Religion in the martial arts

In the most gentle of ways, I offer a bit of personal history to add to the discussion of religion, spirituality, and warrior training.

Certainly, there is no need for, or even relevance to, discussing religion/spirituality if your martial arts are practiced as a form of "art" or as a piece of personal life enhancement. By that same logic, martial arts training may also have no relation to practical self-protection. I once wrestled with that lack of spirituality in martial arts training and came to the conclusion that those teachers with whom I was studying in the 1960s and early 1970s were teaching "martial arts" as opposed to "warrior ways".

This is in no way a criticism; only an observation.

Secondly, it took an enormous amount of bravery (sounds like ego, I realize...) to question those religious structures and assumptions under which I grew up. On this side of all the questioning, I must say that I came to certain realizations as to how much of my childhood religion was based on cultural agreements as to how we as a society wanted to believe that the universe operated. The more I studied and explored, the more I realized that many of those cultural agreements could not really be the way that the timeless and infinite universe actually operated. Of course, this did not at all endear me to those of my society who did not want to invest the time to explore and question.

It is possible that just as there are "child-sophistication martial arts", there are "child-sophistication religious conceptualizations."

Again, my point is not to offend or stir-up, but merely to offer a piece of my own personal path of discovery.

The point? We will each of us fix our comfort level at whatever degree of sophistication that allows us to feel comfortable and "at home" with where we are at the moment in any discussion or contemplation of religion.

- Stephen K. Hayes