I feel like we've got three (or more?) terms going at the same time, each describing your student's inner state. Hatred, though, you account for.
Hatred is a somewhat uncontrolled emotion, hence itās interdicted characterisation in the realm of swordsmanship.
But it feels like maybe we're conflating intent and malice. What you're describing in the thread title as malice feels less like malice in the generally accepted sense and perhaps more like "malicia" as it's used in capoeira.
Malicia is a Spanish and Portuguese feminine noun that translates primarily to malice, spite, cunning, or mischief (CollināsDictionary)
In that it's describing not the mental condition of wishing genuine harm on someone else, but the preparedness to use guile and trickery to achieve an objective.
I used āMaliceā after consulting my beloved thesaurus (I once lost it -I didnāt have the words to describe how upset I was
) because I thought my original title, āMurderous Intentā might be a bitā¦well you know!
In Iai the use of guile and trickery are perfectly acceptable if thatās what it take to kill oneās enemy. We have a few kata in which trickery or what might be classed as unchivalrous technies are used.
In my head (for whatever that's worth), malicia fits neatly into intent because it reflects the willingness to use all the means at your disposal to fulfill that intent.
Malice is the wish, intention, or desire to cause harm, injury, or upset to another person (Cambridge Dictionary)
In terms of instruction, Iād say
something like ā
kill your enemy dispassionately if thatās possible. You need a degree of aggression to do this, but too much will ruin your technique. Aim to use a single cut to kill him
instantly so that you donāt have to apply a secondary coup de grĆ¢ce (Jp.
Todome) to alleviate his suffering and that may require more skill and blade velocity than you think.ā I would imagine that might precipitate inner thoughts of intentional harm and associated mental imagery. She might even imagine a certain work boss as the target of her swordās attention.
I'm glad you brought up the Bhagavad Gita. It's the first thing I thought of as well. That idea that acting in accordance with your sacred duty (dharma) is the mental focus, rather than a sense of malice or an attachment to consequence. (For the record, I spent some time on Hinduism in undergrad, but I'm by no means an expert.)
I was thinking of a particular section in The Mahabharata which you might remember. Drona, the Kauravasā commander, was effectively unbeatable while he held his weapons. Krishnaās counsel was that he would lay them down only if he believed his son Ashwatthama was dead. Bhima killed an elephant that shared the name (in some tellings the elephant was chosen for that reason) and shouted that Ashwatthama was dead. Drona doubted it and asked Yudhishthira, who was famed for never lying. Yudhishthira declared that Ashwatthama was dead, then added, in some versions, the words āthe man or the elephant,ā which was muffled or drowned out, depending on the telling, by conch blasts. Drona gave up his arms, sat in meditation, and was killed by Dhrishtadyumna.
Some might find this an uncomfortable strategy even in the midst of warfare but this is what conflict sometimes requires.
Inner state is hard to evaluate scientifically for various reasons. For one, people might struggle to articulate an inner state without the vocabulary to differentiate. Which, I suppose, is part of the value of studying things like Zen and the Bhagavad Gita. They provide a conceptual framework to describe experience that we don't usually have the words to describe.
I suppose me as her occasional teacher, intimates the feeling one should adopt whilst killing an imaginary enemy, but the inner state it produces doesnāt require her to vocalise and thus language.
Second (and relatedly), inner state is always self-reported. So even if you do have the vocabulary to frame your inner state, you're also then making decisions about how to present that outwardly. And "decisions" may not be the right word, given that a lot of them may be semi-conscious at most.
This is very true and yet we say, āI love youā without much internal thought!
I don't see any real issue with a nun in the Western tradition practicing a martial art. The fact of the matter is that she's not killing anyone with a sword. Nor has she ever (like the rest of us, presumably). So the headspace she's occupying is slightly different, I'd venture, to that actually required to take a life.
But her own saviour deliberately conflates intention with the
actual act. He makes a similar parallel in looking at a woman lustfully being as bad as adultery itself (
Anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Matthew 5:27ā28). Now somebody is bound to say itās about interpretation but isnāt the Bible exactly what Jesus said?
As an interesting aside, my friend is also a Biblical scholar. She reads ancient Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic so has read the Bible in its more original language. Sheās pointed out the
many and interesting places where the King James Bible diverges from this more original version to the point of having opposing meaning!
While I do think the training goes some distance in preparing people for that eventuality--I think we can all agree that there's a difference between someone who's conceptually trained to do harm and someone who has actually experienced that.
Thatās very true. I do, however, feel that our āholy peopleā should live by a much higher set of standards and having murderous thought for the sake of swordsmanship might
not reach those standards.
I think there's also something about the conceptual gap between the training and the real thing. If you look at combat sport, the gap is minimalised. You train to punch someone full force in the head, and then you go and do that. (Or whatever the technique and format you're discussing.)
Yes indeed, but it very rarely could kill them. But with a sword, it always will and you
know that!
When you're talking about sword fighting, though, that gap is very different. I've trained in Western fencing, Filipino swordplay, and full-contact stickfighting. And they all bear a comparatively low level of fidelity to actually killing someone with a sword. So I'm not confident that I have any real sense of the mentality that would either require or engender in a person.
Oh sorry, I didnāt read on before replying!
All of that said, I absolutely agree that you need to cultivate a certain headspace to advance in training. I'm a nice guy, and I had to put a lot of cognitive work into being willing even to kick and punch friends and classmates with any real level of contact. To get myself to a mental context where it was okay to do things that, in normal everyday life, I wouldn't.
Iād have no problem dispatching a unknown enemy
A friendā¦Iād need a half second probably
That requires training, but I don't think it requires genuine malice. And certainly not hatred.
Iām sure none of this is an issue for an Anglican and I wonāt bring it up with her for risk of putting her into a state of mental tension and anyway, despite wanting to be a nun, sheās an intelligent person whoās probably considered this more deeply than Iām capable. Quakers might be different thoughā¦
She really does!
Maybe that's where the disconnect is though. Maybe you're not describing murderous intent. But intent to solve a problem with dispassion and objectivity, as you describe later here. And maybe that's where the real crux of this is. That the concepts of killing and malice or murderous feelings are inherently linked in most people's minds (with good cause, obviously). Whereas a lot of the classical writings about war, combat, etc. describe a far less instinctual state of mind, where those two are divorced from one another. So that violence is an act of expediency, necessarily separated from the emotions that typically accompany it. 
Iām worried now 
