This is one of the issues I have with the concept of Bunkai. Granted, I haven't trained Karate, so I don't have first-hand experience. But I've trained Taekwondo, which uses similar forms, and I've tried to find these answers for myself. In my experience, trying to connect things to the kata becomes more of an exercise in how far can you stretch the kata to meet whatever technique you're talking about, or else it becomes confirmation bias that some like motions teach each other.
Let's look at my second assertation first, and I'll come back to the first one in a minute. From what I can tell, there's a disconnect between how Bunkai is supposed to work, and how it actually works. There's this theory that you learn something in a form, and it teaches you all of these other things. However, people rarely come to learn those other things on their own through training the form. More often, it goes like this:
- You learn the form
- You learn a technique that has some similar movements and/or positions as a technique from the form
- Your brain sees a pattern and connects it to the form
Let's look at math as an example. Most math (if not all) can be traced back to addition in some way, shape, or form.
- Addition is addition
- Subtraction is addition of a negative number
- Multiplication is fast repetitions of addition
- Division is multiplication of a fraction or decimel, therefore fast repetitions of the addition of fractions or decimels
- Exponents are fast repetitions of multiplication, and there fore are fast repetitions of fast repetitions of addition
It goes on, but you see the point. Pretty much every concept can be traced to addition. Does that mean that addition teaches everything else? Does that mean that addition contains everything you need to learn? No. You need to know negative numbers to apply subtraction in this way. You need to know fractions and/or decimals to apply division in this way. We actually do learn multiplication this way, but we need to learn multiplication before we can move on to exponents.
To me, the "aha" moment when you learn about negative numbers, and then realize that addition is the subtraction of negative numbers, is similar to bunkai. You learned subtraction a long time ago using a different process. Now it makes sense in a different way. The same is true of forms. You learn a punch in a form, and later learn it's actually a throw (if you take great liberties with how it's used in the form). But would you have ever learned the throw if it wasn't specifically taught to you? Is knowing the form a prerequisite to learning the throw? Does the form make the throw easier to learn? I'd say the answer to the first two questions is "no", and the third is "maybe." The form does give you some muscle memory in some similar movements. But does it teach the throw?
Now let's circle back to the first issue. The mental gymnastics that sometimes happen. With enough leaps of logic, I can probably make any technique in a form fit any other technique in martial arts. For example:
- A front kick to the head is teaching the rear-naked choke, because if you attack someone from behind, you want to front kick to the knee to buckle it and make their upper body easier for you to control.
- A knife-hand block is teach you how to do an armbar, because after you block, you can grab their hand, apply a hip toss, and then follow them down and transition into an armbar
This is actually not far from some of the "application" videos I've seen. You take a technique from the form and add
a whole lot to it in order to make it practical. In that sense, the forms kind of become like a poetry exercise where you have the first letter of every line, and you have to write the poem based on that. And then you start to get creative with the spelling, because you want to talk about writing and the first letter is an R.
