The ninja warrior is the epitome of spiritual freedom and power.

-Stephen K. Hayes

The strangest things I’ve learned about the ninja involve what we might call spiritual power. They belong in the same box as much of what I’ve read about the bala paramita. And to be honest, that box is labeled, “???”

I don’t really know what to do with the stories of what sound like Jedi mind tricks, or instructions to perform a mudra (hand motion) that will bring you physical protection. What I can tell you is you don’t know much about the ninja if you haven’t yet come across these things. They are everywhere.

In fact, in the East, the caricature of the ninja is a mystical magician who can perform unimaginable feats. (I find it interesting that those of us in the West have instead focused almost exclusively on the caricature of the ninja as assassins. This says something important about our cultures, and what we value, I think.)

While the earliest roots of ninja history remain unclear, most scholars agree that it predates even the most conservative estimate by a few hundred years. In these early years, ninja were living up in the mountains with yamabushi priests and Shinto influences. They spent their days meditating and training their minds and their senses. They focused on cultivating spiritual refinement. I don’t know whether this gave them a heightened senses of hearing, or the ability to walk across burning coals unharmed. I don’t know if they could force a man to drop his sword just by staring at him. What I do know is that the ninja believed the world encompassed more than the physical, and more than the eye can see. They believed there was spiritual energy flowing everywhere, and it could be both felt and harnessed.

Ninja history incorporates aspects of mikkyo, the esoteric branch of Buddhist thought. (It’s like the Buddhist equivalent of Kabbalah.) I realize it’s difficult for us to take these mystical, esoteric ideas at face value from where we sit in 2019. Our world is so different than the world of the ancients. Science and human discovery has revealed so much.

And yet, maybe we’ve forgotten some truths that now remain hidden.

I’m not sure I will ever know what it means to say the ninja is the epitome of spiritual power and freedom. But I believe it’s true. Something about this way of life, this combination of mind-body-spirit, has power to it. And if you devote your life to practicing it, perhaps the mysteries of that power just might reveal themselves to you.

I can’t tell you how to harness spiritual power, exactly. I have no idea what this looks like in the practice of ninjutsu. But I do know these practices can make us better humans, more humane humans. We can be honorable, and live in service to others. Maasaki Hatsumi describes the earliest ninja methods as “discerning what is right for the world, enduring, training to become a moral being, becoming aware of one’s destiny, and dedicating one’s life to other people or the world as a whole.”

That’s a creed I can get behind, and a goal I can strive for.

And maybe, true spiritual power is simply the art of living fully as the humans we are created to be.