Many martial arts come from other cultures with different languages. This new weekly article, Martial Word Wednesday, is designed to shed some light on some of the ideas present in other languages that don’t necessarily have a place in English.
Bu
Etymology is the study of word origins. In English, or other languages, the origin of the word often gives you deeper insight into its use and history. Asian, character based languages are no different. Many of the characters have a complex history that will tell you about the mindset and philosophy of the country/language or origin. So we’re going to start looking at this with our first foreign word, that isn’t ever really a word. It is a character used in many terms in martial arts. You could think of it like a Latin/Greek root word in English.
The character “bu” is used in Japanese as a root connotation to indicated “war” or “martial.” In fact, it is the “martial” in martial arts (bugei, 武芸). Martial artists who practice Japanese arts will see the character used in budo (martial ways, 武道), bujutsu (武術) or even the code of the samurai, bushido (武士道). You can see it’s general meaning in these terms. In Chinese, the same character is pronounced “wu” as in “wushu.”
History
The character is very old, being found in Chinese writings over 3000 years ago. However, there is a theory as to its origin. It appears to be a composite character. That is, two characters written together to become a new third character. In this case, the character combines “spear” (戈) and “stop” (止). So in one aspect, war is “Stopping Spears.” Despite our attention to the more noble weapons such as the sword, the spear was the king of the battle field for millennia. Wars may have been lead by men with swords, but they were won by men with spears. Even up to the American Civil War, there were groups (Georgian infantry troops) who wanted to use pike formations against the line of firearms. Therefore, stopping spears, means stopping conflict.
Interpretation
There are two interpretations to this meaning. One way to look at the character is to stop the spear, and thus spare everyone of the conflict. A second, more aggressive interpretation is that you are stopping the spear… in the other guy’s body. Obviously it isn’t pretty, but it gets the point across (pun intended).
Do you have a favorite martial arts word that doesn’t directly translate into English? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll cover it next week. Or better yet, submit your own “Martial Word Wednesday” and get published.
- Review of The Ankō Itosu Biography - September 13, 2021
- Suparinpei-The Last Kata of Goju-Ryu Karate - July 12, 2021
- Swords Are Cool…That’s All I’ve Got - March 4, 2021
Leave a Reply