Chinese, Korean and Okinawan boxing arts represent an independent tradition from the battlefield disciplines developed by Chinese and Korean armies. The latter were warrior arts in the strict sense of the term, but the former had multiple, overlapping personalities: part self-defense, part competitive sport, part performance art, and part regimen for promoting physiological health and longevity. The traditional warrior arts became extinct when modern weapons rendered swords, spears, and halberds obsolete, but the boxing forms survive and prosper. Japan, however, had no counterpart to Chinese boxingat least not until modern times. The bugei practiced in Japan today descend directly from arts developed for the battlefield. Furthermore, until modern times the Japanese fighting arts were more or less the exclusive property of the samurai, the ruling class throughout the period in which the disciplines matured. Chinese, Okinawan, and Korean boxing forms, by contrast, were created by tradesmen, peasants, ascetics, entertainers, monks, rebels, bandits, and other political have-nots. And, as we shall see later in this study, the special character and status of the Japanese bugei emerged precisely because of their ancestry and parentage.
If martial arts, then, is a less than totally satisfactory term, what might one ask do the Japanese themselves call their traditional military disciplines? Unfortunately, the answer to this question depends on the period under scrutiny. Historically, the samurai employed at least four words that are still in common use today, as well as others that are not; the meaning and popularity of each varied with the times.
The two oldest terms are "bugei," which I have already introduced, and "hyoho," more commonly pronounced "heiho" in modern usage. Both appear in Japanese written records as far back as the turn of the eighth century. The early meanings of the two words overlapped to a considerable extent, but by the Tokugawa period, "hyoho" had narrowed considerably, from a general term to one of several alternative names for swordsmanship. "Bugei," in the meantime, had become a generic term for samurai fighting arts. Today, "heiho" simply means "strategy" in general usage, while scholars and practitioners of traditional swordsmanship and related arts apply it in more restricted fashion to designate the principles around which a school's approach to combat is constructed.
Two other words closely related to "bugei" "budo" and "bujutsu"also came into fashion during the medieval and early modern periods. Pre-Meiji sources use "bugei" and ''bujutsu" interchangeably, but "budo" sometimes carried special connotations. Literally, "the martial path," or "the warrior's way," "budo" appeared in print for the first time in a text compiled in the thirteenth century. Its meaning seems to have been rather ambiguous until the Tokugawa period, when it came to designate what modern authors often anachronistically call bushido that is, the code of conduct, rather than the military arts, of the warrior class. Nineteenth-century scholar and philosopher Aizawa Yasushi's definition is typical of his age:
The arts of the sword, spear, bow and saddle are the bugei; to know etiquette and honor, to preserve the way of the gentleman, to strive for frugality, and thus become a bulwark of the state, is budo.
Among modern authorities in Japan the terms "bugei," "budo," and "bujutsu" have acquired a more or less conventional usage that, for convenience, I have adopted for the present study. "Bujutsu" describes the various Japanese martial disciplines in their original function as arts of war; "budo" denotes the process by which the study of bujutsu becomes a means to self-development and self-realization; and "bugei" is a general term for the traditional Japanese military arts, embracing both bujutsu and budo. It should be stressed, however, that this usage is modern, not traditional.
~~Legacies of the Sword : The Kashima-Shinryu and Samurai Martial Culture -by- Karl F. Friday with Seki Humitake
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