Essays From The Master

The wedding of the tiger and the cobra to bring forth the dragon

The tiger is the symbol of many things such as the ruler of the world, the ruthlessness of nature, warfare and lastly the inner warrior or drive to prevail in every individual. The cobra also is the symbol of many things enlightenment, deception, stealth and lastly the inner divinity or the yearning for what is beyond the mundane in every individual. By wedding the predatory clarity of the tiger with the contradictory nonlinear spiritual empowerment of the cobra by finding a balance between these currents one becomes a dragon or the sentient image of the “way” that one is treading, in this case the way of the Komuso, making it clear to be a dragon is to be in full one’s self. The tiger is a symbol of the Ku or mind-body continuum while the cobra is the symbol of the Wu or power-image continuum making the dragon as a symbol of the Kokoro a balance of the personal and transpersonal scopes of reality as well as showing where the personal and the transpersonal meet and overlap.

The tiger is also the symbol of the arts of war in the Komuso Ryu while the cobra is the symbol of the arts of stealth in the same showing that the etiquette that the dragon is the symbol of the arts of is a balance of the formality and awareness of combat with the patience and deliberateness of stealth. Komuso Nin Do teaches that “life is war” and that the ninja are “weapons in the hands of fate.” With this in mind the arts of war become the arts of both preserving and living life while being hands of fate which requires that one act through or in stealth; “in stealth” is one way to read the Nin in Ninja. The ninja are to be known if at all by the results of what they do and when they act it is an act of war, war against the personal harmony of the individual or against whatever harmony the ninja is representing as an agent. The ninja is always an agent of change either an agent of change to maintain what is or an agent of change from what is into what is more in keeping with the harmony or ideal that one is seeking.

Reality is always in flux and includes all variations of what is and could be reality; an example of this is to read books of history about the same events from different times. The facts of the events have not changed but how they are understood, approached and the agenda behind presenting them have changed. The ninja as a dragon understands the flux and flow of these changes but does not let them unduly influence his own inner tiger or cobra but adjusts as needed to sustain him and remain true to his ideals. The universe like the ninja is a dragon, each is a whole, each is complete and each reflects the other. The foe in combat is a universe out of harmony with the chaotic multiverse and yet is no less a whole and to treat it as less than whole is to disregard the foe out of hand and thus be open to attack.

The word Kokoro has heart among it’s meanings and it is one half of the ideogram for Nin. The other half of Nin is composed of the ideogram for blade and the cobra and the tiger show the aspects of that blade. It is from the dragon i.e. the heart that the blade rises and this blade is no less than the balance between life and death. The tiger can be seen as the will of the flesh and the cobra can be seen as the will as a form of personal power. By wedding the cobra and the tiger one becomes a dragon able to defend the heart with his blade; this is why Nin can be read as “blade over heart”.

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