Issai Chozan's eighteenth century martial art parable, Neko no myoojutsu ("The cat's eerie skill"), for example, portrayed a vision of ultimate martial prowess that entailed being in such perfect harmony with the natural order that one transcended any need or desire to fight.
But Issai and his mid-Tokugawa contemporaries were scarcely the first to contend that martial training can and should reach beyond physical skills and technical expertise. Sixteenth century instructional writings, as well as early 17th century texts...suggest that this notion was already well established during the late Sengoku era. Careful consideration of the circumstances, under which the ryuuha bugei first appeared, moreover, strongly suggests that these arts were never meant to the straightforward tools of war—that, visions of martial art as a vehicle to broad personal education shaped and characterized this phenomenon from it's nascence.
It is clear, first of all, that ryuuha bugei could not have accounted for more than a tiny portion of 16th century military training. Estimates based on surviving documentation from the period suggest that there were at most a few dozen ryuuha around during the 16th Century. Armies of that era, however, regularly mobilized tens of thousands of men….
Ryuuha bugei must, therefore, have been a specialized activity pursued by only a minute percentage of Sengoku warriors.
Nor did the skills that late medieval bugeisha concentrated on developing have a great deal of direct applicability to 16th century warfare. In fact, even the earliest ryuuha bugei were, at best, anachronistic in this regard….
Thus, ryuuha bugei, which focused on developing prowess and personal combat, emerged and flourished in almost inverse proportion to the value of skilled individual fighters on the battlefield. Moreover, the weapon that played the most prominent role in this new phenomenon--the Sword--played a decidedly minor role in medieval warfare. Swords never became a key battlefield armament in Japan. They were, rather, supplementary weapons analogous to the side arms worn by modern soldiers. While they were also employed in combat, they were used far more often in street fights, robberies, assassinations and other (off battlefield) civil disturbances. Missile weapons--arrows, rocks and later bullets—dominated battles throughout the medieval period. Scholars and popular audiences alike have shown a remarkable reluctance to accept this reality and have attended instead to confound the symbolic importance of the sword to early modern bushi identity with prominence in medieval battles….
Why did ryuuha bugei emerge when they did--at a time when generalship, the ability to organize and direct large forces was rapidly coming to overshadow personal martial skills as the decisive element in battle, and the key to a successful military career? Why were there so few ryuuha bugei around during the Sengoku period and why did they proliferate so rapidly during the early Tokugawa period after the age of wars had passed?....
All these questions become much easier to answer if one sets aside the premise that ryuuha bugei originated as instruments for teaching workaday techniques of the battlefield. And indeed, there is little basis for that hoary assumption, beyond the fact that war was endemic in Japan when the first martial art schools appeared. The received wisdom rests, in other words, on post hoc ergo prompter hoc fallacy.
A growing body of evidence, on the other hand, points to the conclusion that ryuuha bugei and the pedagogical devices associated with it aimed from the start at conveying more abstract ideals of self-development and enlightenment. That is, there was no fundamental shift of purpose in martial art education between the late 16th and mid 17th centuries. Tokugawa period Budoo represented not a metamorphosis of late medieval martial art, but the maturation of it. Ryuuha bugei itself constituted a new phenomenon--a derivative, not a linear improvement, of earlier, more prosaic military training….
More importantly, however, the martial and other arts also shared a sense of ultimate—true—purpose defined in the medieval Japanese concept of michi or path. This construct, born of implications drawn from a world view common to Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, saw expertise in activities of all sorts--from games and sports to fine arts, from practical endeavors to religious factors--as possessing a universality deriving from its relationship to a common ultimate goal. It held concentrated specialization in any activity to be an equally valid route to attainment of universal truth asserting that all true paths must lead eventually to the same place and therefore complete mastery of even the most the trivial pursuits must yield the same rewards as can be found through the most profound. Ryuuha bugei, emerging in this cultural and most philosophically milieu, took its place alongside poetry, composition, incense judging, Noh drama, the tea ceremony, and numerous other michi….
It fostered character traits and tactical acumen that made those who practice it better warriors, but it's goals and ideals were more akin to those of liberal education than vocational training. That is, bugeisha, even in the Sengoku period had more in common with Olympic marksmanship competitors--training with specialized weapons to develop a esoteric levels of skill under particularized conditions--than with Marine riflemen. They also had as much—perhaps more--in common with Tokugawa period and modern martial artists than with the ordinary warriors of their own day.
Viewed in this light, the prominent role of the sword in medieval ryuuha bugei is much easier to understand. For, their secondary role in battlefield combat notwithstanding, swords achieved a singular status as heirlooms and symbols of power war, military skill and warrior identity….
This representational functional reflected in the popularization of the term hyoohoo (or heihoo)--which until late medieval times designated military science or martial arts in the broad sense—as a synonym for kenjutsu….
Specialization, formalization, and idealization of ryuuha bugei were not inherently deleterious to military preparedness, because this form of martial training had never been about readying troops for war. Military science writ large continued in the guise of Gungaku, while hyoohoo continued to focus on personal development ....
By the 18th century, bushi who had not made and even trained seriously for war in generations, had lost sight of any separation between martial art and military training. Indeed ryuuha bugei had long since overshadowed and supplanted other kinds of soldierly drill. For the bushi of the mid Tokugawa period and later, there was but one form of sophisticated combative training: the individual-centered, self-development oriented arts of the various ryuuha....
[This resulted in] the conviction that swordsmanship and other martial arts of the day descended directly from instruments of war, and that ryuuha bugei originated as vehicles to train warriors for battle….
Ironically, the martial arts today are closer in role and character--particular in their perceived role and character--to their remote medieval progenitors than to their late Tokugawa parents.
Likes: 
Ryuuha Bugei all soft and mushy, too!
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Originally Posted by ichibyoshi
