Permit me to wax philosophical this morning.
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 fast 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.
Jorge Luis Borges Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
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.
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