修行会

147「つるぎ技筆や口にはつくされず言ぶれせずに悟り行へ。」- 植芝盛平

Original Waka

つるぎ技
筆や口には
つくされず
言ぶれせずに
悟り行へ

植芝盛平 (Ueshiba, 1977)

Translation

“The art of the sword cannot be exhausted by brush or mouth; without public proclamation, practice realization, and enact it.” – Morihei Ueshiba

Waka Translation

Straight sword art, on this:
by writing brushed or mouth spoke,
cannot be exhausted—

proclamation, left without—
realization enacted!

Morihei Ueshiba

歴史的仮名遣い（語構成を明示）

剣技（つるぎわざ）
筆や口には（ふでやくちには）
尽くされず（つくされず）
言触れせずに（ことぶれせずに）
悟り行へ（さとりおこなへ）

植芝盛平

Bungo Romanization

tsurugi‑waza
fude ya kuchi ni wa
tsukusarezu
kotobure sezu ni
satori okonae

Ueshiba Morihei

Translation, Notes, Commentary, and Research by Latex G. N. R. Space-Coyote

Ueshiba, M. (2025). 植芝盛平道歌–147: Sword outstrips tongue & brush (L. G. N. R. Space-Coyote, Trans.; OpenAI ChatGPT-5 Pro, Ed.). Shugyokai.org. (Original work published 1977) https://shugyokai.org/cmyn

つるぎ / 剣（tsurugi） — “sword”; specifically a straight double-edged sword, strongly associated with mythic and ritual swords such as 草薙剣 in Shintō mythology; kakekotoba for つる (tsuru) as “to fish”, “to catch”, or to “attract / lure”; when combined with ぎ as noun suffix, it suggests the concept of “attraction” or “catching,” often relating to catching one’s mind or spiritual state.

技（わざ; waza） — “technique”, “art”, “performance”.

つるぎ技（つるぎわざ; tsurugi waza） — compound noun “sword‑art(s)” / “sword-technique(s)”; and with the kakekotoba of つる (tsuru) as “to fish”, “to catch”, or to “attract / lure”; when combined with ぎ as noun suffix, it allows for “fishing”, “catching”, and “attraction / luring” technique / arts; the line functions as a topic (剣技は…), left without an explicit particle in the waka but supplied in the normalized prose reading—very common in classical poetry.

筆（ふで; fude）— “brush” → stands metonymically for writing / calligraphy; evokes Ōmoto’s ofudesaki automatic writings and Ueshiba’s own calligraphy.

や（ya）— here is an enumerative / exclamatory particle: “X and/or Y”, but in waka it also adds a slightly emphatic, almost exclamatory tone.

口（くち; kuchi）— “mouth” → stands for spoken explanation; evokes kuden (oral teachings) and public discourses.

に（ni） — case particle, here instr. / locative “by, in the realm of”.

は（wa） — topic/contrastive particle “as for… / at least with…”.

筆や口（ふでやくち; fude ya kuchi）— “brush and mouth”, a conventional pair standing for writing and speech; in martial and religious texts it often signals the incompleteness of explanation versus embodied practice; 筆 “brush (writing)” + や (enumerative / exclamatory particle) + 口 “mouth (speech)” + に (格助詞 dative / target) + は (係助詞 topic / contrast) → “by brush or mouth (as instruments), [it]…”; note that the next line does not ban writing and speech, it simply cannot exhaust the reality (see earlier dōka about finalizing speech and word etc.).

つくされず / 尽くす（tsukusarezu） — verb 尽くす “to exhaust, express fully” (サ行五段) + passive ‑る/‑らる → 尽くされ (連用) + classical negative ず → “is‑not‑(can‑be‑) exhausted / expressed”; kakekotoba of the verb つく as (a) 付く (tsuku), which means to stick, to be attached, or to be accompanied by, and (b) 着く (tsuku), which means to arrive or to settle allowing for (a) suggestion that the technique is one that is not attached or not clinging (tsukusarezu) to worldly things, ego, or fixed concepts. This reinforces the idea of non-attachment or emptiness (無 mu), a core concept in Zen Buddhism often associated with the martial arts of the period, and (b) that skill that is not limited to a fixed point, or the idea that the true essence of the technique never fully arrives at a describable state—it is constantly flowing and elusive.

言ぶれ / 言触れ（ことぶれ; kotobure）— closely related to the ethics of kotodama/kototama (言霊), the “spirit of words” in Shintō thought: words should be disciplined so they resonate correctly rather than scatter one’s intent; kakekotoba as (a) 事触れ / 言触れ: the historical sense “public notice, proclamation”, and (b) 言ぶれ: “word‑blur / words going astray,” evoking careless chatter or words that drift away from genuine experience—strongly resonant with Shintō kotodama (“word‑spirit”) ideas that words should be aligned and disciplined allowing for (a) broadcasting “secrets of the art” in proclamations, and (b) letting one’s words “wobble,” dilute, or outrun embodied realization.

せずに（sezuni）— the pattern Xせずに “without doing X” is a stock classical construction (連用形 + ず + に) used in both prose and waka.

言ぶれせずに / 言触れせずに（ことぶれせずに; kotobure sezuni）— here is an admonition against wavering, idle, or careless speech, noun/verb 言ぶれ／言触れ（ことぶれ） “public announcement; to proclaim” + す → せず (negative conjunctive) + に (“without ‑ing”) → “without making a proclamation”. 

悟り（さとり; satori）— “realization, enlightenment, awakening”; in Buddhist and modern spiritual vocabulary, this is not just “knowing,” but direct experiential insight.

行へ（おこなへ; okonae）— “to carry out; enact; perform (a practice)”, here in imperative 命令形 行へ; uses へ where modern orthography would write え (おこなえ). This is standard historical kana usage: the e vowel after /h/ was written with へ until spelling reforms in the 20th century.

悟り行へ（さとり｜おこなへ; satori okonae）— “practice realization; enact the awakening”; uses an imperative form of okonau (“to enact, perform”), urging one to enact realization—a theme common in Ueshiba’s dōka (short waka-like teachings), where insight is authenticated by right action rather than description; 悟り “realization/enlightenment” + verb 行ふ（おこなふ） imperative 行へ（おこなへ） (四段の命令形) → “practice [it]!”, “enact [it]!”.

Kami-no-ki and shimo-no ku. The semantic break runs after the 3rd line (尽くされず), which cleanly separates the kami‑no‑ku (topic + limitation of language) from the shimo‑no‑ku (negative condition and imperative), in line with standard waka reading strategies described in Carter’s method for interpreting classical poems.

Kire (cut). Although there is no explicit kireji like や or かな at line ends, the syntactic closure at 尽くされず (“cannot be exhausted”) and the shift from description (non‑finite) to condition + imperative creates a strong conceptual cut. Poetic theory notes that cuts in waka can be syntactic and semantic as much as morphological.

Kakekotoba. Three kakekotoba for つるぎ, つく, and 言ぶれ is perfectly in the spirit of waka pivot words, where orthography and sound allow for multiple readings to co-exist.

Dōka as waka‑style moral teaching. Dōka (道歌 “poetry of the Way”) has long been used in budō and religious instruction as short waka‑like verses condensing ethical and technical principles. Ueshiba’s collection 『合気道奥義（道歌）』 explicitly presents these poems as waka‑style “secrets of aikidō,” and modern philological work on them reads them as tanka in classical bungo style. Ending a sentence with an imperative is typical in doctrinal or admonitory bungo texts, including dōka and budō precepts.

Aikidō as spiritual discipline: anthropology & religious studies. Anthropological and religious‑studies work on aikidō emphasises exactly this fusion of body practice and spiritual aspiration: (a) Greenhalgh’s (2003) thesis on aikidō and spirituality argues that Ueshiba framed aikidō as an art of peace and a spiritual discipline, where direct bodily experience (through techniques like swords and throws) was seen as a path to insight, in contrast to purely doctrinal religion, and (b) Goldsbury’s (2012) reading of Ueshiba connects his dōka explicitly to meditative readings of the Kojiki and to kotodama practice: the poems are treated as personal commentaries and meditation texts designed to shape practitioners’ inner stance. Dōka 147 fits this pattern perfectly: it tells you that the path is not goes far beyond writing and speaking, and admonishes strongly to enact realization through sword‑art practice—yet it conveys that message through a carefully crafted poem that itself participates in kotodama belief.

Bushidō, budō, and invented tradition. Oleg Benesch (2014) has shown that bushidō as a unified “Way of the Samurai” was largely systematized in the late 19th–early 20th centuries as part of Japan’s modernization, recasting older martial practices into moralized “Ways” (dō). Budō poetry like Ueshiba’s dōka participates in that modern tendency to turn technique into a Way with universal, often spiritual, significance, while also drawing heavily on much older waka and Shintō traditions.

Yoin (after‑resonance). Ending on 行へ (“enact [it]”) without specifying object or manner leaves a deliberate openness—what exactly must be enacted and how is left for the practitioner to discover on the mat, matching the traditional waka emphasis on suggestion and lingering emotional / intellectual resonance.