meaning from kata

-
There seem to be three ways to get meaning from/into kata:  "sensei says", reverse engineering, and "that looks like..."

In "sensei says", the movements in kata have a certain meaning because the instructor/organisation says they have that meaning.  And the meaning might be bloody good, effective and easy to apply under pressure (Or it might be in the "jumping over swords" category).  It is just something that is taught.  And what is often attached as technique to the kata might be attached there to emphasise a certain point and not actually be the best or only meaning for a kata that that instructor will teach if you stick around long enough (but that's another blog post).

Reverse engineering is essentially looking at the movements in the kata and playing around with them (preferably with a test-dummy  training partner) until you find something that works.  That can then become the meaning behind the kata.

The third way is "that looks like...".  I've been doing this one a lot lately - "That looks like the first turn in seisan", "That looks like this bit of shisochin", "That looks like....".  Meaning is ascribed to bits of  kata based on the practitioner's past experiences with doing techniques/applications/fighting.  This variety of meaning is personalised to the individual who has it (until they become a teacher and instruct it to their students, whereupon it becomes "sensei says").

Which is better?  None of them.  All of them can be great (depending on who the sensei/organisation/individual is), or all of them can be crap (again, depending on the people involved).  What is important is that part of understanding the kata is understanding how meaning is derived.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DIY Training Equipment #1 - Punching Bag

-
Image
Being of a frugal and handy nature, I have made many of my training aids myself.  One of the first that I constructed was a heavy punching/kicking bag. New ones of any size cost around $150-$250.  This is money I don't have, and couldn't really justify at this point in time anyway.  So I scrounged around and found enough material to make a functional bag. I used an old brazilian hammock (without the wooden spreader), a 25kg bag of sand, a couple of rubbish bags, lots of old curtains and a couple of rolls of duct tape. To construct it, I taped up the bag of sand into the rubbish bags securely, then wrapped it in about 10cm thickness of old heavy curtains.  This gave me the core of my bag.  I folded the hammock in half, and placed a large wad of curtain in the bottom of the fold.  Then, I hung the hammock by its ends from the garage ceiling and tightly wrapped it up with duct tape, stuffing more curtains around and over the top of it.  Finally, I did a second layer o
Read more

Seienchin Part 2

-
Image
This is now a multi-part series.  You can find Part 1 Part 3 Part 4  here So, finally, I have found some time to think some more about seienchin. As usual, my reason for doing these posts is to help myself make sense of what is happening in the kata and to explore different possibilities.  I am expecting to make mistakes and to pursue leads which go nowhere, but that's what happens when we learn. I took a video of myself doing the kata, and have attached it here.  As is usual, I have noticed quite a few things wrong with it and have fixed them up somewhat as a result (after all, isn't that the whole point of video-taping yourself?), but haven't had a chance to tape myself again.  Some things to note are that my arms are pushing too far forward in the double triangle "block" in Section A, and my hands are meant to be sweeping across high and low, not along a single mid-line in the two backward steps in shikodachi at the start of Section C. I will
Read more

Kata as part of an oral tradition

-
  This way of looking at karate is influenced heavily by Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy (1982) and Lynne Kelly’s Power and Knowledge in Prehistoric Societies (2015) and The Memory Code (2016).  What follows is where my thoughts on kata's purpose and structure have gone, based on the issues and concepts these texts cover.  Kata were created within the context of oral knowledge traditions as a means to retain, recall and transmit knowledge. They are a tool, a vehicle through which knowledge is conveyed, rather than being the knowledge itself.   Having said that, in order to use them effectively, we also need to have knowledge of the kata itself and the ability to recall and demonstrate it/run through it automatically and faithfully. In this regard, kata are a mnemonic device, with particular structure and knowledge features.  They: Are memory prompts - they do not demonstrate/shadow-box complete sequences of movement, just those bits that need recall or are the most important fo
Read more