bodymind, iaido kendo

9 may

Since I have memory, I have been practicing one sport or another. In my teens I was supposed to hold some promise as a tennis player, but after a particularly emotionally heavy training I threw my racquet into the court and promised myself never touch one again, promise that I actually fulfilled, so ending my not yet born career. Not very surprising, since my trainer to be was my father. I guess that is one of the risks of being stubborn and with two parents being sport teachers. Well, perhaps our failed interaction prevented me the disillusion of later on realizing that my supposed capacities as a tennis player were yet another mirage. 

What I was not saved from was from hearing, from a very early age, that thing that the greeks supposedly held as a principle, the mens sana in corpore sano thing. So I got to play and practice whatever sport crossed our paths. I still wonder if the dictum is a correlation, since the sanity of my mind has been not infrequently questioned, but anyhow, sports I do. In the last few years I have been caught by iaido first and kendo later, two complementary forms of japanese fencing. I certainly hope to go on practicing them, until I die in (hopefully quite) some decades from now.

One other thing that my parents passed on is the love, or at least the curiosity, for philosophy. Just like with sports, I am not gifted. But I am certainly in my happy place meanwhile trying to figure out some dilemma that somebody, probably extremely intelligent and with lots of time to waste, posed. So, having expend a life being a dilettante reader of philosophy, now and then things click together. Like few days ago, when reading “Reflections on a Katana – The Japanese Pursuit of Performative Mastery” by Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza. Most of the paper is on performance, but the introduction mentions that the japanese has not brought anything new to the world, but has improved to levels unseen before many things generated elsewhere. So the author goes on and poses that this search for excellency has merged theory and practice in such ways that, certainly in the martial arts, the good old western dilemma of body and mind is not even relevant, it is bypassed “a la aikido”. Indeed, it is not so important to figure out what and how are the details and the causal relations between the body and the mind, that is to enter the ontological analysis of the dilemma, as we have tried in the west, if we can go for the integration of both. 

So then things clicked, of course. The japanese, or at least the japanese people that practice this iaido and kendo thing, have been practicing the good old greek thing the whole time. Mens sana in corpore sano indeed. How many times have I not heard, as one example in between many, that the physical form of courtesy that we practice in our martial art shapes our courteous mind!? I have been told to understand this as more than a correlation or even a causation, but as an intrinsic equality, an integration. And so another thing clicked. Zen, the form of budhism linked to the samurai and to iaido and to kendo, displays a constant mockery for too much thinking, as most of my fellow iaidokas and kendokas do. Actually Zen is not at all about thinking. Would that be because thinking explicitly feed one of the sides of that dilemma? to think that thinking is the solution... would be to choose, wouldn’t it? and that is not what the japanese seems to do. They don’t tackle dilemmas at all, they integrate them into something unique and better. Thinking is not it. It is not the mind, it is not the body. It’s both. Mens sana in corpore sano right there.

But now! How far can we take this? is an ugly body an ugly person? or even worse and perhaps even more unlikely, is a pretty body a pretty person? Now that, that is enough for some forthcoming text, I think.