Sensei Dave Lowry from SMAA tells us why it’s important to ask questions and be curious about your art:
If you are a beginner, if you have perhaps six or seven years in training, “I’m doing it this way because my teacher told me to” is absolutely an acceptable answer. Students at this level do not need to know all or even many of the whys of their art. Indeed, “knowing” too much of these whys can actually be an impediment to training at their level. Knowing something intellectually and “knowing” it with your body, at an instinctive, somatic level, are two very different things in the budo. This is consistent with the thoughts of the neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-Ming (In Japanese, he’s known as Oyomei), who said that “To know and not to act is not yet to know.” Few dojo inhabitants are more irritating than the beginner budoka who “understands” all the theories and can explain them in detail, but who can’t “do” squat.
If, however, you are a more senior student, at perhaps fourth or fifth dan, with maybe fifteen or twenty years of experience, then the reply that “I’m doing it this way because my teacher told me to” is, frankly, not an adequate one. Your answer should not be the same answer as that of the beginners.
Yes, I know. There are those who will sagely explain to you and me the very different Japanese way of teaching and learning. “You don’t ask questions in the dojo,” they say. You just watch and copy your teacher.
To some extent, this is true. But it is also true that Japanese students, at advanced levels, do ask questions. It is also true—and this is important— that non-Japanese students of the budo face different challenges in trying to master these arts. They do not share the culture of the Japanese budo. There is much that can be taken for granted in a Japanese dojo that cannot be assumed similarly in a Western dojo. Further, who is to say that the “Japanese” way of teaching is the best and only method of transmission? (Suffice it to say that when I insist there are too many “teachers” of budo out there who don’t have the qualifications to do so, I am by no means talking about just Westerners.)
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