Reverend Greg

The Know it All Ninja

This last weekend I attended the super-secret Ninja training camp held at the old Nike missile base in San Francisco. Buyu Camp is a yearly event featuring several top Ninjutsu instructors including ex-Marine Jack Hoban who is one of the earliest non-Japanese students to train under Masaaki Hatsumi, the Grandmaster of the Bujinkan.

Friday evening’s session is taught exclusively by Jack and while most years’s training offers new perspectives on our art of Budo Taijutsu, this year was an even bigger bang for the buck. Jack has been focusing on Kukan or space in his evolving personal perspective on this art. This weekend we trained in concepts and variations that truly surprised me.

The funny thing is, when you’ve been doing something for a long time you don’t expect to run into a new slant that literally leaves you thinking “duh, why couldn’t I have figured that out?”, which is exactly what happened. We worked with some very basic techniques, the basic techniques of the Bujinkan School which we call the Kihon Happo or, basic eight techniques.

While I was happily being surprised and wowed by Jack’s latest tricks I could overhear other Shidoshi teaching lower ranking students. What I couldn’t figure out was, why were they teaching? I am confident that what Jack had to offer was hot off the press, concepts from, or inspired by what Soke Hatsumi is teaching in Japan based on this years theme, Roppo Kuji no Biken, and I know these particular Shidoshi are not personal students of Jack, who lives, works, and trains in New Jersey. So why were they so much more informed that they could actually teach and explain what Jack had taught only minutes before?

This is, of course, human nature. In our struggles to be who we wish to be, or even more importantly, to appear how we wish to appear, we work harder at knowing it all than we do at learning something new.

Epiphanies are important to me, like a small child who repeatedly spins themselves around to enjoy the sensation of dizziness; I enjoy having my perspective refreshed, even sometimes rebooted. Unfortunately in order to be open to that experience one must first admit to oneself that one does not already know everything. This is, I am sure, how Jack Hoban thinks and trains. Leaders in SGI whom I have trusted throughout the years seem to have this quality as well. Others are busy just already knowing it.

Everyone must find their own path in the end. Often it is our nature to stand still on our path of individual self-discovery, especially when we are feeling uncomfortable with who we feel we are. This can be a dangerous thing to do though, especially with something so fraught with peril as religion.

With martial arts, especially with a living school such as the Bujinkan who’s Grandmaster is still alive and evolving, the risk of knowing it all is that we become ossified and stuck in our own time and place. We can see this in each other; I know I can see it in people I train with every year at Buyu. There are those who, while capable and talented, are stuck in the taijutsu of the 1990’s or even 1980's.

More fearsome are religious leaders who become stuck in time, clinging to past conflicts that have outlived their usefulness. Even worse are those cult survivors whom, having been unable to manage their relationship with the organizations with whom they once practiced, become militant in a sad effort to shift the blame for their misfortune to the org. They all become, I believe, enemies of the Buddhist law, deceptive and held in place by their own misperception, regardless of whether they know it all or not.

Of course having said this I acknowledge that I may just be one of the few that truly doesn’t know it. Maybe I’m like the stoner high on pot watching Monty Python’s Holy Grail for the 43rd time laughing so hard his sides hurt. Should that be true, it’s ok. Life is not a contest or a comparative game. Unless you can convince others to give you their money there is no pay-off for being a know-it-all, and in the end it’s not much fun.

Rev. Greg

Posted by revgreg at July 1, 2004 09:39 AM