To Blossom and Scatter...
The Martial Way & the Way of Flowers
By Dave Lowry
Flower Arrangements and Photos
by Ann Kameoka
Flowers bloom and scatter. It is their blooming
and scattering that is their essence.
--Giken Honda
 f
all the requisites faced by the budoka ("martial
artist") contemplating the construction of a new dojo or
training facility, the tokonoma ("alcove"), with
its space for the display of arranged flowers, could rank
in importance somewhere between solar-powered showers and
cashmere mats. Pragmatism must sometimes take precedence
over aesthetics. Safe, durable training floor surfaces,
adequate dressing facilities, and so on, are more apt to
concern dojo builders than will a shelf devoted
to flower arrangements. Later on, the tasks of training,
teaching, and maintaining the dojo are more likely to
occupy its inhabitants than are such matters perceived
solely as decorative like the arranging and display of
flowers. This is reasonable. But it also risks the
development of dojo--and we need not look far to find
examples of these--that are physically healthy but
seriously lacking in their collective soul. They are
filled with budoka who are learning well the outer,
physical aspects of their art. Yet something seems
missing, something internal, unidentifiable in words by
the students perhaps, although palpable if by no other
sense than by its absence. A good many trends that today
surface in budo ("martial Ways") training, the
recent interest in some of the spiritual aspects of the
martial Ways, for example, appear fundamentally to be
efforts at nurturing or reestablishing this spirit,
this attitude, this matter of what we might call the
budo's "soul."
I was taught that the arrangement of flowers is a very
real way to foster the soul of the budo, to glimpse, in
fact, into its very essence, an essence which, it seems
to me, lies in those flowers that bloom and then scatter.
Asked to make an arrangement of blossoms to decorate the
front of an aikido seminar I attended, the hosting
teacher admired my (really quite poor) efforts. "You need
to show me how to do some of that stuff so I can do it
myself," he said. This mentality is understandable. But
of course it is roughly equivalent to a complete neophyte
coming into your dojo and requesting that you show him some
"martial arts stuff" so he can teach it himself. (Sure,
got a decade to spend on the task?) It is, however, a
mentality common enough to warrant a brief explanation
here of the rationale of the Japanese art of flower
arranging, particularly as its conventions relate to
the budo.
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