Book Review: The Bodhisattva Warriors

I've noted a number of times before it's hard to find good, well-researched works on the martial arts. As a consequence I'm always on the look-out for quality titles; when I ran across The Bodhisattva Warriors¹ at Powell's I thought that I'd found a winner². On casual review it looked to have a lot of interesting information that I hadn't encountered elsewhere, which is what compelled me to purchase a copy, but a thorough reading ultimately left me disappointed.

A large part of this disappointment stems from the fact that the book fails deliver on the promise in its title. I would expect that a work which dealt with the "origin, inner philosphy, history, and symbolism" of a martial art would spend a fair amount of time on the art itself; it's hard to discuss and analyze a thing unless you've defined it first. But the author, Shifu Nagaboshi Tomio (aka Terence Dukes), spends surprisingly little time discussing specific current or historical practice.

The section of the book focused on physical practice ("The Mandala of Movement") starts with a brief but lucid description of the arts of the Ksatreya caste of ancient India, focusing specifically on Vajramukti (the system of unarmed combat) and nata (roughly equivalent to form-based training). That portion is interesting, and certainly relevant to a discussion of the origins of Buddhist martial arts, but the book then goes off the rails in attempting to make a connection between Vajramukti / nata and Buddhist thought/practice.

The biggest weakness of this book is that Mr. Dukes is an apologist for Buddhism; he doesn't make a serious effort to critically analyze received wisdom. So, when it come time to talk about what Buddhists actually did in ancient India, he says the following:

Buddhism has a long and extensive influence within India, its teaching spreading far into China, Malaysia, and westward into Iran, Turkey, and beyond. Indian history can be classified into four great historical periods in which monarchs goverend their realms according to Buddhist ethics and precepts. We can assume that in all of their monarchical regions the cultured arts of Buddhism were all well know. (p. 172)

Maybe, but even if you accept the basic premise that these periods were governed according to "Buddhist ethics and precepts" it's still a big stretch to assume that the distribution and interpretation of the "cultured arts" was universal. Slightly further on he says:

The Muslim invasions and subsequent slaughter of Buddhist monks and nuns caused many to flee into Southern India, China, and elsewhere. Because of this, much of what we know concerning nata within Indian Buddhism comes to us via Chinese tradition and Buddhist writings. Refugees carried with them living knowledge, not only of Buddhist spiritual teaching, but also of its cultural arts and skillful means of teaching. The Gupta and Pala Dynasty nata would have been among these, and doubtless continued to be developed by subsequent Buddhist masters [Note 34a]. (p. 174)

The problem here is that he's asking us to assume a tremendous amount about the Indian Buddhist nata. He provides enough material that we can be certain that some set of physical practices called nata existed in Buddhist India, but anything further than that is supported primarily by post-diaspora oral tradition and writings. The text is riddled with such logical leaps:

According to traditional and reliable temple accounts, there were several seminal methods of unarmed combat training which came into China from the second to eigth centuries A.D. All of these came from India and thus stemmed directly or indirectly from the martial traditions of the Indian nobility, that is, the Vajramukti method. (p. 207)

He doesn't even bother to provide a citation for that; what do these accounts consist of? How do we know that they are reliable? etc. Moreover, even if we accept the premise that one or more unarmed combat methods came to China from India, it doesn't follow from there that they bore any relation to Vajramukti. Mr. Dukes mentions a "people's army" which existed contemporaneously with the Ksatreya (p. 159) which had its own military practice; absent any good evidence one way or the other it's just as likely that the unarmed combat methods which arrived in China could have had their roots in that tradition.

He also spends a lof time time drawing unwarranted inferences. Take, for example, this passage:

In the countries to which Buddhist nata were taken, particularly Thailand, Korea, and Malaysia, we find evidence of various unarmed martial arts, which were (or are) still practiced with nata movement patterns and techniques, even though Buddhism, itself, has been largely forgotten or replaced by other teachings. It is not difficult to recognize their connection to the Buddhist nata if one knows something of them. (p. 174)

Again, no cites, no notes, no nothing. He's saying "it looks like nata if you squint just right", despite the fact that he hasn't ever defined what nata look like. In a similar vein, he spends a lot of time talking about esoteric mudras (hand configurations) used in Buddhist rituals, seeing the similarities between the mudras and hand configurations found in various martial arts as evidence that the latter descended from the former. He's either unaware of (or totally discounts) the possibility of convergent evolution. There are a finitie number of things you can do with the human body, so the fact that two techniques look similar isn't sufficient to demonstrate a lineal relationship.

And then there are some random, toss-away lines that made me go "WTF?". For example, in talking about the evolution of various schools of Buddhism he has this to say about Sahaja-yana, a type of "left-handed" Mikkyo:

It is said, however, that the aim of this school was to realize voidness by means of what was symbolically designated Mahasukha (Great Bliss) in one's body and mind. Popular in the Bengal region of India, it become [sic] influenced by Hindu Tantrism and rapidly degenerated into a teaching of depravity advocating Maithuna (ritual sexual intercourse) and other titillations. (p. 204)

Huh? Exactly how does rendering judgement on an extinct Buddhist/Hindu hybrid do anything to forward the purpose of the book? There are a number of questionable statements similar to the one above scattered through the main text and endnotes which, taken in gestalt, demonstrate that Mr. Dukes is a polemicist who's primarily interested in defending his interpretation of Buddhism. For example, he really has a hang-up about monks and the use of weaponry, stating several times that no "real" Buddhist monk would ever use a weapon. Evidence to the contrary is either explained away ("the sistrum is not a quarterstaff") or dismissed as the work of non-monks pretending to be monks (p. 216). So who died and made Mr. Dukes the arbiter of all things Buddhist anyway?

That said, the book isn't a complete loss. The first few chapters are interesting in their own right, especially the bits about perception and the Buddhist concept of self-as-process. I found it helpful, in reading those parts, to have first read Zen and the Brain; without that background material the discussion probably would have been to esoteric to be easily comprehensible.

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1 The full title is a mouthfull: The Bodhisattva Warriors: The Origin, Inner Philosophy, History and Symbolism of the Buddhist Martial Art within Indian and China.

2 Of course, my wife will tell you that I'm just a sucker for any thick book with big words on the cover.