point anyway. It is the spirit of the story that is important. The story says that the Komuso sect was derived from a unique, fearless and humorous man whom the great Rinzai characterized as an enlightened being.
Returning to the oral traditional of karatedo, we might ask if Bodhidharma was a real man. Did he actually initiate martial arts training at Shaolin temple? Was he instrumental in the founding of Zen Buddhism? Was he a major influence on Hui Neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China? Who knows! Hui Neng’s name, by the way, does not even appear on lists of early Zen masters in China and no proof exists that someone named Bodhidharma arrived in central China at the time the legend states. (These observations are from a Chinese scholar from Columbia University who was in Japan translating antique Chinese Zen texts and comparing them to Japanese texts). But, as Hanada Shihan suggests, these are not the important points to stress when considering the origin of karatedo. Read the Bodhidharma tale this way: karatedo was created from an ancient system of mind/body/spirit coordination that has taken its specific form from the cultures in which it has traveled, being influenced along the way by Indian yoga, Chinese Taoism, Ch’an Buddhism, and kempo; and Okinawan and Japanese martial arts, philosophy, and culture. Linear history is an impossible ideal. Buddha suggested that to attempt to trace history was like following the tracks of a bird as it flew across the sky. Hanada Shihan noted that the value of an origin tale is found in how it affects the behavior of those who accept it, and not in scholarly questions as to its reality.
It is important for Westerners to understand that human behavior is conditioned in an overwhelming fashion by culture. If we try to apply our culture’s notion of linear scientific history to the “histories” of the Japanese martial arts, we will be making an error. Western history objectively identifies sequences of events: “A” before “B,” “B” before “C,” etc. Japanese oral tradition on the other hand creates a temporal context, an atmosphere, a program of tales and heroes that coherently explains the “feeling” or “spirit” of the art as opposed to the Western desire to know that a particular art’s history is “right” from a Western perspective. “Right” is largely determined by cultural constraints.
One late afternoon after I had been in Japan about a month, I was walking across the campus of Seinan Gakuin, one of the colleges at which I taught, when I heard a familiar sound coming from the rear of a classroom building. “Ichi! Ni! San!” (one, two, three) a man’s voice barked. On “San!” a great shout (kiai), arose from the hidden body of students. There were a number of possibilities, but I guessed that it was a karatedo group practicing a combination of blocks, punches, and kicks with a kiai marking the final technique in the series. I was right.
I took a seat on a bench about fifty feet from the karatedoka, and as the shadows deepened around the ancient pine trees that dotted the campus, I watched the karatedoka drilling back and forth to the commands: Ichi! (front snap kick), Ni! (rising block), San! (reverse punch), the kiai sounding with the reverse punch. It was very familiar, and though I was on the other side of the world from the place of my birth, I felt at home as I watched the Japanese karatedoka in their drills. To the outsider, karatedo looks like a method of fighting, full of kicking, punching, and violent shouts, but in truth it is a physical embodiment of a message of peace and the heroic acceptance of our common destiny.
The sound of strong, focused breathing. The snap of the dogi (practice uniform) sleeve when a student’s reverse punch worked well. The random music of the senior students as they sparred at the end of class, joking lightly with one another. I found myself watching a young Japanese white belt struggling with basic techniques and in my mind I coached him as I would a student of mine back in the States: “Relax your shoulders. Bend your knees. Don’t wobble.” Karatedo has a hard and noble beauty that will come to you after years of relaxing your shoulders, bending your knees, and steadying your posture. In my travels around Japan I saw many karatedo groups, each with its slightly differing ways of performing similar techniques but all giving me the feeling of deep familiarity. The strong common thread of karatedo is present no matter which of the many styles (public and “hidden”) is practiced, and there are hundreds of such styles.
I remember a karatedo class practicing one evening on a beach at Satsuma. From my vantage point about fifty yards away in a formal garden on a hill overlooking the bay, the white dogi of the students glowed as they moved over the black volcanic sand beach. The class began a torturous exercise in which the students kicked as high as they could, as slowly as they could. The sensei spaced the students randomly on the beach with each apparently on his own. The sun began to disappear into the sea and the dogi of the karatedo students took on a misty gray hue as they balanced unmoving in a kicking posture. It looked like some giant had been practicing calligraphy using pearl ink on black paper.
The basic plan of most karatedo classes might entail twenty to twenty-five minutes of warm-up exercises and maybe some strength drills. This will usually be followed by kihon waza, generally practiced as students move up and down the dojo floor, performing the required techniques to the guttural cadence of the sensei or a senior student. Kihon waza may be followed by one- or two-step sparring in which the basic techniques are taught in combinations and practiced with a partner, one acting the attacker for the other. Next may come work on kata, the choreographed series of techniques basic to the style being practiced. In an hour-and-a-half class all of the above may be encountered plus, on occasion, weapons practice (usually bo, sai, tonfa, nunchaku, kama) or a lecture on some important point of history or philosophy by the sensei. A good karatedo sensei will have many surprises to ensure that the training does not become stale. One night you may find mixed into the meat of the class a mini-seminar on binding attackers with short lengths of rope, or the use of the headband (hatchimaki) as a selfdefense tool, or specific customs related to sword handling. Sometimes you might find the entire class devoted to sparring or methods of meditation or breathing exercises. There is always a formal beginning and ending to karatedo classes marked by order and expressions of gratitude. The sensei, of course, can change the plan of a class at any time. Time and space belong to the sensei while in the dojo.
The three main themes in one’s study of karatedo are kihon waza (basic techniques), kata (prescribed practice forms), and kumite (sparring, or literally, “exchange of hands”). The quality of anything one does in karatedo is grounded in basic techniques; a truism for all aspects of life, of course. The basic techniques of karatedo are much more than collections of a style’s fundamental physical techniques. Each technique offers an experience of our common fate: birth, death, remanifestation. Each technique is the first and last thing you do for the rest of your life. Each basic technique is a world in itself, having its own feeling, its own meaning, its own spirit. There is always hope. We are born. We pass away. We live again.
Kata leads one to focus on the life vehicles we use to get us where we are going. The first kata series in Japanese karatedo is called Heian, “peace.” Kata is about shoulders that carry burdens. It is about going and returning, and being stronger on your return. It carries a similar purport to one of the major scriptures of Zen Buddhism, the Prajna Paramita Sutra, which talks of going and returning. The character for “Way” (Japanese: do) is based on an image of a sailboat, a vehicle that carries one “over” and then returns. Another interpretation of the character for do is that it represents a man standing at a crossroads preparing to make a major life decision (artist and calligrapher Zhou Quangwi favors the later interpretation).
Finally, kumite is the battlefield where basic techniques as well as the myriad transitions from one technique to another learned in kata training come together in the spontaneous act of sparring, or kumite. Karate dojo can differ quite a lot on the degree to which they emphasize kumite over kata. In some dojo, kumite is a minor component of training, and kata is given great weight. In others, the situation is reversed. The common thread will be kihon waza. This is the heart of any budo.
Look at kata, kihon waza, and kumite as you would look at a tree. We see it because of light, but we don’t know what we see without the dark that sets off the light. Try looking at the shadows of a tree and not the lighted parts. I think that in karatedo kata is something like that. In kata I see students hurrying from one light point to the next, but the string that holds it all together, the transitional movements, is reacted to almost as a nuisance. A mature student understands that the light’s brightness is directly related to