It was a gray day

Just a short two weeks ago, as I was out walking the trails at Fitzgerald Lake, there was a cold north wind that gusted its way through the tops of the hemlock trees. It didn't feel as though spring was quite in the air yet, though by the calendar it certainly should have been. You could make out small red buds on some of the trees but there was nothing else to really suggest that winter was over except that when the wind wasn't blowing, where the trail widened and there were fewer trees and very little undergrowth, the sun was warm. It might have been fall--the trees were still mostly bare.


I stopped by the edge of the swamp off Boggy Meadow trail to watch a lone mallard drift lazily around the fallen trees. There's usually a lot of activity here. Sometimes you can see turtles hanging out on floating logs and trunks of trees that beavers have felled and abandoned, probably because the trees were too big to maneuver through the maze of stumps and dead trees and branches that have broken off in storms or simply rotted and dropped in the water. The mallard, its iridescent green head catching the sunlight, seemed oblivious to me, but it was in its element and it knew, I'm sure, that I was just a spectator. I'm not sure whether it was the sun breaking through the clouds or the mallard--the only bit of bright color in an otherwise dull gray landscape--that brought my attention to the  grayness of everything around me. There are winterberry bushes with their red fruit and a few flowering weeds here and there, depending on the season, but all of the trees in the swamp, for as far as you can see, are dead, with dead, gray bark--no greens or browns or rust colors here. It all reminded me that most things in life are gray in a metaphorical sense; nothing ever seems simple or black and white, especially, I suppose, when it comes to the applications of kata.

The first technique on the turn from
Seisan, blocking with the right and
attacking with the left palm strike
...or is it another block?

We were fooling around with a different bunkai for the first sequence of Seisan kata the other day, the sequence that begins with the first turn. I had noticed there was something about this sequence that reminded me of the first complete bunkai sequence in Suparinpei, the steps and open-hand "blocks" that follow the last angle technique in shiko dachi to the northeast. I have always assumed that in Suparinpei, the defender is stepping in on an attacker standing in front of him; the first step, with the left foot and left hand coming to the outside of the attacker's right arm and pushing down, and the second step, with the right foot and right hand, coming up inside the attacker's left arm, pushing out. This is followed with another step, bringing the defender's left hand past the attacker's head, kicking with the right, and then bringing the attacker's head into the defender's right elbow attack. Then the right arm comes out and, with the left hand on the chin and the right grabbing the hair or back of the head, the opponent's head is twisted forcefully, breaking the neck.

The beginning of the first complete
bunkai sequence in Suparinpei,
after the last of the four angle
techniques in shiko dachi.

In Seisan, on the other hand, I have always assumed, because it fits with the principles we find in many of the other classical kata of Goju-ryu, that in turning around we are stepping off line, avoiding and blocking the left punch of an attacker stepping in from the west--blocking his left punch with the semi-circular motion of the right arm while attacking the head with a left palm strike. However, if the principle of stepping off line is not one of the things being illustrated by the structure of Seisan kata--if it is more akin to Suparinpei since there are many other similarities between these two kata--perhaps the bunkai or how to apply these techniques in Seisan is also similar to the above section of Suparinpei. If one is simply turning to face an attacker, and the attacker is either grappling with both hands or punching with first the left and then the right, we have something similar to Suparinpei, though initially on the opposite side. If this is the case, the defender would first

The beginning of the head twisting
finishing technique in Seisan.

block with the right from the outside of the attacker's left arm, pushing it down, and then block with the left on the inside of the attacker's right arm. Then, stepping forward with the right foot, the left hand, still in contact with the attacker's arm, pushes or pulls the attacker's right arm down, while the defender's right arm is brought up to attack the opponent's neck with a right, palm up shuto. Then, grabbing the hair (in ancient times, the topknot), the defender would step forward again, pulling the head down, while bringing the left palm up to grab the opponent's chin. The sequence from here pivots to the right (or west), twisting the head, and finally employing the ubiquitous knee kick to finish.

The beginning of the head twisting
finishing technique in Suparinpei.

I'm not sure which is the right answer, at least so far as what may have been the original intent of kata, and in some ways this bunkai and the one I have always practiced (and illustrated in my book, The Kata and Bunkai of Goju-ryu)--that is, stepping off line--are very similar. An awful lot may depend on the kind of attack the moves in kata are a response to, and that's the side that we can't see; all we have is the kata side, the defender's movements. And then there's the question of how this view might alter one's understanding of the other two bunkai sequences in Seisan kata. In other words, rather than showing three variations of the same bunkai or applications, the other two sequences would, if begun the same way, be substantially different. Would that, in turn, change how we thematically looked at the techniques of Seisan kata?

Of course, even so, some ideas may be better than others. Or, it may be simply a matter of personal preference. I don't know. Sometimes there is a lot of gray area in the landscape.

Idle ramblings and word associations

Practicing Gwa in
Matayoshi's dojo.

It's easy to teach kata, I suppose, and you can pick up lots of bunkai fairly easily off YouTube. Of course, it doesn't mean the bunkai is any good or that the kata is done correctly. So how do you know what you're getting?

Matayoshi sensei was very proud that the tradition of kobudo in his family went back generations. He showed me a family tree once, tracing his family back four hundred years. I'm not sure they all practiced kobudo, but the martial tradition in his family did go quite far back in time. And the point was, as he said, that once upon a time there were many many different martial traditions, but over time they got pared down. The bad ones died off, because in the old days you had to use your martial arts to survive. If
you didn't survive the battle or the confrontation, neither did your martial art. Those who survived passed their systems on to others. The problem is that that same natural weeding out of what's good and what's bad doesn't really exist today; we don't generally use our martial arts in battles or confrontations of the sort that might have been more commonplace in ancient times. Nowadays anybody can put a shingle out and teach martial arts without having to put it to the test, without having anyone question the techniques.

How one steps and turns
is very important in
executing this bunkai
 from Shisochin correctly.

I once learned a bo kata from a friend who trained in a traditional Uechi dojo. As a rule, they didn't do very much kobudo--after all, kobudo is really a separate tradition--but their teacher had taught them this one bo kata. I spent about 30 minutes following my friend through the moves of the kata before I realized that it was Sakugawa-no-kon, a kata I already knew. What confused me was the fact that they had been taught the mirror-image of the kata; everything was backwards. Not that there's anything wrong with doing a kata backwards, but I suspect that the teacher had taught himself from watching a video.

You can certainly learn a lot from videos. We live in a very technological age. I've often heard people say that you can find anything on the Internet. And many people are quite adept at navigating through all of that information. The problem is that some things can't be taught through videos. There are some things I have trouble teaching students in the dojo. You have to see it and realize what you're seeing in order to practice it. You can teach the moves, but not the movement. I'm reminded of some of the principles talked about in the Chinese classics and that can be found in Douglas Wile's T'ai-chi Touchstones: Yang Family Secret Transmissions. Here are a few:

"All the joints of the body should be connected without permitting the slightest break." "Power issues from the back." "At all times bear in mind and consciously remember that as soon as one part of the body moves the whole body moves." "Do not allow gaps." 

This movement from Saifa is really
the start of the third sequence, but
it occurs in-between the techniques
that we usually recognize. We don't
turn and face the opponent to then
execute the hand techniques. The
turns in kata show how to step
off the line of attack.

It's all so poetic and cryptic because it's difficult to teach...and just as difficult to talk about. It's almost as if the phrases are only reminders, only useful if you already understand what they mean.
And the really interesting thing is that the katas--and more importantly the bunkai of the various kata--reinforce this kind of movement. In fact, to do the bunkai to the Goju-ryu classical subjects, you have to move this way. In a way, a correct analysis of the kata (bunkai) demands that you understand the lessons contained within the movements of the kata.The most obvious movements are how you get from one technique to the next technique. But the turns and changes of direction are also important in most cases. As someone once pointed out, an awful lot occurs between the movements of kata. So often I see bunkai that ignores the stepping that occurs in the execution of the same technique in kata, as if the body and the hands are disconnected from the feet. It seems to me that people often content themselves with practicing the hand techniques of karate only. If they use the feet, it's only to kick. The stepping and turning in karate, however, are integral to a proper understanding of bunkai, as well as a lesson in how to move. Without a proper understanding of movement, kara-te really is just "empty hands."