'Sooner or later, I will finish'


30th July 2011


There are many wonderful stories about Yamaoka Tesshu. Here are a few of them.


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Japan began the year with civil war. It was January 1868: a few weeks before, the shogun had handed his powers back to the emperor but the transition soon unravelled into fighting.

The shogun retreated from Kyoto to his stronghold in Edo, the city that would become Tokyo. It did not take the imperial army long to follow.

While shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu did not seem keen to continue fighting, any emissary sent to negotiate a surrender was bound to be captured or killed before reaching the imperial command centre about 150km away.

It looked as if Edo – and its million or so inhabitants – would be plunged into war. And they might well have been if not for a 33-year-old samurai in the shogun’s personal guard.

Yamaoka Tesshu, who volunteered for the mission, was soon behind enemy lines. He found the streets lined with troops. Another man might have tried to travel covertly but Tesshu just walked down the middle of the road.

When he reached a place where he thought imperial commander Saigo Takamori might be staying, he announced himself by bellowing, ‘I have come from the house of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, enemy of the court!’

Tesshu later recounted that there were probably a hundred people in the house but they simply stared at him.

It turned out that Saigo was not there so Tesshu carried on walking. None of the sentries stopped him and he finally made his way to the command centre. Something about Tesshu made Saigo, himself a figure of considerable presence, listen.

After they worked out the preliminary terms of surrender, Saigo remarked: ‘I should have you thrown into prison for infiltrating the camp.’

‘Exactly what I would have wished for,’ said Tesshu. ‘Please do so.’

Saigo laughed. ‘Why don’t we have a drink?’

They had more than one. Saigo later said of the younger man: ‘He has no interest in reputation, nor in position or money. He has no need even of life itself. How is one to deal with a man like that?’

That baffling man, Yamaoka Tesshu, was born on July 23 in 1836. After being orphaned at the age of 17, he left his five younger brothers with his relatives, giving them almost all the money he had inherited to pay for his siblings’ care.

He rarely had much money because he was always donating it to charity. Rather than pursue wealth, he pursued his obsessions: swordsmanship, calligraphy and Zen. He found time for these even in his years of public office, when he served first in the new imperial government then as an aide to the emperor.

It was Saigo who recommended him for the post. Others protested – place a man who had once served the court’s enemy beside the head of that court? Was Saigo mad? But, believing that Tesshu would be a good influence on the young emperor, Saigo insisted.

Tesshu agreed to serve at court for 10 years. Once that time was up, he was free to devote all his time to his obsessions. His daily schedule: swordsmanship from 6am to 9am, calligraphy and painting from 10am to 4pm or 5pm, then Zen meditation or sutra-copying at night.

To Tesshu, these things were not separate; poor swordsmanship or calligraphy reflected a lack of spiritual growth.

Though he was reckoned a master swordsman by most, the memory of a bout he had lost when he was 28 haunted him. If the conversation lapsed, he would cross two pipes like swords, seeking the reason for his defeat. Answers sometimes suggested themselves to him at night. He would wake his wife up and get her to hold a wooden sword while he wielded another. (It has not been recorded whether his wife ever, at such moments, smacked him with the sword.)

He also tackled the problem through meditation. And it was during contemplation that the answer finally arrived when he was 45 years old. This is how he described the moment: ‘I reached the state of no-enemy… As I recalled my previous notions of skilfulness and ineptness, fighting and no fighting, I realised that those dichotomies have nothing to do with the opponent; all those things are creations of one’s mind. If there is self, there is an enemy; if there is no self, there is no enemy.’

In its original state, the mind is as clear as a still pond. If the moon hangs over the pond, the water simply reflects it back: an instant and appropriate reaction. But if the pond is stirred up and the water clouded, it cannot do this.

To dwell on an opponent’s supposed strength or weakness is to stir up the mind. If the mind thinks the opponent is stronger, it becomes afraid and the body, tense. Neither can respond properly. Caught by the image of the enemy it has created, the mind stops – and becomes stuck.

Galvanised by this realisation, Tesshu established his own school of swordsmanship. He called it Muto: No Sword. ‘ “No sword” means “no mind”; “no mind” means “the mind that abides nowhere”. If the mind stops, the opponent appears; if the mind remains fluid, no enemy exists,’ he wrote in an explanation of the school’s name.

The training at his school was, like his own, arduous. Beginners had to spend at least three years on only one move: raining blows down on the opponent’s head. This may be why there are only a handful of Muto swordsmen today. But Tesshu’s disciples and their students played a great role in the development of kendo, the modern form of Japanese swordsmanship.

Tesshu’s achievements in swordsmanship were immense. So were his achievements in calligraphy. On average, he brushed about 500 sheets a day though his record was 1,300 pieces.

In the final eight years of his life, he produced at least a million works, mainly to raise funds for charity.

A friend once commented on the volume of his output. ‘I’ve just begun,’ Tesshu replied. ‘It will take a long time to reach 35 million.’ The figure referred to the number of people in Japan at the time; his brush was a way of helping fellow travellers on the road.

The amount of time he spent on his three obsessions might seem self-indulgent. A prominent activist once asked him: ‘When you meditate, are you serving your lord? Are you serving the nation? The people?’

But Tesshu understood that to develop the self was to serve others and that true service could not be accomplished without devoting time to the self.

Two years before his death from stomach cancer, the 51-year-old Tesshu declared that he was going to copy out the whole Buddhist canon. A friend who heard this was astounded: ‘Even if you live to be a hundred, you couldn’t possibly copy more than half.’

Tesshu assured his friend that he was not mad. He’d soon be exchanging this body for another, he said. ‘Sooner or later, somewhere, someplace, I will finish.’