So it seems reasonable to assume that for a lot of people, a `deep' interpretation of the forms of their art can be assumed to hold the technical content of that art, even though the realization of that content can only be internalized and turned into an available tool through devoted practice under realistic conditions. I've come, over the past couple of years, to think this position is the best way of vewing the relationship between a given MA and its forms, and that conclusion then seems to raise two futher questions.
One of these, the `parsing problem', is just that of deciding how to go about breaking up the long sequence of moves that make up the whole form into the subsequences that correspond to `complete' responses to a given attack—that take the defender from some initial attack to the disabling of the attacker. There are various sets of decoding rules out there—Abernethy gives one set, Kane and Wilder give another, Simon O'Neil gives a third—all of them corresponding to what in Japanese is called
kaisai no genri, the systematic method of interpreting kata
movements as martial
moves; but what all of these approaches leave out is a discussion of how to recognize the endpoint of one complet kata subsequence and the begining of another one. This is a question of trial-and-error, of course, and there may be alternative divisions of a single kata into these stand-alone combat units. For
taikyoku shodan, aka in TKD as
kicho il jang, I can think of at least three alternative parsings which yield different respective sets of complete combat subsequences. The situation is in many ways reminiscent of the way in which ribosomes, the body's genetic `interpreters', translate messenger RNA into protein-complexes (and ultimately, tissues); each mRNA strand contains certain subsequences of a small number of large molecules, where each subsequence translates into a specific protein. What's interesting is that a ribosome may read the same string of these large molecules in two or more ways, depending on factors still not completely understood: a given sequence that can be schematized as 1-2-1-3-2-2-1 might be `parsed' by the ribosome into 1-2-1 and 3-2-2-1 on one pass, but on second pass into 1-2, 1-3-2 and 2-1—that sort of thing. The problems of parsing natural language sentences into structural groups, of parsing mRNA sequences into protein-coding subsequences, and of parsing MA forms into sequences of complete combat units, have a number of important parallels, and in each case, the question of how to know when you've reached the `edges' of each of the subunits is of absolutely crucial important to the success of the enterprise in question. But that involves issues that probably ought to be discussed in a separate thread.
There's another question, though, that seems to flow together more naturally than the parsing problem with the content of
this thread, and that is: if we assume the majority position that seems to have emerged from Kidswarrior's poll, then what are the consequences for teaching? If, as at least a goodly number of us believe, the forms of some MA contain the whole technical repertoire of that MA, and training that MA for practical SD use requires us to decipher the forms to yield combat applications, then how are we to structure our teaching around this world-view? People have certainly talked about this question in general terms. So Burgar observes that
It is interesting to track the development of karate with respect to how the central theme of practice has changed. Originally, the heart of karate was individual kata training with one-on-one instruction being a central feature. However, when karate was introduced into the school system on Okinawa (in the early 1900s), the emphasis started to change. Instruction become one to many and classes took the form of performing kata synchronized by count. The use of training kihon (basic techniques) in lines advancing up and down the dojo then became widespread. By the time karate was introduced into Japan from Okinawa, this practice was already well-established and was then built upon... the contemporary karate experience is generally that of kihon centered long-range [i.e., tournament competition range—Exile] training. This means that the basic techniques of karate form the central core of practice from which the rest of the art is practised. The basic punches, kicks and blocks practised, making long steps up and down the dojo floor, set the scene and form the thought boundaries for the way we define our karate.
Karate has not always been taught in this way. Travelling back in time we can see that originally kata was taught in a kata-centric manner. The kata was taught and from that the basic techniques and concepts were practised, and also the short-range self-defense techniques which are the building blocks of the kata sequence.
(
Five Years, One Kata, pp.32–33). So a return to what Burgar calls a kata-centric teaching approach would almost certainly be a more efficient way to train a MA for SD purposes, because the curriculum would be build around the fundamental skill-sets involved in actually conducting a successful defense agains an untrained but dangerous and violent assailant. I've been trying to work out a sketch of just what such a curriculum would look like, and it's pretty clear that it would look
a lot different from what we now have and how we now teach.
But what would such a teaching approach actually look like in detail? And do we have enough mental flexibility to break with our MA educational assumptions (at least for most of us) and drastically rethink a curriculum along these lines?
. Anyway, wanted to acknowledge exile's post and say it very much deserves to be addressed.
