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People speak of the koryu as if they were some sort of physical thing, some sort of body of knowledge, a list of kata that you could find in Wikipedia, or some school building you could find out in the country somewhere.
A koryu is a line of instruction, it's what is passed along from teacher to student and how it's passed along. This supposedly-physical thing might be said to breathe in and out as headmasters add or subtract from the teachings, but in fact it changes form with each new leader. If the 4th headmaster drops half the techniques from what he teaches the 5th, and the 7th headmaster picks them up again, they aren't the same techniques. Despite having the same name and perhaps being vaguely similar to something written on a scroll, they have not been handed body to body. They will probably be something which is pretty close, but filtered through what the 7th head knows and has been taught about the rest of the kata that were handed down. They might be very close but some of the tiny weight shifts here or there will be lost.
Think of a rather opposite situation. A story can be written down and copied scribe to scribe, that's not much problem except that small mis-spellings might creep in, a word changed without noticing here and there but the story isn't going to change much in overall theme or in nuance. That's the kata handed down from one body to another.
Now think of that story being memorized and repeated orally just once before it is again written down. That's the kata written down and revived later from the scrolls. Could be pretty close, the main themes and moral of the story will likely be there, but the nuances of telling will be changed and the writer of the later version will have a tremendous influence on the new-old kata.
The koryu is this passing along, this writing from one body to another, it's not the kata, they change in number and nature. It's the ideas behind the kata, the morals of the stories and these also acquire different meanings over the years. If we assume Aesop's fables are more or less as written generations ago can we also assume we get the same lesson now as a Greek of 500 BCE? It may be close, I suspect it is, but the nuance is probably different.
Education is not a physical thing that can be placed under glass and preserved in its pristine state. It's a process. Koryu is a line of education from generation to generation.
A koryu, being simply a lineage, is as effective, moral, useful, adaptable, honourable, trustworthy and loyal to its members as the headmaster is all of those things.
People speak of combining, adding to, changing or otherwise modifying koryu to create a new koryu. This is, again, to give body to something that is essentially bodiless. A teacher can't unlearn or change what they have learned in order to create a new koryu, they simply teach what they know. If what they know is that they reject completely or partially what some teacher handed down to them, they are still teaching in relation to what they were taught. If they add stuff, they add to, they don't invent out of whole cloth.
I defy any reader to create an entirely new sentence right now. Don't go firing up a search engine to check out your creation, I don't care what it is, it isn't something new in the world. You used an alphabet, grammar and vocabulary that you learned long ago. Did you create a brand new word? So did Shakespeare before you, and nobody ever accused him of being anything but a writer of English.
One might argue that now we can incorporate organizations, make our administrative body a legal "person" and so it's a physical thing. This legislative fiction is intended to make an organization or company easier to deal with, and to protect its members from liability of one sort or another. It doesn't really create something where nothing actually exists, it just invents a way of dealing with a bunch of people doing something together. Your budo organization, whether koryu or modern accumulation of various arts, clubs and ryu isn't a thing, it's the sum total of everyone involved and it is only as good as those in charge. There's really nothing inherent in the organization to honour, be loyal to or otherwise interact with. You interact with the guys running the thing and like your teacher, they deserve as much respect as they earn and not a dollop more. The koryu, the budo organization should get as much loyalty as the top guy gives, as much respect and as much admiration as they earn.
I heard a few days ago that facts didn't start to dominate in the Western intellectual landscape until the 18th century when the scientific method became the way to look at the world. That method was to observe the world, derive a hypothesis from those observable facts, and then do some experimentation to disprove the hypothesis. I say disprove because you can't prove anything scientifically. (Which is why I am constantly amazed at religious folk trying to prove god exists "scientificially" or wanting creationism to be taught in a science class. If we disprove it with experiment, we discard it, it's gone... If we can't test it experimentally, it isn't science.)
Before the uplifting of facts it was more common to try and decide what super-factual ability made man better than the animals, since, after all they said, even a cat can see a rock. Animals deal in facts, but humans can see beyond. Often this "beyond" was/is defined as religious belief (God made us above the animals), or sometimes as metaphysics (we are closer to an ideal state than animals). While most folks of my acquaintance today embrace the scientific method, there are some who still seek some sort of Platonic Ideal world, usually in the form of economic theory (market forces will come into play to solve the oil crisis for instance).
You can see the problem of course, facts, no matter how many are accumulated, can't give you a grasp on how the world works, or what it's for. In one case you won't have a way to predict future events, in the other you may be asking a meaningless question, or one that won't yield to factual analysis (depending on your tendency to believe in the supernatural). Even if we gather huge numbers of facts and subject them to statistical analysis, we will be missing a key element to understanding, the leap to a hypothesis, a way of explaining the facts in a causal manner. It's sunny today, it was sunny yesterday and the day before and it's sunny 46.8% of the days in Januarys of years that are even numbered. Will it be sunny tomorrow? Without some sort of hypothesis about weather, who could say other than "based on past activity, there's a 46.8% chance that it will be".
Well, do we get much beyond that these days? Often not. Numbers and facts are easy, cats can do them, they're simple and comforting, they seem to work, but really, to be useful we need to be asking what we can do with facts rather than accumulating them endlessly in the hope that with enough of them will come understanding (rather than statistics).
Think of Kata as facts.
We can take an entire kata as a fact, or we can break the kata down and know a bunch of facts about it. Which foot goes where. We can examine other people's kata, or rather the kata of teachers other than our own, and learn what they do differently than us... more facts like they put their foot in a different place.
It's simple and comforting to look at our facts and make sure we have them written down, that we have our kata memorized exactly as sensei has taught us, that our school is passed down faithfully from generation to generation. The kata shouldn't change, after all the facts don't lie right? A fact is a fact and our kata work (we've been told or at least, we assume). If we know enough facts we'll understand (somehow) the entire picture... if we just keep accumulating facts. And one fact is as important as any other fact (because without a hypothesis or even a belief, we have no way of choosing between them).
I'm a scientist, was trained as one and worked as one. I believe in facts as much as the next fellow, but facts are only part of the world-picture. If you believe in facts alone, you treat them all as equal and that leads to giving the same TV air-time to idiots as to learned men simply because there's some sort of feeling these days that arguments should be balanced. Thing is, you can't tell an idiot fact from an intelligent fact without some knowledge of the scientific method where the idea of facts come from. Belief isn't fact, opinion isn't fact, and neither is the scientific "other side" of facts.
Hypothesis is the other side of facts, and it's not such an easy thing. With kata you have facts, now put the facts together, or pick them apart, and derive a hypothesis based on these facts. I know 24 kata from a school, what can I do with that? I could break them down and say that 32.5% of the kata involve a vertical sword strike but where's that get me? It gets me as far as our sunny day predictor doesn't it? The problem with recording sunny day facts is that we have somehow missed the reason it's sunny or not sunny. We didn't "get" clouds. No amount of study of the 24 kata, or the 347 lost kata beyond those, or the 1346 kata of the other sword schools we can study will ever suddenly throw up an understanding of clouds if we don't see clouds in the kata. Clouds aren't present on sunny days so why should we consider them when counting sunny days?
What sort of stuff can we miss if we are trying to derive a hypothesis of our martial art school? What things are not present, are outside the facts themselves that have influence and bearing on the facts? (Where are the "clouds"?) Why should we care about such things in the first place? Why should we care about sunshine? What does it do for us?
Now, I hinted at a problem with a belief system, with believing that the market will solve the oil crisis. Belief too is easy, especially if we believe in something we can bend to fit any situation. The problem is that Belief isn't subjected to testing (it would be hypothesis otherwise) and it isn't subject to being discarded if found wanting (same reason). The market will solve the oil crisis because as oil prices go up due to shortage of easily obtained oil, other sources of oil such as tar sands or fracking shale will become economic and will supply the demand. It's a nice belief and it may even work for a while but oil is finite and so is the capacity of "globalization" to work with more expensive shipping fuel. Of course the belief is that when oil gets expensive enough we'll simply come up with fusion... but that's bringing in another "fact" to deny the finding that the supply and demand market can't solve the oil crisis, it will only cause oil prices to be cheap when there's lots of it around, and expensive when there isn't. It's not a bad hypothesis for price fluctuation but it isn't a solution to a limited resource.
My point? To believe that we will derive the benefit of our budo kata if only we keep on doing the kata is the same as believing the market will fix the oil crisis if we only let it work on us. It's a belief that has very little to back it up. The market does affect this and that and so do the kata but we can't be sure of the end result of either if we don't ask deeper questions.
What's the purpose of kata? What's the use of it? What can it predict, produce or otherwise promise? Can you know any of that by simply accumulating more kata, more facts?
Hypothesize.
I am pleased to announce that we will again host a Iaido clinic in Niagara Peninsula with three of the highest ranking sensei in Canada.
The seminar will be Saturday March 10 from 9:30am to 4pm at the Ukrainian Black Sea Hall in St. Catherines (455 Welland Avenue). Price is $50 per person with pre-registration, $60 at the door.
We will be working the ZenKenRen Iai waza in the morning and the first koryu sets for Muso Jikiden Eishin ryu and Muso Shinden ryu in the afternoon.
Your participation is greatly appreciated. Also, please pass this information along.
Contact me for the application form which needs to be received by March 3th but payment is at the door.
Ron Mattie <rmattie@vaxxine.com>
I am not using my left arm very much these days, it mostly hangs loose by my side. I don't trust it. It's not that it's useless, it is recovering from a tear in the biceps and some rotator cuff stuff as far as I can tell. I have a large range of motion (compared to a month ago) that is pain free and quite a bit of strength and I reconfirm all that regularly in the weight room. But the thing betrayed me, it failed and caused a lot of pain for quite a while so I don't trust it.
It would be nice, but you can't just decide to trust something once you've lost faith in it. You have to forget the betrayal and the pain, you have to forget and then use it through old, deep habits for long enough that you can once again rely on it. Any little stab of pain will act as a reminder of the betrayal and you're back to not trusting at all. What's conscious, what's rational, is distrust to avoid more pain. What allows trust once more is a long period of no reminders so that old routines can reassert themselves and eventually you can come to rely on the damaged part again.
It's the same with people. Trust in someone is a habit acquired over quite a long time, family is most deep, then childhood friends and on through the years to the guy you met last week. Trust isn't automatic, that would be rather counter-productive to continued existance. Lions would love monkeys to trust them. Once trust in a person is lost it has to be regained through continued association for long enough that habits of reliance can be re-established. Multiple, constant apologies and explanations only dredge up the pain of betrayal and delay the process. The only thing that will help is to forget. Forgiving is a rational, conscious decision and has nothing to do with trust. To forgive is the same as to apologize, it allows the continued association through which the trust habit may be reestablished. Trust is much more easily lost with those of shallower habit, those you've known for a shorter time, but it can also be regained more quickly since there's not much to regain.
Let's talk about budo since it's a budo blog. We often hear people saying you have to go into a dojo with trust in your sensei, you have to trust what he says and do it without question. What utter rot. Firstly, it doesn't happen, a student who comes into a class and does whatever sensei says is looking for a messiah to save him from personal responsibility and thought. It's got nothing to do with trust and everything to do with abdicating the hard chore of living correctly.
Expectation is a much better way of describing the sensei student relationship. A student should have an expectation that sensei will be able to teach him, and expect that what sensei tells him to do will be instructive. The student accepts the teaching, questions it's result and if the result is more knowledge over the years, the student will come to trust the sensei. You can't go in with trust or you're setting yourself up for a painful betrayal when you fail to learn a lesson. Sorry, I should say you can't go in with trust at all as I've described it here. You can however, go in with faith and so can feel a betrayal of religious proportions when lesson failure inevitably occurs. Look, my left arm was never infinitely strong or pain free, I never had faith in it, I had trust that it would do what I asked as long as I didn't ask what was beyond it's ability.
In most of our personal life trust is the most important currency we can develop. It is for a smaller part of our life that we are dealing with money (hard currency) or other exchange goods in the sort of legally enforceable contract which substitutes for trust. Before lawyers we had our good word. Now we have agreements which exchange actions for goods and defined penalties (usually more goods) for non-performance (the equivalent of a betrayal). Unfortunately it seems people are starting to accept this legalist model of life as the way things should be.
Let's say we've got two people who live together. For 200,000 years of our existance what was important was trust, did the other person have our back? Could we trust them to help us live to see tomorrow? What mattered was the ability to rely on our partner, it was our "word" our "honour" our "trust" that let us set up these relationships. Since the invention of money we have created a world with contracts and agreements. If you give me that or do this work for me I'll give you these tokens which you can exchange with someone else who is participating in this system of trust, for other goods or work. Somewhere along the way somebody thought it would be a good idea to see if we could reinforce the trust-based nature of this stuff (somebody betrayed someone didn't they) by government, by setting up a bunch of guys with bats of wood who would break your kneecaps if you didn't respect your side of the bargains. The value of a man's word began to slip. Then, Chthulu help us, we invented a class of people whose job it was to draw up contracts on paper, and immediately that class doubled in number due to an equal number of people designated to find out how to cheat on said written contracts. So our two people living together and producing kids and fighting back to back outside the cave mouth? Marriage. A contract that says if you want to do that kind of stuff you gotta agree to a bunch of things and if you don't do them you're going to pay through goods, labour or pain. Trust became just another clause in the contract and now even that has gone, betrayal of the marriage vows is no longer direct justification for divorce... well never mind we won't push this one too far.
As martial artists, looking to become better people we learn how to injure, maim and kill. A big part of this training is the injunction against doing just what we've been trained to do. We are training to trust our partners and to give our word to them that we will hold back when swinging lumber at their head. We learn that our word, our honour is something of value. We learn to value the old ways of 200,000 years. Is there any budoka out there who has anything but contempt for that waiver you signed on the first day of training? Fear of lawyers is not what keeps us from hurting each other, it's trust. We aren't paying each other to spar, we're in it voluntarily, it's different. Same with the people we drink with and watch movies with, we exchange trust, not money and if we lose trust in someone, we stop cooking dinners for them.
Of course I have no doubt that somewhere right now someone with no knowledge of honour is suing someone because they hurt their feelings. I'd like to sue my left arm. Is trust as a concept losing out? Do we need to talk about politics? We now have a class of professional rulars (you go to school to learn how to politic and then you join a party and spend your life doing that stuff) who we expect to lie, and we put them in power over us so that they can make decisions about what contractual interactions we will carry out with each other. No need for trust anywhere along this line. It was a lot easier up in the trees where you'd simply turn your back on someone who broke trust. Off they'd need to go to reestablish themselves somewhere else, perhaps a bit wiser and more conscientious, if not they dropped out of the gene pool.
Finally, let's talk about organizations. There are two kinds, those who run on pay and those who run on trust. The ones who pay are businesses and they are subject to all sorts of laws and study in school but boil down to something pretty simple. I'll give you money to do things for me and/or I'll sell you other people stuff for money. No need to get all bent out of shape over trust here, employers don't have to trust employees and vice versa. We've got money and contracts and lawyers up the wazoo. Sure we talk about trust sometimes, and employees who break their trust with the employers get fired, but that stuff mostly boils down to what's in the contract anyway. Thou shalt not steal office supplies is not a matter of trust, it's in the contract. Thou shalt not treat me like a donkey is heading more toward the trust thing but we still have human resources vs human rights to fight that one out in the courts. Money means contracts not trust.
But when we go to volunteer organizations we lose the basis for all that contractual stuff. It's really hard to make a contract on "if you give me your time and effort for nothing I'll pay you nothing". The urge to contract, the direction of value for service, actually moves the other way, from individual to organization. In a business the boss says "I'll pay you to do this", with volunteer organizations the "employee" says "I'll give the organization my time and effort for free so that a certain goal I desire can be attained".
So where's the trust come in? All organizations over a certain size end up with management. Someone has to make sure things are coordinated, goals are set, money is collected, accounted for and spent correctly, etc. etc. So we can go to a simpler agreement. "I'll donate money or give my time and effort to the organization because I trust you to use that money time and effort well".
What happens if management betrays that trust? Pretty simple really, the monkey turns his back and walks away. He's not being paid to work for the organization, he's paying to be part of it. Business principles and human resources theory don't work. Trust works, a person's word is important when all you have is people who say "I'll do that" rather than some middle manager who says "I'll hire someone to do that". You don't fire people from volunteer organizations, they fire you.
It is a constant in the martial arts world that some beginner will ask which book is good to read to start iaido and a dozen people will jump all over them telling them that they can't learn from a book and, further, that it's dangerous and counterproductive and will hurt their chances of learning when they do get to a sensei.
No wonder the arts are drying up. Used to be that we'd get a magazine or a book and start hacking around with each other, and then if we found a teacher we'd jump on the chance and nobody had a problem. Now that we've got the internet a beginner wouldn't dare even read a book for fear of getting bad habits. Don't even think about watching a video.
The most curious thing is that it's rarely the top folks who are giving this advice, it's the beginners who surf the net (and have soaked up the wisdom of the masses) and the intermediate types who have five or six years in.
Bottom line is that you can learn as much iaido from a book as you can learn any other physical activity such as skiing or skating or swimming. Some stuff is really hard to put into words but you generally don't need that stuff until you're beyond "book learning" anyway. I learned how to cross country ski from a book (and many other skills along the way). Never noticed that I was bad at any of it, hurt by it, or held back by "bad habits" when I found a teacher.
The thing is, I'm a bit ticked off every time some junior tells the world you can't learn from a book. I learned from books, I pretty much had to until there were enough people doing iaido in Eastern North America that we could start bringing instructors over from Japan. I was luckier than most, I was only four years from my introduction to iaido until I found my current sensei, but even then, we all read everything we could find to try and get up to speed. My sensei still reads everything he can get his hands on, a good lesson as far as I can tell.
When folks speak so glibly about "go see a sensei" they are actually being quite dismissive of the efforts of the first generation or two of students over here in these arts. Quite often all we had were books to keep up with what was happening, it was many years until we had sensei coming regularly from Japan to update us, and when they finally did become available we worked our asses off to fix what we needed to.
Also understand that while we were trying to get enough time for practice ourselves, we were teaching the next generation who only needed to do as they were told and, as my sensei says "selfish practice". It is not easy to start an art from scratch administratively, while "filling in the blanks", catching up to date and teaching so that there will be enough folks to fill the seminars that bring the sensei from Japan.
Now I am not a bad writer, and as far as banging out words, I'm a good one. It's easy for me so I have written a lot of manuals on how to do iaido. I wrote them intending that beginners could use them to get started and advanced beginners could use them as reference. I spent a lot of time and care on them and so again, I don't appreciate some kid who's never seen them telling me they're harmful.
For a beginner, a book (and even better, books and video) are just fine for learning the large motor skills you'll need to memorize the kata. An advanced student is also just fine with books. If you have a good grounding in the art, you can read an old book (that's well enough written) which might contain kata which you've never seen and be able to fill in the gaps in the descriptions. They will contain the fundamentals, the stuff that is too obvious to write down. Anyone who has developed the skill of making notes will know how the shorthand goes.
As a demonstration of the power of words, many years ago the FIK introduced two new kata to the Zen Ken Ren Iai set. We had a written description (no photos, no video) of the kata from a student in Japan and passed it around to the seniors in our organization. Several months later we had a visit from an 8dan who offered to introduce the new kata to us. Having heard that we had been practicing from written notes he asked us to demonstrate what we had come up with. Several of the brave ones walked forward to demonstrate and not only were we close to each other (we hadn't had a chance to compare notes), we were also very close to the technique. Our difference from the technique was about the same as the changes that came over later that year as the sensei in Japan continued to refine it.
In other words, from someone else's written notes we were able to get very close to a brand new kata. This is not magical, it's simply that humans are very capable of communicating in ways other than speech and demonstration.
This is not to say that all things can be easily taught by book, some are best shown "hands on" so that instant feedback can be given. The time for that type of teaching is during the intermediate ages of, say, 4 to 10 years practice. Just the time when students have the confidence to head online and teach beginners by written posts all about how they can't learn from books.
Is it better to learn from a sensei from day one? You betcha, a hell of a lot easier than the way we had to do it, but don't go all superior about your skills and assume you know the true way to the top of the mountain. There are may ways, as someone starting now you've got one of the easier ones. If the current generation isn't vastly better than we are when you're our age, it will be from pure laziness. I'd like to see a lot more of you stick your noses into some source material instead of looking at us with big cow eyes expecting to be spoon fed and making excuses for not reading like "I'm afraid it will give me bad habits".
In 1982 I decided the philosophy of Aikido was contained in the techniques. I was there to learn how to be a better person because I couldn't find a Zen priest in Guelph and sensei never gave sermons in class so...
Much later I decided the philosophy of the martial arts came during the beers after class, that's when all the stories and jibber-jabber about overall technique and internal dialog during kata showed up.
Now I've moved to a slightly different perspective on sermonizing.
"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" said Hamlet, while Siddhartha taught us that while life is suffering, there is a way out which involves meditation.
And that is a sufficient sermon in my opinion. The brain is the source of pain and thoughts are the source of emotional suffering. A solution must involve treating the cause, rather than adding to the symptoms.
When I started my martial arts practice it was a part of a massive amount of reading and thinking and even obtaining a minor in philosophy, I knew all the dates, all the terms, all the various schools of thought and could demonstrate wonderful dominance over others in that book learning. None of the book learning helped, in fact it just made me argue with those who got something wrong. I sermonized all the time but somehow telling other folks how to live their lives didn't make their life, or mine, any better. Now I just smile and nod when folks tell me how to be happy, or what is best for them or for me or for everyone. That makes me feel better for not getting into conflict, and it must make them feel better because they stop talking to me about it. I am reminded of one fellow I know who can quote chapter and verse of obscure philosophy at me and I'm sure he is never wrong about it, but he's an ass who causes no end of trouble around himself, while making himself miserable at the same time. None of that learning has done him a bit of good, it's just so much craving for things, in his case, data.
Over the years I've forgotten all of that book stuff; if I want to know it, there's Wikipedia where thousands of bright young things argue infinitely over angels and heads of pins. In fact, I was out at a cafe this morning and popped onto the internet to find that Shakespeare quote up there... what a wonderful bit of technology that lets me let go of so much. Now there's room in my head for knowing who Brittney is dating this week without worrying about what fell out of the other side of my head.
These days I mostly just swing the sword and teach my students how to swing the sword better than they were swinging it yesterday. While I do occasionally slip into what they call "rant mode", as I did yesterday when I went on for a while about the kata kaeshaku and what it means today, I try to keep my mouth shut. The best sermon in iaido practice is to swing the sword.
All of which is a trick of course, it really does make no difference at all whether or not you're good at iaido since your average punk on the street with a gun will blow your head off, as the modern fighters are fond of telling us, and your sword is going to be at home when your MMA expert does the ground and pound on you. All those years of swinging the sword. Wasted, just wasted.
Consider what you're doing in an iaido class. Give it 10 or 12 years if it appeals to you at all (and it doesn't appeal to many). If after that time you still feel that you need sermons during the class, go back to church, it will probably do you more good than swinging a sword.
Me, I'll continue to try and perfect something that can't be perfected, I'll continue to enjoy all the impositions and committee-led changes to seitei, all the struggling with koryu iai and kenjutsu to try and work out from the inside of the kata what I should be looking for on the outside. All the while, for each hour of my life I spend doing that, I'll have saved myself an hour of fuss and bother thinking that I should be reading a new book or listening to a new holy man just in case they have the secret formula to make me happy.
Let's face it, we do iaido and the other budo because the spiritual teachers aren't allowed to preach at us.
I was reminded of a comment made by a student several years ago. This fellow is older than I and has been teaching longer than I've been in the arts so he's no beginner (and I've always been honoured that he considers me his student when he's my senior in so many ways). It was when I was teaching koryu iai and had just finished demonstrating three different ways to do a kata that he said "which is the way we should do it".
Of course I started talking about how each way was correct and he could choose whichever he liked. He came back with "which one do you want us to do" and I went on to say that I didn't mind which and...
Not being stupid he interrupted (with a slightly irritated tone) "then which one do you do".
Slowly the dawn. I realized he was after two things, one was to give me a bit of a teaching moment... don't give beginners three different ways to do something they're just learning how to do... and he was honestly looking for the one to practice, the one I practiced, which would be the one the dojo practiced as their base technique. Variations are just that, alternative ways to do the base technique.
So the secret teachings are something revealed in passing to seniors, a variation, an alternative way to think about a technique. They are not something to tell beginners, it's just confusing, they are secrets.
The Fetish? Ah, that's when a student can't get past that first way to do something, that's when a student figures there is a single correct way to do a technique. Note my student never once said "which is the right way" he wasn't a beginner, he knew there were variations, he just wasn't interested in trying to remember all of them while learning the technique. But he has never had a fetish about "the way sensei does it".
I've met students who can't get over "the way sensei does it" or did it, if he has died. It's not a healthy attitude but it's not uncommon. A fetish is an attribution of mystical or spiritual powers to a physical object. A kata is a physical object, so to insist that it be done "the way sensei did it" is to fetishize a movement. Like the wizards and alchemists of old, if we get the movement wrong, bad things can happen, the demon can cross the chalk circle and we all know what happens then.
It doesn't have to be some sort of exaggerated wish to respect our sensei that causes us to fetishize a kata, it could be the belief that these things were invented on the battlefield and that if we change them from what we were taught we'd be doing something that doesn't work "for real".
Real matters, but I have no faith whatsoever that I can tell/teach/show someone to do a movement in a certain way and have them be able to do it "for real".
Last night we were working on moving from the hips.... OK don't look at the date, EVERY last night we were doing that... and we went to a partner practice to try and get the students to move forward, to drive in rather than concentrate on their shoulders or their grip or whatever. I was moving toward one of the seniors and getting right up on her sword. I told her to get back, to protect her distance and she said "I can't, that's as far as I can get back, I'd have to jump" I yelled at her "then you're dead, dead, dead! Do what you have to do to make the distance!". She jumped and suddenly she could maintain the maai.
She was doing exactly what I had taught her for years, but what I taught her was just a movement, perfect or not, it wasn't enough. Good form = fetish. There's nothing wrong with good form, but if your opponent is a foot taller than you and can drive in well, you'd better be concentrating on the maai and not on the kata. Jump, even if you think that's the wrong way to do it.
From "do what you have to" come the changes to your kata that make it "real". Fetishizing the movements simply makes them a distraction to learning the lesson. We came back to "real is what works" later in the class when I couldn't get some of them to begin their iai kata with good posture, or the right starting position. We went to "how do you defeat an iaido technique" and had an unarmed person sit in front of a sword and prevent the swordsman from cutting them. It's not hard if they aren't doing the technique properly. What's proper? That's when they can't be stopped and the cut hits the opponent no matter what they try to do. Funny enough, what works looks just like what I try to teach, but it's a lot easier to get over the fetish of the movement (I'm doing what I was told so I don't have to change anything) when you realize your fetish doesn't work (oops, maybe I wasn't doing what I thought I was doing).
It's why you need to have a teacher, why you need to figure out what actually works. Just because you've always drawn your chalk circles that way doesn't necessarily mean the demon won't find a way out. A kata isn't "the right way" do do a sword technique, it's a classroom where you can go and learn something about timing and distance and moving from the hips and... you really shouldn't make those schoolgirl uniforms a fetish.
A few days ago I was reading a forum thread where a fellow repeatedly stated that he taught self defence and then continued on to make his points, assuming an "expertise by authority of teaching".
Amongst those who teach martial arts, there is likely a majority who also teach "self defence" as a related or separate item from their martial art classes. Let's face it, a "self defence" class is a great way to get new students into the dojo so why not? But are these folks experts on self defence?
Not by a long shot, no more than those who teach photography workshops are expert photographers, or those who teach aerobics are expert exercise physiologists.
It is dangerous for instructors to believe they are experts simply because they instruct. It is dangerous for them to believe this even if they have some sort of certification to teach. After all, most of these things are self-regulated, which means that a few folks who teach something get together, decide on a basic set of "things to know", set themselves up as an accreditation body and proceed to convince health clubs, schools and community centers that their instructors need to be certified.
None of it requires expertise, only promotion and public acceptance of their certification bodies. There is no governmental oversight for most of this accreditation and what there is has nothing to do with declaring expertise, only with ensuring the public isn't abused too badly by such things as lifetime memberships in gyms that last four months.
An expert is someone who does the research, who stays current with the field of experimental ie scientific investigation into their topic. There is a vast and continually growing field of research into assault and resistance to assault which reveals some interesting things about "self defence". Over the years I've acquired the very deep suspicion that most of the martial artists who teach self defence, are unaware of this research. They may be experts at judo or karate or aikido but they aren't experts at self defence. They don't know what works and how best to teach it.
The next time you find somebody saying to you "I teach this stuff and let me tell you..." stop them and ask them what sort of certification they have to teach, and what sort of ongoing research they conduct or courses they take to keep themselves current in developments in their field.
Oh, but self defence is about fighting and I have a high rank (that means I can teach) in a martial art that hasn't changed in hundreds of years so therefore there's nothing else to learn or to keep up with right?
Sooo many things wrong with that sentence.
A couple of things that high ranked martial artists could keep up on:
How to teach
How to teach kids
How to teach adults
How to teach those with disabilities
How to perform their own art at a higher level
How to keep their students safe while practicing (CPR, First Aid, the latest in sprung floors)
All this before they get to self defence instruction.
All the best for the year of the dragon. Here's a drawing from Stephen Cruise, Iaido Eastern Canada bucho and sculptor/artist extraordinaire.
We currently have a full range of sizes in top quality Japanese iaito from 2.3 to 2.6 shaku, in half shaku sizes.
Lots of inventory which means we've got lots of Lauren's university tuition tied up in boxes around the house so feel free to use some of that Christmas Cash. That's the downside of having iaito here to ship to you immediately, it costs us a lot... not that I'm trying to guilt trip you or anything...
We have also ordered a range of sizes (up to 2.6, I'm checking once more about 2.65 or more) of shinken from China and I will let you know when they arrive. In the meantime we have one 2.4 shaku shinken left. This shipment is also going to cost a bundle so if you want to pre-order I will be more than happy to hear from you.
First installment is at: http://ejmas.com/tin/gorinsho/tinart_taylor_1201.html
If anyone wants to have the entire translation right now, I'm happy to provide it in PDF form at its current state (99% done) for $10. Just email me.
Since I try to make a living at this stuff I'm sure I can count on you guys not to create groups to purchase and re-copy it??