Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

Over time, the Confucian ideals proclaimed by and for military rulers
found an audience among powerful merchants, wealthy landowners (chônin),
village administrators, prosperous peasants, and other commoners who aspired
to higher status. Yasumaru Yoshio [147] has analyzed how moral
virtues (such as serious-mindedness, diligence, thrift, humility, submission to
authority, and uprightness) emerged during the Tokugawa period as a new
form of public discourse and hardened into a “conventional morality” (tsûzoku
dôtoku [148]) that exerted rigid control over all aspects of everyday life.
This morality was extremely idealistic, insofar as it posited limitless possibilities
for human development. Mind, or rather the moral qualities of mind,
were seen as the source of all forms of success, whether measured in terms of
social status, material wealth, or martial art prowess. This same moral discourse,
however, justified and rendered invisible to criticism the most atrocious
social inequities and contradictions. It reassured the wealthy and powerful
of their moral superiority, while teaching the poor and oppressed that
their misery resulted from their own moral shortcomings. Since it placed mind
above the external world, malcontents were told that they should find happiness
not by rebelling against that world but by reforming their own minds.
Seen within this background of conventional morality, it is not surprising
that Tokugawa-period martial art treatises devote numerous pages
to mind and proper mental attitudes. The example most familiar to modern
readers (both in Japan and abroad) is the treatise usually titled Fudôchi
shinmyôroku [149] (Marvelous Power of Immovable Wisdom; reprint in
Hayakawa et al. 1915) attributed to the Zen monk Takuan Sôhô [150]
(1573–1643). Nominally written in the form of a personal letter to Yagyû
Munenori [151] (1571–1646), who served as fencing instructor to the
Tokugawa family, Takuan’s essay uses examples from fencing to illustrate
basic Buddhist teachings and Zen sayings. He does not discuss the techniques
or vocabulary of fencing, but rather emphasizes that a Buddhist approach
to mental training improves not just one’s fencing but especially
one’s ability to serve a lord. Significantly, Takuan rejected both the Daoist
practice of concentrating the mind in the lower abdomen (lower field of
cinnabar) and the Confucian practice of serious-mindedness (kei, “reverence”),
which he likened to keeping a cat on a leash. Instead of constraining
the mind through these practices, Takuan advocated cultivating a
strong sense of imperturbability, which he described as a type of immovable
wisdom that allows the mind to move freely without calculation.
Takuan termed this mental freedom “not minding” (mushin [152]) and
compared it to a well-trained cat that behaves even when released from its
leash. Although “not minding” is sometimes misunderstood as a type of
amoral automatic response, for Takuan imperturbability implied a firm
moral sense that cannot be swayed by fear, intimidation, or temptation.
494 Religion and Spiritual Development: Japan