Toyama no Metsuke - – to gaze upon the distant mountains
In martial arts, specifically the Japanese sword arts, there has arisen a concept for the use of the eyes called ‘toyama no metsuke’ or ‘enzan no metsuke’ which is translated roughly as ‘to gaze upon the distant mountains’. Various schools interpret the subtleties of this saying in various ways, but generally it’s accepted that what is meant by the concept is that one’s gaze should be diffuse and generalized, rather than laser focused on a single part of the opponent. We use our gaze in the way that we might take in a distant mountain vista; receptive and generalized, taking in the whole scene, rather than trying to squint hard to see a particular tree. In the same way, we regard our opponent and their setting as a vista to be taken in receptively and holistically, rather than try to maintain a tight focus on the opponent alone, or a specific part of their body.
Why shouldn’t we focus hard on the opponent? After all, they’re dangerous to us! This whole thing about gazing and mountains sounds pretty woo-woo; does it really mean anything?
We fetishize the idea of focus in western society. Society’s emphasis on being productive workers encourages us to keep our mind on the task at hand. Often those tasks can be repetitive and dull, and we need to work to stay engaged with them. Focus is seen as work, and something that has an implication of effort, and even strain if the circumstances are difficult. Society looks down on those that are ‘unfocused’ as lazy or stupid. As with most things, however, looking at the approach that is opposite to the ‘common sense’ has real value, especially when considering the psychology of martial arts or any deeply studied path. I call this opposite approach the Rule of Xu, named after Xu Guoming, a great Master of Xingyi Liuhe, Taiji, and other arts. When asked how he developed his advanced skills, he replied, “I look at everyone else, and see that they are not that good, so I look at what they’re doing, and I do the opposite. That is how I got good.” The natural yin yang reversals of training reflect this approach. We often learn things as we advance that seem to contradict things that we learned earlier in our training. We spend time trying to become fast or strong, then as our appreciation and understanding broaden, we realize that speed is only an aspect of timing, or that strength is only one perspective on power. Advanced students will often spend time trying to remove power and intention from their movements, specifically so that real power can begin to move through the body uninhibited by our narrow ideas about power. They will try to appreciate the value of moving deliberately slowly in order to let a real appreciation and application of timing appear. Students of the spear and the sword, knowing well the advantages of longer weapons, will deliberately begin to work with shorter weapons so that a true study and appreciation of range can start to occur. When one focuses only on what seems important, one is missing a great deal of the big picture, not only because looking at a piece is not looking at the whole thing, but also because we often don’t have a complete understanding of the piece itself or the context that the piece we’re focusing on exists within.
As with everything, there is a time and place for focus, but it often works against us, especially in circumstances where unpredictable things can happen. Focused attention is a narrow flashlight beam in a dark room, defined as much by what it is excluding as what it is focused upon. We might have the brightest flashlight in the world, but we can still trip on something that is not included in the beam. When the stakes are high, as in the case of a martial encounter, focusing on the wrong thing can have disastrous consequence. It works the other way around too. Think about how poachers illegally hunt deer with spotlights. The powerful light provides something for the deer to focus utterly on, and that is what brings about their doom.
Much of a martial artist’s work is to convince the opponent to focus on the wrong thing, to draw their attention away from where an attack will occur, to draw their attacks to places that will put them at a disadvantage. If one is not particularly inclined to have their focus drawn or stuck to any one thing, they are less vulnerable to being fooled in this way. Think of the analogy of an army: if the general is at the front line, lost in the melee, they have no idea what is happening elsewhere on the battlefield, and are stuck in a particular spot regardless of how circumstances change. If, instead, that general is on a hill with an overview of the whole battlefield, they can see the bigger picture and better direct the forces they have available. They may need to send a messenger to a particular spot and issue orders appropriate to what is going on, but they do this with a wider appreciation of how all the pieces fit together, and their attention is able to shift to and appreciate the larger picture at any point. This is much the same in an individual encounter, even, and perhaps especially, against multiple opponents.
In the case of facing another swordsperson, it is commonly understood that if we look at their eyes, we can be tricked or emotionally manipulated. Looking at the hands or the sword makes us vulnerable to feints and misdirections, and also increases our cognitive load because we’re trying to track the fastest and furthest moving part of the opponent. In both of these cases, we are focusing on the small picture and excluding the big one. While various schools will have various places to look, and can articulate very important reasons for their particular ideas, the reality is that looking at any one spot is a potential trap for our attention; a sticky point that our mind can get stuck to and requires effort to remove our focus from. Ideally, we should be able to express the vocabulary of our skill appropriately in any circumstance, regardless of where we’re looking, or even if our eyes are closed.
We learn early in most quality training that the eyes have a great influence on the quality and direction of our techniques. Drifting eyes will often mean diffuse techniques that aren’t well directed. This is something easily observable in beginning students, and if not corrected, can be present in practitioners that have practiced for many years. The problem, however, is that focusing the eyes is only a training tool that helps reinforce larger lessons about directing our intentions and techniques appropriately. We start unfocused because we don’t know any better, then learn to focus and direct our gaze, then finally return to an unfocused gaze. Perhaps it might be better to call this final stage an ‘unformed’ gaze. As in the case of looking at the distant mountain vista, we look to appreciate what has appeared before our eyes, with no preconceived idea of what we’ll find there, only the receptivity of ‘taking it all in’. If we see a column of smoke near a peak, we might look closer for a moment, but the overall vista remains for us to scan and appreciate. Training ourselves to default to this formlessness gives us a greater ability to return to it if our attention is required somewhere else for a moment. Just like the physical position of our sword; if it is held in a central position without a particular shape or pose, it has less distance to travel to any other position or shape and can thus respond more quickly and appropriately to what the circumstance demands. A specific shape or pose is designed for a specific situation, and we don’t actually know what the situation is until the opponent makes their move, or we do. Therefore, by adopting a particular shape, we are less able to do things that aren’t that shape. The difference might be milliseconds, but that can be a vast gap when considering the speed of a sword in motion.
Martial arts are often seen as training for a duel, where 2 roughly equal opponents test their skill against one another. Almost every form of combat is unconsciously viewed and trained this way, especially sword arts. Even street fighters largely train for a one-on-one encounter. Much of this is because of portrayals of ‘fighting’ in the media we consume, not to mention combat sports, which overlap with fighting arts to a limited degree, present this exact scenario to us in nearly all cases. The word ‘martial’ is rooted in the word for war, and is drawn from the Latin maritalis, relating to Mars, the god of war. War was not an individual pursuit, but rather was a group activity, and one that seemingly evolved quite dramatically over time. On the battlefield, one had to keep one’s head up and aware of more than just the person in front of you, because there could be many other people intent on killing or capturing you. Situational awareness is our greatest ally in tough situations, and that is necessarily a generalized application of one’s attention. By being situationally aware, we are alert for things we don’t expect, from places we don’t expect. Focusing on a particular thing can be necessary but also antithetical to maintaining a robust situational awareness. When confronted by a single person, one must always be aware of the potential for others to involve themselves to your disadvantage. For this reason, we don’t want to become too focused on the obvious opponent, or we may miss the real danger that appears from some other angle.
Toyama no metsuke is not just about the eyes and the vision, it is also about our other senses. Again, if we become too focused on one sense, we risk excluding useful information from other senses (and don’t forget, we might not know what is useful either). Our goal is to cultivate the casting of a wide and receptive net of attention all around us, so that we might gather any information that is available. We can never do this perfectly and, we won’t gain supernatural powers by practicing this type of attention, but we can certainly be more perceptive than the average person. An excellent concept from the Chinese martial arts is Ting Jin, which translates roughly as “listening energy” or maybe even “listening power”. Listening energy is not something we do with our ears, but generally we do when we’re in physical contact with someone. We ‘listen’ into their body to ‘hear’ what they’re doing, without necessarily being able to see it happening. The use of ‘listening’ is well-chosen because there’s a certain change in our affect when we are trying to hear something faint and barely comprehensible. Our whole body changes a bit to better receive the information. We might focus on a particular sound, but if we don’t know the source, we open ourselves to hear everything around us. Like a deer grazing that hears a noise; its head pops up and the ears turn this way and that to hear the source of the unexpected sound. It is scanning the whole environment receptively, ready to respond instantly should a predator appear. This relates well to ‘gazing upon the distant mountains’ because it, too, is a receptive and generalized receiver of information; looking/listening/touching to see/hear/feel what is there, rather than searching for something specific that may or may not actually be there.
This approach is useful even in non-martial settings. Any conversation is an opportunity to practice what we’re talking about. Listen to the speaker and don’t get stuck on specific words or gestures, but rather take in the whole package and let yourself hear it all before judging what you’ve heard. By doing this, we gain a certain control over our responses, and, paradoxically, make those responses much more free, spontaneous and appropriate to the conversation. This approach also reduces the chance that we get distracted or triggered by particular words, and can set those words into a larger context that might better inform how we need to respond. We’ve stopped just waiting our turn to speak, and have begun to be engaged with the actual conversation as something that develops its own form as it happens. We can’t very easily pre-impose a form onto a conversation. This would be like writing a script for a conversation you’re going to have, then just sticking to the script, no matter what the other person says. They might have something completely different to say than you had imagined, but because you are following the script you are unable to appropriately respond, and the conversation quickly breaks down. In the martial setting, the metaphor of the conversation applies very well. By appreciating the whole picture (or as much of it as we can perceive), we are better able to respond in just the right way for the particular situation we face, and we are not limited by reactions and misunderstandings as easily.
Toyama no metsuke is something that can be practiced and applied at any stage in one’s training, and has many levels of application and understanding. Firstly, the basic interpretation can be taken as an instruction about how to look at the opponent. As mentioned previously, eyes, hands, and weapon are all less than ideal as a part of the opponent to look at. Instead, consider looking at the base of their throat, where their collarbones meet in the middle. Rather than focusing hard on this point, just look broadly at the opponent with this point as a soft anchor to which your eyes will return if left to wander. What this does is place your vision at the point where movement from the body propagates into the arms, and then the weapon. If someone is going to make a move, you will see that movement before it even makes it down the arms to the hands, because of where your gaze is sitting. If you are aware of the range of the weapon they’re holding, they can’t trick you with ‘hidden distance’ techniques to gain range, such as turning the shoulders, stepping, etc. All of these movements will move through or just plain move that area of the body and thus be perceptible.
It is interesting that we perceive and recognize people by more than just the features of their faces. How many times have you seen someone walking down the street from behind or from a distance and instantly recognized them by their overall shape and posture, or their gait. Our faculties of recognition can often involve some sort of ‘big picture’ aggregate of a lot of smaller data points. This big picture allows us to quickly and effectively identify people and even animals quickly without recourse to ‘higher’ executive analytical functions. We can instantly spot the difference between a raccoon and a cat, especially if they’re in motion, even if many of their other features are similar. Animals also perceive things in this way. If a cat is trying to run past you, it’s not tracking your hands or your eyes, it's taking in a ‘big picture’ snapshot of your body and where it’s going. We generally center our bodies behind our hands as we try to catch something low that is trying to get around us. This makes sense because then our legs are also in a position to block whatever is moving by. However, if you let your body move to one side or another, but trail a hand into the space you’ve allowed to open up, a cat will often run face-first into your hand, because it is going off the position of the bigger ‘you’ rather than watching for what your grabby bits are doing. This proprioceptive tendency can also be used effectively against people in the same way. Many martial ‘tricks’ involve sending the body one way, but allowing an attack to come from a different apparent direction.
So, do our animal examples contradict what we have been talking about? Does looking at the bigger picture leave us unable to see the trees for the forest? I would argue that like anything, it can, but it doesn’t have to. Gazing upon the distant mountains can be less effective if we only look at one part of the vista available to us. The problem for the cat is that it’s seeing a bigger picture than a particular body part, but it’s not seeing a big enough picture to successfully get around the human. As humans, we need to expand the net even further, to take in the big picture of the opponent’s body, AND where their hands and weapon are in space. Fortunately, since hands are generally attached to bodies, and weapons to hands, this is not a difficult step to take in our cultivation of expanded perception. The ‘big picture’ aggregate of a body, by the very nature of there being a body involved, will always be in relationship to the hands/feet/weapon, and can only move independently to a limited degree. Training teaches us those limits and how to perceive and use them to our advantage.
At the most basic level, toyama no metsuke is trained by imagining facing someone holding a sword. The ‘near’ mountain is the tip of the sword pointing at you, the ‘valley’ is the hands, and the ‘distant’ mountain is the opponent’s body at the level where the arms join the torso, which is the middle point of their body between their shoulders. We keep our gaze generally there, instead of being distracted by the motion of the hands and the sword. This is the basic and literal version of toyama no metsuke as a technique.
Less literally, we just let our gaze be soft and receptive generally, ready to soak up any and all information that appears. As mentioned above, we softly anchor the gaze to the base of the throat, but not in a ‘sticky’ way. We just return there if our vision isn’t otherwise engaged. None of this precludes looking at their sword or their eyes, it just provides us the freedom to do so or not as we choose, and shows us the efficiency of other places to anchor our gaze. As we advance in our understanding, we become less dependent on looking anywhere in particular, and we can titrate the level of apparent engagement with an opponent by looking off to the side or somewhere else. We appear less dangerous as we appear less focused, but because of our training and understanding, this is an illusion that can be used to draw the opponent to attack.
Even less literally, we apply this approach to how we relate to the world generally, not just in our martial studies. Instead of getting stuck to things and caught up in this or that, we see everything around us as part of the larger vista of the ‘distant mountains’; not in the sense that we are separate and removed from these things, but that everything exists in relationship and context. The distant mountainside certainly has individual trees we could look at, and many other things we have no idea about, but they all exist as this larger relationship of the mountain range itself, which in turn is there in context with the valleys, the sky, the weather, etc. This web of relationships becomes literally universal and provides a sobering context to the petty dramas that we can get caught up in. By gazing upon the distant mountains, we get out of our own heads and into the world around us.
In martial arts, specifically the Japanese sword arts, there has arisen a concept for the use of the eyes called ‘toyama no metsuke’ or ‘enzan no metsuke’ which is translated roughly as ‘to gaze upon the distant mountains’. Various schools interpret the subtleties of this saying in various ways, but generally it’s accepted that what is meant by the concept is that one’s gaze should be diffuse and generalized, rather than laser focused on a single part of the opponent. We use our gaze in the way that we might take in a distant mountain vista; receptive and generalized, taking in the whole scene, rather than trying to squint hard to see a particular tree. In the same way, we regard our opponent and their setting as a vista to be taken in receptively and holistically, rather than try to maintain a tight focus on the opponent alone, or a specific part of their body.
Why shouldn’t we focus hard on the opponent? After all, they’re dangerous to us! This whole thing about gazing and mountains sounds pretty woo-woo; does it really mean anything?
We fetishize the idea of focus in western society. Society’s emphasis on being productive workers encourages us to keep our mind on the task at hand. Often those tasks can be repetitive and dull, and we need to work to stay engaged with them. Focus is seen as work, and something that has an implication of effort, and even strain if the circumstances are difficult. Society looks down on those that are ‘unfocused’ as lazy or stupid. As with most things, however, looking at the approach that is opposite to the ‘common sense’ has real value, especially when considering the psychology of martial arts or any deeply studied path. I call this opposite approach the Rule of Xu, named after Xu Guoming, a great Master of Xingyi Liuhe, Taiji, and other arts. When asked how he developed his advanced skills, he replied, “I look at everyone else, and see that they are not that good, so I look at what they’re doing, and I do the opposite. That is how I got good.” The natural yin yang reversals of training reflect this approach. We often learn things as we advance that seem to contradict things that we learned earlier in our training. We spend time trying to become fast or strong, then as our appreciation and understanding broaden, we realize that speed is only an aspect of timing, or that strength is only one perspective on power. Advanced students will often spend time trying to remove power and intention from their movements, specifically so that real power can begin to move through the body uninhibited by our narrow ideas about power. They will try to appreciate the value of moving deliberately slowly in order to let a real appreciation and application of timing appear. Students of the spear and the sword, knowing well the advantages of longer weapons, will deliberately begin to work with shorter weapons so that a true study and appreciation of range can start to occur. When one focuses only on what seems important, one is missing a great deal of the big picture, not only because looking at a piece is not looking at the whole thing, but also because we often don’t have a complete understanding of the piece itself or the context that the piece we’re focusing on exists within.
As with everything, there is a time and place for focus, but it often works against us, especially in circumstances where unpredictable things can happen. Focused attention is a narrow flashlight beam in a dark room, defined as much by what it is excluding as what it is focused upon. We might have the brightest flashlight in the world, but we can still trip on something that is not included in the beam. When the stakes are high, as in the case of a martial encounter, focusing on the wrong thing can have disastrous consequence. It works the other way around too. Think about how poachers illegally hunt deer with spotlights. The powerful light provides something for the deer to focus utterly on, and that is what brings about their doom.
Much of a martial artist’s work is to convince the opponent to focus on the wrong thing, to draw their attention away from where an attack will occur, to draw their attacks to places that will put them at a disadvantage. If one is not particularly inclined to have their focus drawn or stuck to any one thing, they are less vulnerable to being fooled in this way. Think of the analogy of an army: if the general is at the front line, lost in the melee, they have no idea what is happening elsewhere on the battlefield, and are stuck in a particular spot regardless of how circumstances change. If, instead, that general is on a hill with an overview of the whole battlefield, they can see the bigger picture and better direct the forces they have available. They may need to send a messenger to a particular spot and issue orders appropriate to what is going on, but they do this with a wider appreciation of how all the pieces fit together, and their attention is able to shift to and appreciate the larger picture at any point. This is much the same in an individual encounter, even, and perhaps especially, against multiple opponents.
In the case of facing another swordsperson, it is commonly understood that if we look at their eyes, we can be tricked or emotionally manipulated. Looking at the hands or the sword makes us vulnerable to feints and misdirections, and also increases our cognitive load because we’re trying to track the fastest and furthest moving part of the opponent. In both of these cases, we are focusing on the small picture and excluding the big one. While various schools will have various places to look, and can articulate very important reasons for their particular ideas, the reality is that looking at any one spot is a potential trap for our attention; a sticky point that our mind can get stuck to and requires effort to remove our focus from. Ideally, we should be able to express the vocabulary of our skill appropriately in any circumstance, regardless of where we’re looking, or even if our eyes are closed.
We learn early in most quality training that the eyes have a great influence on the quality and direction of our techniques. Drifting eyes will often mean diffuse techniques that aren’t well directed. This is something easily observable in beginning students, and if not corrected, can be present in practitioners that have practiced for many years. The problem, however, is that focusing the eyes is only a training tool that helps reinforce larger lessons about directing our intentions and techniques appropriately. We start unfocused because we don’t know any better, then learn to focus and direct our gaze, then finally return to an unfocused gaze. Perhaps it might be better to call this final stage an ‘unformed’ gaze. As in the case of looking at the distant mountain vista, we look to appreciate what has appeared before our eyes, with no preconceived idea of what we’ll find there, only the receptivity of ‘taking it all in’. If we see a column of smoke near a peak, we might look closer for a moment, but the overall vista remains for us to scan and appreciate. Training ourselves to default to this formlessness gives us a greater ability to return to it if our attention is required somewhere else for a moment. Just like the physical position of our sword; if it is held in a central position without a particular shape or pose, it has less distance to travel to any other position or shape and can thus respond more quickly and appropriately to what the circumstance demands. A specific shape or pose is designed for a specific situation, and we don’t actually know what the situation is until the opponent makes their move, or we do. Therefore, by adopting a particular shape, we are less able to do things that aren’t that shape. The difference might be milliseconds, but that can be a vast gap when considering the speed of a sword in motion.
Martial arts are often seen as training for a duel, where 2 roughly equal opponents test their skill against one another. Almost every form of combat is unconsciously viewed and trained this way, especially sword arts. Even street fighters largely train for a one-on-one encounter. Much of this is because of portrayals of ‘fighting’ in the media we consume, not to mention combat sports, which overlap with fighting arts to a limited degree, present this exact scenario to us in nearly all cases. The word ‘martial’ is rooted in the word for war, and is drawn from the Latin maritalis, relating to Mars, the god of war. War was not an individual pursuit, but rather was a group activity, and one that seemingly evolved quite dramatically over time. On the battlefield, one had to keep one’s head up and aware of more than just the person in front of you, because there could be many other people intent on killing or capturing you. Situational awareness is our greatest ally in tough situations, and that is necessarily a generalized application of one’s attention. By being situationally aware, we are alert for things we don’t expect, from places we don’t expect. Focusing on a particular thing can be necessary but also antithetical to maintaining a robust situational awareness. When confronted by a single person, one must always be aware of the potential for others to involve themselves to your disadvantage. For this reason, we don’t want to become too focused on the obvious opponent, or we may miss the real danger that appears from some other angle.
Toyama no metsuke is not just about the eyes and the vision, it is also about our other senses. Again, if we become too focused on one sense, we risk excluding useful information from other senses (and don’t forget, we might not know what is useful either). Our goal is to cultivate the casting of a wide and receptive net of attention all around us, so that we might gather any information that is available. We can never do this perfectly and, we won’t gain supernatural powers by practicing this type of attention, but we can certainly be more perceptive than the average person. An excellent concept from the Chinese martial arts is Ting Jin, which translates roughly as “listening energy” or maybe even “listening power”. Listening energy is not something we do with our ears, but generally we do when we’re in physical contact with someone. We ‘listen’ into their body to ‘hear’ what they’re doing, without necessarily being able to see it happening. The use of ‘listening’ is well-chosen because there’s a certain change in our affect when we are trying to hear something faint and barely comprehensible. Our whole body changes a bit to better receive the information. We might focus on a particular sound, but if we don’t know the source, we open ourselves to hear everything around us. Like a deer grazing that hears a noise; its head pops up and the ears turn this way and that to hear the source of the unexpected sound. It is scanning the whole environment receptively, ready to respond instantly should a predator appear. This relates well to ‘gazing upon the distant mountains’ because it, too, is a receptive and generalized receiver of information; looking/listening/touching to see/hear/feel what is there, rather than searching for something specific that may or may not actually be there.
This approach is useful even in non-martial settings. Any conversation is an opportunity to practice what we’re talking about. Listen to the speaker and don’t get stuck on specific words or gestures, but rather take in the whole package and let yourself hear it all before judging what you’ve heard. By doing this, we gain a certain control over our responses, and, paradoxically, make those responses much more free, spontaneous and appropriate to the conversation. This approach also reduces the chance that we get distracted or triggered by particular words, and can set those words into a larger context that might better inform how we need to respond. We’ve stopped just waiting our turn to speak, and have begun to be engaged with the actual conversation as something that develops its own form as it happens. We can’t very easily pre-impose a form onto a conversation. This would be like writing a script for a conversation you’re going to have, then just sticking to the script, no matter what the other person says. They might have something completely different to say than you had imagined, but because you are following the script you are unable to appropriately respond, and the conversation quickly breaks down. In the martial setting, the metaphor of the conversation applies very well. By appreciating the whole picture (or as much of it as we can perceive), we are better able to respond in just the right way for the particular situation we face, and we are not limited by reactions and misunderstandings as easily.
Toyama no metsuke is something that can be practiced and applied at any stage in one’s training, and has many levels of application and understanding. Firstly, the basic interpretation can be taken as an instruction about how to look at the opponent. As mentioned previously, eyes, hands, and weapon are all less than ideal as a part of the opponent to look at. Instead, consider looking at the base of their throat, where their collarbones meet in the middle. Rather than focusing hard on this point, just look broadly at the opponent with this point as a soft anchor to which your eyes will return if left to wander. What this does is place your vision at the point where movement from the body propagates into the arms, and then the weapon. If someone is going to make a move, you will see that movement before it even makes it down the arms to the hands, because of where your gaze is sitting. If you are aware of the range of the weapon they’re holding, they can’t trick you with ‘hidden distance’ techniques to gain range, such as turning the shoulders, stepping, etc. All of these movements will move through or just plain move that area of the body and thus be perceptible.
It is interesting that we perceive and recognize people by more than just the features of their faces. How many times have you seen someone walking down the street from behind or from a distance and instantly recognized them by their overall shape and posture, or their gait. Our faculties of recognition can often involve some sort of ‘big picture’ aggregate of a lot of smaller data points. This big picture allows us to quickly and effectively identify people and even animals quickly without recourse to ‘higher’ executive analytical functions. We can instantly spot the difference between a raccoon and a cat, especially if they’re in motion, even if many of their other features are similar. Animals also perceive things in this way. If a cat is trying to run past you, it’s not tracking your hands or your eyes, it's taking in a ‘big picture’ snapshot of your body and where it’s going. We generally center our bodies behind our hands as we try to catch something low that is trying to get around us. This makes sense because then our legs are also in a position to block whatever is moving by. However, if you let your body move to one side or another, but trail a hand into the space you’ve allowed to open up, a cat will often run face-first into your hand, because it is going off the position of the bigger ‘you’ rather than watching for what your grabby bits are doing. This proprioceptive tendency can also be used effectively against people in the same way. Many martial ‘tricks’ involve sending the body one way, but allowing an attack to come from a different apparent direction.
So, do our animal examples contradict what we have been talking about? Does looking at the bigger picture leave us unable to see the trees for the forest? I would argue that like anything, it can, but it doesn’t have to. Gazing upon the distant mountains can be less effective if we only look at one part of the vista available to us. The problem for the cat is that it’s seeing a bigger picture than a particular body part, but it’s not seeing a big enough picture to successfully get around the human. As humans, we need to expand the net even further, to take in the big picture of the opponent’s body, AND where their hands and weapon are in space. Fortunately, since hands are generally attached to bodies, and weapons to hands, this is not a difficult step to take in our cultivation of expanded perception. The ‘big picture’ aggregate of a body, by the very nature of there being a body involved, will always be in relationship to the hands/feet/weapon, and can only move independently to a limited degree. Training teaches us those limits and how to perceive and use them to our advantage.
At the most basic level, toyama no metsuke is trained by imagining facing someone holding a sword. The ‘near’ mountain is the tip of the sword pointing at you, the ‘valley’ is the hands, and the ‘distant’ mountain is the opponent’s body at the level where the arms join the torso, which is the middle point of their body between their shoulders. We keep our gaze generally there, instead of being distracted by the motion of the hands and the sword. This is the basic and literal version of toyama no metsuke as a technique.
Less literally, we just let our gaze be soft and receptive generally, ready to soak up any and all information that appears. As mentioned above, we softly anchor the gaze to the base of the throat, but not in a ‘sticky’ way. We just return there if our vision isn’t otherwise engaged. None of this precludes looking at their sword or their eyes, it just provides us the freedom to do so or not as we choose, and shows us the efficiency of other places to anchor our gaze. As we advance in our understanding, we become less dependent on looking anywhere in particular, and we can titrate the level of apparent engagement with an opponent by looking off to the side or somewhere else. We appear less dangerous as we appear less focused, but because of our training and understanding, this is an illusion that can be used to draw the opponent to attack.
Even less literally, we apply this approach to how we relate to the world generally, not just in our martial studies. Instead of getting stuck to things and caught up in this or that, we see everything around us as part of the larger vista of the ‘distant mountains’; not in the sense that we are separate and removed from these things, but that everything exists in relationship and context. The distant mountainside certainly has individual trees we could look at, and many other things we have no idea about, but they all exist as this larger relationship of the mountain range itself, which in turn is there in context with the valleys, the sky, the weather, etc. This web of relationships becomes literally universal and provides a sobering context to the petty dramas that we can get caught up in. By gazing upon the distant mountains, we get out of our own heads and into the world around us.
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