Thank you Chinto for your input.
Thank you Chinto for your input.
kidswarrior
Senior Master
Very incisive, Jade Tigress! Every time I do one of my forms with intentionality (including every time I teach them), it seems another possible application/principle pops up. Most of these fall under the category of mid- to short-range fighting, e.g., an elbow strike can also be seen as a headlock and take down, ala shuai jiao; an up block becomes a strike to the throat. How would those moves not be combat worthy?
And please bear in mind, I HATED forms for years. As an old boxer, and with very superficial instruction in forms' actual fighting usefulness, it took a long time for me to come to this view.
Flying Crane
Sr. Grandmaster
Very good observation.
We have a move that pops up a lot in our White Crane forms. I have always viewed it as a devastating strike, which it is. But I was having a discussion with my sifu not long ago and suddenly it became clear to me that this same movement could be applied as a nasty joint lock and destruction. Amazing how the same movement can have such polar opposite applications.
I think often movements in kata are deliberately "vague", because this leaves the door open to many more interpretations. If the movement is too precise and specified then it gets pigeon-holed into one interpretation. But if the movement is vague enough to suggest several applications then you can get much more mileage out of less material. This also means that the movement itself may not be useful exactly as it appears in the form. Instead, you need to understand that it requires a slight modification to be actually used. But with the right adjustment, it could be used many different ways. As long as you know this, you can make that connection.
I think keeping the movement somewhat vague also keeps the application hidden from observers. If you aren't taught how to analyze the movement, then you are just mimicking without understanding. This ensures your enemies cannot steal your material by spying on you. They don't understand how to interpret what you are doing. But if you understand it, then you know how a "vague" and suggestive movement from a kata might require a slight modification to make it useful. But as you are practicing the form, you keep these various interpretations in mind and you know you could be doing several different techniques with just this one movement.
Quite right, FC and well done to Kds for bringing out JT's point - I'd missed that one somehow (which is ironic as it is almost concept for concept how I used to explain (in the days when I did empty-hand stuff) why kata was important).
I've recently started being trained in the final forms of MJER and they are not only much more flowing and multi-techniqued than the earlier forms but also have in them many more 'decision points' - positions from which your action is not limited to just the one move.
Each kata has a proscribed series of techniques in them that defines the boundaries of the kata but if properly taught it is made clear that what you would do under a given circumstance depends entirely on what your opponent is doing.
That is why visualisation is so deeply important to kata training because if you just learn the moves of the kata without getting 'inside' it then you have really not learned much at all. I remain convinced that the reason why we have so many kata-haters in the MA world is that they have not been led through the envelope of the physical moves into the mindset that underpins them.
I've recently started being trained in the final forms of MJER and they are not only much more flowing and multi-techniqued than the earlier forms but also have in them many more 'decision points' - positions from which your action is not limited to just the one move.
Each kata has a proscribed series of techniques in them that defines the boundaries of the kata but if properly taught it is made clear that what you would do under a given circumstance depends entirely on what your opponent is doing.
That is why visualisation is so deeply important to kata training because if you just learn the moves of the kata without getting 'inside' it then you have really not learned much at all. I remain convinced that the reason why we have so many kata-haters in the MA world is that they have not been led through the envelope of the physical moves into the mindset that underpins them.
kidswarrior
Senior Master
Excellent point!
A 'textbook' that is deliberately left vague in spots, or maybe even ambiguous, so that the 'reader' can render his or her own interpretation--or perhaps better, see the possibility of many interpretations.
'Decision points' and 'visualization'...Along with FC's point of 'deliberate vagueness', think I've just increased my understanding exponentially. Thanks, Gents.Sukerkin said:
You're more than welcome, my friend :rei:. I'm always glad when it seems that I've made coherent sense for a change 
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
I cannot agree more with this position. My teacher requires high ranked students to basically 'pick apart' the forms to find different variations of the techniques. As you say it, in all likelihood, requires a re-interpretation of the movement into and out of the technique.
I have always stressed the importance of 'seeing' the technique as it is performed within a form. Without this visualisation I have found students lose focus in the techniques. That is to say (and I suspect others have seen this) the technique does not flow completely through the arm or leg so that the hand or foot just sort of dangles on the end.
Lack of understanding is most definitely the greatest reason for people hating forms. And I agree it is because they have not been shown the depth associated with the actions they are performing.
Flying Crane
Sr. Grandmaster
Yeah, complete agreement.
I was teaching some beginners a basic Tai Chi sword pattern. The form flows from a thrust immediately to a horizontal cut to the left, without repositioning or withdrawing to set up. The students were sort of stumbling over this, finding the transition awkward. So I told them: "look, this stuff used to be for real, these were real fighting techniques. So think about it this way, you gotta ask yourself what the movement is for. If you thrust at my face, what if I evade to the side and your thrust goes past my head? You immediately transition into the horizontal cut and you cut my throat." And I demonstrated what I meant. I could actually see the lightbulbs go on in their heads, once they had a visual on what the movement could be used for.
I do this with many of the movements in the form. This thrust backwards is if an enemy is chasing you and you stab him thru the foot. This flick back is a hacking cut to the femoral artery or the groin. This high stab downward is stabbing over an enemy's shield or other blocking tool. This weird circular movement is a deflection of an enemy's weapon, you redirect and ride his weapon past your body leaving his guard open, then come back and thrust him thru the gut. Stuff like that. Give them something to identify the movement with, and suddenly it makes a lot of sense and their performance of the form improves because it takes on a real meaning. Later they can begin working on other interpretations, but at least in the beginning they have something concrete to grasp and put some sense into the exercise.
But yeah, that visual while you practice the form is very very important. It makes the difference between performing a live form vs a dead exercise.
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
I have emphasised two similar points which I think go to the heart of skill in kata and forms. If you don't have a sense of what the movement is for you will never be able to use it properly and you may as well be doing ballet, or modern Wushu.
Everyone has been making really excellent points about the nature of the content, concealed like a treasure within a locked chest, that is waiting to be revealed in the explication of kata movements in terms of most economical, most effective responses to standard attack scenarios. And once that content, the set of most effective combat applications, has been discovered, it becomes both possible and necessary, as Steel_Tiger undescores, to practice the kata as a linked sequence of self-defense scenarios, and to visualize the kata movements as the execution of combat moves, with the kata comprising maybe four to six such scenarios, one outlining a response to a grab from in front, another a response to a grab from behind, still another a response to roundhouse punch to the jaw. Bill Burgar's excellent book, Five Years, One Kata has a whole chapter devoted to visualization of kata application and how to develop increasingly vivid and realistic mental imaging of the attack and defense components of the scenario. But there's just one problem...
... exactly what is the key to the lock in that treasure chest? The Japanese term, kaisai no genri, denotes the theory of kata decoding—the method for going from a kata's movement description to a set of combatively sound interpretations of those movements as fighting moves. But how do we get there? There is some excellent literature now on bunkai interpretation, on what the kaisai no genri actually is: Abernethy's now-classic work, the even-more-classic detailed studies of individual kihon techs and their combat applications by Rick Clarke (75 Down Blocks, and he's not kidding!—basically, one down block and 75 different combat applications for this simple, most basic kihon movement); and there's comparable work now coming out on TKD (from, most interestingly, the UK again...something about the Kingdom by the Sea that encourages people to think hard and realistically about combat unpleasantness... could it be having to worry about the next damn' wave of invaders from across the Channel? Or the nastiness of having to be the avant-guard of Industrial Revolution urbanization, with the hellish social conditions and violence that brought about? Alas, we shall probably never know... where was I? ...??) But there are two serious problems we seekers after the Great Answer to the Kata Problem have:
(i) the classic karate katas, the source of virtually all of the forms in the karate-based arts (including those of the Korean peninsula) are fighting forms recorded in the Okinawan kata more than a century ago, in a context when certain techniques and methods of response to an attack were taken for granted and didn't have to be built into the kata explicitly. I suspect those of us in the CMAs have a particularly vivid sense of just how much certain moves, or tactical interpolations, were taken for granted (e.g., a punch is roughly deflected by a slap, not actually present in the hsing, so that although thrown perpendicular to the attacker, it winds up moving across the attacker's body and so can be trapped by the `rear' hand, while the forward hand/arm moves in to execute the finishing destructive strike to the throat, neck, temple or face.) Since these techs (recalled on an idiosyncratic basis by now-ancient MA pioneers in interviews and so on) were simply part of the culture of the fighting arts of the time, we aren't necessarily ever going to see them overtly in kata. But if they're there, we need to be able to read the kata in light of them. That's why people talk about `hidden moves' in kata bunkai: the number of techs a kata corresponds to is greater than the number of movements in the kata itself. But how do we know what these hidden moves are, or whether or not we're just making up stuff because this `lost' culture of assumed techniques can always be called on to justify our attempts to make sense of seemingly bizarre move (`yes, taken literally it's hard to see a combat application for this move Y, but if we can just agree that a certain other move X was interpolated at this point, then the existence of X preceding Y makes Y completely sensible', blah blah blah)? The problem is, you can always do that—you can always assume a hidden move that makes sense of a seemingly nonsensical kata movement. In othe words, you can assume that every movement in a kata has combat significance, just as Iain Abernethy, Kris Wilder & Lawrence Kane and many others—whom I revere—have said. But suppose you (and they) are wrong? And this brings up point (ii):
(ii) What happens when you see a move that seems to make no sense, in terms of the kind of transaction we expect in physically violent combat? One possibility is that there are hidden moves, along the lines described in (i), reflecting a common language and understanding of combat that will remain unintelligle to us until economically realistic time travel comes into existence. But what if some of the moves we see in the kata we learned reflect either misinterpretations by someone up the line in our instructors' lineages, or, even more pernicious, a deliberated distortion of the intended technique brought about by the desire of the karate/CMA pioneers to conceal their techs, even unto the point of, in effect, lying about what you were supposed to be doing at this particular point? So, for example, I've seen 360Āŗ turns in kata and hyungs that made no sense to me. Are they supposed to correspond to throws—but then, how plausible is a throw which require you to turn completely around? Are they stylized moves introduced by someone along the line for Ʀsthetic reasons? How could we be sure? And so on...
(ii) What happens when you see a move that seems to make no sense, in terms of the kind of transaction we expect in physically violent combat? One possibility is that there are hidden moves, along the lines described in (i), reflecting a common language and understanding of combat that will remain unintelligle to us until economically realistic time travel comes into existence. But what if some of the moves we see in the kata we learned reflect either misinterpretations by someone up the line in our instructors' lineages, or, even more pernicious, a deliberated distortion of the intended technique brought about by the desire of the karate/CMA pioneers to conceal their techs, even unto the point of, in effect, lying about what you were supposed to be doing at this particular point? So, for example, I've seen 360Āŗ turns in kata and hyungs that made no sense to me. Are they supposed to correspond to throws—but then, how plausible is a throw which require you to turn completely around? Are they stylized moves introduced by someone along the line for Ʀsthetic reasons? How could we be sure? And so on...
There's actually a third problem:
(iii) keeping it simple, and assuming that there are no hidden moves and that the kata hasn't undergone revision for, um, `artistic' purposes, what are the limits we should adhere to in `parsing' a form? If we see a sequence of moves, call it X, on the left side followed by a 180Āŗ turn and a mirror image of X, call it X', on the right side, should we assume that the point of X' in the kata is simply to train the same moves, whatever they are, on the other side of the body? That makes sense, but it's also quite possible that X' is actually a continuation of X, with the 180Āŗ turn corresponding to a throw—that X and X' don't represent two different lateralizations of the same combat scenario, but rather that X-X' is a single, longish combat sequence. That sort of problem... what are the guidelines for parsing a given kata into its combat subsequences?
I think of (i)/(ii) as the latitude problem (how much freedom do we have in reimaging the form of the kata itself—in effect, subtracting or adding moves, based on, respectively, interpreting the former as involving combat-irrelevant modification, and the latter as requiring the interpolation of `hidden' moves that were well understood to be necessary at an earlier time) and (iii) as the parsing problem (how do we know which moves to `compact' together to form a single complete fighting sequence, i.e., taking from initial attack to effective disabling of the attacker?)
We need some answers to these questions if we're to have real confidence in our analyses of the combat intepretation of kata....
As ever, my friend, you posit a thought process that goes to the core of things.
For some arts, answering these questions is harder than for others and a lot of that comes from lineage ("I know, I know!" I cry as I duck hurled rotten fruit
) and the experience of your sensei.
For me, for example, in my JSA, I am only two steps removed from someone who actually has used their katana in warfare. Thus, they taught my sensei who teaches me.
He is very much aware of how techniques can become corrupted over time and takes pains to explain that varying the parameters of a kata are acceptable between this point and that point but where you are aiming for is this point i.e. he is trying to instill in us the snapshot of the kata in context.
I have seen for myself, in just the past five years, how martial arts organisations can change things by decree from how they once were (or how misinterpretation of aging sensei's physical limitations can cause their proteges to misinterpret what a kata's form should be). I've had to learn a couple of 'versions' of a kata because of this.
Fortunately, as I've mentioned before, sensei's philosophy on teaching is that we learn things his way but if we are under the tuition of others who want it another way then do it their way - but do not lose sight of what you have already been taught. It's a bit Borg-like I suppose as it subsumes that you add their variations to your technique tool-box. In the end it's your skill with the sword that counts.
Given the above, I'm very glad that I practice a koryu art, one in which the information has largely been preserved intact. For others, with less certain 'ancestry', I can only extend my sympathy in the task of striving to get 'inside' the kata - it's so much harder without a living tradition to try and interpret the why's and wherefores
.
For some arts, answering these questions is harder than for others and a lot of that comes from lineage ("I know, I know!" I cry as I duck hurled rotten fruit
) and the experience of your sensei.For me, for example, in my JSA, I am only two steps removed from someone who actually has used their katana in warfare. Thus, they taught my sensei who teaches me.
He is very much aware of how techniques can become corrupted over time and takes pains to explain that varying the parameters of a kata are acceptable between this point and that point but where you are aiming for is this point i.e. he is trying to instill in us the snapshot of the kata in context.
I have seen for myself, in just the past five years, how martial arts organisations can change things by decree from how they once were (or how misinterpretation of aging sensei's physical limitations can cause their proteges to misinterpret what a kata's form should be). I've had to learn a couple of 'versions' of a kata because of this.
Fortunately, as I've mentioned before, sensei's philosophy on teaching is that we learn things his way but if we are under the tuition of others who want it another way then do it their way - but do not lose sight of what you have already been taught. It's a bit Borg-like I suppose as it subsumes that you add their variations to your technique tool-box
. In the end it's your skill with the sword that counts.Given the above, I'm very glad that I practice a koryu art, one in which the information has largely been preserved intact. For others, with less certain 'ancestry', I can only extend my sympathy in the task of striving to get 'inside' the kata - it's so much harder without a living tradition to try and interpret the why's and wherefores
.
chinto
Senior Master
I have to agree in general it is the lack of understanding of what kata is there to show you and teach you that is the basis of their dislike and even hatered of kata.
For some arts, answering these questions is harder than for others and a lot of that comes from lineage ("I know, I know!" I cry as I duck hurled rotten fruit
No, S., I don't think you're going to get too many objections to that point! The fact is, for karate, say, a lineage whereby your instructor studied with a senior student of a currently living Okinawan master (whose own lineage is rooted firmly in the indigenous Okinawan karate elite) is probably as good a guarantee as we're going to get that the bunkai you've learned, and the method of analysis, is sound. Not that other interpretations might not work, but you, by virtue of your lineage, are probably going to be better fixed to understand the sound applications of, say, the Pinan katas than most KMA people are, so far as the `cognate' Pyung-Ahn hyungs are concerned... simply because there's good reason to believe that the Kwan founders were not given the deepest bunkai interpretations, a point that Jay Penfil and Rob Rivers have made in great detail in various threads in the Tang Soo Do forum. As a KMAist, I'm painfully aware of the disconnection between our hyungs, on the one hand, and their Okinawan source (which in many cases give rise to the KMA forms via a kind of mixmastering of elements from different katas, or even kata sets). After all, reverse engineering (of the kind that kata interpreation after the fact consists of) is all the better when the blueprints are free of error.... I have to say that I greatly envy our colleagues in Okinawan karate, who probably have less to worry about so far as both the lattitude problem and the parsing problem are concerned, since they have a pretty direct line to the `horse's mouth'.
Right, that's the sort of thing I'm thinking of in connection with the KMAs as diluted versions of JMAs, which, so far as karate is concerned, is a diluted version of OMAs... at each step, certain knowledge, the priceless oral transmission, is attenuated and probably many critical cases extinguished completely, and you're left with reverse engineering guidelines which you have to apply to kata that themselves have quite possibly been seriously distorted in transmission.
Now imagine that instead of a particular ryu calling the shots, you have a huge supranational agency which is nominally a Korean organization but which in fact is the Olympic regulatory agency for TKD worldwide, basing its decisions about what is competitively valid on both nationalist and international sports-politics considerations, and where the technical/curricuar oversight group and the sport-competitive group share building space and are, in the end, both answerable to the same group of MA apparatchiks in the RoK government, and you have some idea of the problem facing people in TKD, say, who've seen the Pyung-Ahns (corresponding to the O/J Pinans) replaced by the Palgwes, themselves in turn replaced by the Taegeuks, with no consultation whatsoever with the TKD `grassroots' across the world, and you can get a sense of how lucky you are!
Fortunately, as I've mentioned before, sensei's philosophy on teaching is that we learn things his way but if we are under the tuition of others who want it another way then do it their way - but do not lose sight of what you have already been taught. It's a bit Borg-like I suppose as it subsumes that you add their variations to your technique tool-box
Given the above, I'm very glad that I practice a koryu art, one in which the information has largely been preserved intact. For others, with less certain 'ancestry', I can only extend my sympathy in the task of striving to get 'inside' the kata - it's so much harder without a living tradition to try and interpret the why's and wherefores
As you can see, there's very little in what you're saying that I disagree with. The bolded part says it all.
The problem that karateka face in general is this reverse engineering task, which becomes more acute as you proceed from Okinawa to Japan to Korea. There's some reason to believe that the original Okinawan form of kata practice involved a partner—a uke/tori pairing with the kata therefore `compiled out' into the drills of the subsequences that each kata comprises, correspnding to a different scenario based on a different form of attack (this is repeatedly emphasized in Gennosuke Higaki's Hidden Karate: the True Bunkai for the Heian Katas and Naihanchi. Higaki is a senior student of Shozan Kubota, himself a senior student of both Kenwa Mabuni and Gichin Funakoshi, who are the ultimate source of much of the information in Higaki's book. It appears that the kind of live `oyo' training under intense SD assumptions that people like Abernethy have established as the final stage of the `bunkai-jutsu' karate curriculum was the norm in early karate training, where (strictly) verbal instruction would make it explicit to uke and tori just what interpretation should be given to the relevant subportion of the kata. But the big question for those of us not fortunate to have a direct link to correct combat applications (as in the kind of JSA you study) or even an indirect link (as is more likely the case for strictly Okinawan forms of karate) is, what is the best way for us to proceed in interpreting our forms, so that we reinstate necessary material that was dropped or altered in the historical transmission, without in effect alterning the kata into something seems to make sense, just because we've missed the proper bunkai for it....
I personally would really be interested in the input of Mssrs. Penfil and Rivers, and of Upnorthkyosa as well... all of them have knowledge both of the KMAs (especially the relatively `conservative' Tang Soo Do, which has altered from the original kwan form much less than the Olympic style of TKD represented by the WTF/KKW TKD directorate) and of Okinawan karate kata and their bunkai. But I think it's true for the karate-based MAs in general that we badly need a both a good understanding of the Okinawan kata and a detailed knowledge of the history that led from these kata to the currently practiced forms in both the JMAs and TMAs that are the descendents of these original Okinawan forms....
Flying Crane
Sr. Grandmaster
youch!
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
I have been thinking about this for a little while now. It is the concept of reverse engineering katas and forms to find their essence. Let me make a slight detour, it will make sense, I promise.
My field of study is Mesoamerican cultures, those of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, etc. When the Spanish arrived in that part of the world they brought with them priests of the Jesuit sect. These priests took one look at the native texts and decided they were inspired by Satan and had the vast majority burned (the estimate is 75%). The Spanish then set about changing the essential nature of the culture to something they understood and, thus, could control.
Five hundred years later people like myself come along to look at the native culture and cannot find it. We have to reconstruct it from what little we know. So, we have primary or secondary evidence for the Aztecs, but what do we do about the Toltecs, Teotihuacanos and Olmecs? Well, we create a model from the Aztec culture and project it back into prehistory.
It creates a problem. For the last sixty years we have followed this process and the result is an understanding of the older cultures but tempered by the knowledge that they were probably not as similar to the Aztecs as our models suggest. This is a big problem with reverse engineering.
So when looking at forms and kata that we have today and wanting to know the original essence or even shape of them we have to be wary of the parameters that we choose to use for the exploration. Exile has put forward two broad parameters - latitude and parsing which are a strong point to start from, but what we are seeking to discover is the in-between, the oral transmissions, the assumed knowledge, and we have to be careful as to how we seek it or our interpretations will the Aztecs and not the Teotihuacanos.
My field of study is Mesoamerican cultures, those of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, etc. When the Spanish arrived in that part of the world they brought with them priests of the Jesuit sect. These priests took one look at the native texts and decided they were inspired by Satan and had the vast majority burned (the estimate is 75%). The Spanish then set about changing the essential nature of the culture to something they understood and, thus, could control.
Five hundred years later people like myself come along to look at the native culture and cannot find it. We have to reconstruct it from what little we know. So, we have primary or secondary evidence for the Aztecs, but what do we do about the Toltecs, Teotihuacanos and Olmecs? Well, we create a model from the Aztec culture and project it back into prehistory.
It creates a problem. For the last sixty years we have followed this process and the result is an understanding of the older cultures but tempered by the knowledge that they were probably not as similar to the Aztecs as our models suggest. This is a big problem with reverse engineering.
So when looking at forms and kata that we have today and wanting to know the original essence or even shape of them we have to be wary of the parameters that we choose to use for the exploration. Exile has put forward two broad parameters - latitude and parsing which are a strong point to start from, but what we are seeking to discover is the in-between, the oral transmissions, the assumed knowledge, and we have to be careful as to how we seek it or our interpretations will the Aztecs and not the Teotihuacanos.
Flying Crane
Sr. Grandmaster
Interesting point. I will suggest that if it is impossible to know what the original essense or shape of them was, is it not valid to develop a new understanding, so long as it is effective? You may still devise effective and useful techniques from the kata, even if they are not exactly like the original methods that earlier generations had in mind. In short, maybe in their own way the Aztecs are just as good as the Teotihuacanos...
Interesting to find an Aussie who is interested North and Central American archaeology. I suppose I'm stereotyping, but I just would not have expected that...
Flying Crane
Sr. Grandmaster
I had sort of heard of this, actually. I don't know much about what actually happened, but how did the new forms get disbursed among the teachers? How did they learn them, in a timely fashion to begin teaching them? It always takes me at least a few years before I feel I understand a form well enough to even consider that I might teach it to someone else.
I had also heard that these newer series of forms were much simplified, with little depth, and they were sort of thrown together with little consideration. Rather, my impression was that they really were simply "TKD dances", done more for the sake of having their own series of forms and less for any real learning that they would provide the student. They got listed in the curriculum, but in reality you could do without them and not be missing much.
Is this an accurate assessment? I'd appreciate any clarification from the TKD folks. Thx!
Steel Tiger
Senior Master
Interesting point. I will suggest that if it is impossible to know what the original essense or shape of them was, is it not valid to develop a new understanding, so long as it is effective? You may still devise effective and useful techniques from the kata, even if they are not exactly like the original methods that earlier generations had in mind. In short, maybe in their own way the Aztecs are just as good as the Teotihuacanos...
Interesting to find an Aussie who is interested North and Central American archaeology. I suppose I'm stereotyping, but I just would not have expected that...
I agree it is perfectly valid to develop a new understanding if the original is lost. This may have to be the position we have to take with regard to the older kata. You can only interpret what you have, the rest is extrapolation.
One thing is for certain the old masters are not the only people who can or could develop effective techniques. It is the nature of assumed knowledge and implicit understanding that has us chasing back to the originator of the kata. Consequently, those studying Okinawan arts have an easier time than those studying the older aspects of Karate and TKD, because they have a more direct line to the origin.
As to your stereotyping of Aussies, well most do work in Australian archaeology, but from the first time I saw Teotihuacano architecture 20 years ago I was hooked. And it has spread. I have an interest in the native cultures of North America and their origins. a particular interest in the paleo-indian period (Clovis points and all that).
Damn, I wish I could stay with this thread, it's getting more and more interesting all the time... unusual, for an internet discussion! But we're heading out tomorrow at first light or so for Buffalo for the Meet and Greet... if only we could all be there in person, to continue the discussion over our favorite tipple... one day, maybe... meanwhile, I'll be back on Sunday and will try to catch up and pick up some of these great points and comparisons you chaps are making. Have a great weakend, and let the conversation roll on!
Flying Crane
Sr. Grandmaster
Very cool. I don't have any training in this stuff, but I've also found myself intrigued by these topics. I've felt the same way about Australian Aboriginal groups as well. I haven't had any opportunity to study these topics in any meaningful way, tho.
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