Live Blade: The Way of the Sword

A Selection from Chapter 13
Excerpted from Three Years on the Great Mountain
By Cristina Moon

About This Title

An invigorating memoir about a young woman pushed to her limits at a Zen monastery in Hawai‘i, where she learns that the key to unlocking the ultimate breakthrough is igniting her fighting spirit.

At twenty-five, activist Cristina Moon faced an impossible task: preparing for the possibility of arrest and torture inside military-ruled Myanmar. Her response? Learning Buddhist meditation. So began what would become a decades-long spiritual path—eventually leading her to Chozen-ji, a Zen temple and martial arts dojo in Hawaiʻi with a timeless method of warrior Zen training.

Told with immersive detail and an unique Asian American female perspective, Three Years on the Great Mountain chronicles Moon's straight-up-the-mountain training regimen at Chozen-ji, conducted every day and often through the nights. Through the spiritual forging of daily Zen meditation, manual labor, swordsmanship, and Japanese tea ceremony, she discovers a newfound conviction that self mastery and spiritual growth can take fierce form. Embraced by local Hawaiʻi and Japanese culture, and a community of discipline, respect, and discovery, she discovers a profound sense of home.

Straight Through
Chapter 13, page 128-130

     “Straight through!” he said, his voice ringing over the other matches happening around us. “In Kendo, you don’t go around your problems. You cut straight through! If I don’t move, you better go right through me!”

     OK, I thought, and prepared myself for a head-on collision. On my next run, Teshima Sensei gave the opening to strike his men. I raised my shinai up over my head and flung the tip out, aiming for the top of his head. I let out the cry, “Mennn!” and leaped forward, my right foot sounding on the tatami as it landed. Pulled forward by my own momentum, I kept going, straight forward just as Teshima Sensei had instructed. And then, just when I thought we were going to slam into one another, he stepped out of the way and only our shoulders bumped roughly as I went by. And then by the time I had turned around, he was already in position again, ready for the next attack.

     In addition to always cutting straight, I learned that there are no defensive maneuvers in Kendo, or at least not in Chozen-ji Kendo, anyway. The proper response to an attack is only to attack back. This is because the purpose of Kendo is not actually getting good at the techniques of swordsmanship, which is merely Kenjutsu. “Kendo” on the other hand means the Way of the Sword, a way to perfect a human being through swordsmanship in the same way that Chado, or the Way of Tea, is a way to perfect a human being through tea. Kendo is really taught at Chozen-ji to help students develop a fighting spirit, the energy and disposition to always be ready to attack a problem and move forward. The bare minimum of attention is given to the basics of form, etiquette, and technique. But, like me in only my second class, students are put into the bogu as soon as possible, so we can experience what it is like to really fight. At one point, in response to my describing all the meditation retreats I had done in the past, one of the other students joked that Chozen-ji never held retreats.

     “No retreat. Only attack!” was the running joke.

     I naturally improved at Kendo over the following days and weeks as my habits came to the surface. Remarkably, my training was helping me to not just surface them but also to let them go—sometimes slowly, but sometimes with surprising ease and speed. I came to see that each of my habits had both a psychological and a physical side, and as I continued fighting through welling emotions or as I overcame momentary hesitation in the middle of keiko, I each day began to feel lighter, livelier, and freer. I could feel this even in my first few classes, and I became excited about keeping on with my training and with Kendo. But first, I had to stop freezing, putting my head down, and getting small whenever I saw a hit coming! As a beginner, I was reminded that every other student was going to be faster than me, as they had years more experience under their belts. No matter what came at me, my job was to put everything I had into moving straight forward and cutting with full conviction, even if I was terrible at it. This was what made it not just Kendo but Zen training, not just about swordsmanship but about character.

     It all brought to mind an allegory in the Hagakure, the seventeenth-century samurai manual that I had picked up in anticipation of my arrival. In it, a samurai stands on a bridge. With rushing waters below and the enemy behind and ahead, the Hagakure describes only one option for the samurai: to go forward.

     For the samurai in the Hagakure, being slaughtered did not mean failure. Like Tanouye Rotaishi’s favored translation of the calligraphy in the Kyudo range, “One Shot, Absolute Destruction,” the lesson of the allegory was that if I could learn to commit fully and go for something completely, whatever happened next didn’t matter. It would mean living or dying with the confidence that I had done everything I could and that I had left nothing on the table. So survival wasn’t the goal, but moving forward—always forward—was. This seemed like a superhuman ability that I reasoned might take a whole lifetime to realize. Yet I also felt myself making a little bit of progress each day, developing nominally more technical skill in Kendo as well as some semblance of understanding in the Zen lessons Kendo offered.

Cristina Moon is a Buddhist priest, writer, and strategist who lives at Daihonzan Chozen-ji, a Rinzai Zen temple and martial arts dojo in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, known for its rigorous method of mind, body, and spiritual training. After a global career in human rights and social change, and even graduating from business school at Stanford, she now lives in the secluded grounds of Chozen-ji helping others develop the sensitivity and strength needed to stay calm amid chaos and accord with the myriad changes of today's fast-moving world.