Black Belt

By Hugo Silva

Oriental culture and the peculiarity of its principles of life, quite different from Western values, are guided by a logic of balance, management of strengths and fragilities, respect, nobility and the search for harmony between opposites, in all aspects of life of the human being, on a professional, personal and spiritual level. Through the analysis of the 20 principles of Karate-Do, written by Gichin Funakoshi, the reader is guided to a set of reflections that can help to change the way they look and experience the most mundane situations of the day, in an inspiring, constructive and harmonious It is fundamental to know ourselves first, to understand our strengths and weaknesses, qualities and defects, in a real constant analysis of ourselves, in order to live with our own adversities, so that we can better evaluate our surroundings and overcome our challenges, as if it were a combat. A book that will help you grow professionally and beyond. For all who seek to know new strands of oriental knowledge from a martial perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hugo Silva
• Release date: Dec 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781071519851

Book preview

BLACK BELT

Martial Teachings

for Common Life

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Hugo Ângelo Silva

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Learn how traditional martial arts philosophy - BUDO - can help improve

your personal and professional life

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Translated from portuguese 

Printed in 2015

Budo

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Karate-Do

The greatest joy we can feel is that, in the vastness of space and time that we have the privilege to belong to for brief moments, we can embrace life every day as it is given to us, with the ability and will to enjoy it with intensity and passion.

The level of intensity and passion is a personal decision but it defines all of our path.

"The martial arts way of life is based on overcoming before others, being by personal victory or service to others, becoming a known and socially well-established warrior.

However, there are those who say that even if you learn and dominate a form of martial art, that does not mean it will be useful when needed.

When it comes to this subject, the true sciences of martial arts mean for us to practice them in such forms that they are useful at all times and to teach them in a way that it becomes present on all things. "

Miyamoto Musashi, The book of five rings, 1645

ESSENTIAL VOCABULARY

Budoka - the person that practices the art of Budo, including karate-do. Western-made wording.

Bujutsu (or bujyutsu) - Set of Japanese martial arts, inherited from samurai martial arts.

Bushido - Samurai code of conduct.

Confucianism - Chinese philosophy by the ancient philosopher Confucius.

Do - Path, in the mind and philosophical matters of life.

Dojo - Place of practicing martial arts.

Hanshi - Degree above shihan or renshi, considered the sensei of senseis, a sensei of great honor. Usually given to eight-dan or above.

Kami - World making gods or divinities according to shintoism.

Kanji - Ideogram or character of the Japanese language, of Chinese origin.  They are used for Japanese writing, along with Japanese katakana and hiragana wording.

Karate-do - The empty hand path

Karate-ka - Senior practitioner, with elevated knowledge, achiever of the third Dan at least.

Kata - Imaginary combat form, between two or more adversaries, with pre-established forms. It also defines any pre-established form. For instance, the tea ceremony or the ikebana (the art of floral arrangements) also have their own kata, that is saying, their own moves and mandatory rules.

Ki - From the Chinese chi: the vital energy or life force in every being.

Kihon - Basic or beginner techniques in Japanese martial arts.

Kumite - Japanese martial art combat form.

Nirvana - State of total liberation from suffering, according to buddhism.

Renshi - Sensei that has achieved an elevated degree of technical knowledge, usually attributed to a sensei that has reached the fifth or sixth dan.

Senpai - Older student, most graduated one.

Sensei - Master, graduated instructor. Translated from Japanese, the one who was born before.

Seppuku (hara-kiri) - Honored death by bowels committed by samurai.

Shihan - Degree above sensei, it represents a model to be followed, a sensei with elevated moral and physical qualities.

Shogun - Supreme commanders of the Japanese army, ruled Japan from the twelfth century until 1868, although they maintained the divine importance of the emperor, but without ruling powers.

Shogunate - Shogun or shogun clan period of ruling.

Shintoism - Japan's predominant religion.

Yin-Yang - Taoism's philosophical concept that points out the duality of all things for maintaining the balance of the universe.

Zazen - Meditation position in zen buddhism, sitting with knees over the heels and hands resting on top of the thighs or legs.

Zen or Zen Buddhism - Japanese philosophy, with buddhist origins, preaches the contemplation and inner meditation as a way to free the spirit from reality.

CONTENTS

Pag. 11 - Introduction 

Pag. 21 - Preface 

Pag. 25 - Thanks 

PART ONE

The cultural, religious, philosophical and historical origins of traditional Japanese martial arts

Pag. 27 - Budo 

Pag. 31 - To understand the Orient

Pag. 34 - Understanding Traditional Martial Arts

Pag. 37 - Historical origins

Pag. 41 - i-Ching –  Mutations book

Pag. 47 - Confucianism

Pag. 55 - Taoism

Pag. 67 - Yin-Yang

Pag. 74 - Sun Tzu – The art of war

Pag. 86 - Buddhism and Shintoism

Pag. 88 - Zen Buddhism

Pag. 97 - The samurai influence

Pag. 119 - Nijukun – The 20 principles of Karate-Do

Karate-Do begins and ends with rei (salutation or bow) - Pag. 122

There is no first attack in Karate-Do - Pag. 124

Karate-Do follows the path of justice - Pag. 126

First know yourself, then seek to know others - Pag. 127

The mind above technique - Pag. 128

The mind must be free - Pag. 130

Misfortune is caused by your own neglect - Pag. 132

Karate goes beyond the dojo - Pag. 133

Karate-Do is a quest for constant living. Seek perfection in all that

you do - Pag. 133

Apply Karate-Do in everything you do. There lies the beauty of it - 136

Karate-Do is like hot water; if does not receive heat constantly,

becomes cold water - Pag. 137

Do not think about winning. Instead, think about not to lose - Pag. 138

Set yourself by taking into account your opponent - Pag. 140

The outcome of a battle depends on the ability to manage the

strengths and weaknesses, the good from evil, the emptiness

from the all - Pag. 141

Think that your opponent's feet and hands are like sabers - Pag. 143

When you leave home, you face a million enemies - Pag. 143

Kamae (starting position) is for beginners; later, the student practices

the shizentai (natural position) - Pag. 145

Perform kata exactly like it is; be aware that in combat (kumite) it

takes different forms - Pag. 148

19. Do not forget to apply correctly:

- Strength and weakness in force control;

- Expansion and body contraction;

- Control of techniques in slowness and speed - Pag. 149

20. Study, practice, create and perfect each day.

Only then will you find you own way (Do) - Pag. 150

PART TWO

Pag. 153 - Understanding the martial details

PART THREE

Pag. 194 - Practical exercises

Pag. 195 - Balance

Pag. 196 - Vision

Pag. 197 - Breathing

Pag. 199 - Zen

Pag. 201 - Kiai

Pag. 202 - Final Notes

Pag. 218 - Martial quotes

Pag. 224 - Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Courage, sacrifice, self-control,

discipline, respect, compassion, justice,

dedication, humility and belief are the essence of

karate-do

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Usually and when lacking of a deeper knowledge or practice, the society grasps martial arts as an agglomerate of violence, fighting, competition or above the average physical abilities or just as a way of learning how to defend ourselves, to be stronger and more effective than others when it comes to physical confrontation, and being so, be able to respond with controlled efficiency to violence from others, as in robberies or in any physical confrontation scenario. Surely martial arts are indeed a bit of that, but they are also much more than training and learning physical forms of fighting, especially when it comes to traditional martial arts. Above all, in their most pure and genuine essence, they are not a fight form where their practitioners seek only to blindly execute what they learn on their training site (dojo). Despite this mentality of larger physical tendencies existing and taking, what I consider to be, too big of relevance in modern western society, this book is dedicated exactly to the opposite of that intense physical culture. It contemplates on the true essence of traditional martial arts, mainly the Japanese ones, defined as a group as budo, the Japanese martial stream and to its ancestral legacy, a mix between mind, body and spirit, and the consequently positive influence that it may take on the lives of those who practice it or even just try to understand it.

The martial arts, mainly because of the westernization of martial arts, have been constantly translated into competitions, into the violent spirit of fighting for fighting, of physically stronger, of better. But for those that just want to learn how to fight, traditional martial arts will be a possible waste of time. Naturally, those that want to do it just for that reason will learn techniques that might be of use, but little sense it will make to train a few decades with dedication and time to use what has been learned along a lifetime just for a hand full of times, unless we lived in a constant hand-to-hand combat time, which gladly we don't. But even for such, there are way more lethal and effective weapons today than hand-to-hand combat. In reality, it would suffice to live carefully enough to keep away from places and situations where physical confrontation could occur so we don't actually need to fight at all. Obviously, military and police forces have the need of learning fighting or self-defense techniques, but even them tend to use what they learn only on self-defense or of other, for righteous reasons. But in spite of some situations demanding self-defense or of others, it also becomes necessary to not make of this our mission, of eradicating all evil, because that might turn us into exactly what we are trying to fight off. The main question will be: why a budoka (the person that practices the budo arts, including karate-do) dedicates years or even a lifetime to training and developing a traditional martial art if his goal is to never use it in his daily routines?

The traditional budo martial arts deliver a way of life, a life we build for a purpose, in a world that is becoming more and more a world lacking of immaterial goals. To put it another way, traditional martial arts perfectly integrate on an existentialist understanding of the human condition. The study and practice of traditional martial arts can be an important contribution for those that concern themselves on living a fulfilling life filled with sincere sentiments. On a general outline, traditional martial arts, mainly Japanese, are a way of self-discovery along years of practice, of perceiving out strengths and weaknesses, of respecting our enemies with humbleness and wisdom, of facing life with courage, discipline and self-control, of passionately loving what we stand for being that people, attitudes, our surroundings or even thoughts and ideas, at the same time we perfect our bodies, our athletic skills and needed balance between the body and the mind that controls it.

The martial arts integrated in budo are like a path, a way to find ourselves and the right way to interact with others, opting for fairness, never destruction or injustice, avoiding futile confrontations, cultivating kindness, respect, humility and compassion, in a picture of strength, mind and physical disciplined capability.

Since the moment I started the karate-do training, midst 1982 at eleven, the east fascinated me, what took me to a better understanding of the differences that separated the great worldly cultures, eastern and western. For those less young, that lived their pre-teenager years in the 80's like me, tv shows as Shogun with Richard Chamberlain, Kung-Fu with David Carradine, The Young Heroes of Shaolin, the now strange Bruce Lee movies or even Japanese cinema as Ran - The Warlords or Seven Samurais, both from Akira Kurosawa - marked our youth and had some of us trying to find out what was that captivating culture so unlike ours. The millennial eastern culture, mainly Chinese and later on all the eastern world influenced by philosophies and religions such as Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Buddhism or the yin-yang concept, just to name the most relevant ones, transmitted to mankind forms of being and trying to understand our existences, the world and that which created it. It mainly transmitted a way of life that we will try to understand, intending to adapt the traditional martial art vision to our daily life. Abstracting the religious aspect, I invite the reader to understand life just as a form of energy, a passage for something superior to our understanding, that we must respect, live with, flow and transmit to coming generations in a constant respect for all that surrounds us, from the natural world to the cosmic one. Those are the base rules of traditional Japanese martial arts that you will be able to per pass to your life, leading an inner reflection and changes in terms of attitude and behaviors, case you choose to make them. By that you won't learn how to annihilate someone in a deathly form with just a finger or something like that, but you'll learn to change your point of view and attitude towards life in the way that life is just a consequence of your behaviors and actions towards yourself and those who surround you.

The current contemporary society feel and the way we manage and dissolve it in ourselves has been a continuous debate topic for centuries, but perhaps with greater incidence today and in the future, given the speed at which we transform our society and the planet itself. How to process the large and complex daily information that gets to us for free, how to manage the daily chaos of the markets, the company, the customers, our own life,  family, the hierarchies in the company, the Internet, the information,  friends, the status , career, hobbies, sports, ipads and iphones, vacations, credits, unemployment, taxes, crisis,... We are today true warriors, modern samurais, with urgent need to deal with an entire social, political, economic and environmental acceleration, now or in the future, whose weapons are no longer of physical war but rather psychological, behavioral and technical-professional. We live in an era, especially from the late 18th century with the rise of the first industrial revolution, of large and fast social, political, cultural, behavioral and entrepreneurial transformations, which are changing the world and the planet in a disorienting and also dangerous speed, threatening fundamental balances, both social and environmental, to maintain the necessary harmony for co-existing, be it in our generation, or in the next ones.

Companies and their human and financial potential are today the engine of society, which has led us as humans in general to forgetting the fundamental of being itself: the need of harmony and psychological well-being with the world, ourselves and especially to respect the planet and everything that has life in it: air, water and food resources, materials, animals and, of course, to those who live with us on this planet and those who will come after. We increasingly measure well-being by the level of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and little by the level of joy, life satisfaction, level of freedom, the true individual freedom. We are now slaves to money, the mandatory necessity of having it to subsist, to have and not to be. We live in times where the ego has completely replaced consciousness, living more in social roles than being ourselves in our true inner essence.

Measuring the happiness of a nation only by its ability to generate financial wealth is today a, fortunately, paradigm also in debate. Countries such as Bhutan, where the GNH (Gross National Happiness), a term created in 1972 by the then King of Bhutan, Jigme Wangchuck) is fomented to GDP detriment, where wealth is valued by human relations and its purity, where it culturally fosters balance with the environment and not only the amount of money in existence and the material goods that one possesses, are a mirage that emerges from the horizon of a financial enslaved world, which creates more and more money submissive and dependent humans. A materialistic kind of society that leaves little time for us to find our true existential usefulness.

The pillars of GNH are ambitious and even utopic to a large percentage of the world, but perhaps they are one of the ways to live in the future and, undoubtedly, should lead the modern society to reflect:

▪ Promoting educational development for Social inclusion;

▪ Preserving and promoting cultural values;

▪ Ecological resilience on the basis of sustainable development;

▪   Establishment of good governance;

▪   Preservation of values capable of guaranteeing community vitality;

▪ Health in life assurance;

▪ Sustainable development for the inclusion and potentization of living standards and;

▪ Work hours reduction in promotion of leisure and free time.

The mindset and way of living in the Orient, obviously not perfect, have a growing interest in the west, in the sense of discovering individual balance and a better understanding of the world that we have been building and also, unfortunately, destroying. Disciplines such as meditation, yoga, reiki, oriental martial arts, Buddhist spirituality, among others, are increasingly popular in the West as a form of response of human being's equilibrium within the current savage urban life. If until a few centuries ago humans lived an intense communion with nature and the environment, the growing materialism of contemporary society completely altered that, creating a huge distemper between the spirit's purity and the materialistic ego's condition.

The increased demand for essays and pieces on Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", already used in administration, marketing and politics, or publications on Buddhism or Zen Buddhism adapted to Western contemporary life, the success of the Dalai Lama, the growing publication of self-help books and spirituality, etc. have shown that the way to understand life, human existence and its development can evolve back to its origins, the simple plots of our minds and being, through the study of Oriental millennial philosophies for example.

As the budo martial arts are a clear consequence of the history of spirituality, culture and philosophy, I invite the reader to discover the traditional Japanese martial arts thinking in what I consider a clear and positive alternative of living and life understanding.

Martial Arts are a never ending source of personal energy and balance when lived and studied at its most traditional strand. Understanding and assuming them in parallel with contemporary social and personal life is the challenge I propose, whether or not you practice martial arts of any kind. Thus, and for general guidance, the keywords for this book are analogy and parallelism: how we manage our existence, our companies