Budo (1): Bu and Do – The Meaning of the Word
Updated: 2 hours ago
Introduction
I have been training in martial arts since 1989. The system I learned in my first years called itself "jujutsu". Today it is clear to me that it was a kind of modern, Western jujutsu, and the word "budo" was nowhere to be found. It appeared only in 1999, when I began training in the Bujinkan, the organization of Masaaki Hatsumi. His system, which I have taught since 2004, is called Budo Taijutsu (you can read about the system itself on this site, under the "Budo Taijutsu" menu).
After a few years of training I became more and more aware of this name, and I noticed something that has bothered me ever since: it joins "budo", the way, with "jutsu", the skill. And when you add the name Ninjutsu, there seems to be a contradiction here, at least on the face of it.
So before comparing "jutsu" and "do" in depth, I asked myself a simpler question: what is budo, anyway? In part two I will touch on the difference between the terms. A deeper comparison, from the point of view of training, will come in later articles, when I find a little time in my schedule.
I wrote this series on my own about six years ago. Now, with the move to the new site I built, I decided to refresh it, check it again, and use technological tools for searching information that were not available to me then. Here is the result, and I hope it interests you as much as it interested (and still interests!) me.
Almost everyone who trains in a Japanese martial art has heard the word "budo", and many know to translate it as "the way of the warrior". The word is written with two characters: 武 (bu) and 道 (do). Each of them has a history of more than two thousand years, and each has more than one meaning.
This is the first of three parts, and it deals with the two characters: what they originally meant and what was added to them along the way. The second part deals with the full term and its relatives, and the third with the question of why we train at all.
Bu (武): going to war, or stopping it?
The character 武 is made up of two parts:
The part 戈: an ancient Chinese weapon, a blade mounted at a right angle on the end of a pole. In English it is usually translated as "dagger-axe", and often loosely as "spear" or "halberd".
The part 止: the character whose familiar meaning is "to stop".
From here came the famous interpretation: 'bu is "stopping the spear"', that is, stopping the fighting. According to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, this interpretation is very old. It is attributed to King Zhuang of the state of Chu, one of the rulers of China in the 6th century BCE. According to tradition, after a victory in battle he refused to build a victory monument and argued that true military greatness is precisely the ability to stop war. In the 2nd century CE this interpretation was also adopted by the Shuowen Jiezi, the classical Chinese dictionary that explains the origins of the characters, and since then it has been the dominant one.
But this is not the original meaning. The earliest forms of the character appear in the "oracle bone script", divination inscriptions carved on bones and turtle shells in China about 3,000 years ago. There the part 止 depicts a foot and means to walk, and the meaning "to stop" was added to it only later. So, according to the museum in Taipei and also according to an analysis by the language researcher Peter Goldsbury, the original meaning of 武 is "to advance with a weapon", that is, to go to war.
The Budo World project of the University of Tsukuba adds a third interpretation, and suggests linking each interpretation to the period in which it fit:
Dance (舞, also pronounced "bu"): a ritual dance with weapons, meant to call on the power of the gods. This fits ancient society.
Marching with weapons: fits the age of wars.
Stopping the spear: fits periods of peace. In Japan it came back again and again in the Edo period (1603–1868), two hundred and fifty years of internal peace.
The author there does not decide which interpretation is right. And this may be the important point: budo does not come from an original meaning of peace. The word was born of war, and the moral interpretation, "stopping the weapon", was added to it later. But it was added about 2,600 years ago, and it is a genuine part of the word's history. The tension between the two interpretations lives inside the character itself.
From China to Japan
Chinese writing reached Japan through Korea. According to the ancient Japanese chronicles, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, it was brought by a scholar named Wani from the kingdom of Baekje in Korea, together with the writings of Confucius. From about the year 600, Japan sent official missions to China, and they came back with Chinese books, among them Buddhist scriptures. This is how the University of Pittsburgh's Japan Past and Present site describes it.
In Japanese the character 武 appears in many terms from the world of fighting:
Bushi (武士): a warrior.
Bujutsu (武術): martial skill.
Bugei (武芸): the martial arts.
Bushido (武士道): the way of the warrior. I wrote about it in a separate series: Bushido (in Hebrew).
Bujutsu and bugei will be explained in the next part.
Do (道): the way
The character 道 is read in Chinese as "dao", in the older transliteration "tao". In Japanese it has two readings: "do", heard in compound words such as budo, and "michi", which simply means a way or a street.
The literal meaning of do is a path you walk on. The abstract meaning is the right way to live and act. The term does not belong only to Daoism. According to Chad Hansen in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, all the schools of ancient China used it:
The Confucians: saw the dao as the human way, the one that is learned: rituals, manners and social order.
The Daoists: saw it as the way of nature, which includes the human ways and is wider than them. The famous book of Daoism, the Dao De Jing (attributed to Laozi), opens with a sentence that means roughly "a way that can be walked is not the constant way". In other words, the way is not a fixed rule but something that is revealed and changes as you walk.
The way in Japan: art as a life path
In Japan the word took on a more practical meaning. According to the researcher Noel Pinnington, already from the end of the Heian period, in the 12th century, Japanese artists wrote about their art as "michi", a whole life path. The idea was that behind every specialization stands a single unity. So artists borrowed ideas from neighboring fields and wrote mainly about how a student is educated and reaches mastery. This is how, for example, Zeami and Zenchiku wrote in the 15th century. Both were actors and playwrights of Noh, the classical theater of Japan.
Hence the suffix "-do" in the names of many arts:
Shodo (書道): the way of writing, calligraphy.
Chado (茶道): the way of tea, the tea ceremony.
Budo (武道): the way of fighting, the martial way.
In each of them the practice is what matters, not the product. This is how the exhibition "Dō – Spirit of the Way" at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art explains it: the art is practiced like meditation in motion, with full attention, and the act is its own goal.
When Kano Jigoro, the founder of Judo, chose in 1882 the suffix "do" instead of "jutsu" (skill), he borrowed this meaning from the world of the arts. I wrote about this at length in "Bushido (3): From Bujutsu to Budo" (in Hebrew).
Deshimaru: the way as awakening
Taisen Deshimaru (1914–1982) was a Zen monk of the Soto school, one of the two great schools of Zen in Japan. He was a student of Kodo Sawaki, came to France in 1967, and founded the European Zen Association, which later became international. In his book The Zen Way to the Martial Arts he writes, in my paraphrase:
"Do, the way, is the method, the teaching that allows you to understand your own mind and your own self completely. [...] Practicing in this way frees a person from the troubling thoughts and emotions that stop and confuse him".
This is a statement by a Zen teacher, and it sees the way first and foremost as a method of awakening. For Deshimaru, the way frees one from the ego. In our dojo this idea is well known, because Danny Waxman, my teacher, also teaches Zen of the Soto school. But it is important to remember that this is one interpretation among many, not the complete definition of the term.
What comes out of the two characters together?
When you put the two characters together, you get a word with two layers:
Bu: weapons and war, and on top of them an ancient moral interpretation, stopping war.
Do: a path, a way of life of practice, in which the art shapes the person who practices it.
Budo, then, does not give up fighting. It offers to practice fighting in a way that shapes the practitioner. When was this combination formed, and how does it differ from bujutsu and bugei? That is the subject of the next part.
Continue reading: Budo (2): Bujutsu, Bugei and Budo
Sources
National Palace Museum, Taipei: Peace as the Ultimate Martial Greatness
University of Tsukuba, Budo World project: On the meanings of the character 武
Jordi Delage, based on an analysis by Peter Goldsbury: Clarifications on the origin of the character Bu
University of Pittsburgh, Japan Past and Present: On the arrival of Chinese writing in Japan
Chad Hansen, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Daoism
Noel Pinnington, 2006, Japan Review 18, pp. 29–55: Models of the Way in the Theory of Noh
Tel Aviv Museum of Art: Dō – Spirit of the Way
Taisen Deshimaru, from the book The Zen Way to the Martial Arts: on judoinfo
International Zen Association (AZI): Master Taisen Deshimaru
Comments