- Apr 1
- 3 min read
These days, we take for granted that each of us belongs to many overlapping communities. All the kids, parents, and staff members at my child’s elementary school see themselves as part of a school community. The foreign residents here in Tokyo talk about being part of the expatriate community. And, of course, everyone reading Black Belt is part of the martial arts community.
What often gets lost in all this talk of community is how much of an individual endeavor martial arts training is.
In everything from learning a form to fighting in the cage to finding spiritual insights, community is about support. Usually, it’s about giving us context and guidance. But no matter what a martial arts community does for people, it can only take them so far. The martial arts always end in individual achievement.
THE MOST OBVIOUS example comes from the fight sports. You could be a pro MMA guy with a team of coaches, nutritionists, and conditioning specialists all focused on you. You could be one member of a big judo team that spars constantly and does old-school conditioning work together. It doesn’t matter. Your martial arts community can only help you get ready to fight; it’s the fighter who wins or loses the match.
The same goes for the seemingly simple act of learning an art. Some mistakenly believe that learning is a passive process. They think the instructor gives them techniques and they simply do what he says. The reality is that learning is always an active process. It’s something that the student does and that the instructor guides. Without that individual struggle to really understand an art and do it well, there’s no real learning, just rote memorization.
Spiritual development is just as much of an active process as learning the skills of fighting is. Enlightenment, or some lesser insight, might come to a few martial artists suddenly, but it’s rarely without effort. Usually, the real gurus and mystics of the arts spend years in contemplation and study before their flash of awareness.
MY FAVORITE EXAMPLE of this is kyudo. It’s one of the few arts that are competitive and spiritual. And like all arts, you have to figure things out for yourself, even when you have help from an instructor.
The competitive side of kyudo is probably the purest example of individual achievement in the martial arts. You and you alone hit or miss the target. There’s no opponent who can make you look good or bad. You can’t blame faulty equipment if you fail to hit the target because you’re as much responsible for your own equipment as you are for making the shot. As kyudo master Hideharu Onuma said, the bow doesn’t lie. When you shoot, it shows who you really are.
The spiritual side of kyudo emerges naturally from practice. There’s a desire to hit the target that can get in the way of actually hitting it, a desire that must be overcome for the shooting to become effortless. There’s the sense of time and distance being illusions—when master archers feel that the arrow already exists in the target. All these things come only through long, concentrated effort.
Then there’s the simple act of learning kyudo. The forms are short and the movements few, but learning to do them right requires constant self-examination and effort. A novice can be taught and guided, but only he can learn to feel the right position of his body and when to let the arrow fly. Only an active student can gain the kind of intuitive feel for correct shooting that Japanese archery is famed for.
Of course, community is as important in kyudo as in any martial art. It takes a lot to organize competitions and run a kyudojo. But even with all the carefully coordinated effort during practice and all the care needed to maintain an archery range, there’s still nothing more individual than hitting that target yourself.
THE BEST THING about having a sense of community is your identity expands. Your connection with the people gives a larger sense of self, something bigger and more meaningful than just your own talents. But that’s also its greatest danger. It’s easy to get lost in your community, to identify too closely with it, to let actual martial arts achievement fade and allow your personality to become diffuse.
You just become part of the group instead of yourself. And the antidote is always the same: to find yourself through some kind of martial arts achievement. That is what defines our community and ourselves.
