I study and train in violence.
More specifically, I am a budoka, a student of budo, traditional Okinawan and Japanese martial arts. Budo is in part an aesthetic practice, in part a spiritual practice, and it serves as a limited realm in which the pursuit of perfection is possible.
As such, there are similarities between studying budo and devoting oneself to tea ceremony or other such arts, but budo also exists in its own sweaty, bruised, bloodstained category, because it is a warrior way, concerned at a basic level with physical struggle.
Violence and death are its subject matter. Valuing peace and deploring violence, a person might be skeptical about a practice that teaches breaking bones, tearing tendons, and cutting arteries being any kind of spiritual or philosophical endeavor.
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