Traditions. Dave Lowry

particularly among those who have come to believe their stances are immovable. But try it somewhere in the radius of pushes, even a very moderate force will break down your stance. Don’t worry. Your failure to maintain your balance has nothing to do with any flaws in your practice or in the stance. It has to do with the shikaku that is inherent in any stance and in any human’s posture.

      At its most basic level, shikaku maybe thought of as the angle (or angles, to be more exact) where an upright human is vulnerable in terms of balance. It is, in a kinesiological sense, his blind side. In a left front stance as one might take in karate, your partner can slam his sweeping left foot against your left foot all day long in a lateral motion, to no avail. But if he hooks his foot slightly and sweeps at a shallow angle to his right rear corner, you’ll go down like you have been hit with a cattle prod. In that stance, that direction, your own left front, is the angle of your shikaku. In aikido against a wrist grab you rotate your seized hand as if you were going to strike your attacker in his face with your tegatana, or “hand sword.” Doing so causes his upper body to twist away. You are able to pin his arm in the basic aikido technique of ikkyo. But it isn’t until the aikidoka learns to shift his body center slightly at the onset, to readjust his extension of power against the opponent’s dead zone, that ikkyo and every other aikido technique really work.

      As you have probably discovered by my descriptions so far, shikaku is a difficult concept of the budo to describe. Too often, exponents have only a fragmented view of shikaku, and so they are not able to exploit it fully in an opponent or minimalize its effects in themselves. The stance experiment described above is illustrative of just a small facet of shikaku, for example. Against a stable, stationary position (such as a stance), it is possible for even an unskilled person to find another’s shikaku. Rotate 360° around him, pushing at every angle of the circle and you’ll eventually strike it. That, however, is a controlled experiment, where there is no moving resistance. Try finding the shikaku against someone who is moving, shifting his balance point constantly along with his stances, closing and lengthening his distance from you (and trying to find your shikaku as well). That is shikaku in real life.

      Since, except for very good meditation disciples and your average dedicated couch potato, we tend to be mobile in our waking lives, our shikaku are mobile, too. The angles of vulnerability in our posture are in constant flux and flow and just as importantly, they are multidimensional. This latter can be observed when the tai chi expert seems to pull in a partner in “pushing hands,” drawing him forward and down and then shooting him up and back, uprooting his stance dramatically. In karate, a properly executed rising block takes advantage of an attacker’s dead zone, up and to the rear of the attacker’s punching arm.

      Perhaps the best-known illustration of shikaku is a portrait of the eccentric swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. Gripping both his long and short swords, Musashi’s posture and countenance are electric with power. His slit-eyed stare is furious; wholly concentrated. Any number of his biographers and interpreters of Musashi’s writings have suggested there is some meaning in the posture of the warrior in this remarkable portrait. Most of these interpretations are drawn from the discipline of kendo, an art incidentally, that Musashi never practiced. I would, rather presumptuously, like to add my own thoughts about that painting.

      To me, Musashi’s portrait is like some kind of koan, one of the mental/spiritual quandaries posed to disciples of Zen by their masters. It is a simple rendering. Musashi stands erect, dressed plainly in kimono and a haori vest, and his swords, long and short, are gripped in a position that does not seem very martial or threatening at all. They appear to droop in front of him. The expression on his face is, as I said, fiercely concentrated. But it does not seem to be directed at any outer enemy. It is enigmatic; fascinating the more you look at it. Musashi seems to be locked in a profound internal struggle of sorts. Perhaps it is only my imaginative interpretation, but when I contemplate his famous portrait, I see a man struggling with what must have been for someone in his profession, a fundamental obstacle. Musashi stands alone, utterly absorbed, seeking a way to overcome the limitations of shikaku. Think of it. No matter how he stands or holds the sword—even to the extent of taking one for each hand—he must still contend with the dead zone. He must still acknowledge that, as a human, like all humans, he can never be completely invulnerable. From a purely technical point of view, from the perspective of combat strategy, this must have been a psychological monkey clinging to the back of every professional warrior like Musashi. Whatever kamae (combative posture or attitude) they assumed, there was always the shikaku. There was a weakness to every stance, to every position of holding the sword.

      Moreover, Musashi was not merely another swordsman. He was as well an artist, a philosopher. And so I wonder if Musashi was contemplating, in this stern-eyed portrait, not just the shikaku he faced in combat but the vulnerabilities he faced in life. Was he considering the unexpected angle of attack of an enemy’s sword? Or the surprise assaults to which all of us are susceptible: illness, heartbreak, loneliness, death? “How would you respond to this attack?” one of my sensei asked me when he was teaching me one morning, and he grabbed my wrist. I performed a pivot and locked his wrist, using the grip against him. “And this one?” He punched and I countered, punching back, turning his strike aside with my blow and stopping my fist on the spot just to the side of his chin where it would cause the most nerve damage if it connected. He paused and looked at me. “And how about this attack?” he asked. “How about if you have a child someday,” he said, “and the doctors tell you he has an incurable case of childhood cancer. How would you handle that attack?”

      I wonder if, in devoting most of his life to overcoming the limitations of shikaku in the art of the sword, Musashi had not entered into a struggle as well on a different plane. I wonder if his training in the martial arts eventually led to a deeper understanding of the shikaku of life. The possibility that it might, in my opinion, is reason enough to head off for the dojo for still another training session.

       Counting to a Thousand

      This was the question: “Is there anything more irritating than a person who has dabbled a year or so in this art, a year or two in another and who then thinks himself an all-around competent martial artist?” It was posed conversationally by one of my seniors at the dojo, to another budoka, also far my senior.

      “Yes,” the second replied, “there is. It is the fellow who has trained several years in one art, who then thinks of himself as an all-around competent martial artist.”