Impressions of a great seminar

Another superb and instructive iaido seminar is over. It never ceases to amaze me how much one can learn in a weekend and how much pain one can experience in one's knees after two days of shinkage ryu iaido.

The main emphasis this time was on tenōuchi, the grip on the sword hilt. The tendency is to grip the sword tightly, thereby inducing tension in the lower and upper arms. This translates into the use of too much power during cutting. The sword should be loose in the hands until the moment of the cut and then pressure can be exerted in controlling the blade and giving strength to the cut.

Other important lessons were the drawing together of the shoulder blades during sidewards cutting. Instead of focusing on the hands and sword, it is more efficient to draw the shoulder blades together; the arms move as a consequence: clever stuff.

Shinkage ryu seminar

I'm really busy at the moment helping to organise the above mentioned seminar which will be held in Rotterdam at the end of this week. Our sensei will be coming over from Japan to guide us in the ways of Shinkage ryu iaido. He comes twice a year to Europe and it is always a great pleasure to see hime and his deshi (most advanced student) Kinomoto sensei. You can find more info about the seminar here. It will, I hope be the source of iaido posts and definitely inspiration for my training for the next sixth months.

Iaido art

We are running an introduction course in the dojo at the moment and it turns out that one of the new students is an artist and she asked me if it was ok to come along with her brushes and paint and make some sketches of us. Of course I agreed and she spent the evening very quietly in one corner or another doing just that. Afterwards she showed us the results and I was very pleasantly surprised. Here are my two favourite sketches from her notebook; it was a hard choice to make.



If you like this work you can visit her website here or here.

Please if you use the images, put a link to the webpage of the artist.

Sandan

Just to let everyone know that I passed my third dan exam in iaido today. I am feeling very good about myself and not at all smug.....

On the subject of swords...

After a visit to the Atsuta shrine (熱田神宮) in Nagoya, Japan I was inspired to dig into the history of the famous sword which is housed there. It is not possible to see the sword, or even enter the shrine: this is a privilege reserved only for members of the imperial family and high ranking priests of the temple itself. The sword is one of the three imperial treasures [1] of Japan and has a fascinating history, going to the very heart of Japanese Shintoism.

Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi (草薙の剣 Grass cutter) is a legendary Japanese sword, the history of which dates back to the legend of when the Japanese god of storms, Susano-O no Mikoto, encountered a grieving family headed by Ashi na Zuchi. The elder told that his family was ravaged by Yamata no Orochi, the fearsome 8-headed serpent of Koshi, who consumed seven of the family's eight daughters and was coming for his final daughter, Kushi-Nada-Hime. Susano-O proceeded forward to investigate the creature, and after an abortive encounter he returned with a plan to defeat it. In return, he asked for Kushi-Nada-Hime's hand in marriage which was agreed. Transforming her temporarily into a comb to have her company during the battle, he set his plan in motion.

He instructed 8 vats of sake to be put on individual platforms positioned behind a fence with 8 gates. The monster took the bait and put each of its heads through each of the gates. With the necessary distraction provided, Susano-O attacked and slew the beast. He decapitated each of the heads and then proceeded to the tails. In the fourth tail, he discovered a great sword inside the body of Yamata no Orochi which he called Murakakumo no Tsurugi (Two-edged-straight-sword-of-the-village-of-the-clustering-clouds). To settle an old grievance, he presented to his sister, the sun-goddess Amaterasu Omikami.

Amaterasu entrusted the Imperial Regalia [1] to her grandson Ninigi when he descended to the Japanese Islands. Ninigi’s decent to earth established the divine origins of the Yamato clan. He married a descendant of the storm god Susano-O and had a son Jimmu; he was the first Emperor of Japan. The Imperial Regalia are said to have passed from emperor to emperor until later in the reign of the 12th emperor, Keiko, the sword was given to the great warrior, Yamato-Dake as part of a pair of gifts given by his aunt, Yamato-Hime, to protect his nephew in peril.

These gifts came in handy when Yamato-Dake was lured onto open grassland during a hunting expedition by a treacherous warlord. The lord had fiery arrows fired to ignite the grass to trap Yamato-Dake in the field and have him burn to death. He also had the warrior's horse killed to prevent his escape. Desperately, Yamato-Dake used Murakakumo no Tsurugi to cut back the grass to remove fuel from the fire, but in doing so, he discovered that the sword enabled him to control the wind around him to make it move in the direction he swung. Taking advantage of the magic, Yamato-Dake used his other gift, fire strikers, to enlarge the fire in the direction of the warlord and his men and used the winds controlled by the sword to sweep the blaze toward them to kill them. In triumph, Yamato-Dake renamed Murakakumo no Tsurugi as Kusanagi (Grass cutter) to commemorate his narrow escape and victory. Eventually, Yamato-Dake married and fell in battle with a monster after ignoring his wife's advice to take Kusanagi with him.

At one time, the emperor possessed a real sword with this name. Along with the jewel and the mirror, it was one of the three imperial regalia until the Battle of Dannoura (1185), a naval battle that ended in the defeat of the forces of the child Emperor Antoku at the hands of Minamoto no Yoshitsune. Upon hearing of the defeat, the emperor's grandmother led the Emperor and his entourage to commit suicide (by drowning) in the waters of the strait along with three important artefacts which included Kusanagi. Although the enemy managed to stop a handful of them and recovered two of the three regalia of the Emperor, Kusanagi was never found. Emperor Sujin, ordered the fashioning of a replica of Kusanagi which can be found at the Atsuta Shrine in Nagoya. The actual Kusanagi [2] is likely to have been a sword in the style of the Bronze Age, typically double-edged and straight (very much different from the more recent sabre style katana, with its typical curved single-edged blade).

[1] The Japanese imperial regalia, "Sanshu no jingi", or "Three Sacred Treasures", consisted of the sword "Kusanagi no tsurugi", the jewel "Yasakani no magatama", and the mirror "Yata no kagami".
[2] The complete name of the Imperial sword is Kusanagi no-tsurugi which means "grass parting two-edged straight blade”.

Iaido championships

Well, it was that time again this weekend where I get to show how good I am at iaido and completely fail to get past the first round. Either my teachers are telling me that I am better than in actual fact I am, or they are not reading the same guidelines as the referees. It could also be that the referees are not reading the same books as my teacher and that they are also in fact wrong. This is not outside the realms of possibility.

Things were going reasonably swimmingly with me winning the first two matches, one with a 2 to 1 judgement and the other 3 to 0, but during the third match everything went pear shaped. Firstly, the judge who scored against me in the first match was sitting directly in front of me, so I already felt that there was no way I was going to convince him this time because my opponent was (imho) very much better than my opponent from the first match.

Then to my opponent: this is someone who trains in the same dojo as I, so I cannot blame differences in teacher or whatever on the fact that he won (with 2 flags to 1, I might add). I admit I was beaten psychologically before we even started. The funny thing is, I actually don't think that he is better than I am, although I admit he is good. I guess the point is that I will not permit myself to lose against him because I have been training longer. Thus these thoughts in my head, I go to compete and I even felt that I was not as "in the flow" as the previous matches.

I guess the upshot of all this is that when there was no question of winning or losing (only doing my best) then my iaido was much better and I felt more one with myself and my sword, but when these thoughts came into my head, my technique started to fall apart and I came out of balance. Food for thought indeed!

By the way, my opponent went on to win the silver medal, so that takes the edge off it a little.

Sword deity

The Japanese god of the sword

This photograph was taken at the Osu kannon temple in Nagoya, Japan. This guy is called Fudo Myo-O ("the immutable one"), the Buddhist divinity of fire. Fudo is the principal deity of the five angry Lords of Light and serves as tutelary deity to many kamisama spirit mediums. He has intimate associations with the dragon divinity and with the waterfall of Fudo, one of the most important sites of mountain ascetic discipline (shugyo).

The term 'Myo-O' indicates that Fudo is one of the 'Wrathful Kings of Mystic Knowledge' Fudo Myo-O is also patron of the Martial Arts, and patron of all practitioners of mountain-centred ascetic mystic disciplines. He is known by his flaming sword and rope, with which he slashes away material connections and binds up evil-doers.

Furthermore, the sword itself cannot cut the rope; it requires thought and action on behalf of the wielder to do so. The wielder can thus use the sword for constructive or destructive purposes depending upon his intentions. His eyes are looking in opposite directions: one being in the corporal world and the other in the spiritual world.

And you thought George Lucas made that stuff about the "dark side" up all on his own?