Jiu-Jitsu and Chess: Capturing Space, Freedom, and Sight

By Doa Karan

https://bmjja.com.au/jiu-jitsu-and-chess-capturing-space-freedom-and-sight/

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and chess are often compared for their strategy, the idea that every move has a counter, that victory belongs to those who can think several steps ahead. Yet these descriptions remain on the surface. Beneath the visible sequence of action and reaction lies something more subtle. Both are practices of perception. They teach how to see, how to inhabit space, and how to act with presence rather than impulse.

Through repetition, the student begins to develop a form of sight. In chess, it appears as an understanding of structure and position. In Jiu-Jitsu, it comes through weight, balance, and timing. This awareness matures through experience until the body and the mind move together. Calculation dissolves into feeling. Movement and perception become inseparable.

But mastery can also collapse into imitation. The mind may stop asking why. The body may repeat what it knows without seeing what it does. A practitioner can become technically flawless and still remain blind to the meaning of their movement.

Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game (Schachnovelle, 1942) describes this blindness with precision. His protagonist, imprisoned by the Gestapo, steals a chess manual as an act of survival. Alone, he memorises every recorded game until he can play without a board. To do so, he must forget the reasons for each move. Meaning disappears so that motion can continue. In that empty repetition, he becomes divided against himself, both player and opponent, trapped inside the echo of his own mind.

In that separation, Zweig’s protagonist reveals the danger of mastery without relation. The movement that once carried meaning through contact and opposition becomes detached from the world that gave it form. His mind divides so that play can persist in the absence of the other. One part performs, the other observes. This split resembles a kind of schizophrenia, not as illness but as structure, where thought and perception are no longer grounded in shared space. Meaning, having lost its anchor in encounter, turns inward and begins to repeat itself. The same risk exists on the mat. A practitioner who isolates technique from connection repeats motion without perception, creating two minds: one that moves, and one that watches, both circling within the echo of their own pattern.

His adversary, Mirko Czentovic, the world champion, is his opposite. He is slow, unimaginative, and socially inept, yet able to recall every position ever played. He wins through mechanical accuracy. His intelligence is a closed system, untouched by creativity. Between them, Zweig stages a meeting of two forms of confinement: one born from isolation and inner excess, the other from the absence of imagination.

The same condition can appear on the mat. A Jiu-Jitsu practitioner who perfects technique without reflection risks becoming like Czentovic, an idiot savant of movement. They execute, but they do not connect. They respond, but they do not create. Their body speaks fluently while their mind remains silent.

Jiu-Jitsu, at its depth, is not only a contest of control but a study of relationship. The practitioner must move with another person’s centre of gravity, not against it. This awareness reveals a field of interdependence where every action is shaped by response, every response by contact (Kano 2005). Within that field lies what Jung called the shadow, the unacknowledged part of the self. It appears in the urge to dominate, in the fear of losing, in the refusal to yield. If unseen, it governs the practice. If recognised, it becomes part of the art.

The aesthetics of movement emerge when this awareness matures. Technique becomes expression rather than repetition. Control gives way to connection. This is the living field where oyun (play) and bugu (mystery) coexist. They are not separate. Oyun without bugu becomes mechanical. Bugu without oyun becomes abstract. In their union, practice stays alive.

This interplay echoes what Deleuze and Guattari call "smooth space," a space of movement and relation rather than hierarchy or fixed position (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In Jiu-Jitsu, this smooth space is found within structure itself, when the practitioner moves freely inside constraint, when the form serves awareness rather than the reverse.

Both chess and Jiu-Jitsu invite the practitioner to see beyond the surface of skill. They remind us that perception without reflection becomes blindness, and technique without imagination becomes confinement. To see the whole board or the whole body is not enough. One must also see the invisible movements of the mind, the shadow that shapes intention, the rhythm that connects bodies, the field of awareness that holds both freedom and form.

In the end, the art is not in the move, but in the seeing.

References

Zweig, Stefan. The Royal Game (Schachnovelle). Translated by Anthea Bell. Pushkin Press, 2006.

Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton University Press, 1981.

Kano, Jigoro. Mind Over Muscle: Writings from the Founder of Judo. Edited by Naoki Murata. Translated by Nancy H. Ross. Kodansha International, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

And, Metin. Oyun ve Bügü: Türk Kültüründe Oyun ve Tiyatro. Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 1974.