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."