The Grandmaster's book of Ninja training

78 Dr. Masaaki Hatsumi The Grandmaster's Book of Ninja Training 79
efficiently, and that's how I teach now. What I want
you to do is just take it as it is. Don't think too much.
If you get involved with thinking about it, the whole
thing gets lost or loses its purity. Don't think during
practice—do! The more you think, the further from
the truth of budo you get: budo is not an academic
subject!
Anyway, to get back to the question. . . . First, it's
necessary to speak about the stages of training under
Takamatsu Sensei and those with me. I think this is
the best way of talking about the stages involved.
Over the period of his childhood, Takamatsu Sensei
was brought up by nine different women who played
the role of mother, and not only were there financial
difficulties and a scarcity of food, but also he was a
rather sickly child. As a result, I am told, when he
was small he was pretty much of a weakling, but he
was given training under three teachers: his uncle,
Toda Shinryuken Sensei, and then Ishitani Sensei
and Mizuta Sensei. Later, in Korea, on his way to
China when he was about fifteen, he became a student
of a teacher called Kim Kei-Mei. But first, as
say, he was this unfortunate weakling and was put in
the charge of his uncle, Toda Sensei, and practiced
budo under him. He really didn't want to at first, but
soon he came to love budo, and he kept that love for
the rest of his life. His teacher used to train him to the
point of exhaustion. When he was still a boy, he used
to carry, over his shoulders, buckets full of water to
the top of the hill where his father's factory was but
not just the usual two: he used to carry four at time!
He used to do this regularly, so that his legs and hips
became very strong.
But later, you know, he secluded himself in the
mountains. This was not for the sake of his budo
training: it happened like this. ... In his earl
twenties, after he came back from his first stay in
China, he lived in his grandmother's house. At this
time, he was suffering from beriberi and some kind
of lung disease. He'd already been told that his condition
was incurable, but he thought he would go to his
grandmother's house—she was one of the women who
had brought him up, you see—to try to recuperate.
He didn't want to be a burden to her, though, and he
decided to leave.
So, taking a few pounds of whole rice with him, he
went off into the mountains to be alone, perhaps to
die there, and stayed by the Kame-no-o Falls. There,
in the midst of nature, by living on natural food—
fruits and nuts from the trees, and so on—and on the
fresh air of the mountains, he managed to recover his
health. There was also an ascetic mountain monk
there, known as Old Man Tamaoki, who found him
lying there. (Just after Takamatsu Sensei arrived at
that spot, he spent most of his time on his back and
could get around only by crawling. He would wash
his rice in the river and just leave it on a rock in the
sun to split open, and he would then eat it.) One day,
Old Man Tamaoki came and found him there and told
him that he had tapeworms. "We'll have to get rid of
them," he said, and started to chant an incantation.
Well, Takamatsu Sensei had his own ideas about
such things and apparently said, "Come on, old man,
you don't expect that to work, do you?" By that time,
he didn't care whether he died or not. But a week
later, a huge tapeworm—almost the size of two bowls
of noodles—came out of him. Soon, he was full of life
again. He began practicing his budo again, using the
trees and rocks around him in whatever way he could
for his training. As a result of his training, he had
become highly sensitive to many things; for example,
as I have mentioned, he was able to tell intuitively the
sex and age of anyone approaching, before they came
within range of sight or hearing. After about a year
of living like this, he had grown a long, shaggy beard
and finally came down from the mountains. He then