"Donahue, John - Sensei" - читать интересную книгу автора (Donahue John)

felonious of his neighbors there are people walking those streets whose
joints will never work correctly again.

The neighborhood is dirty and smelly and loud. Once you get inside the
dojo, however, the rest of the world disappears. The training hall is
a cavernous space. The walls are unadorned grayish white and the floor
is polished hardwood. There are no decorations on the walls, no
posters of Bruce Lee or the Buddha. To one side there's a small office
area with a battered green metal desk and two doors leading to the
changing rooms. Other than the weapons racks, that's it. There is
absolutely nothing to distract you from the task at hand. It also
means, of course, that there is nowhere to hide, either.

We don't do a great deal of conditioning. What we do is basics.

Yamashita's idea of basics, of course, is bewildering. He thinks
basics are essentially illustrated through application. This is where
the bang and crunch comes in, but with a difference. Anybody can slam
someone into submission take a look at any tough-guy competition or
kick-boxing match. Yamashita is after something different. He thinks
that the essence of any particular technique should be demonstrated by
its effectiveness. He doesn't separate form from results. He doesn't
even admit they are two separate things. He likes us to destroy with
elegance.

There are technical terms for this in Japanese. They can isolate the
mechanics of technique and ri the quality of mastery that allows you to
violate the appearance of form yet still remain true to its essence.
It's hard to explain how they differ and how to separate them, since
most of us have spent years in pursuit of ji and are pretty much
conditioned to follow its dictates. Yamashita doesn't seem to have
much of a problem, however. He prowls the floor like a predator
correcting, encouraging, and demonstrating. And woe to the unlucky
pupil whose focus slips during the exercise: Yamashita screams, "Mm
ri," no til and slams you to the floor. It's a unique pedagogical
technique, but it works for him.

So, beyond the sighs of anticipation, once the lesson started, none of
us spent much time worrying about how tough things were. In the dojo
of Yamashita Sensei, the only way to be is fully present and engaged in
the activity at hand. The unfocused are quickly weeded out and rarely
return. The rest of us endure, in the suspicion that all this will
lead to something approximating the fierce skill of our master.

We were working that day on some tricky techniques that involve
pressure on selected nerve centers in the forearm. At about the time
when most of us were slowing down shaking our arms out in an effort to
get the nerves to stop jangling Yamashita called that part of the
lesson quits and picked up a bokken. We scurried to the lower end of
the floor and sat down as he began his instructions.