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time, most educated people already had abandoned traditional martial arts as
old-fashioned. Four years earlier, in 1876, wearing swords in public had been
made illegal. Fencing had lost all practical purpose. Yamaoka, however, was
not deterred. He renamed his lineage the No-Sword Style (Mutô-ryû [165])
and announced that he would teach fencing not for the purpose of dueling
but for training the mind. His students, he asserted, would learn how to defeat
opponents not with swords but with their minds.
Yamaoka died within a few years of announcing his new approach,
before it could become fully established. Although many posthumously
published texts purport to convey his teachings, they are filled with contradictions
and incongruities. We know more speculation than fact about
his methods or the extent to which they were based on Nakanishi traditions
of embryonic breathing. Nonetheless, it is clear that his own Zen
training occurred with monks at Buddhist temples. Zen practice was an external
supplement to his fencing, not something intrinsic within it. Yamaoka’s
political prominence, the novelty of his methods, and his anachronistic
effort to turn back the tide of history and revive the mental training
of earlier Tokugawa times, however, ensured that upon his death he immediately
became known as the quintessential Zen swordsman. In 1897,
when the chancellor of the Japanese consulate in London, England, gave a
lecture on “The Influence of Shintô and Buddhism in Japan,” for example,
he concluded by discussing Yamaoka’s No-Sword Style (Yamashita). The
chancellor argued that Yamaoka’s swordsmanship was a real-life example
of Takuan’s Zen teachings, which in turn perfectly illustrated the findings
advanced by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) in his Principles of Psychology
(1855). In this way, Yamaoka was more than just a traditionalist who
sought to cling to older styles of swordsmanship during a new age in which
people no longer wore swords. He also served as a forerunner for the introduction
of the now familiar motif of the psychological unity of Zen and
the martial arts to the English-speaking world.
William M. Bodiford
See also Aikidô; Budô, Bujutsu, and Bugei; Form/Xing/Kata/Pattern Practice;
Kendô; Koryû Bugei, Japanese; Swordsmanship, Japanese; Warrior
Monks, Japanese/Sôhei; Written Texts: Japan
References
Abe Ikuo, Kiyohara Yasuharu, and Nakajima Ken. 1990. “Sport and
Physical Education under Fascistization in Japan.” Tsukuba daigaku
taiiku kagaku-kei kiyô (Bulletin of Health and Sport Sciences, University
of Tsukuba) 13: 25–46.
Bodiford, William M. 1994. Sôtô Zen in Medieval Japan. Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press.
Bolitho, Harold. 1984. “The Myth of the Samurai.” In Japan’s Impact on
the World. Edited by Alan Rix and Ross Mouer. Nathan, Australia:
Japanese Studies Association of Australia.
Religion and Spiritual Development: Japan 497