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responsible for the wine from the time the grape vines are planted or bud out, until the moment the wine is on its own, so to speak, when it has been put in casks and must now age and develop according to the qualities inherent in it.
Doesn't this sound very much like the sensei's task? He is the person responsible for a student, from the time that student enters the training hall until the crucial period of the training process has been completed. The sensei is a person, then, in my estimation, who can take a person of raw and unknown potential and turn out a complete and worthwhile product. He can oversee the process from beginning to end.
Now this analogy is going to require some clarification. Suppose, for instance, that the person walking into the dojo to begin training is a complete psychopath. Can the sensei still turn out a worthwhile product? Nope. No more so than the vintner can produce a great or even a drinkable vintage from the sour little grapes that grow wild on the back fence  behind my house. There has to be some workable potential there from the beginning for the sensei to do his work. Do I mean to imply that all of a sensei's students will be of the same caliber and worth? No. Even the most talented vintner is bound by the grapes, the region, the weather in a particular growing season.
The sensei's products will be equally subject to the vagaries of his students' various     dispositions, genetics, and physical abilities. Most importantly, we must be clear on what I mean by the "process" of training, "from beginning to end." Most of us would agree on when a person's training in the martial arts begins. But we hold it as a vital truth that  training does not ever really "end." There is no graduation from the budo. They are a     lifelong process. One is always learning, perfecting.
The concept of completion in the budo is foreign. Perfection is an ever-advancing goal, obviously, and this is what attracts a great many people to the budo in the first place, this promise of levels of profundity that can never be fully plumbed and always hold out the promise of further and deeper and more rewarding investigation. (It is a concept that also scares the you-know-what out of others, intimidates them and so they either abandon their practice in the face of such a daunting, never-ending task, or they award themselves silly 10th-dan or

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