Shigehiko Toyama’s book Shiko No Seirigaku (1983), published in English as The Art of Organising Thoughts (Penguin, 2026), includes a comment on the ‘secret teachings’ of traditional Japanese schools of learning:

“Secret teachings are secret for a reason. You need to do your best to hide them from even your most beloved student. Eventually the student will give up on trying to be taught the secret and start to wonder how they can instead steal it from their master.” (p.14)

The key insight here is that merely learning everything the master knows isn’t enough. The student who hangs forever on their teacher’s every word will remain forever a student. They will always require someone to show them what there is to learn. But there is a crucial threshold to be crossed, where the student works out how to steal the knowledge they seek — in other words, to find it for themselves, despite the resistence. As Toyama says:

“The student who has committed to stealing that which their master does not wish to freely impart discovers that they have developed the ability to acquire new pieces of information and knowledge under their own steam.”

This way of thinking about the value of ’secret teachings’ puts a new spin on the understanding of anthropologist David Graeber about the authority of the teacher.

“What he liked, he said, was self-subverting authority, authority which undermines its own basis. He gave the example of a teacher: A teacher knows something useful to their student, and so they have a natural authority; but if they do their job well, at the end of the process the student knows what the teacher knows, and their authority is spent. The hierarchy is flattened, and no further unequal power can accrue. The student is changed, and so is the world.”
— James Bridle, ‘Benchma(r)king’. Emergence.

Toyama’s insight is that the end of a student’s learning process is not simply to know what the teacher knows, as though there was a bucket of knowledge to be poured from the head of the teacher to fill up the head of the student. No, the end of a student’s learning is to know how the teacher knows, to know how to steal the ’secret’ knowledge the world hides but doesn’t ultimately withhold from a determined seeker. It’s this effectual desire to learn that propels the learner from the Shu stage of learning (imitation or emulation), through the Ha stage (assimilation or adaptation), and into the Ri stage (transcendence). This is why learning how to learn is the most important aspect of the learning journey.

I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.

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