Kurosawa's first film is pensive and, without being obvious, attentive to the symbolic, as in the brilliant fight scenes which take place by moonlight. Sanshiro is an early student of judo whose challenge involves not prowess (he has that in spades) but understanding-the gaining of the "way of life"-which separates judo from the morally void jujitsu. In this context, judo may be understood in Buddhist terms as ritual, and ritual, as a form of cognition that involves the body. It is a particular kind of discipline that would have the mind or spirit and the body performing flawlessly as one, whether in martial arts, the tea ceremony, or an artisan's work. As Donald Richie notes in The Films of Akira Kurosawa, "the way of life is a known route." So we find the brash young Sanshiro clinging, over a whole night, to a post in a lotus pond-clinging, not for life (he could climb out), but for the moment of enlightenment without which there may as well be no life.