[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Looking for some 'definitions' of my own new title I came across this, a good read I think, what do you think?[/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Lessons from the Vineyard[/font][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Thoughts on the Definition of a Budo Teacher[/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]by Dave Lowry[/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Two tea ceremony students learn all aspects of Japanese culture besides tea ceremony in order to become well-rounded sensei, or teachers, of the art of chanoyu. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]How would you define a "sensei?" [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]This is a question I suspect almost all of us involved with the budo, or with any of the traditional Japanese arts for that matter, have struggled with. I must admit that I have directed it myself, more than once, to a person I was interviewing, particularly those more advanced exponents of martial arts, or flower arranging, or the tea ceremony. I have found that the answers that are given are an excellent way to get a measure of the person. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Perhaps as I tackle the subject here, you will gain some insight into me as well. At any rate, I would like to offer some thoughts on what it is that makes a teacher of the budo, the Japanese martial Ways. I also offer some suggestions too, on how to recognize one when you've found him or her. We should begin by noting what some of you may already know, and that is the Japanese definition of the term sensei. You have probably read elsewhere that "sensei" is comprised of two kanji or written characters, borrowed by Japan from ancient China. Sen means literally, "before" or "preceding." Sei is the character that means "life. "The life that came before," then, is a poetic way to denote someone who has walked along the Way before you and who may now show you the path as well. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]However, things in Japan, particularly linguistic things, are rarely as simple as they may first appear. . . If you go to Japan or spend much time around Japanese speakers, you will hear the word "sensei" used frequently. It is used as a form of address for all teachers, public schoolteachers as well as professors at universities. The woman who teaches a kiddie gymnastics programme is called sensei, as is the president of a medical college. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Furthermore, people who are experienced in any of the arts, from pottery to kabuki theater to modem poetry are all referred to as sensei. Medical doctors are called sensei. So are Ph.D.s. As you should be beginning to see, sensei can mean a teacher in the literal sense of the word but it is also used as a title of respect. (In current Japanese slang, in fact, the word sensei is also used sarcastically. A young man-about-town will ask his friend, "Well, sensei, how did you do with the girls last night?" You ought to know right now too, that the word sensei is virtually the only title used for any martial arts teacher. This will simply crush a great many dai-soke, shihan, fuku-shidoin, and the holders of innumerable other fanciful titles in this country, but none of those terms are used in everyday parlance in the training hall in Japan. All teachers, from the most ordinary to the most renowned, are referred to as sensei, period.) [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]So we are left without much help in defining the sensei, not if we depend upon a literal translation of the word from Japanese, nor if we try to define it as it is actually used in Japan. The problem thus remains. Who is a sensei? How do you know when you become one, and most importantly, how do you recognize one when you set out to find him?[/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Well, many dojo in the West have attempted to circumvent the whole matter. Within the training structure of their schools, anyone who leads a class is called sensei. There is really nothing wrong with this. As we have just noted, the Japanese themselves play rather fast and loose with the term. But somehow, such a conclusion is not at all satisfactory. We still want a clearer definition. We want to know if the word implies merely technical skill or if the sensei must be, as well, a person of outstanding moral character. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]My own thinking is that a sensei is very much like another kind of person who is responsible for important matters. A person who, like the sensei seems to be from another age, a person of rare and unique gifts. The sensei, it seems to me, is very much like a vintner. A vintner is the person who produces wine. He is the one who is responsible for it, from the planting of the grape vines, all the way until the raw wine is poured into casks to age. The vintner is the talented individual who can look at a particular hillside or a handful of soil and can tell you which kinds of grapes will grow best there, what kind of yield you can expect. He knows when the grapes need to be pruned. He makes vital decisions throughout the growing season, to fertilize, to spray for bugs. He must decide when to pick them in the fall, to wait for a few more days to let them fully ripen or to pick now and beat out the rain that can adversely affect the whole harvest. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The vintner is responsible for the blend of grapes that go into fermentation tanks. He must add the sugars if they're needed, to begin the fermentation process. In short, he is the guy responsible for the wine from the time the grape vines are planted or bud out, until the moment the wine is on its own, so to speak, when it has been put in casks and must now age and develop according to the qualities inherent in it. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Doesn't this sound very much like the sensei's task? He is the person responsible for a student, from the time that student enters the training hall until the crucial period of the training process has been completed. The sensei is a person, then, in my estimation, who can take a person of raw and unknown potential and turn out a complete and worthwhile product. He can oversee the process from beginning to end. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]A sensei is responsible to turn the a beginner into a worthwhile practitioner.[/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Now this analogy is going to require some clarification. Suppose, for instance, that the person walking into the dojo to begin training is a complete psychopath. Can the sensei still turn out a worthwhile product? Nope. No more so than the vintner can produce a great or even a drinkable vintage from the sour little grapes that grow wild on the back fence behind my house. There has to be some workable potential there from the beginning for the sensei to do his work. Do I mean to imply that all of a sensei's students will be of the same caliber and worth? No. Even the most talented vintner is bound by the grapes, the region, the weather in a particular growing season. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The sensei's products will be equally subject to the vagaries of his students' various dispositions, genetics, and physical abilities. Most importantly, we must be clear on what I mean by the "process" of training, "from beginning to end." Most of us would agree on when a person's training in the martial arts begins. But we hold it as a vital truth that training does not ever really "end." There is no graduation from the budo. They are a lifelong process. One is always learning, perfecting. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The concept of completion in the budo is foreign. Perfection is an ever-advancing goal, obviously, and this is what attracts a great many people to the budo in the first place, this promise of levels of profundity that can never be fully plumbed and always hold out the promise of further and deeper and more rewarding investigation. (It is a concept that also scares the you-know-what out of others, intimidates them and so they either abandon their practice in the face of such a daunting, never-ending task, or they award themselves silly 10th-dan or "Grandmaster" ranks or whatever, and just pretend they have learned all that is to be learned.) [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I am referring to something just a little bit different when I say that a true sensei is one who can take you from beginning to end. Please think of it this way: the wine that the vintner places in aging casks is not finished in most cases. It needs time to mature, for its flavors to reach their summit. But that is a process that goes on in the wine itself. There is very, very little the winemaker can do to influence taste once the wine has reached that point. He has brought it along as far as he can, given it the ingredients it needs to complete the job. The vintner's task at that point can be considered essentially complete. The sensei oversees a similar procedure. He gives the student the basic tools needed, in the way of physical technique as well as attitude, spirit, and intellectual insight and maturity, for the student to go forth on his own, to continue on correctly and productively on his personal journey along the Way. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Let's say, for example, that Bob has been training in Shotokan karate for the past 15 years, when something changes in his life. He takes a job opportunity on the other side of the country. Or his sensei dies. Something happens that separates him from his teacher. If the sensei has done his job, all will be well with Bob. Now, that is not to say that Bob needs no further instruction, that he is on his own, his training completed. Not at all. But the sensei will have provided Bob with the abilities to find the next stage of his training. When he goes to the new city, he will visit other dojo. He will know what to look for in terms of quality in teaching, in the attitudes demonstrated at the dojo. He won't waste time exploring a training hall that won't be worth it. Perhaps he will be in a place where there is no Shotokan training hall. If so, he may visit a place teaching tai chi ch'uan or some other art. He will have the proper background to evaluate this art to see how it might help or hurt his progress and he may feel that the time is right to expand his knowledge of combative systems. He may indeed use that opportunity to study a new art such as tai chi. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In other words, Bob has been brought far enough along that he can make good choices about where he needs to go next to continue properly along the Way. In that sense, his training is "complete" in that he can begin to take some responsibility for continuing it. If the vintner has done his job well, he can sleep soundly, knowing the liquid in the casks is on its way to its own unique maturity as a wine. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]So too, the sensei who has brought his student's training so far along that the student can mature as well. I should not need to tell you that the kind of vintners I've just described are pretty rare. Almost as rare as their counterparts, the sensei. There are just very few individuals who have the aptitude, the background, the ability to manage the whole, complex process of making seed and soil turn into a drinkable work of art. Even fewer who can take a person so far along in life as to make that life worthwhile and meaningful, which is the goal set before the sensei. (Please think about that last sentence, most of you who teach. What exactly is your goal as a teacher? What is it you really want to accomplish in that role?) [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In most instances, in the case of the vintner, his job is taken by several people. There are people working in the average vineyard today who do nothing but work in the fields. They know the grapes well, but they may never have had the slightest role in crushing or macerating the grapes to get them ready for fermentation. The chemist who watches over that operation may never have even walked through a grape arbor. We live in an age of specialization. It is almost certain that the vast majority of martial artists in this country are not the product of a single person's tutelage. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]A sensei is like a vintner, creating fine students like a vintner creates fine wine.[/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]They have not apprenticed under one sensei. They have probably never even met a sensei, not if we are using the definition I am suggesting. Instead, they have met a number of specialists, each of whom has contributed a little bit to the student's training and education. This is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Often, it is such a process as this which makes it possible for us to eventually find a true sensei. And even if we do not, we can undoubtedly learn a great deal and grow tremendously under the supervision of dedicated specialists or seniors. (Once again, the problem of terminology enters in. What, actually, do we call these people? I tend to think of them as seniors. We may be tempted to use the Japanese word sempai. But that is not correct. A sempai is different from what we are talking about. If you use it in the context I am using then "senior" may be fine. But do not consider it to be the equivalent of the sempai as he exists in the social structure of the Japanese dojo. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It should be added at this point too, that you may often find yourself in a position where you are wise in addressing someone as sensei even though you believe they are not. This is not hypocrisy. It's just common politeness. If you're visiting a training hall and everyone is calling one person "sensei," you ought to honor that.) Once we acknowledge the rarity of the true sensei in the West and recognize that our training will in all likelihood come from a senior who is our teacher, we need to consider what it is we should look for in that senior. In my opinion, the senior who is serving as a teacher must display at least two attributes. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]First, the senior must set the pace for all training. By that I mean simply this: he must be continuing his own process of training as well. If he is no longer taking instruction from either a sensei or from one or more of his own seniors, he cannot possibly teach you correctly. This sounds harsh and judgmental and I suppose it is. It is also true. Indulge me another analogy: There are many lakes in the world that are so long in their shape that looking at them from one end you would swear they are rivers. But no matter how long they are, if they are lakes, there is another, opposite shore. And if you start paddling the length of that lake, sooner or later, if you want to keep moving, you're going to have to start paddling in a circle. The water is not flowing. The senior who has mistaken his seniority for the qualifications of a sensei has a limited knowledge and more dangerously for his student's development, he is not moving along the Way himself. He will have no choice, unless he eventually sends you along to another senior or to a sensei, to stagnate your training. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]This situation, of seniors either pretending to be sensei or believing themselves to be, is a very common problem in the American martial arts training hall. A person is awarded a first-degree black belt (or a fifth or sixth-degree for that matter) and he believes he has completed a process and needs no further instruction. He needs no further inspiration, he thinks, no further supervision. He is a fool. In over a quarter of a century of training in the budo in this country, I have met perhaps half a dozen individuals I would consider to be sensei. People who could, as we discussed above, take that student all the way through the training process with no outside help. Everyone else--and I mean everyone--needs more instruction from their seniors. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Maybe they need only an occasional training session. Or maybe attending a seminar a couple of times a year that is conducted by one of their seniors or a sensei. Maybe it is a trip to Japan a couple of times a decade to train with the masters there. But there must be an influx of new ideas in your teacher's life if he is going to teach you correctly. I consider this of such importance that if I were looking for a senior to teach me, one of the first things I would ask would be "Who do you train under?" [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I can imagine the looks of incredulity this might get me in many Western training halls. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"Whaddya mean, I'm a master! I don't train under anyone; I teach!" [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Oh really? Maybe you teach some other poor clown. But you ain't teaching me. Another answer might be something along the lines of "Well I go off to a mountain where my master lives as a hermit and I train alone with him in secret. "[/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Yeah right. The senior who has a teacher that he can't produce or to whom he's not willing to introduce to his students is a walking advertisement for bad budo. A real senior who is your teacher will be happy to have you train with his seniors when the opportunity presents itself. He'll probably insist, in fact, that you attend seminars or training sessions with others who are senior to him. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The senior sets the pace. He leads by example. He is not afraid to admit there are things he doesn't know. He makes it very clear that while he is the teacher and he is in charge, he is still in the process of learning, too. The second prerequisite I would insist upon in accepting a senior as a teacher would be the assurance that not only is he setting the pace, he is also going in a direction I want to go. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]If I begin a study of traditional Okinawan karate, for example, I expect that to be the core of the curriculum. If the senior goes off to a Malayan bersilat seminar and comes back the next week and starts incorporating those techniques into his teaching, I'm going to be suspicious. Perhaps he is not far enough along on the Way to have decided which direction exactly he'll take. If that's the case, he sure can't be leading others. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I was told not long ago of a martial arts instructor who added a class on Ryukyuan nunchaku techniques to his teaching. Since he was teaching a Korean art, this raised some questions. The nunchaku did not exist in Korea historically, of course. When questioned about it, however, the instructor revealed his philosophy. If enough students asked about learning the nunchaku, or any other art, the instructor would go out and buy a book or video and study it and then commence instruction. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]From a mercantile point of view, this makes sense. You give the customer what he's asking for. From the point of view of the budo, however, this is obviously an attitude in conflict with the tenets of the Way. Admittedly, it can be difficult for the beginner to accurately assess a senior according to the qualifications I've just laid out. The senior may tell you he's still learning and you may have little choice but to believe him. After all, even if he's ceased learning a long time ago, he still knows more than you do. And when it seems like your senior is going off on a bizarre tangent in teaching, he could just be showing you some things in his art that you did not know were there. [/font] [font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Far more common, though, is the student who sees discrepancies in his senior's actions or his stories but who ignores or overlooks them because of his intense desire to learn. The senior's charisma can also blind the student to obvious deficiencies. There are real sensei out there. There are also hundreds and hundreds of dedicated and skilled seniors who, while they would readily admit they are not sensei, are nonetheless very competent and able teachers who can take you a long way towards your goals. I have learned from them and I continue to do so. I hope that my analogy of the vintner and the wine specialist will put both these individuals into perspective for you. And I hope that as with a great wine, you are in the process of maturing and becoming of deep and lasting value as a martial artist yourself. [/font] http://www.furyu.com/archives/issue6/sensei.html
