Many children come upon a question, an inquiry around which their life turns. For me, a young Jewish boy in a safe, mostly American suburb, that question was – “If the Holocaust comes for me, can I face it with integrity?” I did not imagine winning, destroying my enemies in some adolescent Rambo fantasy, but simply, “Could I remain a living soul in the face of the worst?” As life began its inexorable erosion upon my innocence, I found that the tinder of Holocaust lay stored away, dry and ready — within myself. My only salvation was either willful ignorance, hoping no spark would light upon me, or mindfulness, a close caring attentiveness that might keep me strong and resilient enough that I not catch fire.
At a young age, I began to study methods of combat, most proximately out of fear and shame, having lost a schoolyard fight that honor seemed to demand that I engage. More essential to me, however, was a desire to know my enemy, perhaps to usurp his power, even to make it mine. Entering into a quest for power, I soon had to ask what power was, particularly power expressed by a human being. At what point is that power demonic – cut apart from both divinity or humanity?
There are many definitions of the term, ‘warrior,’ but such a person is one who believes he has a reason to fight, who believes he is created to fight, who, though perhaps mortally afraid, is willing to enter onto the field of battle, willing to face, even embrace death. In certain societies, he is part of a discrete social class, and is regarded as a member of an elite.
The creation of a warrior can be an exercise of brutality, humiliation, deceit, and/or naked power – this is called ‘basic training.’ This model is not only seen in armed forces, but also in places as varied as medical school and in many religious cults. In many models, a warrior is a man to be broken down, to be stripped from his ties to home and family, remade into an agent of policy, a fatalistic participant in a round of death.
On the other hand, if birthed in a moral nexus, the warrior is created through a combination of ascetic discipline, spiritual practice, ritual, ideology, and sacrifice. Whether from the more brutal practice of ‘breaking down,’ or the more admirable one of ‘building up,’ the warrior becomes a man who has given himself in an extravagant sacrifice to something that he chooses to believe is larger than his own life.
Such self-sacrifice evokes in us a feeling of awe, the sensation we experience in the presence of the implacable divine – a melding of worship, admiration, and terror. That a man could be so brave as to ride into the muzzles of cannons, fly a bomb-laden plane into a ship, or stand within the arc of the slash of a sword, places each of us into question–would we be so brave if so called? That the same man could conceivably – not necessarily, but conceivably – slash the head off a child, or rape a woman on the way to or from that field of honor, evokes horror, and more questions. Could we abstain from such vile brutality? Would we not see it as our privilege were we the kind of being who was capable of riding into the mouth of cannons? Can valor coexist with morality in a man at ease with the stink of blood and torn flesh?
Violence is not alien to our nature. Not only is it a part of us, it can impart joy – as horrible and shameful as that may sound to some. We are primates, animals with a capacity for rage, for hatred, and ecstasy in its expression. But we, as humans, are not determined nor defined by those emotions, because what makes us human is so much larger, so much more exquisitely complex. The ‘savage peace’ that some find in the heart of violence is all too brief, and is truly no peace at all. It is the peace of solitude, of literal inhumanity, the cool clear objective eye that floats in the void gazing at the stars as points of light, without warmth, without fire.
Consider the warriors of New Guinea: joyful, lithe spearmen, who apparently regard combat as an especially pointed game of tag. They seem to experience the melding of limb and heart in a pure state of motion, reaction and counter-attack. However, a study of these warriors shows that, when asked the right questions, they confide that they suffer the same symptoms of post traumatic stress – dreams, terrors, hyper-sensitivity, survivor guilt, the haunting loneliness at the death of comrades – as any draftee in modern war. They fight because they believe they must – the conditions of their lives demand it – so it seems to them to be inevitable. Given no exit, they courageously accept what they believe they must, and find joy as well as terror in a rain of spears and arrows. To abstain would render oneself a conscientious objector to life itself.
The word ‘warrior’ encompasses the Mongol horseman who razed cities and built mountains of skulls as well as the Jewish resistance fighter in the Warsaw ghetto, the feral Conquistador as well as the Vietcong heroically, unimaginably living twelve years in tunnels under their own homes – all equally fierce, all surely savage – yet nonetheless, all very different. One must condemn war, but I defy anyone to simplistically condemn the warrior, who can be the finest of us as well as the worst.
I wish to sketch out, albeit in a rather impressionistic way, the training of the classical warrior, training that, for thirteen years, I participated. I went to Japan in 1976, with the intention of continuing my study of aikido, a martial art which, in its modern form, asserts the (sometimes) achievable ideal that conflict can be resolved through blending with one’s opponents, and neutralizing their aggression: in essence, becoming a benign mirror which reflects their anger away. I practiced this art with religious commitment, but still found myself troubled by my own fear and my own anger. The answers I was looking for could not be found in such elegance.
I encountered an archaic school, the Araki-ryu, a school passed down from the late 16th century, through nineteen generations. This tradition was born in the Warring States period of Japan, a time much like Syria and Iraq of the year 2015. It was a country riven by faction and betrayal. Araki-ryu was an art of utilitarian survival, a coarse, violent system, encompassing sword, glaive, spear, sickle, chain and knife, fist, nail and tooth. In fact, the first techniques I learned, called sankyoku (Three Themes) entailed the careful practice of serving an honored guest tea or sake, in meticulous ritual welcome, and at the moment his guard was down, assassinating him. The oral teaching that accompanied these techniques was, “This is how one defeats the superior swordsman.” In other words, combat is not a game, a noble prancing of toplofty knights – one does violence to survive. In this view, a pretentious honorable code of a fair fight would be regarded as a betrayal of kin, because the only reason one fought was to protect that which you guarded, that which you loved.
In classical Japanese martial traditions, training is accomplished by repetitive practice in two-person forms, which chain together essential techniques required for combat. The instructor is always in the role of ‘loser,’ called uketachi (receiving sword). Since he is the carrier of the tradition, he gauges and adjusts his movements depending upon how well the student executes the techniques upon him. The instructor, the senior received – and ‘died’ – so that the junior got stronger. Therefore, week after week, I would slowly approach, bearing a cup and tray, my face solemn and dignified, and I would slowly lower myself to serve. If I betrayed my intention in any way, my instructor would lunge forward, knocking me over, locking my joints painfully or choking me, stabbing me under the ribs with a wooden training knife or slashing me across the face. When I was successful in betraying no hint of danger nor malice, he waited openly, sincerely, as if truly a guest, and it was I who moved first, throwing the tray in his face, wrenching his arm, grinding a knee into his ribs or shoulder, pinning him down, and stabbing with a knife fractions of an inch from his throat. I patterned the techniques over and over until they became my nature.
We did all of this without rancor, without anger. Sometimes, simultaneous to grimaces of pain, was joyful mutual laughter. The techniques of this school are practiced with exceptional ferocity, accompanied with a grating scream that freezes the blood. To an observer, the Araki-ryu seems to be practiced in a state of berserker rage, but despite its appearance, one is, in a way hard to explain, calm. The energy sweeps through one like a tornado, now here and then gone. But within, one is still.
Week after week, we would practice. As time went on, I was introduced to weapons, two person forms which allowed us to simulate combat, taking us ever closer to the edge of injury and even death. Practice was both terrifying and wonderful. At times, with weapons slashing dangerously close, our minds crackling in a kind of mutual immediate awareness, we became as intimate as ever I have been with another human being.
My instructor was a very severe man, and ungentle, to say the least, but never sadistic or venal. He was among the most trustworthy and moral men that I have ever known, though many of his values were anathema to me. We came into conflict at times outside of the training hall, because, stiff- necked (or perhaps acting with integrity), I refused to submit on a personal level regarding matters I believed not truly relevant to my training. However, there was never any payback during practice, even when we were in the midst of a personal dispute. Training was regarded as practice for the trials of life, not life itself, and only a weakling would violate that space with petty personal disputes.
We bowed upon entering, we bowed to the gods in the shrine, we bowed to each other, and we bowed to our ancestors who paid for this tradition in blood. I, a stiff-necked Jew, whose own culture myths extolled the man or woman who died rather than bow to anyone but G-d: I bowed. And this is how the warrior is forged. In bowing, in reigi (translated as ‘etiquette, the word really means the ‘obligation to respect’), and in deep abiding trust.
Practice was so severe that within my thirteen years in Japan, of perhaps 70 students, only four of us remained. We suffered injuries at times, even broke each other’s bones. I can tell the weather through a knot of scar tissue under my skin, which aches before rain. When injured, we never blamed each other. We transcended, therefore, the child’s whine that demands that someone must be at fault when one is hurt, even when there is no one to blame. Instead we apologized for our own clumsiness in not avoiding the blow.
I became bound to him and to my few fellow students, because our instructor modeled the warrior’s ideal. He was as autocratic as any drill sergeant, but rather than lording it over us, brutalizing and remaining inviolate in a way all too common in modern armies – and in many modern martial arts, as well – he offered himself to us, literally, for our training. He put himself at danger for us to make us stronger. The result is that what started as a bunch of individuals, engaged in a selfish pursuit of power, became a group, bound by ties created in sacrifice, fear, ecstasy, and trust, and dare I say, a kind of love.
That is the beauty of the warrior.
The horror is this. When self-sacrifice is thus modeled and lived, one can lose the self that stands apart and makes moral decisions. One can be bound to any cause, particularly one espoused by one’s senior, one’s mentor, one who has given so much, to whom one feels so in debt. The Japanese warrior felt such a deep sense of obligation that his only protest against injustice became not revolt, but suicide, done by the most painful means known, to demonstrate that it was a protest rather than an escape.
One gets in the habit, for lack of a better phrase, of glorying in throwing oneself away. As in Kipling’s poem, “Harp Song of the Dane Women,” which starts, “What is a woman that you forsake her and the hearth-fire and the home-acre, to go with the old gray widow-maker,” one can throw love aside, be beyond grief, at least the grief which demands we turn from our path. Implacable will in the service of another is the ideal, an unyielding refusal to give in to the demands of pain and fear, a maintenance of a prickly sense of honor that you not be found at fault by your comrades and mentors. For it is your comrades who allow you to feel yourself to be more than a solitary spark encased in a bag of flesh, but instead, through memory of your honorable acts, deathless, part of a living entity which lives beyond you in time and in spirit.
The ideal state of the warrior, then, is truly beyond love and grief. This honor and pride makes the warrior far less likely than the common man-at-arms to sink to committing atrocities, at least for personal reasons, but it must be said that if it seems required for the cause, the warrior will readily commit the worst atrocities as well. And war is bigger than the warrior anyway – only so much fear and rage can be held before he, too, hates all not with him as mere things in his path.
Ultimately, the warrior’s goal is to become a perfect instrument. The agency of this is an amalgam of some of the finest aspects of humanity: love, joy, ecstasy and self-sacrifice. These finest aspects can lead us to the worst ends.
But there is a step apart from that archaic end, a step beyond the path of the so-called warrior. It is a turning back to humanity, to simple manhood.
This is a different kind of humanity than that of the man I was thirty some years ago. I learned of my own capacity to betray both others and myself through the noblest of intentions: in seeking immortality through sacrifice; immortality through the bonds of the group, through the bonds of the just cause; and finally, through the ecstatic freedom from fear and human demands that one sometimes achieves in the heat of combat. I have turned aside to embrace frailty, gentility, love and grief, and as best I can despite my fear, my own death. I thus attempt to live what I believe is both the warrior’s hope and his ultimate redemption – the words of Rabbi Hillel – “In a land where there are no men, strive thou to be a man.”
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