Continuing Steps in Karate

This is a follow-up to my earlier post: What was the original kata? We know that kata have changed - even a cursory glance at youtube will show you the huge variety of ways that any given kata can be performed.  This appears to not be just a modern development, as even by looking at books from the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s etc... we can see that there have been changes to kata since then, and even at the time (compare, for instance, the earlier publications of Funkoshi such as Tote-Jitsu (1922) with his later publication, the Karate-do Kyohan (1931) and then with its re-working in the 1950s; or compare the two earlier works and their rendition of naihanchi kata with Motobu's Karate - My Art (1932)).  Even within the students of the same teacher, we can see variance that cannot all have been contained within what was originally taught (see the different schools of the students of Choshin Chibana, for instance - the differences in kata between Kyudokan and Matsubayashi-ryu are a good ...

How can we know that the kata we are learning is the original form? One of the things that we are told - often unsolicited - is that we should do kata exactly as we have been taught, because 'the old masters knew what they were doing' or 'we will lose the meaning of the kata if we do'. Leaving those two very leading assumptions aside (for now), implied in that is that the kata have been unchanged as they have been taught and handed down from generation to generation. But is that actually true? There is no denying that each kata had, at some stage, a starting point where someone (or someones) created it. At that point in time, there was indeed, only one version of the kata and it was undoubtedly the correct one. But who created it, when and for what purpose, is often difficult to determine. For some kata such as tensho, the gekisai and pinan kata, we do know who created them, when and have at least some recorded information about their intended purpose. So surely, th...

Karate and Evolution. Over on the Blitzmag forum, I have been peripherally involved in a few conversations recently regarding karate, its efficacy, what constitutes "real" karate, and the concept that much karate that is being done is either not true to its origins (either okinawan, or if talking about okinawan karate, to China), or not true to the principles of "real" karate. What follows are my musings on issues and points raised in some of those conversations, from an evolutionary perspective. None of which, by the by, is of the least importance to the training or practise of karate. (And is, quite possibly, very wrong).  But it's fun to think about. Social v. biological evolution. Evolution in biology is inter-generational and Darwinian - in other words, the inheritance of characteristics caused by genetic mutation and 'favoured' over other characteristics in a population due to the influence of selection pressures.  Individuals cannot evolve; th...