A student passed me a link to this episode of a television show called Samurai Spirit. The show focuses on have Greek-Danish karateka and K-1 full-contact fighter Nicholas Pettas. It tells how, as a young man, he was beaten and so turned to karate to toughen himself up. He went to Japan as a teenager and…
Karate is not a martial art. Neither is judo, aikido and many other of the, uh, whatever-they-are arts. OK, fighting arts. Strictly speaking, ‘martial’ is something that pertains to war. So martial arts are war arts. In feudal Japan, martial arts would include systems using swords, spears, bows and arrows, even later guns and other…
The practice of the Japanese martial arts is often connected to the practice of Zen. From a purely practical point of view, a mind that is not distracted by stray thoughts and is completely focused in the present is a mind well prepared for combat. The martial arts are often practised as a form of…
