Martial arts and their misinterpretation

A couple of days ago, when I was writing the address of my dojo's website onto the pavement with chalk (with the aim of drawing attention to martial arts, especially to aikido), a little kid was coming by with his mother. As he saw what I was doing he asked his mother what I was writing there. After having received the answer from her, he immediately asked her mother "What is aikido?" I was curious about what people not doing martial arts might know about aikido so I waited patiently until the woman said something. She tried, I think to the best of her knowledge, to give an answer even a child can easily understand, and she surprised me with the following answer: "Well, aikido is some kind of fighting sport." This was a surprise because I had never thought about aikido as "fighting", and certainly never thought about it as a sport. I could only say something like this: "Well, aikido in reality is not fighting and not even a sport." Starting with this short interaction we had a nice talk there in which I could explain a little bit more about what was characteristic about aikido, and what was the deeper meaning behind it.

The above small story made it clear for me what I had been observing for quite some time, that is, how much people can misinterpret, misunderstand martial arts, and how badly they can judge them. I know that eastern philosophy, that is in almost all martial arts, doesn't mean a lot to many people, but I think it's still worth looking at this misunderstanding a little be more deeply.

Many of the people from the "street" think that most of the eastern martial arts are only about dominating others, about destroying others. This is completely the opposite of reality. The main idea of martial arts is to live according to the concept of 'budo'. To an everyday person, budo means martial art, and the direct translation of it is 'the way of the warrior'. If we go a bit into this, the meaning of the word budo is opposite to what is perceived by the general public. It is the 'art of not fighting'. However, the misinterpretation of the word is not due to some random event. Most of the eastern martial arts got to the West as sports. These arts, now sports (e.g. karate, judo, taekwondo), could only gain popularity through competitions. Because of this, the view about martial arts as fighting sports had become widespread. The aim of competition is that sportsmen and -women (I wouldn't call them martial artists any more) should prove that they are better, better prepared, stronger then others. Behind the learning of the 'killer' techniques, it is the philosophy that creates the opportunity to learn a real martial art.

In today's fast, success-oriented world, where competitions rule and the aim of people is to get above others, unfortunately, most of the people often don't care about what others might experience through their defeats. Because of this surface view, and because of the blinding nature of 'success', people often can't see what they lose despite winning.

If we examine the relationship of winning and losing as well as emotions attached to them, we can realise that these just don't lead towards creating harmony in one's life. The winner is happy, is full with good feelings, satisfied, but the loser is sad and unhappy. You can tell to a person who has just lost that coming second is still a very nice result, t but hey will still look at themselves as losers. There is a tension between winner and loser, and their relationship moves towards total opposition. The aim of life, and that of people, should be to create and maintain peace and harmony at all levels: within themselves, with other people, with everything. This would be a winner-to-winner relationship in which neither of the parties feels defeated, where both of them are able to acknowledge the other without bad feelings. In order to be able to live this way in our everyday lives, one way is to start studying a martial art. It doesn't really matter which art you choose, the bases of all of them are the same. The differences are results of individual masters,' teachers' way of thinking, teaching. Martial arts are about unity. They try to achieve that in different ways, and get there sooner or later. As O'Sensei Morihei Ueshiba said:

"There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit - love."

I'd like to close my post about martial arts with the above quote, I hope it helps the reader to understand the real meaning of a martial art better, to clear up the issue of misinterpretation of martial arts.