Education as Dojo:
Application of Aikido into Forming a Vision of a Just World
Dianne R. Costanzo, Ph.D., Sensei
“When the student is ready,
the teacher will appear.”
Zen Saying
Like Most Zen sayings, this one teases us out of our usual way of
perceiving things, providing us with a fresh way of seeing the world. To that
end, I try to teach my classes in a slanted kind of way, creating a slight
disturbance so that students cannot rely on the easy answer to get by. At
Dominican University, I have had the extraordinary opportunity to offer a
senior seminar called “Aikido as Contemplation.” It is an odd little class, which
has been quite successful because it joins two apparently different worlds—
academe and martial arts—and literally puts Aristotle’s idea of happiness in
action. As someone who lives in these two worlds, I have come to believe that
there is a nexus between thinking about the good and actually learning a martial
art that emphasizes a harmonious engagement within inevitable conflict. By our
practice, we learn how to choose our responses to the things that come into our
lives, and by choosing harmony over harm, we cut a path within ourselves, so that
ultimately what we do articulates who we are.
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Students of this seminar spend one day a week in a traditional classroom
where we discuss, among other texts, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The
other day students come to my dojo (school) to learn the basics of Aikido, a
Japanese martial art that stresses leverage, timing, and body movement to
neutralize another person’s attack without inflicting injury. While at the dojo,
students become immersed in the culture of the dojo and the art of Aikido. It is
a countercultural experience that calls students to act more intentionally and to
begin to realize that the place of their learning provides a mirror in which to see
themselves. One of the benefits of being in the dojo is that it makes students
understand at a very deep level that the place itself is a kind of education.
While many translate dojo as “school,” the literal meaning of the word is
“place of enlightenment.” This realization of what dojo actually signifies
demands students’ active participation in their own learning. From the time they
enter the dojo, they are expected to take their shoes off and place them neatly
near the door before bowing onto the mat. Once on the mat, students sit in a
straight line and the teacher appears, sitting in front of them. Everyone bows
to the shomen or front of the dojo where a picture of O Sensei, the founder of
Aikido, is placed. This signifies that we honor all the teachers who have gone
before us. The teacher then turns around, faces the students who bow, in this
case, to me. The wonderful thing is that as they bow to me, I bow to them,
recognizing one of the deepest truths of our practice: without a teacher, there
is no student, but without the student, there is no teacher. Hence, even before
students begin to learn any of the stretching or the techniques themselves, they
have been given a model of behavior rooted in respect.
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In fact, we bow all the time—when we enter the dojo, when we come on or
off the mat, when we begin class, when students pair up to work with each
other—lots of bowing. It is a simple yet profound act, which can take a lifetime
actually to do with fullness and integrity. O Sensei once said, “When you bow
to the universe, it bows back; when you call out the name of God, it echoes
inside you” (The Art of Peace 123).
It is all about the relationship people establish—within themselves, with
another, with the place of their learning—sounds very Dominican, as we
Dominicans believe that relationship is at the heart of ministry. The dojo itself
is the place where aikidoka (Aikido students) practice their own self-realization,
which is the entire point of Aikido. Because Aikido is non-competitive, those
of us who practice believe that as we improve, we help others improve, and as
others improve, they help us improve, creating a reciprocity within our training.
Since the goal of our training is our own self-realization, the dojo is the furnace
where ego softens up; the sensei is the one who stokes the fire, and the aikidoka
are the iron that gets forged into steel. O Sensei said, “Iron is full of impurities
that weaken it; through forging, it becomes steel and is transformed into a razorsharp sword. Human beings develop in the same fashion” (The Art of Peace
56). In the dojo, we are constantly throwing ourselves into what T.S. Eliot
calls in Four Quartets “the refining fire.” Our training is not always pleasant,
not usually easy, but always significant. Most people wish to improve, although
not everyone wishes to do what is necessary to improve. Improvement requires
effort and a profound willingness to give oneself to the practice. This exceeds
simply mimicking what the teacher has demonstrated. To go back to the
discussion on bowing, improvement begins as soon as one enters the dojo.
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If the dojo is indeed the place of our enlightenment, it is an outer
representation of what occurs internally; it is the place where we train the body
and the soul. As O Sensei says, “From ancient times, deep learning and valor
have been the two pillars of the Path: through the virtue of training, enlighten
both body and soul” (The Art of Peace 57). I believe Aristotle would agree as
he defines happiness as “an activity of soulfulness in accord with virtue”
(Nicomachean Ethics 17). Cultivating virtue (hence happiness) is an activity,
not a feeling. We learn our virtue by what we do and ultimately what we do
articulates what we believe and shows who we are.
If I want my students to make choices that are “good,” then they need to
practice participating in the good. If they are to leave our Dominican colleges
and universities on fire to create a more just and humane world, then they need
to know how to choose the good. Their practice at the dojo can help them
make their way as they physically learn not just a martial art, but the art of
peace, a way of life:
“The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of
Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner,
a suitable path to follow. You are here for no other purpose than to realize your inner
divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment. Forster peace in your own life and then
apply the Art to all that you encounter.”
(The Art of Peace 13)
What they learn in the dojo is that Aikido is “the way of harmony through
energy.” While certainly most students who take this seminar will not choose to
study Aikido full time, they have nevertheless been introduced to a different
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way of interacting with the world. They get a taste of what it means to be a
warrior.
We need warriors desperately—warriors, not fighters. To cite O Sensei
once again, “Foster and polish the warrior spirit while serving in the world;
Illuminate the Path according to your inner light (The Art of Peace 46). O
Sensei himself stands as a wonderful example of what it means to give to his gift
to the world as an offering of peace. Trained in many martial arts, Morihei
Ueshiba (1883-1969), came to see war, competition, and the unjust power of
the few over the many as defective and sinful. In 1942, he had the third of his
visions into a deeper reality: “The Way of the Warrior has been
misunderstood as a means to kill and destroy others. Those who seek
competition are making a grave mistake. To smash, injure, or destroy is the
worst sin a human being can commit. The real Way of a Warrior is to prevent
slaughter—it is The Art of Peace, the power of love” (The Art of Peace 8).
He called for a paradigmatic shift in understanding what the martial arts was for,
and after the atrocities of World War II, O Sensei said that we must learn to
wage peace.
O Sensei’s understanding certainly underwent its own transformation.
Originally called Aikijiutsu or harmonizing technique, the art of peace ultimately
became Aikido, the way of harmony through energy. While one might argue
semantics, it is imperative to note that O Sensei plunged more deeply into the
essence of what he offered. He did not teach simply technique, but a way of
life. In fact, he would dismiss students from his dojo if he felt that they did not
possess the requisite character or virtue to study.
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As Aikido grew in popularity, O Sensei was invited to teach in different
dojo. O Sensei stepped into a dojo to teach as a guest instructor. Sensing
that there was no proper spirit in that particular dojo, he walked out. Such is
the power of place, if we actually can agree that a dojo or school holds the
energy of those in it. If we can agree with that premise, then that creates a
number of implications for us as teachers.
One might infer that learning is more than transmitting information. While
this is certainly important, it is the lowest level of learning—there is so much more.
Learning has to be a formative event. It simply is insufficient that learning gets
flattened out to trading factoids. Learning must be an active engagement
between students and teachers, a kind of conversion process that can really
turn iron into steel or, as the alchemists believed, lead into gold. Such an
alchemical process cannot be perverted into specious snake oil sales people
who trade on the insecurities, fears, and desires of the disenfranchised. Real
alchemy does exist; we see it every day when we come into a class and a student
“gets it.” That moment is sheer joy and cannot be necessarily predicted or
manufactured, but it is made, crafted, created in the space or dojo that holds
the student, the teacher, and the learning itself.
Such deep learning takes time—not the tick tock time of the clock or even
the semester, but time itself, a sinking into the learning, a sort of marinating and
softening so that the learning can actually penetrate to the marrow. Ultimately,
those of us who keep coming to the dojo and willingly place ourselves in the
furnace to be purified and transformed get better, often in nearly imperceptible
ways. But the learning is good, true, and beautiful; it becomes the gift we can
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give to the world, whatever that gift may be. And by continuing to come to the
dojo, we in fact create a dojo within ourselves. We call it education, a leading
out of ignorance and an entrance into the world. As we go in, we also go out
and find that both journeys are really the same.
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