On Wrestling, Chivalry and Pedagogy
In the second, perhaps the third century we find in Indo-Hellenic Gandhara a Buddhist schist relief: the prince Siddhartha spars with another wrestler, surrounded by his fellows. Here is a reminder of the Buddha’s education as a young aristocrat, conversant in close combat, experienced in matters of strength and vigor. What elevates this relief to religious art is the presence of the tree that canopies the sparring partners: recalling the king’s royal umbrella of course, but also the fig tree that the Buddha would attain enlightenment under. The scene gains a spiritual valence, revealing the intimate continuity between mystical and physical virtue. The Buddha was, after all, reputed to be a ‘lion-torsoed’ athlete possessed of great strength and beauty, ‘well-proportioned like a banyan tree.’
This serves as a convenient segue into the idea of the body as a site of religious activity, of the merit of robust and vigorous health in the quest of spiritual wisdom. Physical culture is the marriage of form and rhythm, of spirit and matter: the ascetic’s sacred white heat (divine faculty, techne, a mystical potency wielded through practice by poets, monks and warriors alike), expended in the union of controlled movement and the explosive fluxion of muscles. This harmony is known neither through mere enervated ruminations nor the untamed atavism of beasts. Jünger found in the rarified condition of perfect health a spiritual pathway to the gods: enclosed in the aura of higher forms, a cheerfulness and freshness of disposition, one’s body becomes more spiritual. Here one discovers the biology that underlies and determines one’s spiritual condition: to approach perfection of form is to know divine nature (gnosis, recognition, virtue). To extend the idea: to wilfully entertain the deformity and monstrosity of matter is to countenance the debasement of spirit.
Physical culture, one may posit, is integral to the humanist project: the purification, strengthening, beautification of this fleshly vessel that carries the soul, and through this process ameliorating the soul itself. One’s health becomes the measure of one’s spiritual prowess; the beauty of one’s physical form becomes an extension of one’s divinity. This, we agree, is the crux of humanism in its truest essence: the cultivation of our highest faculties, the perfection of form, the pursuit of excellence, tempered by universal standards.
As such, pedagogical traditions of guilds, of tariqahs, of orders, of schools are essential in fostering a culture of excellence through a system of tutelage, discipline, ascetic temperance. Which is to say that classical wrestling traditions were monastic in essence: the regimen, the lifestyle that a wrestler adopts is meant to inculcate a particular spiritual-moral-martial disposition: chevalerie militaire et chevalerie spirituelle.
The perfection of the body is undertaken as a spiritual pursuit, as the purification and refinement of the spirit, the cultivation of chivalry. The ascetic ideal: not as the vengeance of those ‘with physiological causalities and the disgruntled,’ or the conceit of the priestly caste, but as ‘the highest favorable condition for Geistigkeit.’ A severe technology meant to generate and harness the inner intensing of sacred white heat in pursuit of the chivalric ideal.
The initiate learns, through counsel and punishment, to cultivate an inner integrity and discipline, to order one’s inner life in accordance with classical standards: he learns to civilize himself. The paidonomos, the murshid, the guru: the master becomes the magnanimous (at the same time exacting, even cruel: to become a homoioi meant passing the gruelling program of agoge) ship that steers the initiate towards this ideal, demanding in return the loving gift of unfailing obedience. For the cosmos is a procession of potencies into actualities: the guide oversees (orients, moulds) his initiate’s transfiguration into the realized ideal. Pedagogy as poiesis.
This regimen is necessarily undertaken among comrades, among youth aspiring to similar ideals. The virtues that make the man of the world cannot be attained in solitude but through enthusiastic participation in the männerbund, the agele, the pack. Cicero places the glory of virtue (which he translated to ‘ever to excel’) in activity, in agon: competition, conflict, contest. The wrestlers’ participation and competition centers around the akhara (a word at once denoting a circle of spiritual renunciates, wrestling pits and martial orders) or zourkhaneh: the wrestling pit, the gymnasium, the temple and axis of the männerbund. This is the cauldron that brews virtue through rigorous regimen as ritual, lending the wrestler’s maneuvers the measured, conscious artifice of performance and ceremony.
These virtues transform the worthy wrestler into a javanmard, the Persian ideal of youthful chivalry and manliness: the warrior, the rebel and the outlaw alike bound by the same standards of courtly conduct (Imam Ali, Rostam or the god Hanuman as ideal models). Tyrtaeus extolled the homoioi’s androsune: their courage, or rather, manliness. The roots of manliness are virtus, phronesis, nous, viveka: the worldly man’s practicable sense of discernment and taste that separates the civilized from the savage, and the masterful strength that safeguards this divide. The manushya, the man of the world, is one who thinks, one who can judge. Through discernment is produced eunomia, through this discerning self-governance emerges natural order: this is dharma.
These form the paradigms of the wrestling order as a house of virtue. Here one may note traditional Persian and Indian wrestling lineages that consciously model themselves on Sufi traditions of mystical pedagogy: the guide and the wrestler become master and initiate, the wrestling school becomes a monastic space, the initiate a potential jawanmard, a Ritter, a chevalier.
Someday, the initiate hopes, he shall, having struggled with his fellows under the master’s watch, acquire the refinement that this ordeal promises to the worthy. He hopes to realize the enlightened man’s freedom and sovereignty.
This, we may then conclude, is the whole of the law: excellence, virtue, the honing of sense and spirit, the mastery over and governance of one’s self. At the same time, the strengthening of the body, the mastery of its faculties, the attainment of health, are by no means incidental, but fundamental to the method. (Physical culture founded on the fear of death and infirmity, life as an end in itself, on the other hand, yields nothing but a brute reign of quantities, a neurotic culture of unlife.) The wrestler must be a joyous and youthful bandit.