Trails and Suparinpei

I was out in the woods the other day, off the northern end of Fitzgerald Lake, and took a wrong turn. I was looking down, careful not to step on any rocks hidden under the blanket of oak leaves, and I missed the hill trail. I don't usually come in from the northern end, so, lost in thought, I missed the turn off and just kept on up the lower trail that goes around the edge of the lake. It's still a nice trail, but it's not as isolated, and for some reason I don't find it quite as beautiful. But heading into winter changes things; there's less vegetation. Some days the trees look as if they're suspended on strings from low hanging clouds. Stripped of their leaves, they could be members of some army standing guard along the trail dressed in their grey fatigues. Where the forest is thickest, the trunks are fairly straight with few branches to break the uniformity of this vertical maze that recedes into the distance.

I'm always tempted to head up along a ridge and bushwhack through the bare undergrowth this time of year, but there's something I really like about trails. I don't know whether it's the perception that they go somewhere, that they impose a sort of order on the otherwise chaotic wooded world, or whether it's a natural human desire for perspective, something the early Renaissance painters realized might satisfy some vague human longing. Who knows? I suspect that trails remind us of that temporal aspect to life--we begin in one place, look as far down the road as we can, and then walk towards that end. In other words, some sort of order. One thing follows another as predictably as our feet follow the trail, and everything is just as it should be, just as if we were sitting in a concert hall waiting for that final chord to resolve predictably on the tonic or Shakespeare to dish out everyone's just desserts in the final scene. We are afforded a spectator's view of the wild and untamed as we brush by the tangles of bushes and errant limbs along the trail.

This double "punch"
occurs in both Sanseiru
and Suparinpei kata.

In the same way, we have imposed a sort of order on the classical canon of Goju-ryu. And yet, for the most part, it's completely arbitrary. About the only thing that we can say, because there is some variation between various schools, is that Sanchin is first, always followed by Saifa kata, and Suparinpei is last. But why? There are things here it feels like we will never know. Just as the relationship between Suparinpei and Sanchin and Seisan and Sanseiru--these four. They all begin from a double-arm closed-fist kamae in basic stance. They all begin with "blocks" and "punches." Many of the techniques in Suparinpei can be found in some form in these three other kata. There are the double "punches" of Suparinpei and Sanseiru. There is the ending "crane's beak" technique in shiko dachi (Sanseiru and Suparinpei), not to mention the techniques just before the ending of Suparinpei that look like Seisan. Then there are the opening mawashi techniques in basic stance that only occur in Sanchin and Suparinpei (in basic stance). And there are certainly others. There are, of course, techniques in Suparinpei that remind one of Seiunchin, and Shisochin also begins with a double-arm kamae and three "punches," but the similarities between Sanchin, Sanseiru, Seisan, and Suparinpei are all too obvious.

The "crane's beak" from
Sanseiru and Suparinpei.

And yet I have no idea what it implies other than some sort of historical connection. Were these four kata the original or somehow older kata of an Okinawan-based system? I think Mario McKenna implied something like that in an old post on his website when he suggested that these were the original kata taught by Higashionna sensei. But what I'm curious about is whether or not there is proof, anything more than just a feeling that there's a connection. Do they all begin from a double-arm kamae because there was some sort of link to the old indigenous form of Okinawan sumo? And if that's the case, does it affect how we should be looking at the bunkai for each of these kata? If the other subjects were not part of this original syllabus, why were they incorporated into the system? Is the connection thematic (the tendency to twist the head is certainly common to all of them) or completely arbitrary? If the "other" kata--Saifa, Seiunchin, Shisochin, and Kururunfa (I am omitting Tensho for obvious reasons)--are really from another source, is that why they are, with the exception of Kururunfa, stuck together at the beginning of the curriculum in many schools or is that also coincidental? For that matter, why do Uechi and Goju both share Sanchin, Sanseiru, and Seisan, and not the other kata?

This open-hand block and
attack occurs in both
Seisan and Suparinpei. 

And why is the structure of Suparinpei so different from the other three kata? Seisan and Sanseiru are bunkai kata; that is, they are composed of three bunkai sequences shown in their entirety, with basic techniques tacked onto the beginning of each kata--the slow "punches" in the case of Sanseiru and the three sets of three basic techniques in Seisan. Sanchin, on the other hand, is an almost laboriously repetitive kata with its slow punches returning to the double-arm kamae posture, though here also there are coincidentally three techniques: the slow punches and blocks, the grab and pull-in coupled with the open-hand pushing out and down technique (also found in Seisan), and the end mawashi technique. Suparinpei, on the other hand, is composed largely of individual techniques which are not shown as part of a bunkai sequence, some of which are entry techniques and some controlling techniques. There are three bunkai sequences here also, but two of them are very similar and the third (the sequence that ends the kata) borrows techniques from Seisan and Sanseiru. And Suparinpei is the only kata besides Sanchin where you will find the mawashi uke in basic stance or sanchin dachi--that is, the only place it is really used as an "uke" or receiving technique. Comparatively speaking, it seems like a bit of an odd duck, structurally at least.

This may all be much ado about nothing, as Shakespeare might have observed, but it's curious when each of the classical subjects seems to present unique self-defense scenarios, subtle variations of theme but no redundancy of movement...except Suparinpei. Even if we were to only consider these seemingly-related kata, there are apparently three somewhat unique kata and then Suparinpei, which seems to have borrowed from each. What's with that? Am I looking for things to fit together too neatly when they most likely came from disparate sources, developing over time? After all, the trails through the woods veer off in all sorts of different directions. Who's to say what's a wrong trail anyway? But then again, it's food for thought.

How do you train bunkai?

This raises a lot of questions for me. It almost seems as though the more appropriate question would be...How do you train kata? If the classical katas of Goju-ryu contain the essence or techniques of the system as well as the martial principles, then we use bunkai to study kata. Kata is the study of form--we practice to get the movements right and to understand the principles embedded in the kata--and bunkai is the study of how to use those movements. (When you think about it, what else is there?)

Goju attack to the head
from Saifa kata.

But if bunkai is the analysis of kata--which seems pretty straightforward--then what is henka bunkai or oyo bunkai or even different levels of bunkai??? I read these terms on the Internet all the time and wonder where they came from. There is only one kata movement, so why isn't there just one bunkai for that movement? We don't usually say a white belt should do the kata this way and a green belt should do it some other way and a black belt should do it a completely different way. So why should the bunkai be different? If you are trying to teach someone self-defense, why would you reserve some methods of self-defense for someone who has trained five years and some other techniques for someone who has trained ten years. I've even read authors who say the kata is like an onion, that the kata has different layers of bunkai. But katas are not like onions; ogres are like onions! This does not mean you are teaching a beginner Kururunfa, but the bunkai for Saifa is the same, it seems to me, for a white belt as it is for a black belt. Certainly we hope the black belt is able to execute the techniques better, but they are the same techniques.

Goju attack to the head
from Seipai kata.

Of course, the big question is finding the bunkai, but leaving that aside for the time being....

The next question is how to train bunkai. The problem for me is that so many karate schools base their training on, for lack of a better term, generic karate. The focus of much of the training time is spent on basics and training subjects. By basics, I mean the head punch, chest punch, down punch, the overhead block, the chest block, the down block and a few kicks. Everybody lines up--beginners to senior students--and they do high repetitions of these techniques. Then they practice training kata. In Shorin, this would be the Pinan kata, and in Goju, the Gekisai kata. It seems to me that the emphasis is all wrong here, and yet this is what you see in most schools. The problem is that the emphasis here is put on many techniques that don't really characterize the style, or techniques that don't actually occur that often in the classical kata, at least in Goju. In Goju, we don't see a jodan tsuki or upper-level punch in the classical kata. Rather, the idea is to bring the head down and then punch with a chudan tsuki or middle-level punch. Similarly, there is no jodan uke or rising block in the classical Goju katas, at least not the way that it is practiced in the basic drills of most karate schools. And what we actually find in the classical kata of Goju-ryu is not a gedan uke or down block but a down attack. So if you practice these generic karate techniques in this way, you really are confusing the issue, clouding one's understanding of certain martial principles found in the classical subjects.

Goju attack to the head
from Seiunchin kata.

So one way we should be practicing bunkai is to substitute the techniques of classical kata for the generic basics we seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time on. And we should be practicing them with high repetitions and on both the right side and the left side. Simply doing kata alone does not give us sufficient practice of these techniques, and some techniques are often only done on one side in kata.

The next thing we should be practicing is doing each of the moves against an opponent. The opening move of Saifa kata, for instance, is a response to a same-side wrist grab (or the opponent's left hand grabs the defender's right wrist). We should practice stepping forward along the northeast angle and dropping the right forearm and elbow over the opponent's arm to bring them down. This movement--when done correctly--brings the opponent's head down. The left hand is then brought over to grab the opponent's head, dropping and pulling back into horse stance, and the right forearm is brought down on the back of the opponent's neck. This should, of course, be practiced this way, just as it is done in solo kata.

But there are also some principles that should be trained here as well. It may be less likely that someone initiates an attack by grabbing your wrist, but they may grab your wrist at some point in an encounter. So this technique--in fact any wrist grab response from any of the other katas--can be trained this way: Train the same response with the defender punching and the attacker blocking and then grabbing the wrist. Additionally, the first movement in Saifa is showing you how one might deal with the opponent covering your arm on the same side--that is, your right arm or hand is under his left. Using the ideas or principles shown in this first move of Saifa, one should train turning the body--this is the equivalent of stepping forward along an angle--and coming over the opponent's arm with your elbow and forearm. In this case, we are training parts of the original bunkai but not the whole sequence. In the same way we might repetitively train moving to the northeast or northwest corner--to the outside--of an opponent's attack--that is, just training the stepping shown in the kata. There is nothing pedagogically surprising here; you just break the technique down into smaller and smaller parts until you "get it."

Another way of training bunkai is to train variations (see article "Kata and Bunkai: a study in theme and variations" in Journal of Asian Martial Arts, Vol. 18, no. 4) but that's perhaps a subject for another day.