How Boruto Learned The Flying Raijin
Here, I bring you some breaking news about the Boruto: Two Blue Vortex manga, which is coming to us via the official Naruto website. It provides more information and answers some really big questions we had coming into Boruto: Two Blue Vortex, Volume 2, such as how Boruto learned the Flying Raijin.
It is absolutely expected, given how big a genius Boruto Uzumaki is, as well as how observant Sasuke is as a character, that Boruto still has much further to go as a Shinobi despite all his genius. As the expression goes, the more things change, the more they remain the same, and this is a classic example of this being the case.
Now, this was not the only set of Naruto and Boruto-related news that has dropped in the last few days. There’s a lot here. The entry says that Boruto learned the Flying Raijin by directly training under Kashin Koji, but it also gives us information explaining why Boruto believed he wasn’t as good as his grandfather Minato. Let’s read the entry itself and then break everything down.
Under the Ninjutsu section on the website, it says that Boruto’s Flying Raijin, a teleportation Ninjutsu that Boruto’s grandfather, the Fourth Hokage Minato Namikaze, was famous for, allows users to teleport to specific points that have been previously marked. Boruto’s Flying Raijin comes with the help of Kashin Koji. Boruto develops his own variation of the technique, which could technically be considered an entirely separate Jutsu compared to Minato Namikaze’s Flying Raijin Jutsu. It has more limitations. That last set of lines is what grabbed my attention, and it should have grabbed yours as well. It technically could be considered an entirely different Jutsu, and compared to Minato’s Jutsu, it has more limitations.
That gives us a major answer to two major questions. Boruto said he wasn’t as good at using the Jutsu as his grandfather, and the first thing that people pointed to was that Boruto was using a hand seal for the Jutsu. But we’ve seen Minato use the concentration seal before when using it, the same with Tobirama. The next question, though, was how Boruto was able to teleport to an Otsutsuki Dimension using the Flying Raijin when neither Minato nor Tobirama could do so. After Kaguya took Team Seven to her Dimension, both Naruto and Sasuke were marked with Flying Raijin seals. Minato had marked Naruto, and Tobirama had marked both Naruto and Sasuke. The Jutsu sealing formula never goes away unless someone becomes a Jinchuriki and gets the seal, at which point the seal does have to be reapplied, as we saw with Obito. After Minato cut him and realized that he was the masked man, Minato then saw Obito become the Ten-Tails Jinchuriki and had to remark him with the seal.
We might have our answer here, and it goes back to what Sasuke said was a flaw with Boruto, which is an intentional flaw that Masashi Kishimoto gave when Boruto’s character was being written for the Boruto movie. Boruto is so much of a genius that he picks up on things super fast, finding cheat codes and cutting corners to get to the same result. That might be what we’re seeing here. Just as Boruto was able to master Wind Release after seeing Mitsuki perform it by remaking the hand seals that he saw and applying the chakra nature via his own instincts, he was able to do it with the Rinnegan. He didn’t even realize he added a lightning change in chakra nature to it because he was just rushing to master the Jutsu to be accepted as Sasuke’s student. There’s a direct line you can draw between this Flying Raijin and those instances. Boruto might have done the same thing here, which is what the databook entry on the website is implying by saying that it technically could be a different Jutsu altogether. Think of it in the way that the Wind Release Rasengan is a different Jutsu than the Wind Release Rasenshuriken, but both of those Jutsu are made using the parent Jutsu known as the Rasengan. However, they are all three different Jutsu when you look at them as they are.
Boruto did just the same thing that was previously established with the Flying Raijin that it couldn’t do, which is teleport to a marker in the Otsutsuki dimension. We know those dimensions require an enormous amount of chakra to be sacrificed to enter, as via Obito’s statement in Volume 71. It wasn’t his time-space. In Sasuke’s own words in Naruto Chapter 78 via Naruto Gaiden: The Seventh Hokage and the Scarlet Spring, and as we saw in Naruto Volume 71, Minato and Tobirama were unable to teleport to those dimensions despite having people in those dimensions that had those seals on them.
Regardless, due to Boruto learning the Flying Raijin in such an unorthodox way is very befitting of Naruto’s son, who was unorthodox, and Minato’s grandson, who also had an unorthodox way of making the Rasengan by hearing Jiraiya explain the hair growth patterns and the process, we basically saw Boruto remake the Flying Raijin via this insane level of genius and intellect. This means he isn’t done trying to improve the Jutsu, which means there are more variations coming to this Jutsu. It comes back to the fact that he, in the hopes of learning another of his grandfather’s Jutsu, appears to have unintentionally cut corners in the process and made something new altogether without even realizing it. He added a lightning release change in chakra nature to it. But as Kakashi pointed out, his attack had very little punch to it despite the lightning release chakra nature being added to the Jutsu, which is the pinnacle of changing chakra shape. By default, this should have made it extremely destructive—one of the strongest chakra natures added to the pinnacle of changing chakra form and shape. That ultimately led to Boruto being forced to relearn the basics of the Rasengan under Kakashi to strengthen his Vanishing Rasengan and then form a new Rasengan.
We might see Boruto eventually go back over some of the basics of the Flying Rasengan. That brings me to the next big reveal here. Kashin Koji is why Boruto learned the Jutsu, and it makes absolute sense. We talked about this in the chapter that Kashin Koji is the only logical explanation for Boruto learning the Jutsu. It had to do with Boruto experimenting with a real-life theory, a vague theory that some in the scientific community have claimed to disprove: the belief that clones contain traces of memories of their original. Naruto’s manga has shown us that chakra contains memories. Amado’s clones have both the chakra and the memories of the original. Kashin Koji was shown beginning to awaken the genetic memories of Jiraiya before he died. Kashin Koji and Delta didn’t have the personality of the original in the same way that none of Orochimaru’s clones, such as Log and Mitsuki, have Orochimaru’s personality or memories. The Shin clones have an entirely different personality than the original Shin. We’re seeing both sides of the scientific theory on cloning being put on display here. Another sign of Boruto continuing to build on things introduced in Naruto while also dabbling with stuff that you see in real-life science.
The idea that Kashin Koji possesses those memories of Jiraiya, even though they’re fragmented, and being able to help Boruto with the Flying Raijin by filling in the gaps explains why Boruto’s Jutsu has limitations. The direct line is there. Jiraiya was Minato’s teacher, and he had seen Minato working to develop the Jutsu. Jiraiya might not have mastered the Jutsu, likely due to the large chakra that the Jutsu is shown to require—three Jonin having to pool their chakra together just to perform the basic teleportation of the Flying Raijin specifically because they didn’t have Minato’s large chakra pool to use it, hence they combined their chakra.
However, part of what made Jiraiya so interesting is that he might not have been able to perform every Jutsu, but we’ve seen in the series that he has an extensive knowledge of Ninjutsu. This makes sense given who his teammate was in Orochimaru and his teacher was the Third Hokage, two men who might have the highest knowledge base of any characters in the series when it comes to Ninjutsu and chakra. The Third Hokage was able to correctly guess how Obito was using the truth-seeking orbs after only seeing them used once. There would be some gaps in the Jutsu. Kashin Koji has fragmented memories, so Boruto didn’t get the full thing. It’s like being given pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and being able to make out what the finished puzzle will look like but not taking the time to fill in all the pieces.
That’s the difficulty in terms of the gift and the curse when it comes to training geniuses. Once they figure it out, they are prone to automatically move on to the next aspect of it, even if they’re missing some of the basics. They know enough of the foundation to begin improving on it and pass it off as the real thing. It’s very hard to keep gifted people mentally stimulated because once they get bored, they tend to check out. That’s a really good character flaw for him that goes a long way in explaining why Boruto is using it differently than, say, Minato did. Minato marked kunai to teleport to places, and he placed sealing formulas on places and people, whereas Boruto placed the sealing formula on accessories like the Konoha badges that his toads carry around. He’s using the toads to transport the markers so that he can continuously move to other locations. That’s not to say he can’t use it without the toads because he can, but he is more adaptable by having the toads carry the markers so that his seals are constantly on the move. There’s a little bit more strategic advantage there.
We see him able to use this Jutsu by marking things like shuriken, as he did when he threw the shuriken at Mitsuki during their fight. He bounced it off the snake attack and used the trajectory to land in the tree branch behind Mitsuki in order to teleport to it, basically what Sasuke was trying to train him to do by teaching him the Uchiha clan shuriken Jutsu back during Boruto: Naruto the Movie—the same Jutsu that Fugaku Uchiha passed down to Itachi and Sasuke. Sasuke passed it down to Boruto and Sarada. It’s just a variant, but it is something he’s clearly made modifications to compensate for not being as good at the Jutsu as his grandfather.
It goes back to his original character flaw. He’s so gifted that he cuts corners to get to the outcome, but in doing so, he ends up surpassing aspects of the original Jutsu that he was trying to learn. As Sasuke said, the moment Boruto slows down and masters the basics, he’s going to be unstoppable. It’s a similar critique that Kakashi had when training Boruto.
I really encourage you to go over to the official Naruto website. There’s a lot of good information there that fills in the knowledge gaps for the manga, filling in a lot of information that Naruto’s manga couldn’t show and Naruto Shippuden either changed or did not show altogether. It’s something I highly recommend you take the time to check out. Check out our comprehensive coverage of Boruto manga chapters for more in-depth analyses and updates on the latest developments in the series.
