Watching the deer...and movement

I was out hiking on the Lost Boulder Trail a while back, when I spotted a young deer standing stock still about fifty feet up the hill. It surprised me. I don’t know what had drawn my eyes away from the trail. Most of the time, I think, it’s the movements of deer in the woods that you pick up if you’re going to see them at all. From a distance their legs look like young saplings and their tawny coats seem to blend into the backdrop of dead leaves that blanket the hillside. 

As I stood watching, trying to see if there was a family nearby, it sidled forward a few steps and began to nibble on a small mountain laurel, all the while keeping a wary eye on me. After a while, I moved on, heading down the trail which turned and dropped into a shallow gully, but the deer stayed there until I lost sight of it. 

A young Great Horned
Owl watching me.

I think this was on my mind—the idea of movement—because I had recently been reading something Bernd Heinrich had written about owls. He had performed a sort of experiment with a friendly owl that had regularly come to roost on a branch above the clearing by his cabin in the Maine woods. At first, he threw a piece of meat on the ground beneath the tree, but the owl showed no interest in it. But when Heinrich attached a piece of thread to the meat and dragged it under the tree, the owl quickly dove for it and carried it off. Heinrich concluded that the owl responded to movement or, in other words, movement may have been a more important consideration for the owl than sight alone or smell. 

Movement is such a nebulous thing to describe or put into words. I was watching a video the other day of a teacher trying to explain the movement of the waist, or koshi, in karate, as he slowly twisted his hips to one side and then quickly snapped them back. He did this repeatedly, snapping his hips back faster and faster. What I was wondering, though, was how a student construes this advice from this sort of demonstration, divorced as it is from technique. Might it give one the wrong impression about

how the waist is actually employed? That is, by isolating this use of the waist as an exercise, are we

This technique from Shisochin kata
very obviously uses the waist.

thereby giving students the impression that the waist is something that turns independent -ly of whatever technique is performed? I’ve seen students (and quite a few teachers) actually pull their hips back prior to thrusting it forward with an attack. They seem to be doing this as if it is a movement completely disconnected from the block or parry or whatever receiving technique that precedes it. It becomes a three-part movement: first the waist is twisted, pulling the hip back; then the hip is sharply thrust forward; and then the striking hand is quickly thrust forward. One, two, three. 

There’s a disconnect here, I think. What usually happens in kata—where at least in Goju-ryu we find illustrations of application (what we call bunkai)—is that the waist turns naturally with the initial block or parrying motion of the body (the uke or receiving technique). There is a structure to this, usually, because we learn it in Sanchin kata and we incorporate that learned movement in everything, remembering the admonition that “the arms do not move independently of the body.” This, of course, is facilitated by the notion that the first (and certainly instinctual) response to an attack is to get out of the way. Even if we can’t easily step off line, the body turns to deflect the attack or present a smaller target. The simplest way to picture this is to imagine an opponent stepping in with a right punch. The

The start of the fourth sequence in
Seipai kata.

defender turns to block the attack with the left forearm to the outside of the opponent’s right arm. The defender’s waist has naturally turned away, leaving the left hip forward and the right hip pulled back or “loaded.” In the next instant, the defender thrusts forward with a right counterattack. In each case, for both the “block” and the attack, the waist and arm move together. I’ve found that, more often than not, when you try to teach students to use the waist, they will disconnect the waist from the arms and use the arms independently, as if  the lower half of the body doesn’t know what the upper half is doing, and that seems like a lot of needless expenditure of energy. On the other hand, if all of this movement of the waist and the arms is done naturally and correctly, “blocking” and counterattacking takes very little effort. And, of course, this is greatly facilitated by the off-line stepping we see in kata, when, for example, the defender turns to block and counter, placing him or her self at a ninety degree angle to the attacker.

That seems like a rather long digression. I’m not sure what it has to do with deer standing quietly in the woods, not moving, unless it’s the notion that you probably won’t see much in the way of wasted movement when it comes to animals; they generally conserve their energy. We should too.  Oh, that, and learning to move naturally.

On the dojo floor...what of traditions?

New dojo floor.

I put down a new floor in the dojo last week. We pulled up all of the old wrestling mat that we had inherited from the university and the old worn out canvas cover that I had finagled from one of the Aikido schools in town. I nailed down something like 450 square feet of southern yellow pine, sanded it, and then put a few coats of polyurethane on it, waited a few days and we were good to go. A couple of spots where the grain had come up in the sanding, but all in all it looks pretty good. The surprise came when I slipped off my training sneakers and did kata in bare feet. I haven't trained barefoot on a wooden floor in what seems like twenty years. And what with the cold weather setting in soon up here in New England, I will no doubt slip my sneakers back on for the winter.

But it reminded me, once again, of the traditions we practice, indeed take for granted, in the practice of karate. Slipping our shoes off, bowing to the shrine, all of the ritualized ceremony and language that becomes an accepted and integral part of training. Certainly in one sense, we are merely respectfully acknowledging the cultural traditions that gave rise to karate. But does the ritual and tradition overshadow the real martial intent of karate? I think it does for some. The "costumes" become more and more elaborate, festooned with colorful badges and elaborate embroidery of kanji characters that the average student (non-Japanese student) can't even read!

Hojo undo implements.

For some others, who fashion themselves "traditional-ists," the ritual of karate training seems to be focused on hojo undo or supplemental exercises performed with various traditional Okinawan training implements to develop a strong karate body. Some practitioners seem to emphasize this sort of ritualized use of traditional hojo undo implements as if it too satisfies a spiritual need, scoffing at those who put too much emphasis on the study of bunkai, not merely the more modern adjuncts like competition jiyu kumite or the performance of kata for small plastic trophies.

It's confusing; I'm not even sure what tradition and ritual in karate even means anymore. That's why the wood of the dojo floor felt so strange to me, I suppose. I think the last time I trained with any regularity on a polished wood dojo floor was in Okinawa. I suppose it makes more sense to take one's shoes off and practice on a bare wood floor in a tropical climate than it does in New England. But I've also dispensed with the traditional karate uniform, the belt, and, aside from an admittedly though no less heart-felt but perfunctory bow to the shrine, all of the pre-training ritual. I light incense when I have it and can remember, but we don't address each other with titles--no sensei, no sempai, no "osu" or other use of Japanese when a simple English term would suffice. You won't hear "Moku so," "Kiyotsuke," "Hajime" here. Heretical perhaps but since there are only a few of us old guys--all seniors--the ritual seems a bit unnecessary. And as far as bare feet and wearing a karate gi...well, it's pretty cold in New England at least five months out of the year.


Or does the practice of ritual and tradition actually free us, in some sense, to experience karate in a more spiritual way? After all, the practice of kata itself is a kind of ritual. The movements are clearly defined and taught in a very formal manner, with little room for individual differences, and since for most, at least initially, there is little understanding of what the movements mean or how they may be used, there would seem to be little difference between those who practice karate and those engaged in some arcane religious ceremony. A ritual, by definition, is "a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order." Does it make it more or less spiritual if you don't know what the movements are for? After all, if you didn't visualize what you were doing--that is, if we didn't have any understanding of bunkai or application--then we might be more apt to enjoy the act of movement itself, sort of like yoga perhaps. In this case, I sometimes wonder if meaning doesn't get in the way, if understanding bunkai doesn't somehow detract from one's enjoyment of the simple act of movement and exercise, and, in the process, a more spiritual experience.

And yet I wonder if all of this is not a modern overlay, something fashioned fairly recently and tacked onto what was once only a brutally efficient method of self defense. And kata? Merely a record of martial applications and fighting principles preserved in kata form for an ancient population that was largely illiterate.

And yet...there is something about slipping off one's shoes and stepping on the dojo floor, bowing to the shrine, all of the old teachers looking on, the incense burning, and beginning kata. Just kata. Kata for its own sake.