Who ' s who in the Budo?
Text: Photos:
Carlos Martins © www. budointernational. com
make us travel through time for his deep knowledge of ancient Japanese arts. His dexterity and softness applied to his outstanding technique are of such an indescribable beauty and efficiency that it is almost impossible to put into words.
His 10 DVD ' s already edited and a fourth book forthcoming attest beyond any doubt that Sueyoshi Sensei he has no intention of keeping any secret to himself, on the contrary, his main goal is that his knowledge might reach whoever might be interested in and his teachings not casted into oblivion.
Being a Shugendo monk, he has participated in a good deal of rites and ceremonies, some of them of extreme physical and mental harshness, as the“ fire ceremony”, in which monks stand in front of a huge bonfire at a very close distance reciting mantras to finally walk barefoot through it. Or the " okugake ", a pilgrimage to the mountains of Ominesan of high significance within the monastical Shugendo tradition, that is held annually in the month of August and consists of trekking for a week in mountainous areas, with several stages in temples for meditation ceremonies; here, pilgrims do not have any access to material goods, being only in contact with nature in a relentless pursuit of inner peace. At the end of each day, novice monks take part in initiation rituals, some of which are rather hazardous, like turning around a steep rock on a cliff without any support or ropes they can cling to, or getting hung by the feet in a rock so that their sins will be forgiven, in addition to a daily hike of twenty-five miles on average and barely three rice balls a day as the only food, that one of the days they have to share with a partner.
One of the most demanding rituals he ' s gone through( has done it twice) is that of fasting for twenty days, ten of which were spent locked in a hole of only one meter by one meter, where he could only stay in two positions: sitting or standing. This leads you to physical exhaustion, and all you count on to success in sustaining yourself is your mental strength. According to reports of his own experience, the best way to strengthen your spirit is disciplining your body, which not only reinforces your mind and your spirit, but also teaches your body to cope with extreme conditions. Every Martial Art practitioner should train his body, mind and spirit in the same way, for if you forget
Who ' s who in the Budo?
about one the other two get unbalanced.
The ceremony of the " ten thousand goma " is held in front of a log fire by reciting a mantra every time a firewood is thrown into the flames. This ritual can last over four weeks until completing the " ten thousand goma ". Another challenging tests was definitely the " one hundred days in the mountain ", similar to Okugake although much longer; one hundred days of isolation in which he was only in direct contact with nature and with Buddhism. For him, the hardest part of this experience was that he could only sleep three or four hours a day( even some days no sleep at all), in order to fulfill all his duties in the rigorous hundred-day retreat.
My conclusion is that this magnificent man is a masterpiece of the human nature, someone who upholds his passion for the religion, culture and traditional Martial Arts of ancient Japan. The good news is that his teachings are available to all those who, like him, are likewise trapped in the incorrigible vice of the Martial Arts. 137