Taido's 5 Simple Rules

The gojokun (or five guid­ing prin­ci­ples) is the set of state­ments that forms the heart of Taido ‘s phi­los­o­phy. Since it is pre­scrip­tive rather than descrip­tive, the gojokun acts as a sort of mis­sion state­ment for Taido. Though it gives us a few ideals to shoot for, it doesn’t offer much in the way of prac­ti­cal guidance.

Through the years, sev­eral sev­eral peo­ple have tried their hands and com­ing up with a suit­able English ver­sion. I will dis­cuss a few of them and present my own thoughts on what the gojokun says, what it means, and what we should do about it. With any luck, this arti­cle will get to the point of what can be a very frus­trat­ing mis­sion statement.

What is Taido Gojokun?

What’s the point of the gojokun? That’s dif­fi­cult to say. Though some dojo require stu­dents to chant gojokun in uni­son at the end of class, very few Japanese Taido stu­dents show any evi­dence of giv­ing any thought to what they are say­ing. It was a rare thing that the five prin­ci­ples would be dis­cussed while I was a young stu­dent in America — I mem­o­rized them at one point but was given no induce­ment to pon­der their meanings.

Why Bother?

I think this begs the ques­tion of why we even have the gojokun. I have an answer.

Taido can be a very com­pli­cated mar­tial art. We have three kamae, eight steps, sev­eral gym­nas­tic move­ments, five body move­ment types, five con­trol meth­ods, kicks, punches, and other tech­niques… It can be a lot to think about. The gojokun has the poten­tial to clar­ify things in that it offers us Five Simple Rules (5SRs) for prac­tic­ing and apply­ing Taido. The prob­lem is extract­ing those pre­cepts from the ver­bal fog.

Translating and Interpreting

The pri­mary prob­lem with the orig­i­nal 5jokun is typ­i­cal of Japanese phi­los­o­phy. Even in Japanese, the 5jokun is pretty vague, and in my opin­ion sac­ri­fices applic­a­bil­ity for the appear­ance of depth. This isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing if you are talk­ing about poetry, but I like my “guid­ing prin­ci­ples” to be clear and direct. What’s the point of hav­ing Five Simple Rules if they don’t mean anything?

Of course, they do mean some­thing — they mean sev­eral things — but most stu­dents don’t really know what that is, and aren’t going to be able to fig­ure it out with­out a lot of con­jec­ture and uncer­tainty. Even in the orig­i­nal Japanese, stu­dents have to do a lot of inter­pre­ta­tion to get any­thing out of the gojokun (I’ll look at why this is so a bit later).

Honestly, I don’t think the gojokun can be trans­lated into English words that the west­ern mind will read­ily “get” with­out tak­ing a good deal of artis­tic license. Since English and Japanese oper­ate on dif­fer­ent oper­a­tional prin­ci­ples, they con­vey mean­ing in dif­fer­ent ways. Indeed, English speak­ers and Japanese speak­ers think in dif­fer­ent ways — I’ve dis­cov­ered that some thoughts are eas­ier for me to think in Japanese. Since thought is inher­ently lin­guis­tic, it stands to rea­son that the gram­mat­i­cal struc­ture of a lan­guage affects the thought pat­terns of the peo­ple who think in that language.

Part of the dif­fi­culty is that we can inter­pret the 5jokun in var­i­ous ways, none of which would be present in a lit­eral trans­la­tion. There are trans­la­tions biased to dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tions of each prin­ci­ple, but this requires stu­dents to study sev­eral inter­pre­ta­tions to under­stand what Taido is really all about. By doing so, we end up defeat­ing the pur­pose of the 5SRs because we need to extrap­o­late four or five ver­sions of each.

All this is just to say that any sim­ple trans­la­tion of the Japanese gojokun into English will prob­a­bly leave a lot to be desired. There have been three of four attempts to my knowl­edge at such a trans­la­tion, but none of them have meant very much to peo­ple who weren’t already experts. Experts don’t need sim­ple rules, but stu­dents do.

What it Says

The gojokun is struc­tured around five sets of two state­ments. The first state­ment describes an ideal. The sec­ond state­ment is an “if/then” show­ing the ben­e­fit of achiev­ing that ideal. For exam­ple, I could say this:

Brush your teeth after meals and before sleep­ing. If you keep your teeth clean, you won’t have cav­i­ties and gingivitis.

This struc­ture gives us a direc­tive and a rea­son for each point. I’ll ana­lyze these in more detail later. But before we can go much fur­ther, we need to look at a cou­ple of the exist­ing English translations.

The Official Version

Here’s the offi­cial English ver­sion of the Taido gojokun that most peo­ple have seen:

1. Keep your mind as clear and calm as the pol­ished sur­face of a mir­ror. This way you will see to the heart of things. Having the right state of mind will help you avoid confusion.
2. Be com­posed. Body and mind should be as one. Bear your­self cor­rectly and you need never fear insult.
3. Invigorate your spirit from the source of energy deep in your abdomen. With the right spirit you will never fear combat.
4. In every action, fol­low the cor­rect pre­cepts you have been taught. By doing so you can­not act wrongly.
5. Be adapt­able in your tech­niques and main­tain free­dom of phys­i­cal move­ment. The right tech­nique will pre­vent you from being dominated.

This is pretty lit­eral. As a result, it doesn’t feel like English when I read it. It has clumsy con­struc­tion and odd-sounding fancy words in place of sim­pler words that are easy to under­stand (”bear your­self” instead of “act,” “invig­o­rate your spirit” instead of “focus your energy,” etc.). It also sounds as if the author was try­ing a lit­tle too hard to sound philo­soph­i­cal by using passive-negative con­struc­tion (”you need never fear insult” instead of “oth­ers will respect you,” etc.).

It’s not so much that it’s dif­fi­cult to under­stand — it isn’t — but it reads like a for­tune cookie. That’s great for haiku, but not for the 5SRs. What does it mean to invig­o­rate one’s spirit from the source of energy deep in one’s abdomen? How can I tell if my spirit has enough vigor? What is this energy source, and how do I use it? Is that really all it takes to keep from fear­ing combat?

This vague lan­guage dances around the point with­out actu­ally giv­ing us any real guid­ance. But wait, it could be even worse…

An Older Version from America

This is what I learned as a child and wrote about for my shodan test. Rest assured, I didn’t have a clue what this meant until I had given it a lot of thought.

1. If the mind is tran­quil and searches for the teach­ings of the true state of affairs, one will acquire the right­eous­ness of never being perplexed.
2. If the behav­ior is dig­ni­fied — the mind and appear­ance — one will never be despised.
3. If the feel­ings are con­cen­trated, vigor comes from inter­nal nerve cen­ters. If one has right feel­ings, he will never be threatened.
4. In every action fol­low the cor­rect pre­cepts you have been taught. By doing so, you can­not act wrongly.
5. The tech­niques change appro­pri­ately from offense to defense. One who acquires cor­rect adapt­abil­ity to these tech­niques will never be restrained.

Wow. What a night­mare. I want to “attain right­eous­ness” as much as any­one else, but I’m not sure how that fits in with the things I prac­tice in Taido. No won­der nobody in America seems to remem­ber these, though John Roberts and I once found that it’s a lot eas­ier after a few cups of sake. This is a fine exam­ple of a totally unus­able text.

So What is it really Saying?

That’s a really good ques­tion. Both of the above trans­la­tion efforts use a lot of words and end up say­ing very lit­tle. The only way to get at what the gojokun is sup­posed to be teach­ing us is to take a more inter­pre­tive approach.

Interpreting the Gojokun

A few years ago, Lars Larm wrote a paper trans­lat­ing and inter­pret­ing the gojokun. It’s very good, and I would love to rec­om­mend you check it out, but it doesn’t appear to be avail­able any longer.

I think Lars makes some good points regard­ing the dif­fi­culty of trans­lat­ing ade­quately and the neces­sity of inter­pret­ing the points for use by an English-speaking audi­ence. He also gives ideas about how each point can actu­ally be used, and this is very good.

However, all of this inter­pre­ta­tion (and mul­ti­ple ver­sions of cer­tain points) takes up a lot of space. That’s almost a page of text to con­vey five ideas. Although I like the con­clu­sions Lars draws, I would be more sat­is­fied by a shorter ver­sion that could be quickly mem­o­rized and reit­er­ated dur­ing practices.

One impor­tant thing Lars does is to relate the gojokun to the five suki: mind, prepa­ra­tion, energy, deci­sion, and tech­nique. By look­ing at the gojokun in light of these open­ings, we can get a bet­ter per­spec­tive on how this phi­los­o­phy relates to use in actual combat.

My Interpretation

The first prin­ci­ple tells up to keep a clear mind so we can avoid con­fu­sion. What is the actual goal? Clear and accu­rate per­cep­tion of the truth. Also, as Lars pointed out, there is an allu­sion to reflect­ing real­ity with­out dis­tor­tion. This means keep­ing our thoughts firmly in the present. It’s only by dwelling on past events or fan­ta­siz­ing about the future that we become dis­tracted from what’s hap­pen­ing in the here and now. So to attain the “cor­rect state of mind,” we need to cul­ti­vate a calm aware­ness of the present situation.

The sec­ond prin­ci­ple refers to a dig­ni­fied appear­ance in which mind and body are one. This means hav­ing integrity. To inte­grate the mind and body, we must ensure that our actions match our inten­tions. If we say one thing and then do another, we “look” bad. This is just as true in kamae — men­tal prepa­ra­tion must sup­port our phys­i­cal prepa­ra­tion. Otherwise, our oppo­nents will see through the illu­sion. Most adults can smell bull­shit from a mile away, so our prepa­ra­tion and appear­ance must be genuine.

The third prin­ci­ple is dif­fi­cult to express in English. We should make our ki spring up from the tanden, and this will keep us from “trem­bling” from fear. Ki has a bad rep­u­ta­tion in the West because it is unfor­tu­nately asso­ci­ated with a lot of the mys­ti­cal BS par­lor tricks that peo­ple try to pass off as demon­stra­tion of mar­tial arts mas­tery. But ki is really just a word for energy, and for our pur­poses, it can be summed up as the com­bi­na­tion of proper breath­ing and mechan­ics. Breath con­trol is the eas­i­est way to affect our Central Nervous Systems, which impacts emo­tional arousal, power gen­er­a­tion, and sta­mina. Proper mechan­ics assures that our move­ments will be effi­cient and effec­tive. This is ki, and using it well is the goal of the gojokun’s third principle.

The fourth prin­ci­ple deals with train­ing. It must be empha­sized here that Shukumine viewed the­ory and prac­tice as two sides of the same coin. In a Taido con­text, train­ing includes study. The prin­ci­ple is that we must prac­tice and study deeply. Having done so, we will know what to do at cru­cial moments. The more thor­oughly we train our minds and bod­ies, the more eas­ily we can make move­ments and deci­sions with­out hav­ing to stop and consider.

The last prin­ci­ple is my favorite. It tells us to adapt to our envi­ron­ments with­out going against the cur­rent of change. Taido’s tech­niques are designed so that defense tran­si­tions smoothly into offense. We use con­tin­u­ous move­ments so we can respond cre­atively to sit­u­a­tions with­out the repeated neces­sity to stop and reset. Of course, there are lim­its to how we can move, for exam­ple, those imposed by grav­ity. So we should seek to remove unnec­es­sary lim­i­ta­tions and increase our free­dom of motion (and thought) to allow our­selves the max­i­mum pos­si­ble expres­sion of cre­ativ­ity in the moment.

That pretty much sums up my ideas on each point, but it doesn’t get us much closer to a handy cheat-sheet ver­sion. Now that I’ve explained each point at length, let’s strip them down to the bare essen­tials and cre­ate some rules we can use.

Rules We Can Use

When I started my dojo at Gerogia Tech, I had to think a lot about how to teach the var­i­ous com­po­nents of Taido. I felt that under­stand­ing the gojokun was an impor­tant part of learn­ing Taido, but I couldn’t see my stu­dents get­ting much out of the ver­sion I had learned. I decided to work on a new interpretation.

What I had hoped to accom­plish with this was some­thing that my stu­dents could look at and say “Hey, that makes sense for com­bat as well as more peace­ful aspects of my life.” I tried to make sure that they could under­stand how each point could be applied to a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent venues (and even tested their abil­ity to do so).

Tech Taido Version

This is how I broke it down a few years ago for my stu­dents at Tech:

1. If our minds are clear and calm, we can per­ceive reality.
2. If our minds and bod­ies are united in pur­pose, we can exceed our expected limits.
3. If we employ proper breath­ing and mechan­ics, we can move well.
4. If we prac­tice well, we can be sure to act appropriately.
5. If we are adapt­able, we can always find a solution.

I was pretty happy with this ver­sion, even though I knew it wasn’t express­ing 100% of what’s writ­ten in the orig­i­nal Japanese. However, bas­ing my judg­ment of qual­ity on the abil­ity to cre­ate a pos­i­tive out­come, I wasn’t con­cerned with pre­serv­ing any of the orig­i­nal “fla­vor.” Instead, I opted for some­thing that would improve my stu­dents’ under­stand­ing of Taido and enrich their prac­tice. But then I took that idea to an even greater extreme.

Taido's 5 Principles in Operational Language

In most of the inter­pre­ta­tions above, each prin­ci­ple is stated as an if/then, as in the orig­i­nal Japanese ver­sion. I find this to be a rather abstract way of express­ing pre­scrip­tions for action. If we are really try­ing to state the Five Simple Rules for Taido, can’t we just lay them out like, well… rules?

Most [good] sci­en­tific lit­er­a­ture is uses oper­a­tional lan­guage in order to make sense and avoid inac­cu­ra­cies. I feel it’s help­ful to state the ideas in the gojokun as direc­tives, so we can bet­ter intuit their imme­di­ate applicability.

Here are the 5SRs in oper­a­tional language:

1. Keep you mind clear and in the present.
2. Focus your inten­tion with your actions.
3. Breathe appro­pri­ately to gen­er­ate power and con­trol your emotions.
4. Use your train­ing to guide your judgement.
5. Adapt to the sit­u­a­tion and don’t fight changes.

This gives us a set of sim­ple instruc­tions that we can enact now, at this moment. Each point is sim­ple and use­ful. We can see from these rules exactly what we must do to be more effec­tive in any­thing. It isn’t poetic, and you won’t be able to impress peo­ple by talk­ing like a wannabe samu­rai with this ver­sion, but that’s pre­cisely why it works.

These points can be used dur­ing classes to focus a student’s atten­tion on a spe­cific idea with­out inter­rupt­ing the flow of prac­tice. I intro­duce them one at a time to begin­ners, usu­ally with­out men­tion­ing the gojokun at at all. Once I’ve done that, I can use them as cues any­time that stu­dent needs a quick reminder. If a stu­dent is set­ting stuck in jis­sen by try­ing to apply a cer­tain tech­nique, it’s often enough for me to sim­ply say “adapt!” and the stu­dent will stop resist­ing the flow of the match. This isn’t always the case, and it’s not auto­matic, but it it pos­si­ble when we use oper­a­tional lan­guage for the gojokun.

Finding Taido’s Core Values

So what do all these inter­pre­ta­tions have in com­mon? Let’s try boil each of these five ideas down into a value that the rule attempts to express.

The 5 Core Values

1. Awareness and clear perception
2. Integrity and preparation
3. Correct breath­ing and movement
4. Judgement based on study and training
5. Adaptability, free­dom, and creativity

These five points seem to sum up the desired end prod­uct of each ver­sion of the 5jokun above. Whereas the oper­a­tional ver­sion gave us Five Simple Rules, the above list gives us 5 goals to shoot for in every­thing we do.

Use It

News Flash: Students can learn more eas­ily if they know what they are sup­posed to be learn­ing. Up to now, we’ve been mak­ing them mem­o­rize the rules and telling them that they have to under­stand the con­cepts the rules imply. I’m sug­gest­ing that we begin by telling them the con­cepts and ask­ing them to exper­i­ment with apply­ing them.

The 5SRs as a Teaching Tool

Perhaps it would be ben­e­fi­cial to our stu­dents if we taught them what we wanted them to know. I mean, what’s the point of rote mem­o­riza­tion and occa­sional chant­ing of vaguely-worded philoso­phies? It will serve every­one bet­ter if we can sim­ply remind stu­dents at appro­pri­ate times of the val­ues they are expected to cul­ti­vate by cer­tain prac­tices. This way, stu­dents can inter­nal­ize the desired con­cepts readily.

Goal-directed learn­ing is student-centered. By phras­ing the 5jokun in terms of the 5SRs or as five val­ues, we give stu­dents an idea of where they should be head­ing. This puts their prac­tice into per­spec­tive and allows them more free­dom in exper­i­ment­ing (thus bring­ing new, cre­ative ideas to Taido) while still being cer­tain that they are work­ing within the frame­work of Taido’s value system.

While there are still many fac­tors in Taido’s edu­ca­tional model that could use a lot of re-working, adopt­ing a work­able ver­sion of the 5jokun such as those pro­vided above will be one step in the right direc­tion towards a more effec­tive method of teaching.