My two cents. Kata teaches the student to do everything in a traditional stance, yet at the same time teaches students that all stances are transitional, not static....
I think kata is a good discipline, a walking syllabus of an art's wealth of techniques.
My own take on the stances in kata is that they aren't intended to be maintained; they are there to show you how to link your weight placement to a technique, at least so far as original intentions go. The front stance's importance is that it shows you where to project your weight into a tech: bringing your full weight to bear on an elbow lock, say. The back stance is part of a strike against an opponent whom you're using your back-shifted weight to immoblize or to bring
towards you into a strike, like a knifehand `block'. You don't `assume a stance' and fight from it, on this view of kata; what you're doing instead in using your weight to impose leverage at vulnerable points on the attacker's body to hyperextend his joints and thus to force compliance with your efforts to bring high-valued targets into range of your attacking weapons with minimal risk to yourself. I think it was the move to Japan which reified stances into fixed postures that you adopt and fight from, and it's not hard to see why: on Okinawa, kata were all about the combat techniques revealed by bunkai; in Japan, kata were part of the reinterpretation of karate as a kind of martial calisthenics, and bunkai were largely ignored (Gennosuke Higaki's useful book on the Pinan bunkai,
Hidden Karate: the True Bunkai for the Heian Katas and Naihanchi, makes it clear that the Okinawan instructors had a kind of gentleman's agreement not to show their Japanese students the advanced combat applications concealed in the simple punch-block-kick camouflage that Funakoshi brought to Tokyo). Stances as the temporary byproduct of a movement to enforce a technique by using weight shifts to force a response from an attacker, an essential component of bunkai, were cut adrift from their tactical mooring as bunkai became more and more a lost art; they became instead a standard component of the mass line drill that Funakoshi introduced into karate training, and which has become a staple of the various Korean developments of karate emerging from various kwans in the liberation era. The more you emphasize bunkai in your training—not just the analysis it requires but the realistic partner training of the techniques it makes available—the less stances will have any kind of stable existence in your combat practice.
...for those that spend time actually training for realistic applications in their forms - bravo... there has never been a time for more availability to explanations and applications than today.
Well, this is in a way the crucial point of kata: they are the instruction manual, but they only tell you what to do and how to do it; they do not do it
for you! I'm always surprised at how misunderstood this basic point seems to be in the wider MA world.
Supposed you purchase a book on calculus or physics, as part of an effort to learn these subject matters. In each chapter, without fail, no matter how innovative or `modern' the approach, you'll always find the same thing: (i) a general discussion of a particular kind of problem, along with a description of how the subject matter of the textbook breaks the problem down into subproblems that the methods covered can solve; (ii) a couple of worked examples, showing how the material covered in (i) can be brought to bear on a number of seemingly disparate real cases to yield a complete solution, and (iii) a number of problems that you have to solve yourself—often very many; some of my university physics textbooks had as many as sixty such problems at the end of each chapter, of increasing difficulty. You couldn't really feel you had learned the material, really
grasped the basic relationships, till you were able to solve all of the problems, including the lethal, soul-destroying last five or so. The thing is, you could not possibly get to that point if you didn't fully understand the fundamental relations and mathematical techniques covered in (i), but by the same token, such understanding could never stand on its own, because it was only by doing the problems in (iii), guided at the outset by the models given in (ii), that you finally saw the actual connections sketched in (i).
OK: so, the kata, with their associated bunkai, are like (i) in the preceding analogy. The illustrations given by people like Abernethy, O'Neil and others showing how the techniques laid out in the bunkai can be used for effective defense are like (ii). And what's (iii)? It's you doing highly realistic, noncompliant, extremely unpleasant two-person attack/defense scenarios in which you actually use the techniques the kata teach you to impose unacceptable damage on your attacker. You cannot expect to learn actual combat use of a form-based MA by
thinking about the fighting applications of the form and no further (let alone practicing the form endless without trying to see its combat applications) any more than you can learn a mathematical discipline or branch of physics by simply reading the part (i) of each chapter without ever solving actual problems yielding results that you can then compare with the answers in the back of the book, or with the instructor's answer sheets. Thinking you know a MA because you can execute its forms flawlessly is like thinking that you know integral calculus because you've committed to memory, and can recite flawlessly without looking at the text, the passage in the book that describes how to find the area under a curve by summing the areas of a bunch of infinitesimally thin rectangles. The authors of the book certainly didn't think that was enough—that's why they put those sixty examples at the end of the chapter for you work on!
Fortunately, as IWTL notes, there is now a lot of material around that provides the equivalent of (i)-(ii) for you, and even explains how to go about doing phase (iii) training with better chances of not breaking anything or winding up in hospital. That's exactly why I characterized this as the Golden Age of Kata. But it's only so if you take your analyses to the dojo floor and test them out in hard, fairly brutal training sessions that simulate streetfights as realistically as possible without trips to the ER every week...
