Early on, after ten or 12 years, I became interested in shugyo 修行, and practiced it. I would train on my own for hours at a time, until I could not move. Then I would continue for a while longer. I led my group in ten-hour workouts in the snow. “Like a karate sesshin?”, my Zen teacher asked. That’s right. I understood, from what I read in the lore and literature, and from teachers whom I met and trusted, that this leads to a good result, deepening insight, breakthrough.
Shugyo is practiced in many traditional Japanese arts, including martial arts. 修 “shu” means discipline. 行“gyo” is going or journeying. In Buddhism it connotes “carya” – austerities taken on for the sake of training. Shugyo can translate the Sanskrit word साधन “sadhana”, spiritual exertion towards a goal. This deep spiritual striving is familiar in many traditions, east and west.
The premise, as I understood it, was that by exhausting our body and mind, we would naturally jettison our habitual formation of distracting thought and emotion, drop off categorical thinking and the conceptual and linguistic overlay we impose on experience, and be in the present moment. This, done skillfully, was to lead to the path of seeing, to insight, to the critical transformative threshold on the path of liberation. In the dojo or the zendo, this was the best way.
Severe training was not separate from physical skill. The physical was a means to transcendence. Body and mind as one. My practice of shugyo was fruitful, in mental and physical unification, in the development of will, endurance and skill. But I found it was limited in its transformative effect.
The main flaw is that it conceives of training as a special dimension of life. For most people it is. That is not bad. You train, then you go home. You learn to do your job, then you do it. Then you have time off. We all have many things to do, family responsibilities, other things that need our attention. We do them, do them well, and when we are finished, we rest. Shugyo can be built in to this framework.
But in a life dedicated to training there is no down time. There is rest and recovery. There are obstacles and burdens and opportunities. But those are all included in training. They become part of training when they are understood to be training, and to contribute, at every instant, to the objective of your training.
From the moment you wake up until you go to sleep, and even then, while you are sleeping, it is still training time.
This is not possible to do or to understand at the beginning. At the beginning, even during specially dedicated training time, like during a class, people fade in and out of training. Minds wander. Attention is shallow, fragmented, sporadic.
But if the value of sustained, present-time attention is pointed out, and you work at maintaining and deepening your attention, that changes. Your attention becomes stable, clear, deep, effortless, natural. We train our minds as we train our bodies. They are not the same. But they are never separate. We train them together.
Continuous training and severe training are different. They can be complementary. If you are training to prevail in combat you need to push your body and mind beyond the demands of ordinary, civilized life.
For young men, coming of age, before the advent of the modern world, was marked by a transcendent test of endurance, one that challenged young men beyond anything they imagined they could do. They sometimes entered their rite of passage without knowing what they would face, or what they would need to do to make it through. Pain, fear and exhaustion were a given. Facing difficulties undeterred was required. The possibility of failure, and the ostracism and rejection that would follow, compelled total effort.
These two modes of intense training – severe training and continual training – do not exclude one another. They are both difficult. But continual training is more advanced.
Both take dedication. But severe training need not transcend conventional values and rewards. It can be done successfully within the conventions of measurable performance, personal achievement, social status and gain. That is good, a necessary step in a life of refinement, maturity and achievement. But it is provisional. Over time, continual training pervades all experience. It becomes natural. Not as an act of will but as a way of life. Continual training becomes pervasive training. It requires more thorough preparation, and it relies on deeper conditioning – physical, mental and moral.
It requires a deeper vision of what is possible and what is worth doing.
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Post copyright © 2025 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo, in the mountains of western NC.
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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