Professor Jason Hawkins returns to talk about his book, Light on the Gentle Art: The Jiu-Jitsu Sutras, a set of short sayings modeled on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and written while he was laid up after a 2014 surgery. He explains that a sutra is a deliberately open-ended aphorism meant to start a conversation between student and teacher, and how years of moving between his yoga friends and his SWAT friends convinced him that different arts can speak to each other. As one teacher told him, knowledge has to do with differences and wisdom has to do with similarities.

With Pete hosting solo, the two work through three sutras. The first describes jiu-jitsu as equanimity with internal fortitude: yielding without becoming a cork on the water, and shifting under a forearm across the neck instead of pushing straight back. The second, on practice held over a long time, leads to the ego, pain, and a friendly disagreement about whether the goal is to flatten life's highs and lows or learn to ride them. The third names boredom and fear as the gatekeepers of transformation, which Jason explains through an old Egyptian formula of springtime, destruction and resurrection, and the idea of training with no promise of a payoff.

In this episode

• 0:00 Welcome
• 1:06 What a sutra is
• 3:12 Yoga, SWAT friends and the book
• 9:31 Finding common ground between arts
• 11:39 Knowledge is differences, wisdom is similarities
• 16:54 Sutra 1.2: equanimity and fortitude
• 22:03 Pain directs our lives
• 26:20 Sutra 1.28: practice over time
• 32:37 What happens to the ego
• 33:37 Riding the highs and lows
• 39:52 Sutra 1.40: boredom and fear
• 41:59 Springtime, destruction and resurrection
• 47:07 Practice with no promise of payoff
• 54:27 Detachment and teaching kids

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