Enlightenment and the Martial Arts

Enlightenment and the
Martial Arts

In a way you could say that martial arts and enlightenment have nothing to do with each other.  Or perhaps you could say that martial arts have as much to do with enlightenment as any human activity – dance, baseball, computer programming.  Or that the possibility of enlightenment is always present.  Nonetheless, it is true, particularly because of the association of Zen and budo, that we are used to assuming there is a connection.  And it is true that O-Sensei, the Founder of Aikido, had a famous enlightenment experience.

O-Sensei’s Enlightenment

(The following is taken from John Steven’s Abundant Peace and Kisshomaru Ueshiba’s Aikido):

In the spring of 1925, 42-year old Morihei was transformed by a divine vision. One day, a naval officer visiting Ayabe decided to challenge Morihei to a kendo match.  Morihei consented but remained unarmed.  The officer, a high-ranking swordsman, was naturally offended at this affront to his ability and lashed out at Morihei furiously. Morihei easily escaped the officer’s repeated blows and thrusts.  When the exhausted officer finally conceded defeat, he asked Morihei his secret.

“Just prior to your attacks, a beam of light flashed before my eyes, revealing the intended direction.”

Following the contest, Morihei went out to his garden to draw water from the well and to wash the sweat from his face and hands.  This is what he later said about what happened:

“I set my mind on budo when I was about 15 and visited teachers of swordsmanship and jujutsu in various provinces.  I mastered the secrets of the old traditions, each within a few months.  But there was no one to instruct me in the essence of budo: the only that that could satisfy my mind.  So I knocked on the gates of various religions but I couldn’t get any concrete answers.

Then in the spring of 1925, when I was taking a walk in the garden by myself, I felt that the universe suddenly quaked, and that a golden spirit sprang up from the ground, veiled my body and changed my body into a golden one.  At the same time my mind and body became light.  I was able to understand the whispering of the birds and was clearly aware of the mind of God, the Creator of this universe. At that moment I was enlightened: the source of budo is God’s love – the spirit of loving protection for all beings.  Endless tears of joy streamed down my cheeks.  …  I understood, ‘Budo is not felling the opponent by our force; nor is it a tool to lead the world into destructions with arms.  True budo is to accept the spirit of the universe, keep the peace of the world, correctly produce, protect and cultivate all beings in Nature.  The training of budo is to take God’s love, which correctly produces, protects and cultivates all things in Nature, and assimilate and utilize it in our own mind and body.’” 

This kind of “experience” is the terrain of the Enlightenment Intensive.  Notice that O-Sensei was pursuing a question:  what is the essence of budo?  Inquiry is also the focus of Intensives. 

One other well-known martial artist has written a great deal about enlightenment and has a direct connection to the Enlightenment Intensive:  Peter Ralston. 

Peter Ralston and Enlightenment

The following is an excerpt from an interview in which he talks about how he began taking Enlightenment Intensives and was conducted not long after her won the All-Asian Martial Arts Tournament in 1978:

One day I was sitting in my back yard and a man came up to me. He had run into somebody who knew me and said that he would like me to teach him martial arts. I told him that I wasn’t doing that any more, but he was really persistent, so I began to teach again. Later he said he really wanted me to do some intensive contemplation work. I was twenty one. He said, “I can see that you’re ready and I really want you to do this.” I said no. At the time, I couldn’t see how anything significant could be brought about in only three days of intensive contemplation. However, I realized that some of my decision not to participate was a result of cowardice. Overcoming this barrier, I later went with him to a five-day contemplation Intensive held in Santa Rosa. I sat right down, working on the question “Who am I?” and on the first day, the first exercise, what I was getting just blew me away. I didn’t have a direct experience of the truth right then, but I did encounter the type of phenomena common to intense contemplation. The room changed. It got bright, I saw colors, and the sense of myself was quite different. I felt expanded somehow. Just working on this question, a whole different thing started to happen for me.

At the end of five days, I felt more joy than I had ever felt in my life. I was really happy – I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t been. It was beautiful. Two weeks later, I went up to a place in the mountains and did my second Intensive, working on “What am I?”

I spent the entire time willfully and dynamically going for a direct experience of the very nature of my being. I threw everything I had into it for three solid days, every moment. I didn’t let up – I didn’t notice I let up, anyway. I did it like I did most other things at the time: with just so much drive, so much energy, so much attention in every moment. Thinking back, I don’t know if I could do it like that anymore.

Even so, I didn’t “get” it — I didn’t directly experience my true nature. I didn’t have an enlightenment experience. I thought that I never failed at these things! It can not happen! It hadn’t even dawned on me that it might not happen. Three days and I didn’t have a direct experience of the nature of my own Being.

I had to wait for a ride back with the man who brought me, so I stayed overnight and hung around the next day. Late that afternoon, I was sitting up against a wall in an L-shaped room. Some people were around the corner talking. I was just sitting there feeling good, not doing anything, not contemplating in particular, and I had an enlightenment experience of the nature of my being. It was a major breakthrough, the nature of which was completely outside of my previous experience. It was somehow not of the domain of “experience” and, at the same time, absolutely transformed my experience. It was profoundly and perfectly the case. It changed my whole life and the structure in which I held reality. It was fabulous!

Suddenly, I was aware that I was Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I directly experienced my true nature, not as thingness in any way, shape or form. The possibility that I wasn’t any thing had not existed for me. Through the whole Intensive I had been every thing, every conceptualization, every movement, every sense, every effort. It had never occurred to me that I wasn’t anything. In the enlightenment, I was just . . . no thing, no where, no substance whatsoever. No intellectual understanding of the matter can ever come close to a direct enlightenment. Although I had several others later, this first was probably the most significant enlightenment experience I ever had.

At home a week later, I had an enlightenment experience of the nature of an other. I became conscious that what others are is exactly the same as what I am. I am nothing and I occupy no space, no location. Given that I don’t occupy a location and they don’t occupy a location, I became conscious that we are not separate — we are the same one.

It was after those enlightenment experiences that abilities like being able to read someone’s disposition accurately started to come. I was able to see what people were going to do before they did it. As a result, when somebody was going to hit me, I would finish the situation before they were able to, and that was it. Sometimes in class people would ask, “How would you deal with a situation where someone is going to hit you?” I’d say, “Hit me.” And the moment they would think to hit me and start to motivate their body, I’d stop them. That’s it. Handled. I suppose in one sense you could say I noticed their mind. I was seeing where they were coming from, the source of where the action arose. Seeing the bottom of the motivation of their thought and actions through knowing what I am and what they are. I knew where they were coming from and would watch them spring from there: that appeared to me, not visually, but it touched me before their body moved. Since it’s a process for them in which they have to manifest intent, and then turn that into action, I can act before they arrive at their action.

I was just dealing with the situation in a more real sense, dealing with what was true. That ability happened because it is aligned to what is true. I hadn’t noticed that the ability was something I could develop, or was something that somebody didn’t have but could develop. At that time, Cheng Hsin was still on the horizon, and I was just beginning to clarify what was later to be known as the Principles of Body-Being, an alignment to which allows for great functional capacity.

Sometime later I did a 14-Day Intensive led by Charles Berner. A lot of interesting people and a lot of “old hands” were there. It was incredibly tough sometimes, and yet it was very powerful. On the fourteenth day, I hadn’t gotten it. I was working on “What is Life?” or more accurately, “What is Existence?” On the last exercise of the last day, during the last ten minutes, I had an enlightenment experience. The first enlightenment experience I had was the most significant, but this one was the deepest or most profound.

It was the last exercise, and I thought if I hadn’t gotten it in fourteen days what difference could this one exercise make? So, I was just enjoying myself. For some reason, I decided to go up out the top of my head a distance that felt like several feet above me. It felt like I would go up there and meet my diad partner, Neil, like we joined up there. And then, quite to my surprise, I had an experience of what the Zen people call the Void. That of Absolute Existence. There was no distance, no time, no space . . . nothing.

I guess my appearance changed dramatically at the time, since, after we were done with the exercise, Neil started jumping up and down and pointing, exclaiming how different my face looked, saying, “You should look in a mirror!” I hadn’t looked in a mirror for fourteen days. When I got home, I walked up to a full-length mirror and looked at myself and it was a deep shock to my body. It was a shock because I saw a body that I had known before, and it wasn’t me! Not that my appearance had changed. The familiarity is what shocked me. In some sense, I had forgotten that I had a body. It’s
like the body reflected my history, my character, my ideas, my personality, all the things I had thought I was. All the things I had been being. Without thinking about it, I guess I really expected my reflection not to show up.

Notice that for both of these men, the enlightenment experiences were connected with a change in perception, a change in the way they held the world and with an increase in their ability as martial artists.  This, I think, is one of the reasons martial artists are intrigued by enlightenment.  It certainly is true that enlightenment experiences always involve a change in the way the world is held.  However, it by no means follows that one’s abilities will increase.  One may, in fact, become utterly indifferent to martial arts.  In other words the results of the shift in awareness are individual and utterly unpredictable. The value of these experiences lies not in how they can be utilized (they can’t!) or how they solve problems or increase abilities.  The value lies in what one becomes conscious of and in what becomes free of.