This essay is part of a series on science as a discipline of mind, beginning with “Science as Mental Self-Defense.”
A Scene That Repeats Itself
Somewhere in the Western world right now — in a converted warehouse, a community center, a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers — a teacher is demonstrating how ki energy can throw a student without physical contact. The students fall. The teacher explains that the technique cannot be shown to skeptics, because their disbelief interferes with the energy field. Footage of elderly Japanese masters performing apparently impossible feats is shown as supporting evidence. The words budo, bushido, and the way of the samurai are invoked with reverence.
This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a substantial and growing part of how Japanese martial arts exist in the Western imagination. And almost everything it claims about the Japanese warrior tradition is historically wrong.
This essay is not an attack on martial arts practice. Decades of committed training produce real and valuable things: physical conditioning, mental discipline, community, and a set of meaningful rituals. These goods stand on their own and require no supernatural scaffolding.
This essay is about what happens when that scaffolding is constructed anyway — and about what the actual historical record of the Japanese warrior says, which turns out to be considerably more interesting than the mythology.
How the Spiritual Samurai Was Built
The romanticized, spiritualized samurai did not emerge from Japanese history. He was largely assembled in the late nineteenth century, at the intersection of two anxieties: Japan’s need to present itself as civilized to a skeptical West, and the West’s desire for an exotic spiritual tradition it could project onto Asia.
The document most responsible for the Western image of the samurai is Bushido: The Soul of Japan, published in 1900 by Inazo Nitobe. It is crucial to understand what this book was and was not. It was written in English, published first in the United States, and addressed explicitly to a Western audience. Nitobe — who had been educated in the United States and converted to Quakerism — consciously drew parallels between the samurai and Western chivalry. He stripped historical samurai practice of its most mercenary and violent aspects and reframed it as a spiritual code analogous to Christian knighthood.
Scholars today largely treat Bushido as what historian Oleg Benesch has called an “invented tradition” — something presented as ancient and continuous that is, in fact, a recent construction. The word bushido itself appears to have been rarely used before the eighteenth century, and the systematic ethical code Nitobe described has little documentary support in earlier samurai sources. The book was, in essence, a piece of cross-cultural public relations.
The spiritualization went further during the twentieth century. As various arts spread to Western audiences in the 1960s and 1970s, their founders and promoters often emphasized the spiritual and philosophical dimensions over the pragmatic ones. The Meiji-era transformation of martial practices from jutsu (techniques for killing) to do (ways of self-cultivation) had genuinely introduced spiritual content into some arts; in others, that spiritual content was present from the founding, rooted in the personal religious commitments of individual founders rather than in the broader warrior tradition. In either case, the degree to which this spirituality was ancient, universal, or representative of Japanese warrior culture was consistently overstated.
What we are left with is a constructed image: the samurai as spiritual warrior, the dojo as temple, ki as the animating force of reality, and Japanese martial arts as a vehicle for accessing truths unavailable to Western rationalism.
A Case Study in Construction: Zen in the Art of Archery
No single work did more to cement this constructed image in Western consciousness than Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, published in German in 1948 and in English in 1953. It has sold millions of copies, been translated into dozens of languages, and is still cited in martial arts schools around the world as evidence that Japanese archery is a vehicle for Zen enlightenment. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most influential books ever written about Japanese culture.
It is also, in its central claims, deeply unreliable — and the way in which it is unreliable is more illuminating than the claims themselves.
Herrigel was a German philosopher who came to Japan in the 1920s specifically seeking Zen. Unable to access it directly, he chose kyūdō — traditional Japanese archery — as a proxy. He studied under Awa Kenzō, a master of exceptional skill. For six years, Herrigel practiced, struggled, and eventually — by his account — experienced the mystical union between archer, bow, and target that he had come seeking.
The problem, documented in meticulous detail by scholar Shoji Yamada in Shots in the Dark: Japan, Zen, and the West (published in Japanese as Zen to iu na no Nihon-maru), begins with a fundamental fact: Herrigel never learned Japanese. He communicated with Awa exclusively through an interpreter, and that interpreter later acknowledged that Awa’s language was frequently cryptic and difficult, and that the interpreter’s translations were often loose paraphrases rather than accurate renderings.
More critically: Awa Kenzō was not a Zen practitioner. He had developed his own religious system, which he called Daishadōkyō — a personal metaphysics of archery that drew on Mahāyāna Buddhist language but was not connected to any Zen lineage. When Awa spoke of spiritual dimensions of archery, he was articulating his own idiosyncratic religious vision. Herrigel, filtered through an interpreter and primed by his prior expectations, heard Zen.
The now-famous central episode of the book — in which Herrigel experiences “It shoots,” the sense that the arrow releases itself without conscious intention — has been examined closely by Yamada. The evidence suggests that what Awa said was considerably more prosaic than Herrigel recorded, and that the transcendent interpretation was largely Herrigel’s own projection, transmitted through an interpreter who was himself uncertain what Awa meant.
There is a further biographical dimension that must be acknowledged. Herrigel was a member of the Nazi Party, and Zen in the Art of Archery was published in the immediate postwar period, when its implicit themes — the transcendence of individual will, submission to a higher force, the superiority of non-rational modes of knowledge — carried resonances that his German readership would have felt, whether consciously or not.
The book’s global reach was dramatically amplified when D.T. Suzuki — the Japanese Buddhist scholar most responsible for introducing Zen to the West — wrote the preface to the English translation. Suzuki’s endorsement gave the book a stamp of Japanese authenticity that it had not earned. Suzuki himself had complex motivations: he was deeply invested in the idea of Zen as a universal spiritual technology, and Herrigel’s book supported that project.
The result was a self-reinforcing construction. A German philosopher projected Zen onto Japanese archery. A Japanese Buddhist scholar with his own agenda endorsed the projection as authentic. The book sold millions of copies to Western readers who wanted to believe exactly what it claimed. Kyūdō schools around the world incorporated its language into their teaching. And a generation of practitioners came to believe that what they were learning was an ancient Japanese tradition of spiritual archery rooted in Zen — when, in fact, they were practicing a twentieth-century martial art refracted through a German philosopher’s wishful thinking, mistranslated through an interpreter, and endorsed for strategic reasons by a Buddhist scholar.
This is not a minor footnote. Zen in the Art of Archery is the founding text of the entire genre of Western writing that treats Japanese martial arts as vehicles for spiritual enlightenment. If its central claims are unreliable — and the scholarly consensus increasingly holds that they are — then the genre it founded rests on a manufactured foundation.
Yamada’s critique does not argue that kyūdō has no value, or that practice cannot produce genuine experiences of flow, concentration, or meaning. It argues that what Herrigel described was not what he claimed it was — and that the difference matters.
What Is Actually Happening in Western Martial Arts
The constructed image has consequences.
The philosopher Karl Popper argued that the defining characteristic of a scientific claim is falsifiability: the claim must specify in advance the conditions under which it could be proven wrong. A system of belief that can absorb any outcome — that reinterprets every failure as a different kind of success — is not a theory. It is a faith structure.
Measured against this criterion, a significant portion of what circulates in Western martial arts communities fails badly.
Consider no-touch knockout techniques. George Dillman, a prominent American practitioner, claimed the ability to knock out opponents using pressure points and ki energy without physical contact. When tested by National Geographic under conditions where his students were replaced by neutral volunteers, the technique failed entirely. Dillman’s explanation — that one of the volunteers was wearing red underwear, which blocked the energy — is a textbook example of unfalsifiable reasoning: every possible test result can be reinterpreted as evidence for the theory.
The pattern in such cases is consistent: a technique that works (or appears to work) in a controlled environment is explained by a cause that cannot be tested. The technique becomes the proof of the untestable cause. The untestable cause becomes the reason only initiated practitioners can access the technique. And anyone who challenges the system from outside is, by definition, lacking the prerequisites to evaluate it.
This is not the way of the samurai. This is the way of the unfalsifiable.
What the Historical Samurai Were Actually Like
The historical samurai were professional warriors in a violent, competitive, politically unstable society. Their primary concern was effectiveness.
They switched allegiances when it suited them. In the Heian period, samurai served whoever paid most. At the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 — one of the largest battles in Japanese history — allegiances shifted during the fighting itself, as commanders calculated which side was more likely to win. The image of samurai as paragons of unconditional loyalty is drawn almost entirely from the Tokugawa period (1603–1868): a time of unprecedented peace in which there was almost no actual warfare, and samurai had time to theorize about what warriors should ideally be rather than demonstrate it in practice.
The actual fighting samurai were technologists and pragmatists. Within decades of Portuguese firearms arriving in Japan in 1543, major warlords had integrated arquebuses into their armies at scale. The specific tactical details of how exactly firearms were deployed at particular battles — such as Nagashino in 1575 — remain subjects of ongoing historical debate, and some popular accounts have been shown to rely on later embellishment rather than contemporary sources. But the broader pattern is not in dispute: firearms were adopted rapidly and extensively because they were effective. The idea that the samurai had a principled opposition to “inelegant” weapons like firearms is a romanticization with essentially no historical support.
Even Zen Buddhism — perhaps the most prominent element of the spiritual samurai image in the Western imagination — was not the universal faith of the warrior class. Research consistently shows that Zen was one of several Buddhist schools practiced by samurai, and that it was “the religion of the samurai” only in the sense that many patrons of Zen were samurai, not in the sense that most samurai practiced it devotedly or exclusively. The specific association between Zen and martial training, so central to the Western image of the bushido warrior-monk, was largely developed and promoted during the Meiji period and after.
The samurai, in short, were not seeking transcendence. They were seeking to survive, to win, and occasionally to articulate what they had learned about doing both.
Musashi as One Example Among Many
Miyamoto Musashi is the figure most often invoked in Western martial arts culture. He is worth examining precisely because the contrast between the real man and the mythologized figure is so instructive.
First, the necessary historical note. The most famous story about Musashi — that at the duel on Ganryūjima he arrived hours late, carved a wooden sword from a boat oar, and defeated Sasaki Kojirō without using his signature two-sword style — is a legend. Historians have long noted that the details are poorly supported by contemporary sources and were substantially elaborated in later centuries. Accepting this story as fact is precisely the kind of thinking these essays argue against: a compelling narrative that feels true, believed in place of evidence.
The actual Musashi we can verify through Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings, c. 1645) — written in his own words in the last weeks of his life — is something more interesting than the myth.
Go Rin No Sho contains no mention of hidden spiritual energies, secret transmissions, or powers available only to the initiated. It is relentlessly, almost severely pragmatic. “Do not have a favorite weapon,” Musashi writes. “To become overly familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well.”
He names the failure mode explicitly: hyōhō no yamai — “the disease of strategy.” It is the condition of a fighter who has become so attached to a particular method that he can no longer see when it is failing him. The technique becomes a belief rather than a tool. And belief, unlike a tool, cannot be put down.
This is a warrior who spent his entire life developing a technique, and his final written work is a sustained warning against becoming attached to any technique. That is not mysticism. That is a sophisticated understanding of how cognitive attachment creates vulnerability — an understanding that maps precisely onto what cognitive scientists today call confirmation bias, and what Popper described as the unfalsifiability problem.
Musashi is one example. But the same pragmatism appears throughout the documentary record of actual Japanese warrior practice — in the tactical manuals, in the historical behavior of successful military commanders, in the technical evolution of weapons and armor over centuries. The pattern is consistent: what worked was used; what stopped working was abandoned.
The Transmission Problem
There is a teaching in Zen — one that Musashi himself invoked — expressed in Japanese as: tsuki wo sasaseba yubi wo miru (“when the finger points at the moon, one sees the finger”). The forms, the lineages, the terminology, the titles: these are fingers. What they were designed to point toward is an actual effect on an actual human being.
The danger is not in having fingers. The danger is in worshipping them.
The Western spiritualization of Japanese martial arts has produced a particular kind of practitioner: someone who came seeking something transcendent, found a framework that promised transcendence, and has since organized their practice around protecting that promise from scrutiny. The techniques, the lineage claims, the esoteric terminology — all of it functions as the finger, mistaken for the moon.
What makes this particularly important to name clearly is that the framework claims Japanese authority for itself. It says: this is what the samurai believed. This is the actual tradition. Western skepticism is itself a form of cultural blindness. The claim of Japanese authenticity becomes a shield against the kind of honest scrutiny that Japanese warrior culture actually produced.
The historical record does not support the claim. The karate-do that was spiritualized was karate-jutsu first — a practical fighting system that was deliberately transformed into a vehicle for moral and spiritual cultivation as it was brought from Okinawa to mainland Japan in the early twentieth century. The bushido that moved the Western heart was written in English for a Western audience in 1900.
To say this is not to diminish what is genuinely valuable in these practices. It is to ask that the value be located honestly — in what the practice actually does to an actual human being, not in what the lineage claims to possess.
What Mastery Actually Looks Like
The romanticized samurai offers certainty. The lineage is unbroken. The technique is complete. The hidden teaching, once transmitted, answers all questions.
The historical samurai offers something harder and more valuable: a method. Not a destination, but a way of traveling. The discipline of not clinging to the last good answer when the situation has changed.
To master a technique — any technique — is to understand precisely both where it applies and where it does not. To recognize clearly: this tool is not suited to this situation. And to act on that recognition without ego, without attachment to reputation or identity.
This quality — not any particular victory, any miraculous demonstration, any lineage transmission — is what it means to have genuinely mastered something. It is visible in the historical record of Japanese warrior practice. It is what Go Rin No Sho is about. And it is, expressed in a different vocabulary, what Karl Popper meant when he said that the willingness to be wrong is the precondition for being right.
There is a reason the most effective practitioners in any martial discipline — when tested in contexts where the test cannot be controlled — tend to be the ones least committed to any single system. The ability to set down the technique you have spent years perfecting, because the situation requires something else, is not a betrayal of your training. It is the proof that your training actually worked.
Only those who have truly mastered a tool understand its limits precisely enough to put it down without hesitation.
That is what the finger pointing at the moon actually looks like. Not mystery. Not transmission. Not energy fields that fail when a skeptic is present.
Clear seeing. And the courage to act on what you see.
Perhaps now you understand why I call myself a practitioner of kyūjutsu — not kyūdō.
This essay is part of a series beginning with “Science as Mental Self-Defense.” The author is a researcher in information science.
Sources and further reading:
- Benesch, Oleg. Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushidō in Modern Japan. Oxford University Press.
- Nitobe, Inazo. Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900). [Historical context on the constructed nature of the Western samurai ideal.]
- “Fake martial arts: The psychology behind ‘no-touch’ knockouts.” Big Think.
- Miyamoto Musashi. Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings, c. 1645).