正勝吾勝 masakatsu agatsu True Victory is Victory Over Oneself

The one victory worth the name is over the contending mind in your own heart, and an art that contends with nothing is never defeated: that is the teaching aikido's founder read into these four characters when he made them his motto, and the characters he chose were already twelve hundred years old.

The four characters are twelve hundred years older than the motto: they open the name of a god in the 古事記, Japan's oldest chronicle, and preserve Susanoo's shout on winning an oath-contest with his sister Amaterasu, truly, I have won. Ueshiba Morihei 植芝盛平, the founder of aikido, took the first four characters of the god's name for his motto and read the teaching into them; the sense is his, the characters are the chronicle's, and even the reading was in print before he had a motto. The English title is John Stevens's, from his The Secrets of Aikido of 1995.

The phrase is composed of the kanji 正 (read masa) meaning "correct; true", 勝 (read katsu) meaning "victory", 吾 (read a) meaning "self" and 勝 (read gatsu) meaning "victory".

We want you to be as happy with the meaning as you are with Master Takase's art. To learn more, visit Philology of 正勝吾勝.

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