Shorinji Kempo - Overview

Overview

There are two sides of Shorinji Kempo which are believed to be true budō (武道) and educational system. As the latter, the organization is well known among boys and girls for their mental training institution as well as body training facilities dōjō (道場).

Doshin So as the founder of Shorinji Kempo wanted to establish not only an organization which incorporated mental and physical training but also wanted to educate Japanese people who had been completely demoralised by World War II/ Pacific Rim War. His aim was to defuse those who had lost their way and rebuild Japan for the future. It is said that he tried to teach philosophy based on the original buddhism and zen but no one followed him. Then he thought to follow Bodhidharma who was believed to be the originator of zen as the mental training and ekkin-gyō (易筋行) as the body training according to his book. Both of these are later to become the main training methods of Shorinji Kempo.

As the part of the philosophy Shorinji Kempo aims at self-improvement for the person and world peace by creating never-bending courage, harmonious personality and compassion for others. To help create a peaceful and ideal society, Shorinji Kempo has been insisting every person be a real leader of their respective area.

Technically, Shorinji Kempo has a whole set of defense techniques but the demonstration known as embu (演武) is the commonly demonstrated technique. It is usually performed by 2 persons and called kumi-embu (組演武). The embu consists of 6 sections and each section includes a series of techniques which are either gōhō (剛法) or jūhō (柔法). During the embu, one person attacks and another person defends, they then swap roles and repeat the technique immediately. Each technique is known as hien (飛燕) or flying swallow which represents speed and smoothness of those techniques. The embu is occasionally performed wearing a black gown hōi (法衣) at the beginning ceremony of annual taikai (大会) or convention.