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
There is a comfortable place you return to without noticing. A favorite technique. A preferred side. A distance where you feel safe. You have rehearsed it for years, and it feels like mastery.
It is not mastery. It is a bubble, and you are living inside it.
The trouble with a bubble is that it feels exactly like home until the moment it fails you, and by then it is too late to lea...
TO THE READER
You can know a thing perfectly and still be unable to live it. This is one of the quiet tragedies of being human, and the martial arts are full of it.
There are men who can explain peace with such clarity that you weep, and who cannot get through a single afternoon without conflict. And there are men who could never explain it at all, who simply are peaceful, the way water is wet....
TO THE READER
There is a particular kind of help that arrives from a direction you were not watching. It comes from someone who owes you nothing, who belongs to a different camp, who has no stake in whether you succeed.
When that help comes, most people are suspicious of it. They start looking for the angle. What does he want? What is this going to cost me?Sometimes the answer is nothing. Somet...
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