Kata-The Foundation of Karate
Lee Gray
We inherit karate forged through two thousand years of human anxiety, emerging out of mankind's needs, fears and desires, spontaneously, like language - a martial necessity in a savage world. It was incorporated by endless lineages of warriors through China and into Okinawa, for use in one sort of combat or another, spanning almost 20 centuries, from ancient Chinese monasteries, to Ming soldiers, to Okinawan Bushi.
In Okinawa, at the end of the 19th century, however, the evolution of karate as an actual fighting art, deadly and serious, faded away, rendered virtually irrelevant by the advent of a modern, civilized society filled with guns, photographs, videos, organizations, systems, mass media and the politics of modern man.
Karate had been filtered, for those two millennia, through twists and turns and history’s dead ends, often kept secret, until what little survived ultimately re-emerged as the bits and pieces of remnants we pick through today. And, unless our societies regress into (or we happen to live in) unarmed, disorganized chaos where such an art would once again be valued, karate will probably remain pretty much as is for most of us - a unique glimpse into a warrior past, an interesting hobby, a spiritual quest.
But here is the question - what will it become in the future? What will it become in the 22nd century? What will karate be when the photos of long dead instructors that adorn dojo walls are photos of us?
Lee Gray, Shobukan Goju-Ryu instructor and friend, said, "Karate has made us what we are, but we also make karate what it is." In other words, it's we who create the legacy. It will wind up as the art that we, its brief guardians, bequeath the generations.
The future lies, as is often the case, in the past, in the history of the art - the foundation. That foundation is the ubiquitous kata that were used to pass on fighting techniques through the ages. If the kata that remains a hundred years from now is based on that foundation, then the future will be securely linked to karate’s colorful past. If not, it will be something much less. It is up to us, you and me, to make it happen the right way.
Karate tumbles our way as a hodgepodge of attack and defense routines that somehow survived time and re-surfaced toward the end of the 19th century, after the Japanese Meiji Restoration, like a new species of fish, or a newly discovered civilization of Amazon Indians. Hundreds of masters in hundreds of training halls had nudged it, over the centuries, into a fighting art, the shell of which we teach our kids today, after school, in mirrored training halls. The katas and their shadowy interpretations are hieroglyphs whose obscure meanings recount tales of ancient battles and bring to life the fortunes of countless forgotten warriors.
Benny Meng and Matthew Kwan, in an internet article about the Chinese martial art Wing Chung, under Ving Tung Museum, allege that, in the middle of the 17th century, Ming soldiers resisting the Manchu invasion of China, sought refuge in monasteries like the Shaolin. Bits and pieces of their training and traditions, then, probably filtered into the Chinese martial arts and these traces of history may emerge today in the hand motions we make in our routines on modern dojo floors.
The story of the Ming warriors may have been preserved for perpetuity through the peculiar hand position at the beginning of such katas as Pasai, Jion, Jutte and Jiin, where the right fist (representing the sun) is placed into the left open hand (representing the crescent moon) in a salutation misunderstood over the years by countless students and teachers like me.
There is often some bunkai attached to that move by teachers eager to understand it all. But that salutation, so the story goes, was a secret signal devised by the dispersed Ming soldiers to communicate their Ming allegiance to other soldiers “in-the-know”, like a medieval gang sign.
The name "Ming," in Chinese, is written with those symbols for the moon and sun placed side by side, from which the signal is said to have arisen. The salutation eventually became common throughout the Chinese-based martial arts.
That one tidbit of information, if true, becomes a conceivable launching point to dig up related influences on the origins of our art and the secrets concealed just below the surface of these archaic routines.
Benny Meng and Matthew Kwan, in an internet article about the Chinese martial art Wing Chung, under Ving Tung Museum, allege that, in the middle of the 17th century, Ming soldiers resisting the Manchu invasion of China, sought refuge in monasteries like the Shaolin. Bits and pieces of their training and traditions, then, probably filtered into the Chinese martial arts and these traces of history may emerge today in the hand motions we make in our routines on modern dojo floors.
The story of the Ming warriors may have been preserved for perpetuity through the peculiar hand position at the beginning of such katas as Pasai, Jion, Jutte and Jiin, where the right fist (representing the sun) is placed into the left open hand (representing the crescent moon) in a salutation misunderstood over the years by countless students and teachers like me.
There is often some bunkai attached to that move by teachers eager to understand it all. But that salutation, so the story goes, was a secret signal devised by the dispersed Ming soldiers to communicate their Ming allegiance to other soldiers “in-the-know”, like a medieval gang sign.
The name "Ming," in Chinese, is written with those symbols for the moon and sun placed side by side, from which the signal is said to have arisen. The salutation eventually became common throughout the Chinese-based martial arts.
That one tidbit of information, if true, becomes a conceivable launching point to dig up related influences on the origins of our art and the secrets concealed just below the surface of these archaic routines.
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This is why it behooves us to be allegiant to the foundation of our art - to pass katas on intact and as learned. If we alter them to win tournaments, or because the Emperor gave someone a mission, or for some other seemingly worthy but superficial reason, how will 22nd century students ever hope to figure out how a Ming soldier fought, or the obscure meaning of some kata move.? Ideas like these are potential portals into martial history. Erase the portals - destroy the history.
The foundation of karate, then, is the syllabus of kata that underpins every incarnation of that Okinawan martial art. It's all that remains to us and it is what binds our art together. Almost all the details of random fighting techniques devised by ancient masters over centuries are, for the most part, lost. Who knows the intricacies of Roman Legionnaires’ battle techniques other than generalities? But detailed kata survives, available to us if we wish to learn.
We seek out the root, like an anthropologist digging for clues to an ancient culture. Preserve the kata for mankind.
Don’t change it. Once it’s changed, it’s gone.
When someone alters a kata, they doom their martial progeny's chance to ever understand it's original meaning. Today there are teachers who struggle to overlay fighting applications, sometimes comically, onto the gestures of katas modified over the years, trying to make sense of the pointless gesticulations they pass on.
In about 1905, Itosu Ankoh, or his followers, adapted katas he had learned from Matsumura and others into a physical education program for Okinawan middle school boys. It was a noble, visionary gesture. If he hadn't done it, you and I wouldn't be talking about this today. It became widespread from that point on, carried to Japan by Funakoshi and Mabuni, disseminated after the war, through other cultures. The rest is our history.
But Itosu's quest also had a dark side. His adaptation from fighting techniques to Phys Ed - later proliferated worldwide to tournaments and after school dojos - intentionally obscured the meaning of the techniques, in order to avoid teaching "deadly" moves to kids. Students ever since have been trying to figure out such mysteries as why Basai Dai uses 11 blocks to "penetrate a fortress" before the first punch is ever thrown.
The foundation of karate, then, is the syllabus of kata that underpins every incarnation of that Okinawan martial art. It's all that remains to us and it is what binds our art together. Almost all the details of random fighting techniques devised by ancient masters over centuries are, for the most part, lost. Who knows the intricacies of Roman Legionnaires’ battle techniques other than generalities? But detailed kata survives, available to us if we wish to learn.
We seek out the root, like an anthropologist digging for clues to an ancient culture. Preserve the kata for mankind.
Don’t change it. Once it’s changed, it’s gone.
When someone alters a kata, they doom their martial progeny's chance to ever understand it's original meaning. Today there are teachers who struggle to overlay fighting applications, sometimes comically, onto the gestures of katas modified over the years, trying to make sense of the pointless gesticulations they pass on.
In about 1905, Itosu Ankoh, or his followers, adapted katas he had learned from Matsumura and others into a physical education program for Okinawan middle school boys. It was a noble, visionary gesture. If he hadn't done it, you and I wouldn't be talking about this today. It became widespread from that point on, carried to Japan by Funakoshi and Mabuni, disseminated after the war, through other cultures. The rest is our history.
But Itosu's quest also had a dark side. His adaptation from fighting techniques to Phys Ed - later proliferated worldwide to tournaments and after school dojos - intentionally obscured the meaning of the techniques, in order to avoid teaching "deadly" moves to kids. Students ever since have been trying to figure out such mysteries as why Basai Dai uses 11 blocks to "penetrate a fortress" before the first punch is ever thrown.
If we are going to pass karate on; if we are going to be links in a chain that winds back 2,000 years into history and potentially as far into the future; if we are going to be teachers worthy of having our faded photos strung up on 22nd century dojo walls, then we should look past the organizations and politics and egos that populate our ancient art and learn what karate is really about, where it came from and who did what and why.
I have spent 60 years doing just that, trying to learn the origins and bunkai of kata from a half dozen styles of Okinawan origin. I can assure you I have only scratched the surface. So it’s up to you.
The styles and systems and organizations that exist today, that were put together in the 1930's and on by martial politicians, often don't further our understanding of the art at all, in fact, they more often obscure it. Many simply propagate, as orthodoxy, the ideas of their founders who have almost all altered them in one way or another. Yet we pass them on as gospel.
The art isn't ours to change, nor theirs. It belongs to the ages.
It behooves us to uncover the foundation of our art - the roots, the kata - as far back as possible, and hand it down, as intact as feasible, so students in a dojo in 2120 have a chance to appreciate what it was all about.
If we don't, in a hundred years, teachers will be stumbling around trying to figure out the deeper meaning of baloney infused into an ancient warrior's fighting art by 20th century karate politicians.
I have spent 60 years doing just that, trying to learn the origins and bunkai of kata from a half dozen styles of Okinawan origin. I can assure you I have only scratched the surface. So it’s up to you.
The styles and systems and organizations that exist today, that were put together in the 1930's and on by martial politicians, often don't further our understanding of the art at all, in fact, they more often obscure it. Many simply propagate, as orthodoxy, the ideas of their founders who have almost all altered them in one way or another. Yet we pass them on as gospel.
The art isn't ours to change, nor theirs. It belongs to the ages.
It behooves us to uncover the foundation of our art - the roots, the kata - as far back as possible, and hand it down, as intact as feasible, so students in a dojo in 2120 have a chance to appreciate what it was all about.
If we don't, in a hundred years, teachers will be stumbling around trying to figure out the deeper meaning of baloney infused into an ancient warrior's fighting art by 20th century karate politicians.
