on the front wall—along with national flags in many contemporary training
halls. Hierarchy is signaled by positioning within the dôjô. The higher ranks
line up facing the front of the training hall, with lower-ranking students
lined up behind them; teachers stand at the front of the room facing stu-
dents. The dôjô and the behaviors appropriate to it set the model for many
other contemporary Asian martial arts and those non-Asian systems influ-
enced by them.
In south India, a dynamic relationship is believed to exist between the
students of kalarippayattu and their training hall, in that the building is
analogous to a human body, while the students are the body’s animating
spirit. One cannot exist without the other. Even abandoned training halls
do not lose their sanctity. In ancient times, Howard Reid and Michael
Croucher report that landowners commonly owned private kalaris. If the
training buildings fell into disuse, rather than destroying them, owners had
them converted into temples. Rituals such as lighting a sacred lamp every
day marked the abandoned kalari as sacred space.
Again, even in those systems lacking formal buildings for the practice
of their disciplines, the symbolic use of space is obvious. Even in Southern
Kalarippayattu, where outdoor areas rather than buildings are utilized, stu-
dents of this art, like their northern counterparts, ritually honor deities as-
Training Area 645Practitioners of kendô, the Japanese Way of the Sword, practice their moves with bamboo swords in a dôjô in Japan,
ca. 1920. (Michael Maslan Historic Photographs/Corbis)