This is very apt, HSÂvery apt, especially in the historical setting where the kata were invented. In the original Okinawan setting where Matsumura, Itosu, Azato and other karate pioneers got their skills, the only way any techniques were transmitted was by the kata themselves. The kihon line drills through which virtually everyone in the West who learned MAs in the current era was taughtÂthe bread and butter of dojo/dojang/studio teaching methods everywhereÂwere unknown. From all available accounts, including his own autobiography, Funakoshi's training for the first decade with Itosu consisted solely of practicing the Naihanchi kata set and working out their bunkai (even though Motobu didn't think much of Funakoshi's analysis and suspected that Itosu had withheld the most effective applications from him; but then again, Motobu seems to have loathed GF personally); where else would he have learned his techs from except Naihanchi?Âthat's all he had to work with! And as Abernethy notes, Motobu wrote in Okinawa Kenpo Karate-jutsu that `the Naihanchi, Passai, Chinto and Rohai styles are not left in China today and only remain in Okinawa as active martial arts'. The bolded material makes it pretty clear that these kata were not regarded as `parts' of a martial art, add-ons so to speak, but were thought of as complete stand-alone fighting systems on their own. In a way, `karate' corresonds to a general description (in much the same way that the generic term kung fu covers an enormous variety of specific CMAs regarded by their practitioners as quite different from each other.) And as Burgar points out in his book, `the fact is that before circa 1880 it was the norm for karateka to know a small number of kata. We also know that each master of karate was capable of defending himself. Therefore his one, two or three kata contained all of the knowledge that he would have needed to achieve that goal. This means that each kata (or small group of kata) was a `style' in its own right.' (p. 29). Motobu also mentions in the same 1926 book that `a master usually only had one kata in his style'. All this changed radically when karate was brought to Japan, taught to mass classes as part of a kind of calisthenics and discipline exercise to university students destined for military service, and broken up into individual, isolated techniques unconnected to the application sequences that they were originally constructed to communicate to the learner. That approach was the prototype for the current instructional model. But it's probably possible to reapproach, to some extent anyway, the earlier Okinawan teaching format.
So it seems to be the case that the kata we learn today, which are essentially just variants of the original Okinawan kata, contain the whole content of the fighting system. As Burgar argues at length in his book, they can be used as the entire core curriculum of a martial artÂarts which were indended by their creators to be, first and foremost, effective fighting systems. So a full syllabusÂincluding the use of throws, trapping and locking techs, nicely illustrated for example in Javier Martinez's book Okinawan Karate, which provides a number of photos of Funakoshi, Motobu, Chitose, Konishi and other great practitioners performing these techs both on their own and also in tandem with strikesÂis already present in the kata.
One of the problems I see in current TKD is the backfeed from Olympic practice into training; a lot of time is spent drilling high, complex kicks, often with spins, that literally do not exist in any of the hyungs. People with heavy street-fighting/security work experience, such as Peyton Quinn, Loren Christensen, Geoff Thompson and Lawrence Kane, are unanimous in rejecting high complex kicks as practical street defense; as Gm. Pelligrini commented at one point in the seminar he gave this past weekend, when you're fighting at close quarters, which is where fights actually start, you simply cannot execute these kinds of kicksÂyou have no room! High kicks themselves are great for balance training; I do them (well, as high as as I can manage!) several hours a week. But the kicks that the hyungs themselves depict are typically middle or low kicks, and in realistic bunkai, of the kind that Stuart Anslow and especially Simon O'Neil offer, are unbalancing techniques, inflicting lower body limb damage, setting up the finishing strikes which are almost always hand/forearm/elbow techs. Competitors in poomsae competitions have been steadily increasing their height under the impression that higher is better, which doesn't always sit well with knowledgeable judges, according to my instructor. To the extent that training is going to be practical for street defense, it will look much more like kata/hyung-based techniques than sport-based, and one way to implement this would be to follow Abernethy's and Burgar's ideas about curriculum and make kata/hyung much more the basis of technical instruction than they currently seem to be.
Absolutely. One problem with practicing forms with this intent is worrying too much about how `pretty' the form looks when you do it. That I think interferes with training for effective application. It's like skiers who worry about keeping their skis locked together as though they were a snowboard, to create a `pretty' visual effect, when in fact stepping moves to correct your line and position yourself high in the gate are one of the three or four most important components of modern racing technique. Burgar and Abernethy both advise practicing kata as though you were applying the techs of each subsequence against an actual attacker engaged in as lifelike an assault as you can visualize, continuously until they become more like conditioned reflexes than the dancelike movements they start out as.
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