Ji-Ri Icchi

Ji-Ri Icchi means "Your Performance and the Principles Should Be One (or Should Match)".  Ji is things happen around you or phenomenon. But of course, your performance is included in that. And Ri is the principle; the ultimate and absolute truth.

A simple way to understand this is to do what you learn from teachings.

By learning, our lives should improve, our personality becomes better and finally we can improve our communities that each of us live in. A long way to go. To do so, we encounter conflicts. THAT is WHY we train kendo.

Now we know what Ji Ri Icchi is. So how are we going to make that happen?


Yagyu Sanma Ho

It is called Yagyu Sanma no Kurai as well. You learn, study and practice. Can you see which one is Ji and which one is Ri?

Ji is to practice. Ri is to learn. Study probably is a bridge between "practice" and "learn".

You learn first. And you practice what you learn. And you study what you learn and how you practice it to make it work.

In kendo or in anything, you learn first because you want to become good at. And you practice it so you can understand how things work. To make it better, you have to study what you have learnt and how you practice it. And you quite often have to go back to the "learning phase".  And then you practice it and you study it to make it better.

• So you learn the principles and
• you actually perform it, and
• to understand the principles you must study it.

This is a very simple process but this is very true. This is the principle of the learning process. And at different levels, we always do that.

When you are a beginner, you must learn all the basics and you practice them. To make it better you study them and must ask your instructor how you can make them better. Again learning process. And then you study and work on what you just learned to improve. We do that even when we become a higher grade holder but at a different level.

This is how we must study and this is how we can understand the teachings of samurai (the principle). We learn the principle and practice and work on it to understand the principle. By this process, we will become better as a person.

People without the principle will have a hard time to understand how things work. They have to figure out everything by themselves. Those people with a full of knowledge but no practicing and studying it usually do not attract other people and kendo will lead others.

This sounds like a common sense yet the majority of us, including me, have struggles to do so. And that is why we need some kind of training so we can match ji and ri , i.e. we will have the better understandings of life and ourselves thus we can be a better people.

Hope this helps.

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Hiro Imafuji
Kendo For Life, LLC
Kendo-Guide.Com
Contact me at
http://kendo-learning-products.com/contact-me .
Phone: 317-426-0512
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