrustworthy narrator that Niwa chose as spokesman for his sermon.
He had many reasons for doing so, but a major motive was the indirection indicated by the choice. He could speak of serious things in a playful manner, he could suggest rather than state.
In the words of the first "reviewer" of the work (the hermit Kanda Hakuryushi in 1728), "using the pretext of the eerie voice of a demon, he speaks of the true principles of swordsmanship."
In keeping with his author's aims, William Scott Wilson, in his elegant and erudite translation, embeds the sermon between a kind of overture and a postlude comprising some of the charming animal allegories to be found in another Chozanshi book, the "Inaka Soshi" (here winningly rendered as "The Hayseed Taoist.")
The centipede questions the snake, the sea gull and the mayfly discuss the "Tao," and the toad speaks of the way of the gods. Their message is very like that of the demon -- get down to essentials, forget yourself, rely on nothing, search for the heart of the truth.
Beasts and demons alike share an accepting naturalness that is long lost to man. It, however, is a quality partially recoverable, says Chozanshi. It is this salvaging that is proposed in his slender book, a work quite in the spirit of Musashi's "Book of Five Rings," and the later "Hagakure."
It is fitting that Wilson has also translated both books and written a biography of Musashi. He knows the field and understands the problems involved in discovering the fundamental principles of the martial arts.
These the demon elliptically elucidates: "Facing your opponent, you forget about life, forget about death, forget about your opponent, and forget about yourself. Your thoughts do not move and you create no intentions . . . . If you will be like this, how could you fail?" The reader moves back, views this from the side, and has his answer.
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