拳禅一如 kenzen ichinyo The Body and Mind are One
This is a philological study of the Japanese phrase 拳禅一如 (kenzen ichinyo), the fist and Zen are one. It spans the record from the founding of Shorinji Kempo in 1947, its earliest dated use, back through its Meiji-era model 剣禅一如, coined in 1919 for what the Zen master Takuan had taught the swordsman Yagyū Munenori three centuries earlier, and examines why a phrase every karate book treats as a venerable saying is, on the print record, a postwar creed built on a Meiji pun.
Abstract
拳禅一如, kenzen ichinyo, the fist and Zen are one, is a karate maxim of the middle twentieth century: the first principle of Shorinji Kempo, founded in 1947, and a watchword of the Okinawan and Kyokushin lines. It was made by putting the fist where the sword had stood in 剣禅一如, and that phrase is itself Meiji and Taishō, coined in 1919 to name what the Zen master Takuan had taught the swordsman Yagyū Munenori three centuries before without ever naming it. Both readings belong to the phrase: the fist and Zen are one is the literal, and the body and mind are one is the karate teachers' gloss, in English since 1982.
Overview
The sense. That the striking art and Zen are one and the same discipline, the trained body and the trained mind one thing; a karate maxim made from the swordsman's 剣禅一如 by putting a fist for the sword.
The words. 拳 is the fist, and in the names of the striking arts it stands for the art: 拳法, 拳術. 禅 is Zen. 一如 is a Buddhist word twelve centuries old in Japanese, one and the same, not two; the dictionaries give the everyday sense with the example 物心一如, matter and mind one. So the four say the fist and Zen are one and the same. They are modeled on 剣禅一如, the sword and Zen are one, and that on 剣禅一致, the sword and Zen agree, which the big dictionary defines as the stance 沢庵 taught in his letter to the shogun's fencing master: that the last ground of swordsmanship is the same as Zen's ground of no-thought. Both first characters are read ken, so the karate phrase is a pun on the sword's, and a karate man hearing one hears the other beneath it.
The text in English. The house English, The Body and Mind are One, is not a translation of the characters but the teachers' gloss of them, the fist for the body and Zen for the mind; it has been the English of the phrase since a 1982 translation of Musashi explained There is a saying, Ken-Zen Ichi Nyo, ("Body and Mind, Together"). The literal, The fist and Zen are one, is what the karate books print.
The historical record
Before 1645, 沢庵, the 不動智神妙録, which does not contain the phrase. The Zen master's letter to 柳生宗矩 on the sword and the unmoving mind is where every later writer sends the reader, and the 1921 edition of it has neither 剣禅一如 nor 剣禅一致 in the text: its text carries 劍禪一如 once in the whole book, at scan 6, in the editor's preface. 沢庵 taught the thing. The name is three centuries younger [1].
1908 to 1919, the name. The three phrases for the sword appear in the Meiji and Taishō literature on 山岡鉄舟, 宮本武蔵, 沢庵 and 宗矩, and nothing older carries any of them: 剣禅一味 in 1908, 剣禅一致 in 1909, 剣禅一如 in 1919. The 1919 sentence is a biography of 宗矩 in a collection of Zen anecdotes: he took his mind to the essentials of Zen, paid homage to 沢庵, tasted his angry fist for years, and attained to the sword and Zen being one; 沢庵 gave him an iron sceptre as his certificate, the one kept at 天沢山 in 湯島; and what the world calls the 不動智神妙録 is what 沢庵 taught him. A 1921 edition of 沢庵's works copied the sentence into its preface with the reading けんぜんいちにょ, writing 痛棒, the master's stick, where 1919 had 瞋拳, the angry fist. 徳富蘇峰 used it in 1926, of 沢庵's letter to 柳生; two 1936 books call it what 山岡 used to call 剣禅一如; from 1935 吉川英治's newspaper 宮本武蔵 made it the name of what its hero seeks, and in 1940 the first book was titled with it. The 1940s made it a slogan [2].
1935 to 1968, the fist takes the sword's words. Karate came to the mainland in the 1920s and borrowed the sword's vocabulary. 船越義珍's 空手道教範 (1935) carries the idea in an introduction by his nephew Gisho Funakoshi, printed with Harumi Suzuki-Johnston's English translation of the 1935 text: a state of mind in which "there is a unity of fist and Zen". Which Japanese form that English translates is not known; Tsutomu Ohshima's 1973 English of the manual does not carry the sentence. The Shōtōkan line's own form is the older 拳禅一致: it hangs in its dojos as the fifteenth of the sayings, and the school cut kenzen-itchi into the monument it raised to 船越 at 円覚寺 in Kamakura in 1968. The Okinawan founder of 剛柔流, 宮城長順, is reported to have set 拳禅一如 as the state karate should aim at, in a lecture of 1936 [3].
1947, 宗道臣, Shorinji Kempo. The school's official site dates its founding to October 1947 at 多度津 and calls it the 拳禅一如 Shorinji Kempo; the phrase stands first among its six defining features, before 力愛不二, strength and love not two. This is the earliest dated use of the four characters known, and the school is the phrase's home: its magazine's twenty-first number is the way of 拳禅一如 [4].
The 1970s and 1980s, the creed spreads. The manga 空手バカ一代 (1971–77) has 大山倍達 vow not 剣禅一如 but 拳禅一如, the etymology as a joke, and its reissue titles a volume with it. 長嶺将真, founder of 松林流, gave it a chapter of his memoir, Karate and Zen are One, and a section Dedicated to Seeking Ken Zen Ichinyo. A 1982 magazine article, a Kodansha book of 1983 titled The Way of 拳禅一如, and a 1994 Kyushu karate memoir carry it in the national library's catalogue [5].
The sense across time. One idea, two names, three centuries apart. 沢庵's idea, that the sword's mastery and Zen's are the same mastery, went unnamed until Meiji readers needed a word for it and made three. The karate schools took the third and changed one character, and in doing so changed what the name is for: the sword's phrase describes an attainment, something a master reaches; the fist's phrase describes a method, body and mind trained together from the first day, which is how Shorinji Kempo defines it [4].
What is not a source. 沢庵, who never wrote the words; the 1921 edition of the 不動智神妙録 does not carry them. Nothing pre-Meiji: the library's nine classical hits on 剣禅 are the two characters as accidental neighbors in lists. Nothing Chinese: neither form in any form. No Meiji bilingual dictionary. Blyth is silent.
Today, the dictionaries. No Japanese dictionary has the four characters as a headword; the sword's 剣禅一致 is the only one of the family in the big dictionary. The phrase lives in dojos and their books, in three languages [6].
The phrase in English
1966 to 2013. The sword's phrase, in the scholarship. A Jesuit Zen teacher wrote in 1966 that the Japanese language has expressions like Ken-zen ichinyo, which means "fencing and Zen are one," and the scholars of Zen and the sword (Hurst 1998, Victoria 1997, Ives 2009, Haskel 2013) have used the romaji since; Victoria records a Zen master who didn't know when the phrase "The sword and Zen are one" had first been used, a question the 1919 sentence answers [7].
1976 to 2023. The fist's phrase, in the karate books. The earliest known is a women's self-defense book of 1976 (kenzen itchi — harmony between the fist and Zen); Ohshima's 1973 Funakoshi has no such sentence, and a unity of fist and Zen is Suzuki-Johnston's English (Neptune Publications, copyright 2005, reissued 2016) of the nephew's introduction; Nakayama's Best Karate (1978, quoting 沢庵 as The sword and Zen are one), Rielly's Shotokan histories (1998, 2000: The fist and Zen are the same, with calligraphy plates), Nagamine's memoir (2000, Karate and Zen are One), Nakamura (2001, the old saying Ken Zen Ichi Nyo), a dojo calligraphy in Rhinoceros Zen (2005, Karate and Zen as One), Bennett on Shorinji Kempo (2009, 2023: unity of ken and Zen, i.e. technique and spirit) and Hall's encyclopedia (2012, boxing and Zen are one) [8].
Today. The house title's line runs from a 1982 Bantam translation of Musashi, Ken-Zen Ichi Nyo, ("Body and Mind, Together"), copied since by popular books far from any dojo as an old Zen adage. The house rendering is that gloss in other words and needs no credit [9].
A reading
The honest history of this text is short. 拳禅一如 is a karate maxim of the middle twentieth century, the first principle of a school founded in 1947 and the creed of the Okinawan and Kyokushin lines, made by putting the fist where the sword had been in 剣禅一如; and that phrase is itself modern, coined in 1919 to name what 沢庵 had taught 宗矩 three centuries earlier without naming it. So the four characters carry a real idea with a long pedigree and a name two generations old, and the pun is the point: ken is both, and 沢庵, 武蔵 and 鉄舟 stand behind the sword the fist replaced. The fist and Zen are one is the right literal; body and mind are one is what the teachers say it means, and it has said that in English since 1982. Both belong to the phrase, with the schools and the model named and no antiquity claimed. On a dojo wall, the four characters carry the modern karate creed.
References
- 沢庵宗彭, 不動智神妙録, before 1645, in 後藤亮一, ed., 禅門法語全集 第1巻, 1921, scan 6 and from scan 14. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/968098/1/6
- 森大狂, 近古禅林叢談, 1919, scan 45 (the earliest 剣禅一如); 常磐大定, 釈迦牟尼伝, 1908, scan 131 (剣禅一味); 足立栗園, 胆力之錬養, 1909, scan 101 (剣禅一致); 加藤咄堂, 剣客禅話, 1916, scan 60; 徳富蘇峰, 1926, scan 140; two books of 1936, scan 99 and scan 13. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/963150/1/45 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/816597/1/131 · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/757708/1/101
- 船越義珍, 空手道教範, 1935, the introduction by Gisho Funakoshi, trans. Harumi Suzuki-Johnston, Neptune Publications, copyright 2005, at Internet Archive (karatedokyohanma0000gich); Tsutomu Ohshima (trans.), Karate-Do Kyohan, Kodansha, 1973.
- Shorinji Kempo, official site, shorinjikempo.or.jp/what/ and /federation/compulsory/features; magazine, vol. 21 (2012), shorinjikempo.or.jp/magazine/.
- 梶原一騎・つのだじろう, 空手バカ一代, 1971–77; 長嶺将真, Tales of Okinawa's Great Masters, Tuttle, 2000, ch. 12, at Internet Archive (talesofokinawasg0000naga); 鈴木義孝, 拳禅一如の道, Kodansha, 1983; 宮田実, 拳禅一如, 1994, National Diet Library Digital Collections.
- kotobank, 剣禅一致 (the only headword); 拳禅一如 and 剣禅一如 (no entry). https://kotobank.jp/word/剣禅一致
- Hugo Enomiya-Lassalle, Zen: Way to Enlightenment, Taplinger, 1966, at Internet Archive (zenwaytoenlighte0000hugo); Brian Victoria, Zen at War, Weatherhill, 1997, at Internet Archive (zenatwar0000vict); G. Cameron Hurst, Armed Martial Arts of Japan, Yale, 1998, at Internet Archive (armedmartialarts0000hurs); Christopher Ives, Imperial-Way Zen, Hawai'i, 2009, at Internet Archive (imperialwayzenic0000ives); Peter Haskel, Sword of Zen, Hawai'i, 2013, at Internet Archive (swordofzenmaster0000hask).
- Jun Sugano, Karate and Self-Defense for Women, Ward Lock, 1976, at Internet Archive (karateselfdefens0000suga); Nakayama Masatoshi, Best Karate 3: Kumite 1, Kodansha, 1978, at Internet Archive (bestkarate3kumit0000naka); Robin L. Rielly, Complete Shotokan Karate and Secrets of Shotokan Karate, Tuttle, 1998 and 2000, at Internet Archive (completeshotokan0000riel, secretsofshotoka0000riel); 長嶺将真, Tales of Okinawa's Great Masters, Tuttle, 2000, at Internet Archive (talesofokinawasg0000naga); 中村忠, Karate: Technique and Spirit, Tuttle, 2001, at Internet Archive (karatetechniques0000tada); Jeffrey Brooks, Rhinoceros Zen, 2005, at Internet Archive (rhinoceroszenzen0000broo); Alexander Bennett, The Martial Ways of Japan, Nippon Budokan, 2009, and The Insider's Guide to the Japanese Martial Arts, Tuttle, 2023, at Internet Archive (martialwaysofjap0000alex, insidersguidetoj0000alex); David A. Hall, Encyclopedia of Japanese Martial Arts, Kodansha USA, 2012, at Internet Archive (encyclopediaofja0000hall).
- The Book of Five Rings, Bantam, 1982, at Internet Archive (bookoffiveringsg00miya).
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