Yet Hayes says his success came not from fighting, but from seeking the deepest spiritual roots of the Japanese traditions.
“My teachers (in 1970s Japan) would say, ‘To really understand how all this works, you would really have to go to the Buddhist monastery,’” he recalled, speaking in a side room of his training center in Kettering. “So I went.”
Seeking answers
In 1985, Hayes was already an international leader in martial arts. He was elected that year to Black Belt Magazine’s Hall of Fame. The award honored not only his years of training in Japan, but his efforts to spread awareness of the art of ninjitsu beyond its ancient home.
His quest for knowledge led him on a journey to the Himalayas, seeking answers to the Buddhist roots of his training. Ultimately, he connected with the Dalai Lama.
“I told him about my search, that I was in Japan trying to learn to be a protector and had run into some Buddhist questions I couldn’t find the answers to. Of course, they were baby questions, embarrassing to think back!”
The two men connected again in 1989. Hayes was on hand when the Dalai Lama, at a conference in Los Angeles, was announced as the winner of that year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Hayes helped lead the suddenly expanded security details, and in the years to come, he would often serve as a bodyguard and security liaison to the Dalai Lama.
“With all that access to him over the years, and listening to his teachings and seeing the effect he had on people — a courageous heart, a realistic brain — it affected my own martial arts,” Hayes says.
In fact, most of Hayes’ attention in the 1990s became focused on creating a martial arts style that honored both Buddhist and ninja traditions while adapting to modern American life. He called it To-Shin Do.
A new ‘way’
To develop his new system, Hayes drew heavily on the traditional ninja practices he’d mastered. He had begun studying martial arts in the mid-1960s, when karate was still an exotic skill and ninjitsu was nearly unheard of in the West. His college studies at Miami University gave way to life and ninja training in Japan, where he supported himself — and his future wife Rumiko — by writing books and articles about the ninja arts.
But he turned away from the traditional teaching format, which he says discourages questions and uses shaming and punishment to motivate students. Instead, his school focuses on education and achievement: Belts, ranks, a core curriculum and group graduations at regular intervals.
Hayes also tackled head-on the ideas of martial arts practitioners as bullies and brutes.
“What if we were protectors?” he asks. “What if people saw us coming and thought, ‘great, things are going to get better, kids don’t have to live in fear.’”
Hayes credits the approach both to his wife, Rumiko, who helped design the new system and is herself a master-level instructor, and to the Dalai Lama.
“We took a lot of the Buddhist philosophy and techniques: what motivates a human when they’re under pressure, the codes for how to develop a heroic life,” he says.
‘A cure for violence’
The paradox of most modern martial arts is that they teach fighting skills in order to create peace. That’s the goal of To-Shin Do, Hayes says.
“Some people with black belts never deal with what’s inside,” he says. “Early on, people would come to my school, some very advanced in martial arts, and see somebody’s mom taking down a big guy with an elbow. And they didn’t like that. They’re looking for self-confidence and still haven’t got it. They’re afraid (that) they might be afraid.”
Likewise, many people in spiritual circles haven’t addressed their shadow side, Hayes says, calling it an “inner violence, a self-righteousness.”
For both, he says, To-Shin Do can be a path to real peace.
“As the [training level] belt color gets darker, we go into the psychological, so you can see what’s inside and see you’ve got the power to overcome it,” he says. “My martial art is a cure for violence.”
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