One myth of classical training is that it is silent. The teacher gives an occasional command and the students just work. This is usually seen as positive, time is spent “training not talking”. People say that is the “old way” when no one questioned the teacher and people didn’t want to gab instead of work out. Sounds reasonable, I guess. Certainly the other approach- lots of talking- is not a very good way to train. I have visited dojo where people spent far more time discussing the details of a technique (and often how “devastating” it was) than sweating. The term “kuchi bushi” (口武士) roughly translates as “mouth warrior”, and means someone who talks about training instead of actually training. The fact there is a common term for it means that it is something of a problem, in Japan as well as here.  But the other extreme is equally bad.

A while back I wrote a little about communicating in the dojo. If you are just working out- doing physical exercise like pushups, hitting a bag, working with the chishi, doing reps of technique or kata- not a lot of conversation is needed. Once you have the basic instruction just do it. Don’t gab. But for much of our martial arts training you need to be actively engaged with your partners. One way to do that is to use your words. They come in handy. For example doing body conditioning it is important to be working at your edge. Your partner is unlikely to know exactly where that is, so giving each other feedback- hit a little harder, a little softer, etc.- is the most efficient way to train. Instead of getting injured or not getting any benefit, just communicate.

On top of that, if you are taking charge of your own training you need feedback and information. Your teacher, and training partners, are the only place you can get that. If you don’t  communicate, ask questions, listen to answers, have your current knowledge and assumptions challenged mentally as well as physically, you can’t grow. So you need instruction. And you need to ask questions and receive answers. But how much of this is a good thing, and how much is just blather?

I have never been in a good dojo that was silent. Nor in one that was a gab-fest. Instead periodic topical conversation was the norm. Partners giving each other feedback, some instruction from the teacher or seniors, and a question every now and then. Occasionally some laughter, because funny things can happen when you are pushing yourselves. It is not a church, it is a dojo, and since we are studying what can be considered a form of communication, it is essential we do just that.

I can’t help but wonder where the myth of the silent dojo got started, especially since I have not seen them in Okinawa or Japan. It is not even a tradition. If you pay attention to the stories of Miyagi, his classes were really physically demanding, but there are also these epic lecture and Q&A sessions after training or at other times. He talked a lot! Sure there are plenty of stories of the “old days” and plenty of teachers who discouraged questions, but somehow the information got passed down… So where did the idea of a silent dojo come from?

I do have a theory. Most of the first generation that brought the arts back to the US were servicemen. They came from a “don’t speak unless you are spoken to” environment. They did not have much if any language training, and they were not in Asia for that long. Early in one’s training questions and conversation are less useful as one is working on basic movements and doing a lot of repetition. Talk isn’t needed much. And without a common language it is pretty time-consuming, and often not very rewarding, to try to talk. That seems like a double whammy to me, one that keeps conversation to a minimum. When I was living and training in Japan I noticed that as my language skills improved my teachers talked more. They were willing to explain concepts like ma’ai, kuzushi, chinkuchi and kyusho as they were relevant to what we were doing, explanations that would have been impossible earlier. That was probably also fostered by improved understanding of what we were doing- I was reaching points where the explanation was actually relevant.

At the same time I also learned how to phrase questions, and when to keep quiet. The phrasing is actually rather important. It may be a personal thing or it may be a cultural thing but I realized that there was quite a difference between “sensei, what does this mean” or “how do you do x”, and “sensei, does this mean this…” or “is this the right way to”. The first were usually met with a fairly dismissive answer, anything from “keep training, you will learn eventually” to the patently untrue but clear conversation ender “I don’t know”. The second was met with anything from “no, keep training” (especially if what I presented was particularly poor) to a long delve into the movement or idea and its accompanying practices and applications, where I was on the right track and where, and why, I was not.

That was coupled with timing. When to ask questions is important. Of course if sensei says “do you have any questions” it is the perfect time. Otherwise? It is kind of rude to interrupt when your teacher is actually teaching. If the group is doing something it is not be a good time. When you are expected to be doing something else is also not particularly timely. When then? Well, when were Miyagi sensei’s talk-sessions? After training. You can also try before training. Out having drinks or dinner. Other times might include out with a dojo group at a festival. When stopping by the dojo on a non-training night. At a fellow student’s sayonara party. If you only come to the dojo, and only see your teacher, for scheduled training times then you might not actually get any chance to ask questions. So not only do you need to train, but you need to be part of the group, and spend time with your teacher(s).

So timing, phrasing, language skills, etiquette, understanding of the system, all may be reasons why students are asked to keep quiet. But there is one more. As you get to know someone better there is more to talk about. You get more comfortable communicating. How much time do you spend talking to people you hardly know? Simple greetings, polite small talk, but not much of substance I would bet. Isn’t it the same for new students? So again, relationships are important. They can have a pretty strong impact on just what is communicated in the dojo. And what is not.

After some of the feedback on my post The Good Old Days, I have been thinking even more about the power of tradition. The martial arts are obsessed with passing on the tradition.  In a way no other art- dance, music, painting- seems to be we are much more concerned with conserving the past than with creativity or development. It i dconstant- passing down the knowledge, maintaining the flame, keeping the art alive- they are catchphrases in the martial arts, on websites, dojo walls, tshirts and patches. If you think about it, it is astounding. Imagine a musician deciding that his or her main goal was to be identical to Huddie Ledbetter, or Thelonious Monk? Imagine a painter saying the epitome of his art was painting exactly like Raphael, or Picasso? That diverging from these masters was the worst blasphemy. But in the martial arts the vision is constantly backwards, to the masters of the past. They are venerated. We are told we cannot equal them. Their skill, their approach, is as good as it gets: no one now is their better and straying from their path is just ego. If you know me you know how much stock I place in what has been passed down to me. I value it deeply, and believe it is worth preserving. I am not what you would call a radical innovator. But there has to be more!

It some ways of course it is understandable. Those arts that have something really concrete to pass on can hold an incredible body of knowledge, hard won and carefully nurtured. It is knowledge that cannot be imitated by athleticism or created out of whole cloth. And while we tend to credit the founders alone for this knowledge it is really the accretion of information and skill through multiple generations that gives us what we have today. Each generation has left its mark and in deep arts the accumulation of information, the honing and improvement of the technique and teaching methods, has resulted in something greater than the original. But that is because in each generation, once the system as it is has been internalized, those that wound up passing it on added their mark to it, heralded or not.

The process of passing a folk art down through generations can be very complex. In our desire to hold the earlier generations up as examples and maintain the traditions we value I think we often refuse to recognize how much change is inherent in the transmission. Things cannot stay the same. They either change or decay. One of my teachers, Liu Chang’I has an excellent description of this process:

The best student, the one who is the most dedicated, attentive, and talented, will learn at most 90% of what his teacher has. (And let’s be clear. By this I don’t mean sequences of kata and other subjects. These can all be passed down easily. I mean the meat, what makes these things work!) This is not because the teacher is better, or the student misses something, or even because the teacher doesn’t teach something. It is because no one is perfect, and no one can, or should want to, copy another person exactly. So what about that missing 10%? It is up to each student to fill it in him or her self. That is the process of making the art your own. The bones of the art- the mechanics, theory, fundamental movements- they are what you make your contribution with, what you use to grow the art for yourself. They are what keeps the art coherent across generations and they must be mastered before you can contribute something. But, and this is important, if each generation does not add their 10% back in the art will die. At a 90% retention rate In 3 generations it will be 73% of what it was. Just 3 generations! So the art cannot, must not, remain exactly the same. You cannot just practice what your teacher shows you! Once you have the bones you must think for yourself! You must learn as much as you can and then try to move your art and practice forward. That keeps it alive, so another generation can enjoy it.

I think this is a powerful idea. It assumes careful attention to your teacher, learnt depth of knowledge and good instruction. It acknowledges the complexity and imperfection of human interaction. And it takes out the hero worship and replaces it with hard work. It is also not really a new idea. There are a number of proved, working models of knowledge transmission that essentially describe this exact idea. Apprenticeship practically and Shu-Ha-Ri conceptually are two examples. Regardless of the exact model however, the concept says three things to me:

• You need to learn the bones of your system as deeply as you can. Without these you are no longer doing your system you are making something up.
• When you are ready (and your teachers should help you understand when this is) you need to take these bones and work with them to grow yourself and your art.
• No art is the same as it was even 100 years ago. It cannot be and we should not want it to be. Anyone who tells you different is lying, either to themselves or to you.

So, basically, transmission is an attempt to forestall entropy. But entropy is a given so energy must be added in to the transmission or, by the simple nature of things, it will decay. I have seen that happen to what must have been valuable arts once. Now they are shadows of themselves, forms and methods that lack life and are practiced by people who don’t even recognize it because they are obsessed with being just like the last generation, with making sure they don’t alter any part of the treasure they have been handed. And in the process they have altered it beyond recognition.

“To have been always what I am – and so changed from what I was.”         Samuel Beckett

So, kata has “secrets”. Yup. I guess. They certainly carry information. But I don’t want to get into what techniques are hidden in our kata (sorry if that was what you were looking for). I am more interested in how that information is held, and how it is transmitted. How to access it.

Kata are pretty easy to teach. They are essentially short combinations of movements, in the Okinawan arts usually taking a minute or so to perform. A professional dancer would probably be able to learn and repeat a sequence of similar or greater length and complexity to the most difficult karate kata in a single training session, and would learn dozens a year taking class. If you know how to move and how to learn, they really are not that hard to take in.

But we spend years working on the same forms. Why? Here is the secret. It is not in the sequence of the forms, as important as they are, but in how they are performed. This is why a dancer could probably learn any of our forms in an hour or two but not be able to do them quite properly. They wouldn’t know HOW to do the forms. Internal muscle work. Posture and structure in our art as opposed to theirs. Breathing. Power generation and direction. Intention (yi). The things that are more important than the sequences.

I see lots of bunkai that emphasize the sequence of the movements. This arm does this, you move here, etc. etc.. Ok. That concept of kata, that the sequence of movements in itself holds the key to using them is pretty appealing. It means if you learn the sequence you can then learn the application. By learning more sequences you learn more applications, and by extension have more skill. But it is also a very shallow understanding of form, of what kata is doing and how it fits into a system. It says anyone can do the applications if they know the sequence. It implies the shape of the movements holds the key, as opposed to what is inside that shape.

To make the kata movements work, and make sense, you have to contextualize them within the system. This is really not complex. It means they have to be used in concert with how the system works. What is the range preferred might be one element. One of the most important elements when looking at kata, in my opinion, is how the body works. How does the system generate power. How does it move. How does it deal with strength and structure. And so on. Looked at this way the kata are not isolated “textbooks of technique”. They are part of a system. That means they don’t function on their own.

For example, a movement that looks like a press, the palm edge rotating down from a defending position at mid extension, might actually be a strike to break bones if the system focuses on short power development but could never be interpreted that way if that type of power development was not in the practitioner’s body. What looks like an extended arm deflection might be a powerful throw if the system has good methodology for developing the “frame” and waist-shoulder-arm connection and power, an option that would again be invisible or impossible if you don’t have that skill.

So while learning a bunch of forms might teach you some interesting techniques or combinations, it really won’t help your art grow any. Those techniques will all be bordered by the skills you have. You will see in them what you already know. This may or may not be what the system was designed for…

That is one of the difficulties with kata. They do hold application for the system. But this may look mysterious or seem confusing if you don’t have the system’s approach in your body and mind. (It may still, but a topic for a different time!) It may lead to some pretty convoluted, or conversely really simple, applications if what you are doing, probably without knowing it, is working out an application that doesn’t include the attributes of the system, that is actually working around the skills you don’t have. It may even resemble the movements at the end, and so how to say it is wrong? But starting with the system’s foci- power, range, structure, etc.- might lead to some very different answers.

And this is where taking in lots of forms can be very misleading. It is nice to think that by learning the “highest” kata in a system you have been given some secret or special knowledge. You can even (shhh!) short circuit the system by learning the highest forms from another source, even from video. But if the secrets to the application of these forms are not in the sequence but in how they are done, you have not really short circuited anything because you have not learned the skills that make these forms work properly. You don’t know what you don’t know.

An analogy I have used is dropping a Ferrari engine and transmission in a pick up truck. With some effort you might be able to get the truck to go, even to haul things. But it won’t really work right. The transmission probably won’t take the load from the engine with a bed full of gravel. And the other way around? The truck engine and transmission won’t really get the Ferrari to move like it could with the right insides. What a shame… In much the same way the applications in the forms require the right engine. That is the lens to see them through. Different engine, different capacities, different answer.

This really comes to the fore when learning forms from other systems. Without also learning their engines all they do is reflect what you already have. I’ve had the pleasure to experience a number of good systems in seminars or from friends. I have enjoyed and learned from it. But if I were to do a Hsing’I form it wouldn’t be Hsing’I. It would be Goju, or Feeding Crane, or Kingai, or the mix of those that I brought to the form. If I examined it for application I would find applications I could do, ones that ran off my Goju, Kingai, and Feeding Crane body skills and tactics.

So secrets in the kata. Yup. They are there. And they come out through the basics of the system. Not what we often think of as basics- punches, kicks, etc.- but the real basics. Power, structure, sensitivity, options, position, all the choices inside these variables the system prefers. Using those as a lens opens the kata in a very different way.