Kosho Chronicles Issue #5
To the Reader
I told you the manuscript was a riddle. That Mitose wrote it using religion and politics to hide the martial arts. That he said it was his duty to teach me everything in that book.
This issue begins the teaching. The first thing Mitose explained to me from that manuscript. The foundation of everything that followed.
It starts with a stranger beneath a pine tree.
The Teaching
In the manuscript, Mitose writes about a temple called Kinkaizan. The name roughly translated means Golden Pavilion Temple. It is a Buddhist temple in Japan, on a mountain, on an island.
According to the scrolls at that temple, a stranger appeared. Some accounts say a guide, some say a priest. He came to the temple and meditated beneath the old pine tree. He kept repeating the same words over and over again.
"There are many nations, but only one truth."
Mitose asked me what I thought that stranger discovered. I did not know. He said the stranger discovered that in the study of similarities, you find natural laws and natural principles.
That is the foundation of Kosho Ryu. Not techniques. Not forms. Not styles. The study of similarities that reveals natural law.
Shaka In - Courtesy Lynn Kelch
