Aikido, Zen, and the Clear Response

The Case

An Aikido teacher is giving a mid-level student the opportunity to practice teaching. Toward that end, he asks a beginner to work beneath the mid-level student. During the course of the class, the beginning student sees his peers practicing with the black belts elsewhere on the mats and begins to grow irritable. He is a beginner in Aikido, but, with a few years of other arts under his belt, he is not a beginner in the martial arts in general; why should he be put in this position and denied the superior training?

At the end of the session, a senior student cordially asks how the beginner enjoyed the class. The student responded from the heart, honestly and spontaneously, that he thought the class was a waste of his time and his money, that he was not paying to be instructed by a mid-level student while others had one-on-one interaction with black belt students.

Later, the student wondered if his honest response was correct. During the next class, the student got the sense that the instructor was giving him the cold shoulder. He suspects that word got back to the instructor and that she was responding badly to his remark...

[Case is taken from a posting to AikiWeb, a source of Aikido discussion.]

Takemusu and the Clear Response

Aikido and Patriarchal Zen are both intently focused upon connecting the practitioner with his "center," the solid, immovable, relaxed core of his very being. A result of this connection is finding a spontaneous, perfectly clear, and appropriate response to your every situation. In Aikido, this is takemusu, the clear martial response to an attack on your body; in Zen, this is the clear response to a koan attacking your mind. The response of either is called appropriate in that it is crafted to restore harmony, or "original mind." But until these responses are understood, they are often severely misunderstood: Responses may seem well-formed and appropriate when in fact they seriously miss the mark. In Zen, some label this "monkey Zen"---imitating the form demonstrated by Zen masters without comprehending the essence; in Aikido, the difference between martial "dancing" and combat is easily felt, but not necessarily easily seen.

In the cited case, the student knows that his response was honest and appropriate. How then could the matter remain unsettled? How then could he question the situation after the fact or have regret?

In fact, the student's answer was an honest, pure reflection of his state of mind---his every word, action, and subsequent wonder were certainly a pure expression of that state---but was his answer from his center? Was the source of the answer beneath his calm, undefiled mind, or was the source of his answer his resonant resentment with his situation in class? Would we be more likely to characterize his answer as a response or as a reaction? Lastly, did his answer ultimately quell the situation, or did it exacerbate the situation?

Operating purely and spontaneously from the heart, or "being true to oneself," may make for great novels and movies, but it is not necessarily enlightened action; in fact, it may be the height of delusion. Believing the action to be enlightened or pure and clinging to the delusive state often only exacerbates the situation.

Working through these obstacles and tendencies is ultimately a matter of practice. Training can be long and arduous, and we do stumble, but practice is the place for this.