Visceral
Study of Spiritual Martial Arts
I'd like to share
something about hitsuzendo - the way of the zen brush - body movement
and Yamaoka Tesshu Sensei's calligraphy. If you take this as a
practice, it might change the course of your bodily (martial or
healing) practice. My zen calligraphy and zen master Terayama Tanchu
Sensei's main practice close to the end of his life was kusho (空書,
lit. empty writing) - writing in the air with one's hands and body.
He would hang up a calligraphy or painting on his wall, study the
movement of the brush and then trace it in the air with his hands and
body movement. The idea is not to study Chinese language but to study
the bodily movement of the past masters to better understand how they
moved which in turn reveals something really interesting of their
state of mind, or realisation. The basic idea of kusho is very
simple. You could for example write your own name or some piece of
text in plain block letters or cursive handwriting to try it out. The
idea is to use one's whole body while applying different kinds of
intensity of intent (c. yi/j. i, 意)
into the writing. What I mean by different kinds of intensity is that
we could use our hand to write very lightly in the air, like writing
with a finger on the surface of water (without making the water
splash) or we could imagine tracing our finger one inch inside mud.
With mud we would have to use more intention or concentration to get
the thing written. Our writing could also be a combination of both
light and heavy, combined with slow and fast. From here to enter the
realm of "zen" we would have to be able to recognise the
most basic state of mind or basic awareness, commonly called
buddhanature (佛性)
in mahayana buddhist schools.
In the case of a professional
zenman this buddhanature should be present at all times and one's
writing, whether in the air or on paper, becomes a play of intent,
where intent isn't based on mindfulness (念)
but on effortless basic awareness. Because of this fundamental
difference in the degree of realisation (見性),
the meaning and result of intent is not the same but becomes
non-intent (無意)
because mindfulness does not appear and disappear. This very point
separates "zen calligraphy" or zen art from ordinary art.
Anyway, the point of kusho is to write in the air or to trace the
movements of masters' works with one's body. I am sharing here one of
Yamaoka Tesshu Sensei's calligraphies. The large characters on the
left read Namu Amida Butsu, which venerates Amitabha Buddha. The
small characters on the right are a part from some sutra or poem. I
don't know what it says but it's not important either for our
purposes.
Tesshu is one of the most respected spiritual
martial artists of all times in Japan. He died in 1888 so he is quite
recent and this is why there are many of his works available. Tesshu
was a martial artist of the highest kind who held several lineages of
kenjutsu and kendo and started his own Muto/No-Sword school. To
understand Tesshu's uniqueness, we need to know the order of the
strokes in calligraphis characters. Generally, calligraphes are
written in vertical lines from right to left. The strokes in
characters are written from up to down, left to right, from outside
to inside. The piece below is wrotten in cursive or "grass"
script and doesn't look except distantly to what people associate
with kanji, Chinese characters. Anyway, with these few instructions
you can understand that you begin from the top right corner and how
each character is formed. It would really be important to get the
order right to get the point that I'm trying to make. When you do
know the right order, then trace through the whole piece. Do it
several times. Get the angles right. That is very important...
because it shows exactly how Tesshu, the legendary spiritual martial
artist, moved...
Now, I have analysed thousands of
calligraphies but among all of them Tesshu is unique. No one out
there moved like he did. People move like block letters but not
Tesshu... It must have puzzled the heck out of his students and
opponents who came to challenge him! If you study how he moved, you
will see that because of his exceptional free flowing shapes, you
can't predict his movements and that is the treasure to be found from
Tesshu's works. Copying him opens up a whole different realm of
bodymind movement that I have not seen elsewhere in my 35 years of
study of the field.
-Kim Orgyen Pema Rinpoche Katami
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