JUDO: THE GENTLE TAO
BY ALAN WATTS
"Man at his birth is supple and tender, but in death, he is rigid and
hard. Thus, suppleness
and tenderness accompany life, but rigidity and hardness
accompany death."
I have just been reading from Lao-tzu on the philosophy of the strength
of weakness. It
is a strange thing, I think, how it is men in the West do not realize
how much softness
is strength. One of old Lao-tzu's favorite analogies was water. He spoke
of water as the
weakest of all things in the world, and yet there is nothing to be
compared with it in
overcoming what is hard and strong. You can cut water with a knife. It
lets the knife go
right through, but when the knife is withdrawn there's not even the
trace of a wound.
Lao-tzu also said that while being a man, one should retain a certain
essential
feminine element, and he who does this will become a channel for the
whole world.
The ideal of the hundred percent tough guy, the rigid, rugged fellow
with muscles like
rocks, is really a weakness. Probably we assume this sort of tough
exterior as a hard
shell to protect ourselves so much from the outside as from fear of
weakness on the
inside. What happens if an engineer builds a completely rigid bridge?
If, for example,
the Golden Gate Bridge or George Washington Bridge didn't sway in the
wind, if they
had no give, no yielding, they would come crashing down. And so you can
always be
sure that when a man pretends to be one hundred percent man, he's in
doubt of his
manhood. If he can allow himself to be weak, he can allow himself what
is really the
greatest strength, not only of human beings, but of all living things.
It is upon the
philosophy of the strength of weakness that came from China to Japan
through the
migration of Zen Buddhism that there has largely been inspired one of
the most
astonishing forms of self defense known as Judo, or perhaps more
popularly, Ju-jitsu.
The word Judo is fascinating because it means Ju- the gentle, do- way.
Do is the
Japanese way of pronouncing the Chinese Tao, and so it is the gentle
Tao, the
philosophy of the Tao as applied to self defense. Now this philosophy
has various
components, and one of the most basic things to the whole practice of
Judo is an
understanding of balance. Balance, indeed, is a fundamental idea in
Taoist philosophy.
The philosophy of the Tao has a basic respect for the balance of nature.
You don't
upset that balance. You try to find out what it is and go along with it.
In other words
you avoid such mistakes as the wholesale slaughter of an insect pest, of
the
introduction of rabbits into a country like Australia without thought as
to whether the
rabbit has a natural enemy, because through such interference with the
balance of
nature you find yourself in trouble. So the philosophy of balance is the
number one
thing that all students of Judo have to learn.
You may illustrate this principle using a ball. Wherever one pushes the
ball it yields,
but it never loses its balance. It is the safest form in the world;
completely contained,
and never off center. And thus to be completely contained, and never put
off center by
anything, this is what is aimed at in Zen.
This is also symbolized sometimes in the figure of the legendary founder
of Zen,
Bohdidharma. Japanese toy makers represent him as a little dumpy toy
figure
weighted in such a way that however you hit it, it always comes upright
again. And so
in the same way the expert in Zen, as well as in Judo, must be a man who
is never
fazed. He is never brought to a point of doubt where he hesitates, where
there's an
interval between the action of life and his response to it. Now if we
look at these
principles of Judo the problem of balance is easily demonstrated with a
question of
lifting a heavy roll of material. We would be foolish to try and just
pick it up from the
top because that shows no understanding of the laws of balance. If you
want to lift
something, go below its center of gravity. Put your shoulder to it,
undermine it, and
lift it so. And that principle goes throughout Judo. Part of the
understanding of
balance in Judo is to learn to walk in such a way that you are never off
center. That is
to say your legs form a triangle, and your body is on the apex of it,
and when you turn
you always try to keep your feet approximately under you shoulders, and
in this way
you are never of balance.
The second principle, beyond keeping balance, and understanding balance,
is not to
oppose strength to strength. When one is attacked by the enemy you do
not oppose
him. Instead you yield to him, just like the matador yields to the bull,
and you use his
strength and the principle of balance to bring about his downfall.
Supposing, for
example, there is a blow coming at me from a certain direction. Instead
of defending
myself, and pushing the blow off, the idea in judo is to carry the blow
away. The knee
goes out, catching the adversary below his point of balance, and he
drops with a 'bang'
brought about on his own initiative, and your cunning. The same attitude
of relaxed
gentleness is most beautifully seen, for instance, in watching cats.
When a cat falls of
a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and
lands on the ground
with a heavy thud. And if, for example, a cat were about to fall off a
tree and suddenly
made up its mind that it didn't want to fall at all and became tense, it
would be just a
bag of broken bones upon landing.
So, in the same way, it is the philosophy of Zen that we are all falling
off a tree. As a
matter of fact, the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice
and we are
falling, and there is nothing that can stop it. So instead of lining in
a state of chronic
tension, and clinging to all sorts of things which are actually falling
with us because
the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat.