Kosho Reflections Issue #3: The Student is a Better Teacher Than The Teacher
Mar 01, 2026
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To the Reader
If you teach, this will challenge you. If you study under someone, this may confuse you.
Either way, pay attention. What follows strikes at something most martial artists protect without realizing it.
The Teaching
The student is a better teacher than the teacher.
This is not a contradiction. It is a truth that most people in positions of authority refuse to examine.
The teacher represents the individual who is instructing. However, if that individual has forgotten to keep his mind fresh by being a good student first, he lacks the ability to understand and communicate the concepts. The student has the ability to analyze, to search, to look over and over again. This student is superior to one who is merely teaching others and not going through a learning process himself.
TO THE READER
A root that stops drawing water does not simply rest. It begins to kill the tree it was meant to feed.
We tend to think of loyalty to a tradition as a matter of guarding it, walling it off, keeping it pure. Mitose taught almost the reverse. The surest way to destroy something you love is to close it.
There is a difference between the root of a thing and the fruit of it, and confus...
TO THE READER
The most valuable thing a man owns is sometimes the thing he did not reach for. And the surest way to fail a test is to know you are being tested.
There was a document that changed the course of an entire art, and it spent part of its first afternoon in a waste basket. This was not disrespect. It was, in a strange way, the very reason it had been given.
Pay attention to what a per...
TO THE READER
A man decides he is ready to die, and instead of despair, what fills him is calm. Not resignation. Something closer to freedom.
We spend enormous effort avoiding the one outcome that is certain for all of us, and in the avoiding we make ourselves easy to move, easy to frighten, easy to defeat.
There is a different way to carry it, and it was shown to Hanshi in a single startling i...
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