I listend to Mr. Abernethy's podcast on this and it had me wondering if there is all that much of a difference between 'being safe from harm' and 'having a peaceful mind', especially in that time-frame/environment. I don't know Chinese or Japanese, let alone think in those languages, but it seems to me that phrases may not just contain the same or similar charaters, but could have also meant the same thing.
Then again, given my ignorance, I may be totally wrong about this. I found it a very interesting pod cast, and did have me thinking about how we communicate and how people may need to think in a language to really understand where someone is coming from, not to mention the addition of idioms and other manners of speech and language that may not translate well.
The thing I find particularly interesting from IA's discussion is his urging us to consider the cultural context of late 19th c. Okinawa. The Okinawan connection with China is quite old—it was an official tribute-state of the Han empire from the late 14th century on—and there was a strong bond between the Chinese and the Okinawans that may well have been part of the reasons the Tokugawa shogunate sent the Satsuma samurai over to Okinawa: a prospective Tokugawa plan to attack China had relied on supplies from Okinawa which the inhabitants never provided, and the Satsumas, IA suggests, were likely part of the punishment meted out to the islanders for their non-cooperation. Chinese had the status of a kind of court language, similar to that of French in the court of Peter the Great and later Czars, and a member of the scholar class, such as Itosu, was expected to be both fluent and literate in Mandarin. Japanese, on the other hand, was regarded as the language of heavy-handed occupiers, whom the Okinawans had no power to resist but, if Bruce Clayton is correct, viewed with a good deal of distaste, as one might expect. So if you think about the
symbolic role of Chinese as vs. Japanese, as IA asks us to, his analysis seems particularly plausible.
The distinction between `safe from harm' and `quiet/peaceful/tranquil mind' seems to me to parallel a distinction between the art itself on the one hand and the practitioner on the other. On IA's scenario, Itosu was in effect advertising the
method implicit in the Pinan set. He was describing the utility of the system. The Japanese sense fit in better with the kind of meditative Zen aura that Funakoshi and other karateka sought to clothe karate in after the war, although
before the war they had promoted training in karate—successfully!—with the Japanese education and war ministries as being an excellent mass training method for young men who were to enter the military (of which Funakoshi was an enthusiastic proponent); as Rob Redmond points out
here, the leaders of Japanese karate were quite happy to tell one story to the Japanese military in the years before the war and a different one to the Allied military in the years following the war, and during the latter, were able to save karate from being axed under the US demilitarization program for karate, as Redmond points out, by emphasizing its ethical and meditative content.
So there is again a fairly heavy symbolic burden borne by the shift from the Chinese description of the Pinans as something like a `bombproof' method to the Japanese description of the
practitioner as being in a tranquil mental state, or (on the stricter construal of the Japanese interpretation of the characters) a kind of impersonal sense of tranquility somehow associated with the Pinan kata set. The bottom line, IA is implicitly noting, is that if he's right, Itosu's name for the kata set was intended to underscore the fact that the principles and methods retrievable from the katas were all about
effective fighting.
Have saved this podcast but not listened to it yet, cos this month is crazy busy at work. But knowing Abernethy's work, it is both rational and practical, with plenty of humor sprinkled in, which all adds up to tremendous Aha! moments in the area of forms and bunkai.
Thanks for the reminder, Ex. Can't wait to get to it.
I think your really gonna like it, KW—it is just as you say, rational and practical. What I like about IA's work especially is that it takes a very pragmatic, sensible view of karate, and the MAs in general, and invites us to see them in proportion, as just another useful, constructive part of normal life, something we should try to understand in practical fashion so that it can be a tool for us to resort if we need it, and pursue for the sheer pleasure of the activity even if we don't actually have to apply it for self-defense.
