Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

58 Budô, Bujutsu, and Bugei
Meiji-period (1868–1912) educators did differentiate -jutsu and -dô in precisely
this fashion, but their forebears did not.
Historically the samurai employed a cornucopia of terms for their
fighting arts, some still in common use today, others not (swordsmanship,
for example, was called kenjutsu [6], kendô [7], kenpô [8], hyôhô [9],
tôjutsu [10], gekken [11], shigeki no jutsu [12], and various other appellations,
without distinction of form or content). The meaning and popularity
of each term varied from age to age. Two of the oldest words for martial art
are bugei and hyôhô (more commonly pronounced heihô in modern usage).
Both are Chinese borrowings, and both appear in Japanese texts as far back
as the turn of the eighth century. The early meanings of the two words overlapped
to a substantial extent, but by the Tokugawa period, hyôhô had narrowed
considerably, from a general term to one of several alternative names
for swordsmanship. Bugei, in the meantime, had become a generic appellation
for the fighting arts. Today, heihô simply means “strategy” in general
usage, while scholars and practitioners of swordsmanship and related arts
often apply it in more restricted fashion to designate the principles around
which a particular school’s approach to combat is constructed.
Budô and bujutsu came into fashion during the medieval and early
modern periods. Budô, which appeared in print at least as early as the thirteenth
century, seems to have been rather ambiguous in meaning until the
Tokugawa period, when it sometimes carried special connotations. Nineteenth-century
scholar and philosopher Aizawa Yasushi differentiated
budô from bugei in the following manner: “The arts of the sword, spear,
bow and saddle are the bugei; to know etiquette and honor, to preserve the
way of the gentleman, to strive for frugality, and thus become a bulwark of
the state, is budô” (Tominaga 1971, 1). For at least some Tokugawa-period
writers, in other words, budô had far broader implications than it does today,
designating what modern authors often anachronistically call bushidô
[13]—that is, the code of conduct, rather than the military arts, of the warrior
class. Nevertheless, pre-Meiji nomenclature for the martial disciplines
betrayed no discernible systematization. The sources use bujutsu interchangeably
with bugei, and use both in ways that clearly imply a construct
with moral, spiritual, or social components, as well as technical ones.
Karl Friday
See also Japan; Koryû Bugei, Japan; Samurai; Swordsmanship, Japanese
References
Friday, Karl. 1997. Legacies of the Sword: the Kashima-Shinryû and
Samurai Martial Culture. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Hurst, G. Cameron, III. 1998. The Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship
and Archery. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rogers, John M. 1990. “Arts of War in Times of Peace: Archery in the
Honchô Bugei Shôden.” Monumenta Nipponica 45, no. 3: 253–284, 3.