Community Concepts (January 2024)

01/06/2024

Dojo Philosophy for Everyday Life

This short and simple code of ethics is simple at first glance, but is so important to me that twenty years ago when I first decided to start my own dojo, I chose the name Unity Martial Arts to honor it. When I looked for a symbol for “Unity,” I searched for a Japanese kanji (since my teacher had enjoyed Japanese calligraphy) and found seven candidates! There are many ways to write this word in Japanese, since the concept has many facets. There are also many kinds and states of unity. I had to dig deeper and ask people who were fluent speakers in order to understand the difference. The primary division that I found made me even more sure that Unity was the name that I wanted for my dojo.

One of the most common, “Toitsu” meant unity with an emphasis on conformity. This made some sense since we were wearing the same uniform and learning the same curriculum, but it just didn’t feel right. The one I chose is “Gouitsu,” a combination of the symbol for harmony and the number one. It means many different things gathered under the same roof to become one. That was it. It was also the key to the phrase “unified in spirit.”

The idea of unity is a weak notion when it means that all of the individuals involved have to shed their personalities and differences in order to make a powerful connection. Then the whole can be no greater than a magnification of a few common principles. Such a simplified unity ends up taking from each participant in order to grow the whole while vilifying those aspects of the individual that don’t match. That has never been what Cuong Nhu was about.

When I was young, I first studied Cuong Nhu for six years. Then, after moving away to a state without a Cuong Nhu school, I tried out many other martial arts. They all had aspects that I enjoyed, that were effective, fun, and helped me grow. There was a common thread that didn’t sit right with me in almost every school I tried. There was a fear of change and of outside knowledge. We weren’t allowed to train with other schools or even with other schools of the same discipline. Infighting and rivalries between schools and styles were common, and distrustful silence seemed like the best relationship between schools that I could find.

When I moved back to my home school after seven years away, I felt all of that uneasiness melt when I walked through the door and saw my old master and the head of another school, beaming with joy while learning something new from a visiting master from another style. When I read “unified in spirit,” I see many people of different backgrounds with different skills and gifts, bringing all of those uncommon parts together to form an extraordinary whole. By being unified in spirit, we acknowledge that we have many differences, but that our work, our respect, and our love bind us together as one.