What first drew me to Mugai-ryū is its name. Most sword schools are named for a founder, a place, or a technique; this one is named for a line of Zen poetry. The phrase its founder borrowed, that there is nothing outside the one reality, is the kind of claim that sounds either profound or empty depending on the day, and I find I cannot quite decide which, which is probably why I keep returning to it. A school that stakes its identity on a single religious idea is making a promise about what swordsmanship is for, and that promise is worth taking seriously even if you do not share the metaphysics behind it.
I like that Tsuji Gettan is a real man and not a legend. So many of the founders I read about dissolve under examination into shrine stories and heroic duels that cannot be checked. Gettan has dates, a teacher, a city, a dōjō. He studied the Yamaguchi-ryū, he settled in Edo, and he spent years in Zen practice that he plainly thought mattered more than another set of forms. There is something steadying about a founder you can actually locate in time, and it lets me read the philosophical side of the school as the considered choice of a particular person rather than as the usual fog.
Where I have to be careful, and where the school's admirers sometimes are not, is the iai. It would be easy to assume that the drawing forms practised today come straight down from Gettan, an unbroken seventeenth-century art. They do not, or at least not entirely. A great deal of the iai entered the tradition from a separate root and was joined to Gettan's kenjutsu later. I do not think this is a scandal. Schools borrow, combine and reshape themselves constantly, and a composite art is not a fraudulent one. But honesty asks that you say so, and that you keep the swordsmanship and the philosophy, which do descend from Gettan, distinct from the technique, much of which does not.
The shift from kenjutsu to iai is the part I find most quietly moving. Gettan built a school for men who carried swords and might have to use them. What survived him, after the samurai class was abolished and the sword became an anachronism, was not the cutting but the drawing: the slow, solitary, almost ceremonial act of taking the blade from the scabbard and returning it. An art designed for a world of armed men outlived that world by becoming a discipline of attention. I am not sure Gettan would recognise it, but I suspect he might approve, because the thing he seems to have cared about was never really the cut.
I am wary, too, of the way a school like this can be sold. Once a tradition is mostly iai and mostly philosophy, it becomes very easy to wrap in more spiritual language than it can carry, and the line about nothing outside the one reality can be made to do a great deal of marketing. I try to hold the idea lightly. Taken as a technical instruction, to settle the mind so completely that nothing stands between intention and movement, it points at something real that anyone who has tried to do a hard thing under pressure will recognise. Taken as a cosmic boast, it tells me much less.
What I am left with is a school that is honest about being made of two things, an old swordsmanship and a later iai, held together by one borrowed idea. There is no single headquarters that owns it, which I count as a virtue rather than a defect; it means the tradition has to be carried by people rather than guarded by an office. And the idea at its centre is a good one to practise against, whether or not it is finally true: that the work in front of you, done completely, has nothing outside it.