Forms: A total fighting system?

[kidswarrior]

After some more reading, trial & error with partners, and refinement of both forms and their applications (bunkai, oyo, henka to use Japanese terminology), I think I would make a further distinction if posing this question today. Some of the key figures of the 'bunkai revolution' posit that they are following the founders in making the point that any kata/pattern/form should be a complete fighting system. While I find this a useful litmus test for choosing whether to keep a form in the arsenal, said 'complete' form may not include all there is to an art. So in my own use, have come to phrase the original question more in terms of: Could a small grouping of forms (I'm thinking 3-6), well-understood and realistically practiced with a partner, amount to a complete fighting system? And I think the answer is Yes.

Anyone else have further thoughts along these lines?

 

[exile]

After some more reading, trial & error with partners, and refinement of both forms and their applications (bunkai, oyo, henka to use Japanese terminology), I think I would make a further distinction if posing this question today. Some of the key figures of the 'bunkai revolution' posit that they are following the founders in making the point that any kata/pattern/form should be a complete fighting system. While I find this a useful litmus test for choosing whether to keep a form in the arsenal, said 'complete' form may not include all there is to an art. So in my own use, have come to phrase the original question more in terms of: Could a small grouping of forms (I'm thinking 3-6), well-understood and realistically practiced with a partner, amount to a complete fighting system? And I think the answer is Yes.

Anyone else have further thoughts along these lines?

I think that's realistic. Abernethy analyzes the Pinan set as a complete fighting system: the each of the first three katas contain techs which correspond to progressively closer fighting ranges; the last two contain advanced/backup techs for those ranges. No one normal-length kata is going to contain techs for every fighting range, comprehensively. But 3-6, as with the Pinan set, might very well, and similarly with Naihanchi.

A lot of times, it seems, the single kata name actually covers several different forms that belong in that set. So this is actually consistent with your idea here.

 

[Makalakumu]

No one normal-length kata is going to contain techs for every fighting range, comprehensively.

I would disagree with you here. Pinan and Naihanchi are relatively short forms and the amount of application for each move explodes exponentially.

Now imagine what a longer kata like the full version of Bassai (dai and sho), Kusanku (dai and sho), or Gojushiho is like when they are fully examined? You could practice the applications to any of those three for the rest of your life and never have to practice another kata.

 

[exile]

I would disagree with you here. Pinan and Naihanchi are relatively short forms and the amount of application for each move explodes exponentially.

But there are five Pinan kata, and at least three in the full Naihanchi set. There are many applications for each move, but if Abernethy is right, each of the first three Pinan kata are aimed at a particular fighting range. Gojushio and the others are substantially longer... I guess it comes down to what you consider normal length. I've always regarded the ones you've mentioned as a bit on the long side... is that not correct? [/QUOTE]

 

[Makalakumu]

Yes, they are longer, but if you removed the redundancy in the pinan and naihanchi sets, they'd probably be of equal length.

Of course, the redundancy has a lesson to teach.

 

[CuongNhuka]

I have a question about this idea. Do I think it's great, yes. Has it been done before? Yes, sort of. Wing Chun has a total of 6 forms (three disarmed, one dummy, two weapon). But they 'mix things up' by doing drills (San Sik), using a wooden man (and various bags for wacking), and using two weapons (Double Butterfly Knives, and the 6 1/2 point pole). They also spend about 4-6 months doing 1/3 of one form, and one drill.
So, If Kid were to break off and create his own style (I think he has already though, but bear with me), would he do something like this? Ie, drag out the length of teaching forms, include drills/routines not part of forms, add weapons, or the like?

 

[kidswarrior]

I have a question about this idea. Do I think it's great, yes. Has it been done before? Yes, sort of. Wing Chun has a total of 6 forms (three disarmed, one dummy, two weapon). But they 'mix things up' by doing drills (San Sik), using a wooden man (and various bags for wacking), and using two weapons (Double Butterfly Knives, and the 6 1/2 point pole). They also spend about 4-6 months doing 1/3 of one form, and one drill.
So, If Kid were to break off and create his own style (I think he has already though, but bear with me), would he do something like this? Ie, drag out the length of teaching forms, include drills/routines not part of forms, add weapons, or the like?

I've taken the approach of spending more time on the application of the forms. That is, we'll take a section which has a fairly obvious start and end point (maybe 3-5 moves total), first review the applications we've already come up with, then in partners maybe just free flow/experiment. If one set of partners comes up with a particularly good new app, I'll stop the class and we'll observe and dissect, and someone may even then have an idea for extending it. Then switching partners and/or pieces of the form, we'll continue on. Anyway, just my direction--not the total of what we do, but the current direction of forms instruction.

 

[CuongNhuka]

Ie, drag out the length of teaching forms, include drills/routines not part of forms, add weapons, or the like?

Well?

 

[Xue Sheng]

After some more reading, trial & error with partners, and refinement of both forms and their applications (bunkai, oyo, henka to use Japanese terminology), I think I would make a further distinction if posing this question today. Some of the key figures of the 'bunkai revolution' posit that they are following the founders in making the point that any kata/pattern/form should be a complete fighting system. While I find this a useful litmus test for choosing whether to keep a form in the arsenal, said 'complete' form may not include all there is to an art. So in my own use, have come to phrase the original question more in terms of: Could a small grouping of forms (I'm thinking 3-6), well-understood and realistically practiced with a partner, amount to a complete fighting system? And I think the answer is Yes.

Anyone else have further thoughts along these lines?

Yang taiji has a whole lot of forms made up of even more postures but if you understand the 13 postures you can defend yourself. That by the way sounds a whole lot easier than it is.

 

[kidswarrior]

Yang taiji has a whole lot of forms made up of even more postures but if you understand the 13 postures you can defend yourself.

Kung fu san soo has a similar foundational concept: the eight basic foot movements, or stances. Add stops ('blocks') and strikes in random patterns and as you say, understanding it will pretty much guarantee good self defense. But also as you say:

That by the way sounds a whole lot easier than it is.

 

[Sanchin-J]

I believe that Forms "could" encompass a total fighting system but there are limitations to this. There was a time when the martial arts were banned by certain governments or dynasties, and the people whom had developed the specific styles did find a way around this by developing "form" based exercises that encompassed their actual training in the martial art, however the form itself cannot truly complete the training due to the way it had to be taught.

 

[JWLuiza]

I feel like kata are a package. You can look at how pretty the wrapping is or you can "open up the box" and pull out different parts and work on applications, perfecting technique, extracting principles, etc.

And just like Christmas, some kids will open up their gifts and think the boxes are the most wonderful things in the world and forget about the toys that were inside the box.

 

[SageGhost83]

I feel like kata are a package. You can look at how pretty the wrapping is or you can "open up the box" and pull out different parts and work on applications, perfecting technique, extracting principles, etc.

And just like Christmas, some kids will open up their gifts and think the boxes are the most wonderful things in the world and forget about the toys that were inside the box.

Bingo!

 

[seasoned]

Historically, that's exactly what the forms were. Both Iain Abernethy and Bill Burgar point out that in Okinawa at the turn of the century, individual kata were not considered to be `part' of the fighting system but the actual `style'. I'm not fond of quoting myself, seems a bit arrogant, but since I wrote something a while back that expresses exactly what I want to say on this topic, I hope the following passage isn't taken that way. In the original Okinawan setting where Matsumura, Itosu, Azato and other karate pioneers got their skills, the only way any techniques were transmitted was by the kata themselves. The kihon line drills through which virtually everyone in the West who learned MAs in the current era was taught—the bread and butter of dojo/dojang/studio teaching methods everywhere—were unknown. From all available accounts, including his own autobiography, Funakoshi's training for the first decade with Itosu consisted solely of practicing the Naihanchi kata set and working out their bunkai (even though Motobu didn't think much of Funakoshi's analysis and suspected that Itosu had withheld the most effective applications from him; but then again, Motobu seems to have loathed GF personally); where else would he have learned his techs from except Naihanchi?—that's all he had to work with! And as Abernethy notes, Motobu wrote in Okinawa Kenpo Karate-jutsu that `the Naihanchi, Passai, Chinto and Rohai styles are not left in China today and only remain in Okinawa as active martial arts'. That comment makes it pretty clear that these kata were not regarded as `parts' of a martial art, add-ons so to speak, but were thought of as complete stand-alone fighting systems on their own. In a way, `karate' originally corresonded to a general description (in much the same way that the generic term kung fu covers an enormous variety of specific CMAs regarded by their practitioners as quite different from each other) comprising the various kata, each of which was a style unto itself. And as Burgar points out in his book,


the fact is that before circa 1880 it was the norm for karateka to know a small number of kata. We also know that each master of karate was capable of defending himself. Therefore his one, two or three kata contained all of the knowledge that he would have needed to achieve that goal. This means that each kata (or small group of kata) was a `style' in its own right.'

(p. 29). Motobu also mentions in the same 1926 book that `a master usually only had one kata in his style'.

So it seems to me that kata, and forms in general, have to be seen as constituting fighting systems on their own; the question is, do karate kata constitute a complete fighting system? And what makes a system complete. I've seen it argued, over and over again, that there are no complete fighting systems (karate/TKD/TSD is weak on groundwork, aikido is weak on strikes, this or that style is hopeless at this or that fighting range...), but while I think that you need to train against attacks designed to take you to the ground, or that use empty hand techs that your system doesn't, I don't think that every MA has to contain the whole kitchen sink to be complete. A complete system has to provide you with ways to deal with attacks and ranges even if that system doesn't use such attacks itself, or train you to stay in those ranges (as vs. giving you the goods to get out of those ranges and back to familiar territory, which a complete system definitely has to).

So with karate, Abernethy and other bunkai-jutsu practitioners have shown, in great detail, how you can use karate in the ground game—not to `win' in the ground game, but to get off the ground that your untrained, but violent and dangerous attacker has taken you to, before he does. Abernethy's detailed book Grappling for Strikers does exactly this, and there's an increasing literature on how traditional karate-based techs (including those of the karate-based KMAs) can help you keep the fight at the stand-up CQ range that karate was designed for.

So that's why I checked the top option in the poll choices...

This is exactly right and the textbook/practice dichotomy contains the secret of the answer to those people who insist that kata has nothing to do with the `martial' content of the MA. I think of it along the lines of learning a branch of physics: you can read the `text' part of any given chapter without doing the many exercises at the end of the chapter. But you aren't going to be able to answer a simple question about what is the value of what, given some description of a physical situation, unless you do those problems. Knowing about physics, or math, or geology, or whatever, which just reading the text can lead to, isn't the same as actually knowing physics, math, etc. The latter is a lot harder and takes a lot more work. And that's true for every branch of knowledge under the sun. Learning the kata is like learning the basic mathematical relationships in some branch of science; training the kata—applying the bunkai that you've worked out for the forms to the problems posed a noncompliant training partner simulating a realistic physical attack on you—is like doing the often hellishly difficult problem-solving that leaves you, in the end, really understanding just how those mathematical relationships play out in real physical situations.

No one ever got an engineering job just because they knew how to take a first derivative. And no one ever really learned a TMA just because they learned how to perform a number of kata. There's a dry-cleaning place near our house that has one of those marquees on which they post wise/witty saying, you know the kind I mean; but whoever owns that place has better taste in wise/witty sayings than most such businesses. The one he currently has up is, `Nothing works unless you DO it.' And really that says pretty much everything about the role of forms: you have to take the techs they embody and DO them—practice them under unpleasantly realistic circumstances, hundreds or thousands of times. Combat Hapkido doesn't have forms, but they do have drills, and it's the same story: you have to drill, drill, drill, no matter how well you understand just how the biomechanics of the moves work. If people thought of a form as just a set of drills, drills which have been `chunked' into a single long sequence as a mnemonic convenience, then their view of how such forms could themselves amount to a MA on their own, and what you have to do with the form in order to get martial benefit from it, would probably be a lot more practical—and a lot more in line with the intent of the original masters of the art who constructed the forms....

I wrote the above and when I got back to the thread, Mark had posted this:



This is, in somewhat different words (but not all that different, now I think of it) , exactly what I'm saying here and what FC was getting at, I'm quite certain, in what I cited above from him.... and what Kidswarrior was getting at when wrote that



Burgar, Abernethy and numerous other karateka (and progressive TKDists of that school) complain very insistently about just this point—the emphasis on `performing', rather than analyzing the kata to determine its applications and then practicing those applications in a tough-minded way, with partners who aren't going to just go along with you to make you feel competent....

These are the kinds of posts I have missed from exile (Bob). Hoping to see him back very soon.

 

[Makalakumu]

This thread hits on the subject of the book I wrote.

http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/usercp.php

I also miss Exile. Hope he returns soon...

 

[JWLuiza]

This thread hits on the subject of the book I wrote.

http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/usercp.php

I also miss Exile. Hope he returns soon...

Wrong link

 

[seasoned]

Historically, that's exactly what the forms were. Both Iain Abernethy and Bill Burgar point out that in Okinawa at the turn of the century, individual kata were not considered to be `part' of the fighting system but the actual `style'. I'm not fond of quoting myself, seems a bit arrogant, but since I wrote something a while back that expresses exactly what I want to say on this topic, I hope the following passage isn't taken that way. In the original Okinawan setting where Matsumura, Itosu, Azato and other karate pioneers got their skills, the only way any techniques were transmitted was by the kata themselves. The kihon line drills through which virtually everyone in the West who learned MAs in the current era was taught—the bread and butter of dojo/dojang/studio teaching methods everywhere—were unknown. From all available accounts, including his own autobiography, Funakoshi's training for the first decade with Itosu consisted solely of practicing the Naihanchi kata set and working out their bunkai (even though Motobu didn't think much of Funakoshi's analysis and suspected that Itosu had withheld the most effective applications from him; but then again, Motobu seems to have loathed GF personally); where else would he have learned his techs from except Naihanchi?—that's all he had to work with! And as Abernethy notes, Motobu wrote in Okinawa Kenpo Karate-jutsu that `the Naihanchi, Passai, Chinto and Rohai styles are not left in China today and only remain in Okinawa as active martial arts'. That comment makes it pretty clear that these kata were not regarded as `parts' of a martial art, add-ons so to speak, but were thought of as complete stand-alone fighting systems on their own. In a way, `karate' originally corresonded to a general description (in much the same way that the generic term kung fu covers an enormous variety of specific CMAs regarded by their practitioners as quite different from each other) comprising the various kata, each of which was a style unto itself. And as Burgar points out in his book,


the fact is that before circa 1880 it was the norm for karateka to know a small number of kata. We also know that each master of karate was capable of defending himself. Therefore his one, two or three kata contained all of the knowledge that he would have needed to achieve that goal. This means that each kata (or small group of kata) was a `style' in its own right.'

(p. 29). Motobu also mentions in the same 1926 book that `a master usually only had one kata in his style'.

So it seems to me that kata, and forms in general, have to be seen as constituting fighting systems on their own; the question is, do karate kata constitute a complete fighting system? And what makes a system complete. I've seen it argued, over and over again, that there are no complete fighting systems (karate/TKD/TSD is weak on groundwork, aikido is weak on strikes, this or that style is hopeless at this or that fighting range...), but while I think that you need to train against attacks designed to take you to the ground, or that use empty hand techs that your system doesn't, I don't think that every MA has to contain the whole kitchen sink to be complete. A complete system has to provide you with ways to deal with attacks and ranges even if that system doesn't use such attacks itself, or train you to stay in those ranges (as vs. giving you the goods to get out of those ranges and back to familiar territory, which a complete system definitely has to).

So with karate, Abernethy and other bunkai-jutsu practitioners have shown, in great detail, how you can use karate in the ground game—not to `win' in the ground game, but to get off the ground that your untrained, but violent and dangerous attacker has taken you to, before he does. Abernethy's detailed book Grappling for Strikers does exactly this, and there's an increasing literature on how traditional karate-based techs (including those of the karate-based KMAs) can help you keep the fight at the stand-up CQ range that karate was designed for.

So that's why I checked the top option in the poll choices...

I miss this man's input big time.

 

[K-man]

An excellent post, worth reading more than once.

 

[Daniel Sullivan]

I miss this man's input big time.

I as well. Hope he is doing well.

Daniel

 

[dancingalone]

I miss Bob too.

But back to the topic... Let me asked a somewhat related question. What is the optimal number of forms for you personally? I 'know' dozens from goju-ryu, shorin-ryu, taekwondo. I even know a few Korean variations of the same karate forms.

The average TKD or karate system has at least 6-8 forms to reach black belt. Too much food to absorb? Have any of you instructors decreased the number of sets learned in an effort to make your students learn the ones they know better?