TimoS is correct. All the Abernathy's, McCarthy's, Clayton's, etc. are doing one heck of a lot of speculation and asking people to take it as gospel.
Well, let's see. I've written IA and asked him about his sources. It may well be that he has some good reason for assertions he makes here. I've notice that in a lot of his writing he's careful to qualify his statements when matters are uncertain or the facts are incomplete. He
could be speculating; but he might also be relying on the work of someone like Harry Cook, which would be a different thing entirely. I think it would wise to wait until there's some data on the point—which I hope will be forthcoming before too long—before deciding that IA's point of view can't possibly have any basis.
Probably because they understand that you can't learn bunkai from books and tapes and they understand that there is some dignity and uniqueness to their arts that is above just tossing it out there for any wannabee to play with. Ya' reckon?
What
I reckon is that while you can't learn
everything about bunkai from books and tapes, you can certainly learn a different way of
thinking about them, by seeing 'worked examples' and getting some idea of the kind of logic that people are applying in coming up with interpretations of bunkai that are so different from the standard Itosu-packaging which has diffused into the Japanese and Korean developments of karate. It's like saying, you can't learn calculus from a book. But then why does virtually everyone who teaches calculus have a favored textbook, which invariable contains, in each chapter, both a general discussion of methods and a series of carefully worked out examples which give you illustrations of how you need to
think about the problems presented, to render them solvable? So far as I can see, that's exactly what people like Abernethy, Clark, Burgar and the other people who work in this relatively new tradition do—they present what is, for many people in the MAs, a novel way of viewing the familiar but often badly understood phenomenon of forms, via a series of concrete example of how those forms encode practical information about combat strategy and tactics, in a way that many students of the MAs have not been exposed to. Exactly what is
wrong with that?
I find it interesting that most of the people in this discussion do not train in karate. I don't go onto TKD or Arnis threads and try to talk knowledgeably. I guess that is the custom on this forum.
Well, I would welcome nothing more than some participation, in many of our TKD and KMA discussions, of a few karateka with background in Okinwan systems, as an antidote to the often toxic insularity and myth-recycling that goes on there. We have more than a few people in the KMAs—UpN will bear me out on this, I'm quite sure!—who simply cannot believe that TKD and TSD didn't spring out of the soil of the Korean peninsula fully formed and independent of all other influences, in spite of the known history of the modern KMAs. I certainly wouldn't dream of trying to discourage the participation of an OMA or FMA practitioner who might well be able to shed some light on the issues under discussion. If what someone is saying is wrong, fine, invoke the relevant facts to show why they're wrong. But I think it's a serious error to assume in advance that people who have experience primarily in one art have nothing to say of use in understanding either the technical or historical aspects of other arts.
Probably the single best piece of writing on the subject of Shakespeare's
Hamlet, certainly
one of the very best, came from the pen of someone who wasn't even a Shakepeare scholar. H.D.F. Kitto was an Oxford classical scholar who wrote a brilliant set of essays on Greek tragedy; but the final essay in his book wasn't about Sophocles or Aeschylus, but about
Hamlet, and it was a real watershed. He was able to make a great deal of sense out of aspects of the play that had been regarded as cruxes—things that supposedly made no sense—by proposing a novel view of the play as an expression, in Elizabethan England, of certain themes that were at the heart of ancient Greek literature. From everything I heard about it, his essay had a great impact on Shakespeare scholarship. Not once, if I recall, did anyone respond to Kitto's novel interpretation by saying, 'Pay no attention to this chap, he's a classicist.'
