The History of the Go-Dai no Kata

by Stephen K. Hayes

Note: this article originally appeared in the March 1996 issue of Ura & Omote.

When I first began training with Masaaki Hatsumi over twenty years ago, his Bujinkan Dojo was but a small room in his residence. In those days, there were fewer than two dozen of us training with the grandmaster. Masaaki Hatsumi made it very clear to me at that time that he was not “teaching”. He and the students were training, practicing the methods that had been taught to him by his recently deceased teacher Toshitsugu Takamatsu.

There were no classes for beginners. New students just joined in with the seniors and attempted to pick up the techniques from one class to the next. The closest thing to a starter collection of basics in the 1970s was a set of techniques that we called the Hatsumi-ha no Kata (the word ha in this case indicates “branch” a good translation might be “the Hatsumi-branch” or “Hatsumi-style training examples”). These were a few kata that Hatsumi-sensei had selected from the nine historical martial arts lineages he had been given by Takamatsu-sensei.

After several years of training in Japan, I returned to the USA and began teaching as a way of training in what I had been studying with Masaaki Hatsumi. Though my residence was once again in the USA, my wife Rumiko and I continued to return to Japan once or twice a year for continued training with the grandmaster. In 1982, Masaaki Hatsumi even came from Japan to live with us in our house in Ohio for a few weeks.

In those early 1980s, I had to come up with some sort of systematic way to introduce the basics of nin-po taijutsu to new students in America and Europe. We needed a way to present the kihon, the basic techniques. The Hatsumi-ha no Kata really were too advanced, and there actually was no clearly prescribed set. The specific contents of the Hatsumi-ha no Kata seemed to shift and alter from season to season. My teacher Masaaki Hatsumi encouraged me to devise my own teaching plan for my students.

While training in the dojo in Japan, I had become familiar with a classification device called the go-dai, a set of “five great“ elemental dynamics that was an important part of Japanese metaphysics. In old Japan, these five elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and formless void were such a mainstay of the culture that they were often used as a counting device, so familiar were they to the people. However, at that time I was convinced that because I was a foreigner, I was the only one who did not understand the significance of the go-dai. My curiosity turned into a form of obsession for finding the real meaning behind the cultural idiom.

I worked to grasp the deeper meaning of the go-dai by means of late evening talks with Dr. Hatsumi, and much exploration with two of the seniors at that time (these two men have since gone their own way and no longer train with the Bujinkan Dojo, so it would be disrespectful to list their names here). Everyone else at the dojo assured me that the five elements were just a device for counting as far as they were concerned. Convinced that there had to be more, I continued my cultural detective work. I sought out descendants of the monks and mountain priests allied with the roots of ninjutsu who referred to the five elements in the form of mandala graphics that described like blueprints the human psyche. As the years of study went by, the meaning of the go-dai five elements became more and more clear to me.

Hatsumi-sensei often referred to a set of five techniques we practiced in the dojo as the go-gyo no kata. Go-gyo refers to a Chinese Taoist set of five elements: earth, water, fire, metal, and wood. However, the elements of Dr. Hatsumi’s go-gyo no kata were listed as earth, water, fire, wind, and formless void — the set that makes up the go-dai Indian tantric five elements familiar to students of Japanese and Tibetan vajrayana Buddhism. Awkwardly, the name of the collection did not match the contents. For the sake of consistency then, I came to refer to the five elements as the go-dai.

When I began to teach in America and then Europe in the early 1980s, I used the go-dai no kata, a collection of fighting examples based on the original Hatsumi-ha no kata and classified by the five distinct dynamics of the go-dai five elements. My own experience in the martial arts in the 1960s convinced me that the one most important and most consistently missing piece of self-defense training was an honest approach to developing the mental state needed to make the techniques work against an attacker who was larger and more hostile than the victim. All the schools I had ever visited simply assumed or hoped that the physical training alone would suffice to turn a worrier into a warrior. More often than not, such assumptions were insufficient. For authentic self-protection training then, we needed to acknowledge the mental state of the fighter. We needed a way to approach understanding the role of spirit in the fight. The go-dai was and is the perfect vehicle. Therefore, as a means of teaching a Japanese cultural collection and as a way to prepare for self-protection in the violent Western world, I chose to base my students’ early training on the motions and emotions of the Go-dai no kata five tantric elements. (Details of the five element system can be found in the 15 books authored by Stephen K. Hayes)

As a direct result of the books I published in the early 1980s, foreign students began to travel to Japan in search of training with Masaaki Hatsumi. I had started the great gaijin rush to Noda City. By 1983, so many foreigners were coming to Japan that the seniors there had to come up with some sort of systematic approach to teaching the basics. Since the old Hatsumi-ha no Kata really was just a temporary classification, some of the seniors agreed on some of the striking methods from Gyokko ryu koshi-jutsu and some of the locks and throws from the Takagi Yoshin ryu and Kukishin ryu jutaijutsu. The collection of basics was referred to as the kihon happo, kihon meaning “fundamentals” and happo meaning “collection” (literally “eight directions”). It is important to note that these kihon fundamental techniques were not yet firmly set by the early 1980s. Different techniques made up the kihon happo at different times. The number 8 was eventually established by Hatsumi-sensei as a kind of play on words involving the happo literal translation as “eight directions.” Eventually, by the mid 1980s, there developed a more consistent pattern.

However, at the time of the establishment of the Bujinkan Dojo Kihon Happo, I had already been teaching the Go-dai no Kata for several years. Rather than change all the material that by then had appeared in several books and that made up my students’ curriculum, I simply adopted the “new” kihon happo into my training plan and incorporated the 8 techniques as part of my curriculum, which I still do to this day. Our instructors teach the kihon happo along with the go-dai.

What of worries that “Stephen K. Hayes isn’t teaching the way they do in Japan”? There is nothing to worry about. Our students learn every bit of the Japanese curriculum, from the kihon happo to the san-shin gata to the scrolls of kata that make up the nine historical lineages of the Bujinkan Dojo. No other dojo teaches “more” Bujinkan material than the Bujinkan Kasumi-An. We have it all. AndÉ we also have the powerful go-dai concept for teaching how to mobilize the fighting techniques of the Bujinkan Dojo under the pressures of real life street self-defense that is likely to be encountered in the Western world.

What of whispered accusations that the Kasumi-An and the Bujinkan are “different” entities, that Stephen K. Hayes’ students are not part of Masaaki Hatsumi’s Bujinkan? Again, false assumptions on the part of some silly troublemakers who are trying to scare our students into leaving the high quality of our program. The rumor mongers of course want our students to transfer over to their programs, even though these teachers are far junior to the teachers that make up our Kasumi-An branch of the Bujinkan Dojo. Of course all of my students and my students’ students are fully licensed by Masaaki Hatsumi and receive hand-sealed Bujinkan Dojo certificates for every grade from kyu-kyu ninth class license on into black belt degrees. As students of the man responsible for bringing Masaaki Hatsumi and his Bujinkan Dojo to the Western Hemisphere, they expect no less.

- Stephen K. Hayes