High whirling kicks, explosive punches powerful enough to smash boards, terrifying shouts: that’s the typical image of the martial arts, the one we see in the movies. Depending on our prejudices, it either thrills us or turns us off.
But there’s a deeper dimension to the martial arts, a spiritual outlook at the very heart. Not every martial arts teacher communicates it, just as not every preacher embodies the spiritual heart of Christianity; but the essence of martial arts training aims at a radical transformation of the student. In the fullest sense, the martial arts aren’t about fighting so much as about harmony. Few teachers have given this aspect of the martial arts as singular and inspiring an expression as Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido.
The stories about him are legend, and border on the supernatural. At the age of forty-two, after years of studying traditional forms and becoming a master at spear, sword, and jujitsu, he had an experience one day in his garden that transformed his life. Having gone there to rest, he suddenly felt himself bathed in a heavenly light; the barrier between the material and spiritual worlds crumbled, and he imagined himself as a golden being that filled all of space — a transcendent moment that left him convinced the purpose of his work was to love and nurture all beings.
Aikido, he said, “is not a technique to fight with or defeat the enemy. It is the way to reconcile the world and to make human beings one family. The secret of Aikido is to harmonize ourselves with the movement of the universe and bring ourselves into accord with the universe itself.
“I am never defeated, however fast the enemy may attack. It is not because my technique is faster than that of the enemy. It is not a question of speed. The fight is finished before it is begun. When an enemy tries to fight with me, the universe itself, he has to break the harmony of the universe. Hence at the moment he has the mind to fight with me, he is already defeated.”
Able to throw opponents without even touching them, he had apparently attained that true harmony of mind and body of which he spoke. There is a film of him, at the age of seventy-five, a thin old man no more than five feet tall, being charged from the front and back by two hulking Judo black belts. Projected in slow motion, successive frames show the master standing calmly while his attackers hurtle toward him. Then, as one account describes, “just as they are about to grab him, between two frames he has moved several feet out of the way and is facing in the other direction. The two black belts continue their rush, to collide violently into each other, while the master watches. Such a movement, which from the film testimony must have taken less than one-eighteenth of a second, demonstrates a transcendence of the normal laws of time and space.”
Skeptics, no doubt, will scoff, but contemporary practitioners of Aikido — whose stories can be read in Richard Strozzi Heckler’s intriguing anthology, Aikido and the New Warrior — report experiences that are no less mind-boggling. Non-traditional ideas about the body and its subtle energies are central to these accounts; so, too, is the notion that the real enemy to be overcome is oneself — one’s fears and projections and self-limiting beliefs.
Heckler, who holds a third-degree black belt in Aikido, is a psychologist, co-founder of the Lomi School, and author of The Anatomy of Change. One of the more moving chapters in the book, by George Leonard, describes Heckler’s own testing for black belt. It is reprinted here, along with Terry Dobson’s eye-opening experience on a Japanese subway car that taught him the real meaning of Aikido.
Our thanks for permission to reprint these excerpts. Aikido and the New Warrior is published by North Atlantic Books, 2320 Blake Street, Berkeley, CA 94704 ($12.95 paperback).
— Ed.
