Continuing Steps in Karate

Last year, in preparation for a unit on Indigenous Knowledge Systems I was to teach to Year 11 students, I read a book by the Australian academic Lynne Kelly called The Memory Code . While I had already known of the concept of orality and how it relates to the transmission and retention of knowledge in pre-literate/non-literate societies, Lynne Kelly's book thrust it right to the forefront of my consciousness. Every chapter I read, I would stop and think (and sometimes say out loud) "but that's what we do/why we do it in karate!"  From reading it, I am now in the midst of a personal paradigm shift in how I view certain aspects of karate, what it is and what it is for; and this blog post is my first attempt at trying to create some order from my thoughts, so I apologise for its disjointed nature.  I think this may be the first of several attempts I make to make sense of how I now view karate, and kata in particular. If you have read many of my other posts, you might ha...

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...