You can train to fight, to be fearless, to dominate and to win. That’s good. Especially if your life is guided by virtue so the fight you enter is righteous.
You can train to have fun, be fit, join a group of good people, enter a tradition, find a teacher, feel challenged, alive and strong. That’s good too. Especially if you and your group, your tradition and your teacher, uphold values that are good, and technique that works.
Over a lifetime of training, you will see people go right, and people go wrong.
It is easy to get sidetracked.
What drew them at the beginning was they loved the training, the vitality and the camaraderie, connecting with a new culture, doing something hard, overcoming, getting strong and sharp, becoming who they wanted to be.
But then, it is easy for people to get sidetracked when they open their own dojo, take on commitments that go beyond the scope of training, and stake their hearts on competing for something else. They buy the idea that what matters is being admired, well-known, influential, and big. Those things might be good. But they can be an obstacle, a dead end, or a disaster. Because what you have to do to achieve those things is different from what you need to do to master your art.
Being big is different from being serious, and not everyone in your target market wants to do real, challenging, transformative training. It is easy to pander. You do need to meet people where they are, and help them achieve what they want to achieve in a way that works with their interests and commitments and limitations. But that can change the way you approach your own training, and where you devote your effort, every day. Without noticing, without meaning to, it is easy to get addicted to flattery, status, money, attention and the other seductions you encounter down that road.
Then the art you once loved turns into a racket. The relationships with people who come sincerely to learn, little by little, can become deceptive, manipulative, predatory or parasitic. That degrades everyone involved and turns noble traditions to something artificial, and encourages good people to be crass or corrupt.
That is not the only way to do it. But it happens. It is conventional, and accepted. People have been convinced that this is the way, it is good, necessary, validating, or exciting. These unexamined, often unnoticed assumptions make it seem that this is just the way things are. It is not.
It takes a long time to refine your body and mind and master them. The process does not lend itself to hurry, performance, checking boxes or maximizing profit.
It may be rare to meet a person who understands what you have to offer, and rarer still to meet someone who values it, and wants it.
If you compromise for expedience, you will never meet that kind of person. If you train sincerely, you might.
Either way, you will change for good. You will have the rare chance to come face to face with a world that is noble and beautiful. You might realize the potential in your own heart and in this world, a goal which generations of practitioners set out to find. You will have access to the real rewards of training, of living an accomplished human life.
Here’s the thing people miss until it is too late: No tribal allegiance, no group identity, no alliance, betrayal, bribe, threat, deception or promise can bestow it. And none of those things can take away what you have rightfully earned.
If you can follow a good path of training then training is coming home. In solitude or in company. Every kata, every class, every time. It is a good way of life. Then you can realize the pure, strong spirit that drew you to training in the beginning, and which does not end.
***
Post copyright © 2025 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo, in the mountains of western NC.
Photo of a detail from “Ken Zen Ichi Nyo”, the motto of Nagamine Shoshin’, brushed by Sakiyama Sogen, seen at Mountain Karate.
***
read True Karate Dō by Jeffrey Brooks
“One of the best books I’ve read in years, inviting and compelling. Jeff Brooks moves effortlessly from martial arts to Buddhism to consciousness studies, self-transformation, and related fields in this wide-ranging and Illuminating study that has much to offer both novice explorers and veteran practitioners. A splendid achievement.”— Philip Zaleski, Editor, The Best Spiritual Writing series