Defining Martial Arts - a near-life experience

There is something I’ve been trying to articulate for some time regarding martial arts. I may be making an error in articulating it. I think it is profane to talk about certain internal occurrences and so I generally avoid it. I think in this one though there is something to be gained by others to the extent that the risk of ego-inflation is balanced by benefit. I want to share an experience I recently had that has altered my life to an extent which I am still digesting and will be for some time. One thing is certain, it helped me understand the meaning and purpose of martial art in a whole new light. I had read about fearlessness and acceptance and had vague conceptions of what these meant. I recognized that unless I were unfortunate enough to come close to death I would never truly understand this outside the realm of the abstract.

Then one day I had such an experience and I glimpsed death for the space of one breath. And in that one breath life came back to me just as the breath will naturally come back if one exhales completely. I am going to try to give a full, accurate, brutally honest account of what happened to me and how it relates to martial arts. I hope it will help others set their mind right about martial arts practice.

My taijiquan teacher wanted me to stay in the city that weekend. We had been studying some new theoretical concepts and trying to apply them in our practice and he wanted to get our small group of the most enthusiastic students together to enhance our learning. It was Thanksgiving. I had been in the city for a month straight, training hard with him. I had an opportunity to escape for the long weekend for some reflection. The chapel at my old University was holding a Thanksgiving retreat at a camp out by the Bay of Fundy. There would be canoes, hiking, meditation and prayer. The priest was a very interesting and balanced man. He is a rebel within the church, supporting the ordination of homosexual clergy and opening the chapel to the practices of all faiths. I was also interested in his lectures on how prayer was “warfare to the last breath.” I thought it would be an excellent exposure to the good that can be found in some parts of Christianity. I struggled with the choice between taiji and the retreat. My decision was ultimately made easier by the fact that most of my fellow taiji students would not be around that weekend anyway. That way I did not feel that I would miss much.

The retreat was wonderful. The quiet of the lake calmed my mind a great deal and my practice was excellent. I found practicing Iaido to be tricky on the grass and had to sit through a LOT of prayer, but had a wonderful time. I found myself buying beer and then giving away five out of six, leaving my co-retreaters to stay up late drinking by the fire while I went to bed early to get out on the lake for some meditation and practice. My practice and focus deepened to a level I had never experienced. It was a weekend where some aspects of reality unfurled themselves quite naturally, with little effort. This built up over the weekend as I continued to rise early for meditation and practice. My days were spent constantly either practicing, meditating, praying, eating or sleeping. There was little in between and I loved it. Ultimately, it was the exuberance of my practice that both doomed and saved me. On Sunday, the day of Thanksgiving dinner, we went on a hike through a nice path by the bay. My body and mind felt as though they were made of liquid, I flew from rock-tip to rock tip along the ocean, stepping with a grace and precision I’d never experienced before. I became drunk on life, quite literally. The sun, the ocean, my calm all mixed to give an indescribable feeling of peace and power. I came to a cliff that led down to some rocks and the water. I wanted to get next to the water and the little cul-de-sac formed by the cliff looked like a great place to explore. The cliff was far. If I fell I would be seriously hurt or killed.

Under any other circumstances I would never in a million years dream of free climbing a cliff like that. But I was feeling something new and wanted to put myself in a situation where I would have to draw on all my powers in order to remain safe. So I said a prayer and went down the face. No problem. I splashed a bit in the water, checked out the rocks and waterfall and soaked up the sun. Soon enough my friends returned and called me home. I casually went back the way I came. I climbed up the cliff, carefully sighting my holds as I went. At the top, something happened. I caught sight of the rather striking girl who I had talked to on the way up. At that moment I was about to reach for my next handhold. Rather than sight it properly my mind was briefly occupied by a thought along the lines of “wow, she’s going to be impressed by this…” as I thought this and wasn’t paying attention, the handhold I was pulling on gave way on me. I found myself very suddenly weightless, gravity having not quite started to catch on to my predicament and pull me back to earth. I breathed in the thought “Now you will die.”

People have since asked me if my life flashed before my eyes, if I was scared or upset or any normal emotion. I felt none of these. What I felt was a kind of calm joy. I felt absolutely powerless to change what had happened. Part of me laughed gently at my stupidity, like a grandfather will laugh at the stupidity of his grandson who wrecks his father’s car just as the father had done to the grandfather at the same age — detached from the situation sufficiently to appreciate its humour. I will never be able to account for what exactly did flash before my eyes and what exactly the feeling was of submitting myself joyfully to death. There was certainly a sense of “have I completed my work so soon?” With that joy came something else that I am even less able to describe. I suppose you can call it “will” with some degree of accuracy. Whatever it was, it moved me. I somehow found myself with my toes bracing on a slim ledge of rock, a few inches wide, my hands searching quickly for some handhold to stabilize myself. Alas, there was none so I fell again and hit the bottom, collapsing like a ragdoll. The joy faded away as I became self-conscious again. I was alive. I was in control again and it seemed I was okay. I learned that I wasn’t when I tried to walk, the fall had fractured my left heel fairly badly and I was ultimately carried out of there fireman-carry style by a British Infantry Officer on vacation.

Now, I am by no means an accomplished martial artist. I have some good understanding, inherited entirely from a few good teachers, of the proper direction but have crossed very little ground in that way. I have no illusions that in a situation involving multiple attackers, weapons or someone of significantly superior strength and size, my chances of coming out unharmed are still quite slim. And even outside the worst case scenario, while my monkey-mind hasn’t gotten the better of me lately, it certainly has put the pressure on to make me wobble a fair bit. However, what I realized in that moment of weightlessness is that my skill is almost inconsequential. That joy I felt at facing death is not a side-effect of training, it is the purpose of training. I felt joy from my practice, I felt I was living the way I ought, doing what I ought. Even though I had only lived that way for a couple of days prior, to die having spent my last days in such a way brought me immense joy. The purpose of martial arts as I saw them that day is to ensure that whenever I face death again, I will find that joy waiting for me. So long as I feel that joy and experience that will whenever I face death, I will never die unnecessarily. I may be deluding myself but I believe that so long as I continue to train and practice the way I should, then this joy will await me every time I come close to death. Now, if I have trained myself well enough then when this joy comes the resultant will of the body will be sufficient to preserve my life. But whether or not that happens is inconsequential — the joy is there. If that joy accompanies death then it doesn’t matter if a knife-wielding attacker does me in or not. The chances that he will will be greatly reduced from the certainty were I to become paralyzed rather than joyful, but sometimes the situation cannot be helped and it is time to die. That won’t be so bad if I experience that same joy up to my last breath.

There are many lessons in my experience, not all of which I understand. I hope others will be able to take something from this. The joy I experienced should not be confused with a death wish, if anything it was a realization of my joy of being alive, which almost instinctively began to burn with blinding brightness the moment it was threatened — as if I would overpower the darkness which meant to extinguish it. The other lessons which I cannot explain as well are in the cause of my fall, that moment of distraction. Ego is not some abstract Freudian concept, it is real and can kill you. Mine almost did. Finally, the weight of choice. I chose not to train with my teacher that weekend. If I had done as he wished none of this would have happened, I would not have a significant amount of steel in my foot and the likelihood of mobility problems in old age. I would have learned a great deal more about taijiquan and would not have had this experience. One simple choice, for good or ill, was almost the end of me. That is the crux of the issue in martial arts. The purpose of this is to return to the question I struggled with before — what do we mean by “martial arts” today? I would say in light of this experience that martial art is the science of life and death. That to practice this science is to enhance our life by improving our relationship with death. I would love to hear any feedback on this definition and my account. Thank you.

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Charles Humphrey — April 13^th, 2008 (add comment)