Читать книгу Traditions. Essays on the Japanese Martial Arts and Ways онлайн

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It is quite an awful feeling to hurt someone under almost any circumstances, obviously. This is especially so in the dojo where one’s accidental victim is likely to be a friend or a training partner and one feels towards that person almost as if they were a brother or sister. If it is a senior that you have clobbered, you feel terrible because you’ve repaid the kindness of his instructing you by battering him. If it is a junior, you feel worse: a junior in the dojo is dependent upon you for his progress, not for abuse. The initial response to causing an accident in the dojo—the unconditioned response of the untrained budoka—is to abandon instantly whatever exercise it is, to rush forward, apologizing profusely and checking for damage.

The dojo, however, is not a place for unconditioned responses. The budoka who go there to practice must be willing to give a great deal of their lives over to the crafting and shaping of very highly conditioned responses. They are seeking to respond correctly to every contingency, in a wide variety of situations. Among those contingencies is the possibility of an accident. The budoka must realize there is a chance, a risk involved, every time he trains. When you allow me, for the purposes of our learning, to uncork punches at your face, or to twist your wrists to nearly the point of injury, or strike at you with a weapon, you are accepting the possibility I might miss, go a bit too far. I assume the same; that I may injure you. We have voluntarily accepted what insurance companies call “assumed risk.” Like mountain climbers, big wave surfers, and ski racers, budoka would be idiots if they thought the martial Ways were risk-free. That is simply not the nature of these Ways.