I've finally had enough time to read and at least start digesting the book. On the whole I enjoyed it and found it well worth the cover price.
Before thinking about the book's content, I'll say that I was very impressed with the binding and book design. It is a handsome book and of much higher quality than I expected. In my experience both martial arts books and privately published books have a tendency towards cheap printing, and I was very pleased to see Mr. Amdur bucking that trend.
With regards to content, I found the book to be both interesting and thought-provoking. Not all of it was to my taste; I could have easily read another hundred pages of history on the Kurama-den, while I could have done without the "three peaches" discussion altogether. For many people I'm sure that this would be reversed. Each section of the book, however, offered its share of interesting nuggets of information and intriguing ideas, and many interesting historical records and first hand accounts are provided.
Unfortunately there are many places where the intriguing ideas seem to vastly outnumber the nuggets of information. Mr. Amdur is careful to remind his readers that he is often speculating, but there are a few places where I felt this should have been underscored even more forcefully. The problem here is in some ways worsened by Mr. Amdur's decision to provide limited citation. It is often possible that the ideas he is spinning have a solid foundation, but if so the reader is left without any clue to that.
Also, while Mr. Amdur's speculation is often intriguing and thought-provoking-- well worth considering, even if we have no way of knowing whether or not they are true-- sometimes they seem to be logically inconsistent, a case of shoehorning in the known facts to fit the image that Mr. Amdur has in his mind. One particularly perplexing example of that came in "The Birth of Daito Ryu":
Can you, then, imagine Sokichi trying to teach such a boy [Takeda Sokaku] the kind of stilted, rigid kata you see enacted in present day Daito Ryu? He would have had to burn a pile of all the incense in Aizu on him to make this wild child pay attention to that!
Instead, Sokichi taught him sumo-- but not just any sumo. I believe he coupled this with solo power training exercises, breathing coordinated with mindful attention to lines of tension and relaxation... that very likely were part of the Inagami Shinmyo-ryu curriculum...
Amdur, 87.
I'd like to unpack a few problems that I have with this passage as a way of illustrating the level of speculation present in this book.
First, let's look at Mr. Amdur's suggestion that Takeda Sokaku would have been unlikely to settle down long enough to learn the kata of modern-day Daito Ryu. I'm not sure if I buy that statement on its face. Even if it is true, however, why does Mr. Amdur assume that the kata practiced in that time period were done in the same manner that they are today? I vividly remember a passage in one of Mr. Amdur's earlier books in which he described watching a film of a recently-extinct naginata school in its last generation. The practitioners minced along, their movements confined and restrained by their lovely kimono, their attacks lacking any type of power or commitment, their "martial art" devoid of any realism or threat. He mournfully compares that final evolution of the school with what the kata must have looked like when practiced by the gigantic, savage battlefield veteran who first brought the school to life. If the kata of today's Daito Ryu are "stilted" and "rigid"-- an assertion that I'm not quite prepared to accept-- then Mr. Amdur's own writings give us ample reason to know that we cannot from this assume that the kata of past generations were the same.
Playing along with Mr. Amdur's assumption for the moment, however, look where we land-- because Sokichi clearly could not have taught his son formal kata, he must have taught him sumo and internal power training exercises, "breathing coordinated with mindful attention to lines of tension and relaxation." So, we assume that Takeda Sokaku was too unruly to settle down into kata training, but at the same time we assume that he willingly sat down to practice these solo training exercises that involve both intense concentration and myriad repetition, often requiring the practitioner to stand, unmoving, for long periods of time? Those ideas aren't even consistent-- either he was too wild to sit still long enough to learn the kata, or he had the patience to devote hours of training to internal power until he developed the skills that Mr. Amdur describes him displaying in his sumo bouts.
The assumptions don't end there-- this passage continues with the assumption that Takeda Sokichi learned Inagami Shinmyo Ryu, an assumption based entirely on circumstantial evidence. It assumes that Inagami Shinmyo Ryu has internal training methodology-- a bold assumption considering that no records of that school survive. That assumption is, in turn, partly based on Mr. Amdur assumption that Inagami Shinmyo Ryu is "given the name,...almost surely a local offshoot of Shinmyo Ryu" (Amdur, 69). Mr. Amdur, of course, knows full well that such names are not a guarantee of relationship; given the presence of Itto Ryu (particularly of the Mizoguchi-ha) in Aizu, Aizu Itto Ryu would "surely" be a local offshoot of the Itto school-- but as Mr. Amdur points out only three pages earlier, it is totally unrelated to the Itto family of sword arts. And even if Inagami Shinmyo Ryu is a local offshoot of Shinmyo Ryu, we've still seen only tenuous evidence that Shinmyo Ryu has the type of training that we are looking for in Takeda Sokaku's early life.
So, while this passage introduces a very interesting-- and, I think, an ultimately plausible-- explanation of Takeda Sokaku's early training, it is made only by piling speculation on speculation. We assume that the jujutsu kata of the time would have been fairly uninteresting to someone of Takeda Sokaku's temperament, we assume that he paradoxically would have had the temperament to make the rigorous and exacting study of internal power, we assume that his father had studied Inagami Shinmyo Ryu, we assume... if there is firm evidence backing these ideas, I've missed it.
And this, in short, is my main problem with the book-- so many wonderful ideas, but so little support for any of them. Mr. Amdur seems to spin theory after theory, but only rarely do we see a firm bedrock beneath them.
Having said all of this, I'd like to point out one of my favorite things about the book. Mr. Amdur takes great pains to show what, exactly, is expected of someone who wants to be the next O Sensei. He spends an entire chapter laying out the type of dedication, the type of sacrifice, the type of obsession that went into the forging of Ueshiba. This is not an easy road; this is not something that we will be able to catch by going to the dojo once or twice or three times a week. If we want to have what the old masters had, if we want to follow their path to the forest, and say their prayers and sing their songs, we must be prepared to make their faith a daily practice. We must be ready to eat, sleep, and breathe these arts. We have to be willing to make each movement of our daily lives part of our budo. We have to be willing to look beyond what we are spoon-fed, to seek the art that lies behind the drills and the kata. And we have to have the right attitude. One of the most beautiful lines in the entire book is a quote from Terry Dobson, when he told fellow students that he didn't care about being O Sensei's student; he wanted to be O Sensei.
That sums up in one line the attitude that we have to have if we want to be serious about our budo. Our teachers were not born superhuman-- some of them started younger than we did, but all of them started at some point. If they are better than us it is because they have been training longer, because they have trained harder, or some combination of those factors. If we are content to be their students, content to say, "Wow, isn't he great?" then our arts won't survive our teachers. We have to be willing to say, "He got there... and I can too." Mr. Amdur's book is a sharp reminder that rather than sitting around and swapping stories about great masters of old, we can walk the paths that those men walked and eventually reach, if not the exact same destination, a destination worthy of their successors.
There is so much more that I could say about this book; it is an excellent read and each time I return to it I come away with more thoughts. However, given that I've been rambling for quite a while, I'll wind down now and simply say that this book is definitely worth the read.
Last edited by DDATFUS; 17th September 2009 at 20:53.
David Sims
"Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum." - Terry Pratchet
My opinion is, in all likelihood, worth exactly what you are paying for it.