Almost every Japanese martial art begins and ends its training session with zarei, a seated bow. The origins of this custom lie in the fact that, in the past, much of the stuff of daily life was conducted from seiza, or seated position, on tatami.

Today many of us may not understand or even notice that there is a certain method of performing seiza. It is not a matter of simply sitting down on the floor. There is a clear significance underlying each movement of legs, arms and body, and the significance is related to only one thing -- survival. If we were to turn back the clock to the time when a person's life literally depended upon his cunning, awareness and martial prowess, it would become apparent that moving "just so" could mean the difference between life and death. Any gunslinger in the old American West knew that lesson well, as does any modern Special Forces soldier today.

In the case of olden Japan, katana were the order of the day, and samurai conducted all aspects of their lives around the physical reality of their swords. Samurai made sure that regardless of what they were doing, they were always in a defensible position, offered no opening for attack and maintaining instant access to their blades. This was true whether they were standing or sitting in seiza and whether they had their larger tachi blade at their side or only the smaller wakizashi tucked into their obi.

Since the study and performance of martial arts today is almost exclusively within the confines of the dojo, it might be argued that we could do away with some of the traditional customs and affects of the past. But traditional customs help to teach us about the art and to distinguish it and its practitioners in a special way. Performing a proper bow, or zarei, helps us to maintain our connection with our art and puts us in the right frame of mind for training.

The basic form of moving into seiza and zarei goes like this:

From a standing position with your feel parallel and situated directly beneath your shoulders, pull your left foot back slightly and then let your left knee lower to the ground. The ball of the left foot should be touching the ground with the toes bent back. At this point, the right knee will still be up. Then, bring your right foot back and put your right knee down beside the left knee. Once again, the toes of your right foot should be bent back and your weight toward the balls of the feet and toes. Let your weight shift toward the knees momentarily at this point, to allow your feet to straighten out so that the tops of the feet (the instep) touch the ground. Place both hands at the juncture of your leg and hips. When you settle, transfer your hands from here, away from where your sword would be, to your thighs, indicating that you have no aggressive intentions.

The reason that we pull the left leg back first and keep our right knee up is to allow access to the sword that is strapped onto our left hip. Additionally, we can move forward easily from this position, should we need to. Those who study iaido will have direct experience with this. The reason that we bear weight on our toes during this process is to allow freedom in the knees, so we may be able to move quickly and freely.

Continuing, from the non-aggressive seated position, we bow forward from our hips and slide our hands forward on our thighs, keeping our eyes trained at the opponent to monitor his actions. Before commencing the bow, both hands should remain on our thighs, while still looking at the opponent. From here, your left hand first comes off the left thigh and is placed onto the ground at a 45 degree angle toward your center line. All five fingers and the palm touch the ground. Then, the same action is done with the right hand. These actions are performed at the same speed and rhythm, with neither being faster than the other. The position of the hands on the floor should be with the thumbs and index fingers touching, a triangle formed by their shape in between. This triangle should be at the place where your nose would encounter the ground when you bow forward from this seated position. We bow until our nose almost touches the ground; otherwise, we bow down with our eyes trained at our partner to watch for aggressive intentions. Although both methods are commonly used during modern day practice, bowing all the way down without maintaining eye contact is more common in our peaceful society. When we finish the bow, we return to the regular seiza position by first taking our right hand off the ground and placing it onto our right thigh at the same time that we are returning our upper body to a seated posture. After this, we place the left hand back onto our left thigh. The reason that we retract our right hand first is to ensure we have the ability to draw the sword if necessary.

To stand up from this position, we simply reverse what we have done up to this point. As you can see, this method has traditional roots based on practical functionality. All of its movements were designed so as to not to offend the opponent while still maintaining an ability to remain safe during the movements.

This "prudent-greeting" behavior is not limited to Japan, of course, but can be observed all over the world. In Western societies, we can see that the origin of the custom of shaking hands was to extend trust and friendly intentions by showing that we were not carrying a weapon in our right hand. This is akin to the aforementioned placement of our hands onto our thighs to indicate peaceful intentions in Eastern cultures.