The history is so important. You can't understand how the various perspectives developed without having the ability to recreate a distinct picture of your own lineage. This whole project has taught me that when it comes to karate, lineage really is important. Without it, you can't make any philosophic sense of what you are looking at, because you don't have the guidance of the people who came before you.
Absolutely. This is one reason why the antihistorical attitudes of much of the TKD establishment seem so destructive to me. The truth may not be 'out there', but it is, in many important respects, '
back there'.
I suppose if we start seeing applications in kata that are radically different then what the moves in the show, then we have to change the kata. I don't see any way around it...but then, when do you get to the point where the kata you practice is no longer recognizable as the kata you learned?
Is this even a worry? When you start looking at versions of Chinto or Rohai kata, for example, it's very hard to tell that these kata have anything in common other then the name. These are classical kata practiced by various karate ryu.
Rohai was exactly the form that came to mind as I was reading your earlier posts. The chain of thought was: OK, clearly someone devised Rohai, at one particular point in time earlier than anyone else, and called it that. And yet we have all these different, seemingly disjoint (or nearly so) sets of movements that all call themselves Rohai, and which are all probably pretty old; so
someone had to be mucking around with the original form, and produced something quite different, and someone else after them, and so on. People don't seem to have been too 'devout' in their reverence for the originals here—and back then, the only people who were constructing or altering kata would have been professionals, people who belonged to the very small expert pool. So clearly, at least some people
weren't worried about changing the forms as they saw fit.
The trick is to figure out exactly
why they saw fit. What was going on such that the first person to innovate and alter the original Rohai thought their final product superior to the original? Because it's hard to imagine why one would do that in the first place unless the intention was to produce something better, eh? But then, what did they see as being better about it? What were the shortcomings in the original that they were trying to correct? This is where history could tell us a huge amount, if we only knew the crucial details, because we would have some insight in just what the differences in technical thinking were about actual combat at the time, and how different people saw the strategic and tactical issues of hand to hand combat. Unfortunately, we're never going to know those details...
Perhaps the view that kata are fluid is actually the more "traditional" view? When you stop to consider what kata actually represents, you actually begin to get dumbfounded at the way we mindlessly pass on movements we hardly understand. The whole effort to "stadardize" the practice of karate seems more like an effort of conformity rather then a feasible way of passing on a self defense art.
QFT. There really has been a remarkable lack of attention to the practical aspects of kata/hyungs, accompanied by a bizarre insistance on their perfect replication from instructor to student—almost like the ancient Aztecs who figured that one tiny little mistake in their propitiatory rituals (there was always some blood-crazed god or other who needed appeasement) would doom the whole society to slow death from drought and crop failure. Even the slightest glitch, and you yourself, the priest, would be the next sacrifice.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the way we view kata now days would surprise many of the people who allegedly founded the kata we practice.
Yeah, that could well be. When people don't really grasp the
function of something that they believe is important, they tend to insist on absolute fidelity to the
form . This happened repeatedly in the history of Alpine skiing, for example...
