Martial Arts Don't Make You a Better Person

Martial arts have a strange relationship with morality. Spend enough time around traditional martial arts and eventually you're going to hear about Bushido, the warrior code of the samurai. We're told that martial arts aren't just about learning how to fight. They're supposed to teach discipline, humility, courage, loyalty, respect, self-control and honor. The belt is supposed to represent more than technical ability. It's supposed to represent personal development.

I like those values. I think most of them are worth cultivating. What I'm less comfortable with is the story we sometimes tell about where they came from.

The version of Bushido that has become deeply embedded in modern martial-arts culture is often presented as though there was a single, ancient Japanese code of conduct that samurai had followed for centuries and that was eventually passed down through the martial arts to us. The historical reality is considerably more complicated. Scholars have found no single, universally accepted ethical system that can simply be traced from medieval samurai culture into modern Bushido. The modern concept of Bushido developed largely during Japan's modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on contemporary Japanese thought as well as European ideas about chivalry and gentlemanship.

Inazo Nitobe's Bushido: The Soul of Japan, published in English in 1900, became particularly influential in shaping the version of Bushido that Western audiences came to know. Nitobe wasn't writing a straightforward historical account of an ancient code that had simply been handed down unchanged. He was presenting an idealized picture of Japanese warrior ethics to a Western audience, and his formulation was influenced by Christianity and Western literature. Later, different interpretations of Bushido were used for very different purposes, including Japanese nationalism and militarism.

That doesn't mean the samurai had no values, no ethics or no traditions. Of course they did. It means something more interesting: the neat package we call Bushido isn't nearly as ancient, unified or historically straightforward as martial-arts mythology often makes it sound.

And honestly, I think that's okay.

Because the part that interests me isn't whether some ancient samurai actually followed the exact list of virtues hanging on the wall of your dojo. The part that interests me is what we do with those virtues now.

Martial arts are absolutely filled with this stuff. Walk into a traditional dojo and you're likely to hear about respect, discipline, humility, perseverance and character. You bow when you enter. You bow to your instructor. You bow to your training partner. You wear a belt that represents years of work. You are told that the practice is supposed to make you a better person.

Then sometimes you look around and realize that some people are really good at performing the culture without actually living it.

• The guy who talks constantly about humility can't handle being corrected.

• The instructor who lectures everyone about respect treats beginners like garbage.

• The person who tells everyone about discipline disappears whenever training becomes inconvenient.

• The martial artist who talks about honor has no problem lying when it benefits him.

• The black belt who tells everyone that martial arts build character treats people terribly outside the gym.

Martial arts don't make you a better person.

They can give you an incredible opportunity to become one.

Martial arts put you in situations where your character gets tested. You get tired. You get frustrated. You get embarrassed. You lose. You get submitted by someone you thought you should beat. You struggle with the same technique for months. You have a terrible training session. Someone criticizes something you've been doing for years. A younger athlete becomes better than you. Someone you thought you were better than beats you. You have to show up when you don't feel like it.

Those experiences can teach you humility, patience, discipline and resilience.

But the experience itself doesn't guarantee the lesson.

You can get submitted and become more humble, or you can get submitted and become angry at your training partner. You can lose a competition and use it as information, or you can blame the referee. You can spend ten years training and become more patient, or you can spend ten years becoming an expert at defending your ego.

The martial art provides the situation.

You decide what you do with it.

This is one of the reasons I've become increasingly skeptical of the idea that a black belt automatically represents some kind of personal enlightenment. A black belt tells me that someone has accumulated a significant amount of experience and developed a certain level of technical skill. That's meaningful. It takes years of work to get there.

• But it doesn't tell me that they're wise.

• It doesn't tell me they're honest.

• It doesn't tell me they're kind.

• It doesn't tell me they're emotionally mature.

• And it certainly doesn't make them some kind of modern-day samurai.

I've made plenty of mistakes myself. I've been wrong about things. I've handled situations poorly. I've had moments where I wasn't as patient, disciplined or thoughtful as I should have been. Training martial arts for most of my life hasn't somehow elevated me above the normal problems of being a human being. If anything, martial arts have given me more opportunities to discover those problems.

That's probably a more useful way of thinking about martial arts and character. The practice doesn't magically install virtues. It gives you a laboratory in which you can practice them. If you want discipline, you have thousands of opportunities to practice showing up and doing the work.

• If you want humility, you have plenty of opportunities to be wrong.

• If you want courage, you have opportunities to do difficult things while you're uncomfortable or afraid.

• If you want patience, BJJ will give you plenty of opportunities to wait, struggle and try again.

• If you want respect, you have to learn how to train with someone who may be very different from you and still treat them well.

None of those things require Bushido.

And that's actually where I think the historical mythology becomes less important. Maybe the samurai did follow certain ideals. Maybe particular schools and periods developed their own ethical traditions. Maybe later writers constructed a more unified concept of Bushido because they were looking for a way to describe or shape Japanese identity. The history is interesting, and it's worth knowing.

But I don't need to believe that I'm inheriting an ancient warrior code in order to believe that discipline is valuable. I don't need to pretend my black belt contains some mystical wisdom.

And I don't need to tell a student that martial arts will automatically make them a better person. I'd rather tell them the truth. Martial arts will give you opportunities to become a better person. Whether you actually become one is up to you.

That's also why I think the best test of martial-arts character has very little to do with what happens during the bow-in ceremony.

• Watch what happens when the black belt gets tapped.

• Watch how the senior student treats the beginner.

• Watch what happens when someone makes a mistake.

• Watch how a coach behaves when they're frustrated.

• Watch whether people help each other when nobody is watching.

• Watch what happens when someone loses.

• Watch how someone treats the person who can't offer them anything in return.

That's where the philosophy gets pressure-tested. It's easy to talk about honor when everything is going your way. It's much harder to demonstrate humility when someone exposes a weakness you've been trying to hide. It's easy to talk about discipline when you're motivated. It's much harder to keep showing up for years when the novelty is gone.

That's the part of martial arts I believe in. Not the fantasy that wearing a black belt somehow transforms you into a better human being, but the much more difficult idea that you can use the practice to become one.

Maybe that's ultimately what we should take from all of the talk about Bushido. We don't need to pretend that we're living according to some perfectly preserved ancient samurai code. We don't need to romanticize warriors or put martial artists on a pedestal.

We can simply decide that courage, humility, discipline, respect, responsibility and perseverance are good qualities to develop and then spend the rest of our lives trying to actually develop them.

And unlike a belt, those qualities can't be awarded by somebody else.

A black belt is evidence of experience. Character is something you still have to demonstrate.