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Karate Kata's Rosetta Stone

I'm a karate guy. For years I've been obsessed with kata, the dance like moves performed solo. I believe these "dances" are a teaching syllabus of striking, wrestling and joint locking technique and not an imaginary stand-up fight against four or more opponents, or something only to be performed for the sake of choreographed movement. I was convinced there was something beneath the surface, something hiding in plain sight.

Our understanding of kata today is similar to what the last guy understands of a message in the game of telephone. As each person receives the message it mutates, gets edited or embellished and is then passed on. After many repetitions, the message contains some bits of the original but also nonsense. This situation is fine if kata were only a performance dance, but no so good for teaching practical fighting applications or simply for historical accuracy.

If the phone message were in a foreign language, accurate message taking and transferring becomes nearly impossible. At best we can relay the shapes and sounds, but lose the meaning. Knowledge of foreign languages, or other martial arts, can help in the interpretation of the fragments that are knowable. In the past I've used my limited experience in Judo and joint locking to understand bits of kata. There is so much more to learn.

The learning of it won't come from frequent repetition. No, I needed something to break the code; something to unlock the frequent patterns of seemingly arbitrary movement found in many martial arts. I needed a Rosetta Stone of kata, a key to unlock its mysteries.

If there were such a key, the likeliest place to find it would be where the message originated: for arguments sake, China. In other words, by understanding White Crane Kung Fu and Taijiquan, for example, our understanding of kata is greatly improved. In the telephone game, this is like skipping all the middlemen and receiving the message directly from the source.

Click the title of this post for a link to what I believe to be a key to understanding kata. On my first viewing, it made sense of karate technique such as manji uke, morote uke, mawashi uke and mawashi uchi, zenkutsu dachi, nekko and kokotsu dachi and more. For your reading pleasure, I recommend Analysis of Shaolin Chin Na by Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming.

on the metaphysics of martial arts: sex, chimps, and complex human behaviour

The article (linked in the title) cleared up some confusion that arose over a discussion I participated in on fighting. Some women involved in the discussion wanted the opportunity to fight against males under full-contact rules. The men active in the discussion were unanimously opposed to the idea of fighting women as if they were men. Some men felt that rules should be established prohibiting such match-ups. While notions of chivalry, equal rights, oppression and declining masculinity were tossed about, the crux of the problem, I see now, is sex, no not gender, the nasty.

Chimps have long been observed using sticks and blades of grass to extract termites from their burrows. Recently, some scientists have documented male chimps using dry leaves to entice females to mate. This is fascinating, complex behavior for the purpose of getting down with the ladies. Should we be surprised?

Martial arts, as distinguished from killing, I would argue is an activity to establish hierarchy and mating rights. If it were about self-defense and killing, martial artists would be training with the latest weapons and technology available. Instead, martial arts is all non-lethal fun. Tournaments, cage matches, kumite, along with rams butting heads or peacocks in display mode are primarily male pursuits, whose object, we might not realize, is to get the girl.

Getting back to the discussion of full-contact matches between men and women, perhaps the males' reluctance to hit women is not because of chivalry, but because deep in our simian brain we are simply programmed to hit "on" women. Hitting is reserved for the competition, the other guy.

Today's workout:
-weighted chin-ups (5, 4, 4, 4, 4, )
-1 to 15 burpee breathing ladder