Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Everything is always in a state of change, the arts martial or otherwise the same.

Change isn’t bad or good, it’s just the reality that you can’t step into the same water in a flowing stream no matter how hard your try, nor can you stop changing what you were taught and practice or teach. Nobody ever has. In fact developing a healthy respect for change, so that you understand an attack will likely never follow any training sequence you’ve experienced, but those experienced help develop skill that can be inserted into the current new and changing reality, too.

All the admonishments, ‘never change the kata’, ignore the reality is that kata continually changes. In fact the origin of that statement likely had nothing to do with the fact kata change but probably was a focus given to beginners to help them focus their training.
At some point in time, we no longer remain beginners, though it is healthy if we keep the beginners mind in our mindset too.

The act of change that is more subtle is the creeping change that infiltrates our studies, especially when we don’t know it’s happening.

I can recall going back decades and learning Sanchin in a more Okinawan standard, without words wrapping around the training. Then an article describing Ibuki breathing, followed by Mas Oyama’s books describing it and in turn started using that term myself. The issue isn’t the use of the term ibuki with hard focused breathing (Quick Definition of course), but the use of a term that wasn’t part of my Isshinryu training. Then making the link to that term and my practice changing my art to use the term.

A more complex example is how the Japanese term ‘bunkai’ crept into the Okinawan arts, and I suspect many of it’s current definitions do not really describe the original Okinawan methods of studying kata technique applications. Today you are hard pressed to find one capable of making the distinction about ‘bunaki’s’ usage.

The past few years I’ve been working hard to identify much that has crept into my own practice, understand why and work to expunge or annotate its usage correctly.

Then a few weeks ago I came across a reference to a short story I had read in College (back in those dark ages of the 60’s). The story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges .
It truly is a short story, a fiction describing a fantastic world, written in very rich detail.

Essentially he described a few friends who found a book with a few more pages than any other copy of that book, partially describing a fictional planet, Tlön. A few years pass and then the 11th volume of an encyclopedia of that planet is discovered. It was so rich in detail many started trying to re-construct the remaining volumes until finally it was published, and in turn much of the world started changing to the practices of that planet.

Of course the author then discovered the entire effort was a work of a secret society, but after making some observations, turns away to his own efforts.

To quote from the story,

“Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false.”

“Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.”

I have no further comment at this time, except to note much current change in the martial scene has a similarity to Borges description.

I prefer to point you to the story itself and let you experience “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/Borges_-_Tlon,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius.html

Borges short stories in his book ‘Labrynth’ are always worth reading.