kendo

Recently we’ve had the good fortune to be visited by Reuben Barnett sensei who is a member of the Melbourne Budokai. Reuben is former national Kendo kata champion and recently received his 5th dan in Kendo. He has been coming to training and sharing his time to help our kendo students train at a higher level.

Reuben also very kindly donated some shinai (bamboo swords) that he carefully refurbished. As there were exactly the right number, he gave one to each BSC Kendo student present. This was an unexpected gift and the students were stoked to be getting such a cool gift out of the blue. Who doesn’t like getting presents?

Reuben’s gift illustrates an important point about the culture of Kendo. Over the years both he and I have been on the receiving end of amazing hospitality and incredible generosity from various kenshi (exponents of Kendo), so much so that it has been impossible to repay their kindness. Instead we can only ‘pay it forward’, showing similar generosity to those junior to ourselves.

In Kendo when one faces an opponent and bows, a connection in made. In Japanese this is called en 縁. This character is also the Japanese character for ‘karma’. Karma is the idea that in English we sometimes describe as ‘what goes around comes around’. In Kendo and Japanese culture this concept is very much alive. Although one of the meanings of en is “destiny”, it is not necessarily something that is pre-ordained, but something over which we have control. Our actions, whether good or bad, influence the chain of events that becomes our karma.

This is an important lesson for our students: everyday you should choose to act in such a way as to send good things out into the world. How did an art-form like Kendo, based as it is on killing, develop such positive and humanistic values? Well that’s the subject of a much longer article!