“The person who knows kindness and compassion is a true warrior.”
A warrior is kinder. It takes way more inner strength to be kind than it does to hurt someone. Understanding this, the real goal of training is then to make us kinder not more hostile. Furuya Sensei once said, “The martial arts are one of the most useless things.” What Sensei meant was that the act of fighting, on most levels, is useless in everyday life. When our car is stuck in the mud, we don’t need a warrior, we need kindness. Thus, the act of kindness has more value than the act of violence. True power is the ability to be kind to someone that doesn’t deserve it or who is trying to harm us. That is why the Japanese say, Nasake wo shiru ga makoto no bushi (情けを知るが誠の武士) or “The person who knows kindness and compassion is a true warrior.” Have you ever tried to do something nice for a stranger? There is this weird back and forth that happens in our minds and then we must muster the courage to do it. Anyone can be petty or hateful, but it takes entirely more strength to be kind. The true value of budo is not in its ability to teach us to destroy, but in its ability to teach us to be kind. Today, the world doesn’t need more fighting, it needs more kindness. True power is not in how many lives we can take but in how many we save and that is why a warrior is kinder.
Today’s goal: Try a random act of kindness and notice how hard it is and how much inner strength it actually takes.