A critical integrative review of Japanese Chinese and English literature
Introduction
The question “What is shugyō?” has no adequate answer if training intensity is treated as its defining feature. A demanding practice may pursue technical excellence, social recognition, religious liberation, or several purposes together. Conversely, a modest activity can become significant within a sustained discipline. A literature review must therefore examine how practices acquire their aims and meanings, rather than infer a common essence from exertion alone.
This review develops Shugyōkai’s proposal of “self[less]-cultivation,” including its account of flow and renunciation (Space-Coyote, 2026). The proposal asks what happens when individuals, schools, or institutions treat practice as their possession. To investigate that concern, the review examines how particular traditions have understood and organized cultivation. A normative proposal about what practice should become requires a different kind of support from a claim about what practitioners have always done.
The review addresses three questions. How do Japanese and Chinese cultivation vocabularies overlap without becoming interchangeable? How have scholars explained the relations among bodily discipline, insight, and ethical formation? What can the literature support in Shugyōkai’s proposed model, and which claims remain interpretive or untested? The resulting definition is deliberately provisional: shugyō refers here to sustained practices understood by participants or interpreters as cultivating a person’s capacities, dispositions, or religious realization. This working definition permits comparison while leaving the content and value of transformation open to examination.
Review approach and scope
This is a critical integrative narrative review. It brings unlike forms of evidence into dialogue and evaluates the fit between claims and their sources. It is not a systematic review or meta-analysis, and it does not claim comprehensive coverage of the three language literatures.
The source page and literature searches were refreshed on 22 October 2026. A fresh direct retrieval confirmed the article text used for this revision. Searches combined exact-title verification of the page’s references with topic searches and reference tracing. Japanese terms included 修行, 修養, 身体, 稽古, and 世阿弥; Chinese terms included 修行, 工夫, 修身, 身體, 無念, 陽明, 莊子, 技藝, and 自然與自由; English terms included shugyō, self-cultivation, body–mind, Chan, flow, and martial arts outcomes. Search discovery was followed by checks against J-STAGE, university repositories, the National Taiwan University Buddhist Studies Digital Library, journal sites, and publisher records. A targeted recent-literature search located relevant work published in 2026. Reference tracing also identified Chinese studies connecting Daoist interpretation, bodily training, and artistic practice.
Sources were selected for direct relevance to the article’s concepts, identifiable authorship and publication details, and a contribution to a substantive comparison or correction. Research articles and scholarly books were prioritized. Canonical translations and specialist reference entries clarify terms but are not treated as empirical studies. Practitioner writing provides evidence of a position or aspiration, rather than independent verification of its effects. Publication language, author nationality, and the tradition studied were kept distinct: a Japanese-language study of Thai Buddhism, for example, belongs to the Japanese-language corpus without making Thailand a Japanese tradition.
Relevant argument, methods, and conclusion passages in accessible full texts were checked. The revised corpus includes full-text consultation of Tsai’s study of perception, Duan’s Sōjiji fieldwork, and Carter’s historical introduction and translation, alongside additional Chinese articles on the Zhuangzi. Yang’s and Yuasa’s books remain limited to publisher descriptions and bibliographic records, supplemented where indicated by accessible scholarly discussions; they identify research orientations rather than supply unverified detailed findings. Appendix B records these access differences. The principal comparisons rest on accessible scholarly articles. Searches did not systematically cover subscription databases such as CNKI or all Japanese and Chinese journals, and no independent second screening or translation check was performed. The account therefore offers a selective synthesis rather than a census of scholarship. Interpretations were compared by asking what each source takes as evidence, which population or textual tradition it addresses, and whether its conclusions warrant the claim being made here. No formal quality score was assigned. Conceptual resemblance is treated as a basis for comparison, not as proof of historical transmission or identical experience.
Cultivation vocabularies and the limits of translation
Nishihira (2019) provides a useful starting point by showing how shūyō, yōjō, shugyō, and keiko can all be translated as cultivation. His comparison connects these terms to politics, morality, health, specialized skills, and relations to worldly usefulness. Translation reveals a shared field while also concealing distinctions within it. His structural comparison of Edo and Meiji thought should not be treated as evidence that cultivation exists outside history.
Some of Nishihira’s contrasts are deliberately strong. His discussion associates rigorous shugyō with a negative assessment of human nature and contrasts it with more affirmative cultivation models; it also examines Kiyozawa Manshi’s movement between self-effort and other-power. These are arguments within his comparative construction, not definitions accepted across all Buddhist and artistic traditions. The article itself acknowledges blurred boundaries and unresolved tensions in Kiyozawa’s position (Nishihira, 2019, pp. 477–478).
For the present review, 修行 and 修業 identify overlapping emphases, with the former frequently marking religious cultivation and the latter training or the completion of a course of learning. They should not be made into a hierarchy in which one is intrinsically authentic and the other merely instrumental. That hierarchy can express a community’s priorities, but its adequacy must be argued in relation to a practice. Likewise, keiko describes a mode of engagement whose purpose depends on what is practiced and how it is taught.
Chinese-language scholarship complicates any account that starts and ends with Japanese vocabulary. Lin (2012) distinguishes concrete methods of gongfu from the assumptions that make those methods intelligible. His account challenges its reduction to martial skill. Comparison must therefore distinguish activities, developmental processes, and ideals of realization, even when translations overlap.
Character decomposition has a limited role in this inquiry. The visual components of 修, 行, or 武 cannot independently establish a philosophy of cultivation. Historical usage, textual context, and documented interpretation must carry that argument. The current review therefore does not derive religious doctrines from a character’s shape, or assign a single original meaning to all later practices.
Embodied cultivation in Japanese scholarship
Yuasa’s account remains relevant because it makes the relation between mind and body a problem of development through practice. The publisher’s description of The Body presents variation across levels and kinds of cultivated capacity, rather than a single fixed relationship (Yuasa, 1987). This review does not reconstruct the entire book from that description. Accessible Japanese discussions provide a firmer basis for identifying how the account has been received and used.
Watanabe (2008) examines faith, knowledge, practice, and the body, using Yuasa’s account of body–mind unity as one interpretive frame. His discussion of Saigyō’s Buddhist poetry connects imagery of the moon with religious understandings of nature and contemplative practice. This is a valuable corrective to treating embodiment as an exclusively mechanical process. Bodily discipline is interpreted through language, imagery, and religious commitments. Watanabe’s study is an interpretive analysis, however, and cannot demonstrate a universal physiological mechanism of transformation.
Kurasawa (2011) revisits Yuasa’s work and its intellectual setting. His article is explicitly a critical discussion, not a controlled experiment. Its relevance lies in explaining a philosophical project and its subsequent reception. Claims that repeated training permanently dissolves ego, entrains a particular neural pattern, or guarantees clarity would require evidence beyond this source. Philosophical accounts can suggest mechanisms and research questions; their explanatory vocabulary should not be presented as a measurement of the nervous system.
Yano (2008) supplies a substantial qualification from within Japanese-language religious studies. He argues that a narrow model of shugyō organized around bodily discipline, personal transformation, and exceptional practitioners fits some Thai Buddhist settings better than others. His comparison of mainstream practices with those associated with Wat Phra Dhammakaya questions the transferability of categories developed in Japanese scholarship. He also observes that bodies are involved in ordinary activities such as reading, even when observers do not mark those activities as special bodily practices. The comparative issue is consequently which dimensions of embodiment a tradition or researcher foregrounds. This prevents embodiment from becoming a criterion so broad that every activity confirms the theory.
These studies support a relational account of cultivation. A practice involves bodies, but its significance also depends on instruction, an account of the desired change, and ways of recognizing progress. They leave room for disagreement about whether bodily intensity, doctrinal learning, ritual participation, or everyday conduct should receive analytical priority. That disagreement is part of the literature’s substance.
Chinese debates about effort perception and selfhood
Chinese scholarship provides more than a historical background for Japanese shugyō. It supplies conceptual disputes that should change how the category is constructed. In the publisher’s account of Yang’s (1996) Rujia shentiguan, Confucian views of the body connect physical form, qi, mind, and social or cosmic relations. The book’s stated scope, centered on the Mencian tradition, resists separating an exclusively interior moral self from an external physical body. Because only the publisher description and bibliographic records were inspected here, this review uses the work to identify a research orientation and does not attribute detailed chapter arguments to it.
Lin’s (2012) comparison of Chan and the Yangming school examines a difficulty within cultivation itself: a method aimed at producing attainment can reinforce the very stance that the practice seeks to relinquish. His account of “anti-gongfu” distinguishes criticism of instrumental striving from the abandonment of cultivation altogether. This distinction is particularly relevant to Shugyōkai’s renunciation proposal. It gives that proposal a comparative question—what is relinquished in a particular discipline?—without proving that different traditions teach one identical act of letting go. Lin also makes clear that arguments about practice depend on assumptions about mind, nature, and the goal of cultivation.
Feng (2002) offers a doctrinal interpretation of “no-thought” in the teaching associated with Huineng. He distinguishes nonattachment within perceptual and mental activity from suppressing all thought or falling into dullness. His account accommodates both sudden and gradual approaches and discusses concrete practices in relation to the ideal. This challenges a simple opposition between effort and effortless realization. Yet Feng’s argument adopts a standpoint that affirms continuity within Buddhist truth; it should be read as a particular doctrinal interpretation, rather than as a neutral description of every Chan community.
Tsai (2008) makes the act of seeing itself a site of cultivation. His philosophical reading of the Diamond Sutra examines the relation among the observer, what is observed, and the activity of observing. He distinguishes perception that becomes fixed upon its objects from perception that examines how those objects and their apparent boundaries are constituted (pp. 29–30, 58–61). In this account, greater sensory attention alone is insufficient: the assumptions organizing perception must also be examined. This gives embodied cultivation an interpretive dimension that cannot be reduced to bodily intensity or absorbed performance. The argument is a textual and philosophical account of liberation, not an experimental demonstration of perceptual change.
Daoist scholarship adds a disagreement about the subject that is supposedly transformed. T.-L. Liu (2016) contests interpretations of the Zhuangzi that subordinate bodily activity to an autonomous spiritual subject. His alternative emphasizes body and qi, cultivated responsiveness, and the relation between personal freedom and political life. His discussion of Cook Ding preserves the importance of bodily training and caution even in accomplished performance (pp. 27–29). Read against a purely inward model of cultivation, this argument makes engagement with the world central. It is a contemporary philosophical reconstruction in dialogue with Nietzsche and other European thinkers; it is not an uncontested statement of what all Daoists believe.
Wu (2020) further develops a phenomenological interpretation of skill in the Zhuangzi and compares it with Zeami’s account of performance. He treats meaningful bodily form as something realized in responsiveness to a situation and to others, including spectators. His comparison extends the analysis from a practitioner’s internal condition to relationships enacted in performance (pp. 23–24). It offers a conceptual bridge between Chinese textual interpretation and Japanese artistic practice, without demonstrating a direct historical line of influence. This also suggests a limit to identifying cultivation with private absorption: a performance can be evaluated through its responsiveness to others as well as through the performer’s reported state.
Together, these works identify different objects of cultivation. Confucian embodied formation, Chan nonattachment, Buddhist examination of perception, and Daoist accounts of freedom are not merely alternative names for one psychological state. Their partial convergence concerns the transformation of habitual engagement with the world. Their differences concern the person being cultivated, the status of ordinary discriminations, and the criteria of realization. Comparative analysis becomes more informative when it preserves those differences.
Buddhist practice and the problem of sequence
The relationship between practice and insight requires textual precision. The three trainings conventionally concern ethical discipline, concentration or mental cultivation, and wisdom. In AN 3.88, the training in discernment concerns understanding suffering and its cessation; it is not equivalent to acquiring doctrinal information (Sikkha Sutta, 1998). Study can support wisdom, but those terms should not be substituted for one another.
MN 117 gives right view a guiding role and distinguishes ordinary meritorious right view from a noble, supramundane form. It also describes right effort and right mindfulness as supporting the cultivation of other path factors (Maha-cattarisaka Sutta, 2008). The text therefore supports the importance of orientation and discrimination in practice. It does not justify the broader claim that ethical conduct cannot develop before mature insight, nor establish a single timetable for every Buddhist tradition. A list’s order, a factor’s guiding function, and a practitioner’s developmental history are different questions.
Technical path terminology also needs its own scale of analysis. A specialist account of the “path of seeing” explains its relation to prior practice and the subsequent path of cultivation, while distinguishing śrāvaka and bodhisattva interpretations (Ishida, 2018). The narrow use of 修道 in such a classification cannot determine every use of 修行. In particular, it does not follow that all shugyō begins only after enlightenment. The review therefore avoids combining different path schemes into a universal stage model.
Sharf (2014) approaches early Chan through the problem of reconstructing practice from historically situated and sometimes polemical sources. His analysis examines disputes over mindfulness and “mindlessness,” as well as the difficulty of explaining how conditioned practices relate to unconditioned awakening. It cautions against using contemporary Zen practices as a transparent record of early Chan. Read alongside Feng, this produces a methodological tension: a doctrinal interpretation can explain the coherence of a teaching, while historical criticism asks how the available texts and their competing claims developed. Both approaches illuminate practice, but they answer different questions.
This tension matters for original enlightenment and for claims that attainment makes further practice unnecessary. The material reviewed here supports identifying an ongoing problem concerning practice and realization. It does not support reducing that problem to a choice between training toward a future goal and declaring that nothing needs to be done. Nor does it authorize treating Buddhist liberation as interchangeable with any pleasant or absorbed experience.
Ritual artistic practice and institutions
Ritual provides another route into the relation between bodily action and meaning. W. Liu (2019), writing in Japanese, interprets tea practice and gatherings through rites of passage, drawing on participation and observations of practice. The study directs attention to spatial arrangements, host–guest relations, and movement between ordinary and exceptional experience. It offers a situated interpretation of how training and ritual organize participation. It does not show that every repetition of a tea procedure produces the same personal transformation, or that all shugyō follows one ritual sequence.
Duan’s (2017) study of public meditation gatherings at Sōjiji adds participant evidence. Fieldwork in 2015 combined observation, questionnaires, and interviews across several programs. Duan interprets participation through separation from everyday life, a temporary community, and return to ordinary settings. Participants’ concerns included mental life, health, and cultural experience; these did not simply reproduce the temple’s religious aims. The study makes variation in motivation visible, but it does not demonstrate durable changes in ethical conduct. Its limited comparison of Japanese and Western participants, and exclusion of other Asian visitors from that comparison, also restrict generalization. Read alongside W. Liu’s (2019) tea study, it suggests that ritual form organizes possibilities for experience while participants give those possibilities different meanings.
Shikimachi’s (2014) study of Zeami’s instructions for training across the years brings a different timescale into view. Her analysis concerns adaptation to changing bodily capacities, including gains and losses with age. Cultivation here cannot be represented adequately as a straight progression toward ever greater intensity. A mature practice may require changes in technique and judgment as the body changes. This finding is especially useful for interpreting “steadiness” in Shugyōkai’s account: sustained commitment need not mean performing an invariant task under invariant demands.
Mountain practice likewise requires historical specificity. Carter’s (2022) introduction to and translation of an eighteenth-century lineage narrative at Mount Togakushi shows how Shinto, Shugendō, and Buddhist materials were combined to authorize a particular religious formation. The narrative’s claims about origins must be distinguished from Carter’s historical reconstruction of their production. His account also follows institutional resistance to the reforms of the cleric Jōin. This case makes narratives of continuity and disputes over authority part of the history of practice, rather than treating them as incidental to a timeless experiential core. Shugendō is therefore a specific historical formation within this comparison; its name and mountain setting do not make it synonymous with every form of shugyō.
The scholarly question is not exhausted by whether institutions preserve or distort practice. Institutions also arrange access, authorize teachers, establish schedules, and provide interpretive resources. Their effects need investigation. The review’s synthesis is that resistance to institutional appropriation can be a legitimate ethical commitment, while a history of cultivation must still explain the organizations and relationships through which practices become possible. Presenting every institution as a later contamination would conceal this part of the inquiry.
Purification vocabulary needs similar restraint. Nishioka’s (n.d.) account of kegare concerns ritual pollution, taboo, and purification in Shinto contexts. It cannot simply be substituted for Buddhist accounts of mental afflictions or for a doctrine of innate moral evil. Where a community combines such vocabularies, that combination should be documented and interpreted as a particular formation. The working definition of shugyō in this review therefore does not require participants to regard themselves as inherently polluted.
Comparative theory and empirical evidence
Takayama’s (2026) article brings the discussion into current comparative education. It uses Japanese and East Asian accounts of bodymind, kata, and self-cultivation to reconsider studies of pedagogy in Edo Japan, Taiwan, and China. Its methodological emphasis on regional dialogue is relevant to a review that would otherwise let English categories determine the comparison. Takayama presents the argument as exploratory and invites revision or refutation. It should therefore be used as a theoretical resource, not as proof of a homogeneous East Asian pedagogy.
This approach also clarifies a limit of the term “decolonization.” In the present review, that term can name an effort to question inherited hierarchies of knowledge and who has authority to define practice. It does not by itself demonstrate that removing institutional names reveals an original, culturally unmediated process. A more defensible research program compares the categories through which different communities recognize practice and examines whose experience those categories include or exclude. This is the review’s proposal, informed by comparative scholarship rather than an empirical result already established for Shugyōkai.
English-language psychology asks a related but narrower set of questions. Peifer et al. (2022) review studies published from 2000 to 2016, addressing absorption, perceived skill and challenge, and individual, contextual, and cultural factors. Their review also calls for more experimental and longitudinal research to clarify causal relations. It supports using flow as a candidate construct when studying some experiences of training. It does not validate Shugyōkai’s distinctive definition of flow as joyful awe, and it does not establish that flow is liberation, nonattachment, or ethical excellence.
The empirical literature also qualifies automatic claims about the benefits of discipline. Vertonghen and Theeboom’s (2010) review of martial arts participation among young people reports inconsistent findings and methodological and conceptual limitations. It points to the importance of understanding the conditions under which practice occurs. Because its population and activities are specific, it cannot settle the effects of adult aikidō or of shugyō generally. Its relevance is methodological: a practice’s ethical aspirations and its demonstrated outcomes must be examined separately.
Lindahl et al. (2017) document challenging contemplative experiences and the influence of practice context, interpretation, and relationships. Their purposive sample was selected to investigate experiences that are often underreported. It cannot estimate how common such experiences are in the general population of meditators. The study nevertheless shows why transformation should not be described as an invariably pleasant progression. Reports of altered selfhood or perception require attention to their meaning and effects in a person’s life, rather than immediate classification as progress.
These empirical studies cannot decide doctrinal questions about liberation. They can help specify what is observed, over what period, under which conditions, and according to whose criteria. That contribution is substantial if psychological measures are used with appropriate boundaries.
A situated proposal for Shugyōkai
Shugyōkai’s distinctive contribution is the proposal that shugyō involves flow together with renunciation, articulated through self[less]-cultivation. It also identifies embodied, ethical, ritualized, communal, and ordinary–sublime dimensions, and uses 武 to express a creative halting or cutting away of what is extraneous (Space-Coyote, 2026). These ideas are retained here as the starting point of a situated model. They are neither a recovered dictionary definition nor a finding jointly established by the sources reviewed.
The first task for the model is to distinguish a descriptive vocabulary from an ethical aspiration. “Self[less]” can express a commitment to loosening possessiveness and conceit. It does not establish the disappearance of self-related cognition or identify a single Buddhist doctrine of nonself. “Renunciation” likewise needs an object: a desire, a claim to mastery, an unhelpful habit, or a social privilege may each be relinquished, with different consequences. These distinctions would make the model more precise while preserving its intended direction.
The role of flow requires a similar choice. If the term retains Shugyōkai’s local meaning, it should be defined explicitly and studied in participants’ own accounts. If it is used in the psychological sense, its measures and assumptions must be specified. Treating the two meanings as automatically interchangeable would create apparent confirmation without testing the proposal. The relation between sustained absorption and the capacity to interrupt an activity is itself an open question. Renunciation may sometimes support fluent action and sometimes require breaking it off.
The five dimensions are most useful at present as questions for investigation. Embodiment directs attention to trained perception and action; ethics asks how conduct toward others changes; ritual concerns patterned activity and its interpretation; community concerns relationships and authority; the ordinary–sublime dimension concerns how everyday situations acquire unusual significance. None has yet been established here as a necessary or sufficient condition for shugyō. They should not be scored as a validated scale.
The interpretation of 武 belongs to this proposed framework. It can function as a philosophical or practice-oriented metaphor without being offered as a historical etymology. Likewise, claims about resonance, signal and noise, or liberation can express a phenomenology of practice. They become causal scientific claims only when the relevant processes and outcomes are defined in ways that permit evidence to support or challenge them.
A practical research agenda follows. Comparative interviews and observation could examine how different communities describe restraint, effort, and ease. Repeated observations could distinguish short episodes of absorption from changes in everyday conduct. Accounts from participants who leave, disagree, or report no improvement would help prevent the model from being confirmed solely by selecting its successful examples. Any claim of ethical transformation would need evidence beyond technical performance, group loyalty, or a teacher’s recognition. These are proposed research requirements, not studies already conducted.
Synthesis and remaining questions
The literature supports treating shugyō as a contested field of practices and interpretations. Japanese discussions make embodied formation and translation visible; Chinese studies expose tensions within cultivation itself; English historical and empirical work clarifies what different kinds of evidence can establish. Across these studies, three analytical distinctions recur: what a tradition prescribes and what participants do; what an experience feels like and how its effects are evaluated; and what makes a comparison illuminating and what would establish a historical connection. These distinctions change the question from whether every practice expresses one essence to how particular practices organize and interpret transformation. There is no consensus in this corpus that one experience, institution, or developmental sequence defines the outcome.
Several gaps remain. The Daoist discussion concentrates on modern interpretations of the Zhuangzi rather than the history of Daoist religious communities or internal alchemy. Coverage of mainland Chinese journals, individual martial lineages, and gender, labor, or exclusion within training institutions remains limited. Its discussion of Japanese original-enlightenment debates also requires a dedicated historical review before stronger conclusions can be drawn. Book-length sources available only through descriptions remain candidates for fuller consultation. These limits constrain claims of regional or historical representativeness.
Shugyōkai’s model can contribute by making its ethical commitments and experiential vocabulary explicit, then allowing comparison to revise them. Its emphasis on restraint and care can guide inquiry into what training enables people to do, what they become willing to relinquish, and how those changes affect others. Keeping those questions open gives the proposal a clearer scholarly status and a more credible basis for future work.
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