Uselessness of kata in the real world!
- Thread starter scottie
- Start date
Mmm. Kinda like China calling itself communist?
Wow! Mr. Boke . You must be One leg Martial Arts expert!
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Didn't pizza originate in China?
My good friend is from Taiwan, he loves to jive me about white people stealing stuff from other cultures. I then point out that he's wearing camouflage and drinking a Budweiser. That's usually when he tells me to shut up round eye!
Good times.
My good friend is from Taiwan, he loves to jive me about white people stealing stuff from other cultures. I then point out that he's wearing camouflage and drinking a Budweiser. That's usually when he tells me to shut up round eye!
Good times.
SirKicksAlot
Yellow Belt
I think you are thinking of spaghetti noodles.
I prefer to use the term "form" instead of "Kata". In online discussion, I try to use the translation term. For example, I'll use the term:
- "Chinese wrestling" instead of "Shuai Chiao (or Shuai Jiao)".
- "long fist" instead of "Chang Quan".
I will never use Chinese terms (without translation) or Japanese terms. If I can make one person to avoid online translation, I'm doing the right thing.
Form is to record information and for teaching and learning only. Form is not for training. You should train drill. You should not train form.
A form is like a paragraph. It may contain sentences such as: "This is a book. Boy love girl. One should not steal". There exist no logic connection between book and Boy, girl and One. To train this form 10 times is the same as to train "This is a book" 10 times, "Boy love girl" 10 times, and "One should not steal" 10 times.
I don't train form. I train combo. I may divide a form into 10 combos. I then drill each combo 20 times.
Here are examples of combo train (not form training).
A form is like a paragraph. It may contain sentences such as: "This is a book. Boy love girl. One should not steal". There exist no logic connection between book and Boy, girl and One. To train this form 10 times is the same as to train "This is a book" 10 times, "Boy love girl" 10 times, and "One should not steal" 10 times.
I don't train form. I train combo. I may divide a form into 10 combos. I then drill each combo 20 times.
Here are examples of combo train (not form training).
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Do people know there are 3 ways to do form?
You do for:
1. combat - you punch out fast and pull back fast.
2. performance - you punch out fast and then freeze your punch in the thin air.
3. health - you punch out slow (with slow exhale) and pull back fast (with fast inhale). The slow exhale and fast inhale seems to work with swimming.
You do for:
1. combat - you punch out fast and pull back fast.
2. performance - you punch out fast and then freeze your punch in the thin air.
3. health - you punch out slow (with slow exhale) and pull back fast (with fast inhale). The slow exhale and fast inhale seems to work with swimming.
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Same Trick
Purple Belt
Ha, you’re jealous of the traditional Japanese karate kata champ !
Same Trick
Purple Belt
Akuma is actually a demonic entity in Japanese folklore, a master of disaster, just as the Akuma of this thread is with his Kata knowledge - a disasterNow I remember the name.
You're that character from Super Street Fighter II
Akuma
Akuma is a character and recurring antagonist of the Street Fighter series, first appearing in Super Street Fighter II Turbo as a hidden boss. He is an emotionless and powerful warrior fixated on mastering the Satsui no Hado. Akuma is a cold and extremely powerful warrior whose sole reason for...nintendo.fandom.com
Sammy Naur
Green Belt
So it could be Satan. Ok that makes sense, but Akuma from SF2 is also very antagonistic.
Given the age I'm going to put my money on SF2 player and not someone well versed in ancient Japanese demons, but who knows.
Same Trick
Purple Belt
I suspect that Akuma of this thread has a parallel account on this forum, another username, there’s some similarities in their writings, and both seem to like manga/anime/(japanese computer games ?)
Just a hunch
Prince_Alarming
Brown Belt
IMO kata is useful in a fight once you learn how to b*st*rdise it effectively. If you shorten the movements, treat the kata itself as a perfect template which will not transfer to reality unless you get to play around with it when you actually get to scrapping.
To a degree, but often this is interpreted a bit too widely. The kata movements are concrete examples of principles which work in their own right. A bit like 1 +1 = 2, it does not define summation, but it's a well working example. Obviously they will need to be adapted to the anatomy and differences of the opponents, but say a leg sweep is a leg sweep, or a spin throw is a spin throw.
The difficult bit with kata is to discern what details are essential and what are just incidental, which can be done only finding the intended context a movement was made for and find what's the essence that makes it work in that context. And this is very hard when often one doesn't have a clue about that context in the first place.
Funny revived thread in any case
SirKicksAlot
Yellow Belt
I sometimes wonder about this. If we don't know the actual intended moves of a kata, why practice them? We can and have, of course, imposed moves we think they are meant to demonstrate, but it is just an intelligent guess. It is like a future person finding the card game UNO without the directions and just guessing how it is played. At that point, only the cards (kata moves) are being preserved, not the game (intended moves). Granted you can make up a new game with UNO cards, but you will never actually know what UNO is. I feel this is the way with kata.
Well, most of what we call knowledge are intelligent guesses, which survive experiment. There's nothing particularly special with kata understanding. Some things, we are told. Some others, we observe, make hypotheses on and experiment, finding a predictive theory, which we then verify.
For katas is very often possible because they're relatively new stuff, made by human people, we know the general idea of application (combat), and we can to a great degree peel off the layers of misunderstanding and disinformation because we know pretty much when and how it began happening. To make an example, fantasy swords can be completely useless because nobody actually uses them.
The game of Uno is much more arbitrary and simple and would be much harder to decode from nothing (even though once one's got the key idea..). Occam razor's also helps: if one agrees that kata was born from actual, selective experience (in evolutionary terms), it would rapidly be reduced to the simplest form achievable with the means of the time.
To make another example, Champollion did it with far less for hieroglyphs, which nobody alive had been able to read for thousands of years. He did it by looking at patterns, using the knowledge he had of the rosetta stone, making hypotheses, validate them and then trying to apply them to stuff he hadn't seen yet.. and it worked.
In other words, the fact that many people don't have a clue of what the context of kata was, doesn't mean it's not possible to know. It just means that not many yet take the time and effort to drop their preconceptions and trace the history we know of and take the consequences (sadly, the same happens in all courses of life).
And even if some do, the information is not yet disseminated enough yet to become common knowledge.
Actually, often this process is actively countered, because there's already a "common knowledge" and not enough selective pressure to dislodge it (since combat is a very rare occurrence nowadays, so it matters little if interpretations are correct or not).
And finally, there is a huge selective force - money - that pushes in the direction of keeping alive the current idea of context, which makes kata hard to understand.
Imagine commercial interests pushing for a completely different game than Uno but using the same cards, and lots of people invested in playing it. Even knowing the original rules, you would have a hard time getting them out.
In practice, once you realize karate is a set of ideas to deal with close-range confrontations (because these are the confrontations that happened, and still happen, for which we know karate was designed.. exactly like we knew that hieroglyphs were for writing, not just art), without requiring youth, incredible athletic skills and has to be relatively simple, you have most if not all of your context.
Then you observe the katas - as many as you can - and find patterns and ideas that seem to work in that context - where "work" means surviving an encounter with attackers by quickly disabling them. Then you deduce the principles - which must match what you have observed. Here we are aided by the Rosetta stone of texts, writing and direct and indirect comments of people who lived when the art was actually applied and under selective pressure.
Then you put katas and principles together and come up with ideas, putting them to the test, hard - meaning with multiple situations and levels of intensity. Most often only one will actually "work" consistently, in realistic conditions. If there's more than one, you keep looking at situations and find if one works significantly better than the other, or you can apply Occam's razor - if there's a simpler way to achieve the same aim, then the one you're looking at ain't it.
Sometimes one won't manage at all and then yes, that bit of kata is truly lost (that is, maybe until someone more brilliant comes along) but most often you can.
It can be done, it's just that not many do it.
For katas is very often possible because they're relatively new stuff, made by human people, we know the general idea of application (combat), and we can to a great degree peel off the layers of misunderstanding and disinformation because we know pretty much when and how it began happening. To make an example, fantasy swords can be completely useless because nobody actually uses them.
The game of Uno is much more arbitrary and simple and would be much harder to decode from nothing (even though once one's got the key idea..). Occam razor's also helps: if one agrees that kata was born from actual, selective experience (in evolutionary terms), it would rapidly be reduced to the simplest form achievable with the means of the time.
To make another example, Champollion did it with far less for hieroglyphs, which nobody alive had been able to read for thousands of years. He did it by looking at patterns, using the knowledge he had of the rosetta stone, making hypotheses, validate them and then trying to apply them to stuff he hadn't seen yet.. and it worked.
In other words, the fact that many people don't have a clue of what the context of kata was, doesn't mean it's not possible to know. It just means that not many yet take the time and effort to drop their preconceptions and trace the history we know of and take the consequences (sadly, the same happens in all courses of life).
And even if some do, the information is not yet disseminated enough yet to become common knowledge.
Actually, often this process is actively countered, because there's already a "common knowledge" and not enough selective pressure to dislodge it (since combat is a very rare occurrence nowadays, so it matters little if interpretations are correct or not).
And finally, there is a huge selective force - money - that pushes in the direction of keeping alive the current idea of context, which makes kata hard to understand.
Imagine commercial interests pushing for a completely different game than Uno but using the same cards, and lots of people invested in playing it. Even knowing the original rules, you would have a hard time getting them out.
In practice, once you realize karate is a set of ideas to deal with close-range confrontations (because these are the confrontations that happened, and still happen, for which we know karate was designed.. exactly like we knew that hieroglyphs were for writing, not just art), without requiring youth, incredible athletic skills and has to be relatively simple, you have most if not all of your context.
Then you observe the katas - as many as you can - and find patterns and ideas that seem to work in that context - where "work" means surviving an encounter with attackers by quickly disabling them. Then you deduce the principles - which must match what you have observed. Here we are aided by the Rosetta stone of texts, writing and direct and indirect comments of people who lived when the art was actually applied and under selective pressure.
Then you put katas and principles together and come up with ideas, putting them to the test, hard - meaning with multiple situations and levels of intensity. Most often only one will actually "work" consistently, in realistic conditions. If there's more than one, you keep looking at situations and find if one works significantly better than the other, or you can apply Occam's razor - if there's a simpler way to achieve the same aim, then the one you're looking at ain't it.
Sometimes one won't manage at all and then yes, that bit of kata is truly lost (that is, maybe until someone more brilliant comes along
) but most often you can.It can be done, it's just that not many do it.
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isshinryuronin
Senior Master
Pretty good post, touching on a lot of valid points. Understanding karate's historical context as a particular fighting method, many "confusing" techniques can be discerned. Also knowing the principles of kata such as lowering your stance often means grappling or grabbing/touching your own arm means you're grabbing the opponent or that joint breaks are a major feature. And simplicity in combat is paramount as you noted. I've seen some ridiculously involved bunkai from high-ranked YouTube sensei that make me wonder about their understanding of their own art - it's a disservice to all, except maybe themselves and their wallet.Well, most of what we call knowledge are intelligent guesses, which survive experiment. There's nothing particularly special with kata understanding. Some things, we are told. Some others, we observe, make hypotheses on and experiment, finding a predictive theory, which we then verify.
For katas is very often possible because they're relatively new stuff, made by human people, we know the general idea of application (combat), and we can to a great degree peel off the layers of misunderstanding and disinformation because we know pretty much when and how it began happening. To make an example, fantasy swords can be completely useless because nobody actually uses them.
The game of Uno is much more arbitrary and simple and would be much harder to decode from nothing (even though once one's got the key idea..). Occam razor's also helps: if one agrees that kata was born from actual, selective experience (in evolutionary terms), it would rapidly be reduced to the simplest form achievable with the means of the time.
To make another example, Champollion did it with far less for hieroglyphs, which nobody alive had been able to read for thousands of years. He did it by looking at patterns, using the knowledge he had of the rosetta stone, making hypotheses, validate them and then trying to apply them to stuff he hadn't seen yet.. and it worked.
In other words, the fact that many people don't have a clue of what the context of kata was, doesn't mean it's not possible to know. It just means that not many yet take the time and effort to drop their preconceptions and trace the history we know of and take the consequences (sadly, the same happens in all courses of life).
And even if some do, the information is not yet disseminated enough yet to become common knowledge.
Actually, often this process is actively countered, because there's already a "common knowledge" and not enough selective pressure to dislodge it (since combat is a very rare occurrence nowadays, so it matters little if interpretations are correct or not).
And finally, there is a huge selective force - money - that pushes in the direction of keeping alive the current idea of context, which makes kata hard to understand.
Imagine commercial interests pushing for a completely different game than Uno but using the same cards, and lots of people invested in playing it. Even knowing the original rules, you would have a hard time getting them out.
In practice, once you realize karate is a set of ideas to deal with close-range confrontations (because these are the confrontations that happened, and still happen, for which we know karate was designed.. exactly like we knew that hieroglyphs were for writing, not just art), without requiring youth, incredible athletic skills and has to be relatively simple, you have most if not all of your context.
Then you observe the katas - as many as you can - and find patterns and ideas that seem to work in that context - where "work" means surviving an encounter with attackers by quickly disabling them. Then you deduce the principles - which must match what you have observed. Here we are aided by the Rosetta stone of texts, writing and direct and indirect comments of people who lived when the art was actually applied and under selective pressure.
Then you put katas and principles together and come up with ideas, putting them to the test, hard - meaning with multiple situations and levels of intensity. Most often only one will actually "work" consistently, in realistic conditions. If there's more than one, you keep looking at situations and find if one works significantly better than the other, or you can apply Occam's razor - if there's a simpler way to achieve the same aim, then the one you're looking at ain't it.
Sometimes one won't manage at all and then yes, that bit of kata is truly lost (that is, maybe until someone more brilliant comes along
It can be done, it's just that not many do it.
Looking outside your own art helps too. There are things that seem to be a common thread through karate, knife arts, old bare knuckle boxing and others. I'm sure there's coincidence at play, but when you're trying to figure out some posture in a kata and then run across a grainy old picture of a bare knuckle boxer actually in that posture hitting someone....well is it coincidence?
A video of a karate guy playing with a knife arts guy, using the same movements from kata, only one guy is barehanded while the other welds a knife....is that coincidence?
A video of a karate guy playing with a knife arts guy, using the same movements from kata, only one guy is barehanded while the other welds a knife....is that coincidence?
Yes absolutely! (Meaning it helps too
)
