Blame this on George Donahue

 

Hi George,


Great post!  As I kept reading, my head kept nodding, hearing things I’ve said for a long time

I like that we have an Eagle Claw connection. I’ve watched my friend and instructor, Ernie Rothrock for 25 years as he’s grown in that system, One where the title ‘Master Instructor’ as a concrete meaning as having passed one of the most hellacious tests I’ve ever encountered. Ernie’s description of that test still leaves me in wonder how one can push oneself so far.


I agree with you, Eagle Claw is fantastic for the gods among us, alas I’m far from that status.  But Tuttle’s publiciation of Shum’s book this year is a great effort.  It’s so pleasant to point out to those karateka that there are no blocks in karate, a literal example of a Chinese system that uses blocks as blocks….


Shum’s Wu Tai Chi Chaun is awesome. My Yang with Ernie goes back to a different version he originally studied of the 108. I remember when he was resisting Shum’s attempts 20 years ago to get him to move to Wu, but as the years passed under Shum’s tutelage, his Yang changed a great deal from Shum’s tutelage on the Yang 24, into a very different form from my original studies, and when he went into Wu, also incredible. Being an iconoclast, I’ve stayed the course with my original form. No small part because I couldn’t make a serious effort to train with him, but I have begun working on the Wu form, which is vastly more complex, and allows me to tap his studies in small part.

 

Tai Chi, correctly approached is a marvelous martial art. Whether I approach it that way is open for discussion, but I try in my own small fashion. But as a vast study ( as all arts are) there are no short cuts, “well I’m now an old dude so I’ll shift to tai chi………”


What little I understand of your Kishaba Juku comes from Ernie’s patient instruction in my tai chi and its own transition into my Isshinryuu. I honestly believe all three practices tap the same koshi abet in different ways.


My instruction from Earnie was mostly non-verbal. We’ve never spent time talking about Chi, rooting or the I Ching. When he originally taught me he only rarely referred to the terms for sections of the forms. Years later when he published manuals for his tai chi classes, all of those aspects came in, but as I had been running the form for a decade, I rarely bothered with the words.

 

I have a great percentage of the texts written in English the past 20 years on Tai chi, most of them rarely touch the essence of the art. I once read a great book takes a great instructors 50 years of experiences and sets them forth. ..Unfortunately it takes the reader 50 years to understand what the author  was saying.  In that I concur.


Where Jou, Tsung Hwa wrote of the I Ching and Tai Chi, I took it at a different level than decoding the trigrams. [This is interesting in part because Isshinryu’s founder was a know Okinawan fortune teller, and possessed multiple copies of the I Ching.] The I Ching was compiled to address the change of the universe and fortell the future (or the present), based in the art of change. Tai Chi is a study in change, movement flowing from one place to the next, eventually when you practice you simply enter the flow and you leave the flow, in between the art of change the art of Tai Chi exists.


It is only natural that the comparison of the study of I Ching and Change to the study of change in Tai Chi would exist. But it is not as simple as decoding some hidden applications (IMVHO).


I personally find the I Ching tapping into a version of the universe I choose not to let rule my decisions. Decades ago my wife was pregnant with our first daughter (scheduled to be born on my fathers 50th birthday).  In a moment of chance, I threw my coins and interpreted the I Ching on the babies birth and wrote the divination down, then placed it in the I Ching, and forgot it.


On my fathers birthday our daughter was born, stillborn. One of life’s many impending tragedies nobody takes the time to prepare one for. I was living in Salisbury Md, had no family near by, was a new student of Isshinryu and still remember attending the burial by myself. Been there did that and life goes on.


But months later I opened that copy of the I Ching and the prediction fell out. Opening it and reading it, it predicted that it would be a girl, and closed with the line something like, ‘the sleeping dragon chooses to remain in hiding’.


What the I Ching is  or what it taps (Confucius maintained it was never wrong) I can’t say. It may hold incredible truths for us. But I will not let the oracle make my decisions for me and have done my best to let it rest.


On the subject of ‘Master’ George strikes many of my own beliefs.  Personally, while I’ve know and trained with some incredible martial artists, I don’t feel they are masters (except in the case with Ernie as a ‘master instructor’). All is change, and where some are more a-tune to the change required, the journey never ceases. It’s a shame, Shimabuku Tatsuo did so much harm with his granting some new students 8th degree black belts in the late 50’s and started the rock rolling down the hill in the States. Of course over the decades his original choices have proven they were worth the rank, but other systems copied the rank without the underlying understanding who should have such rank.


A few years ago I returned to Pennsylvania for a karate tournament in the Pocono’s, not having been there for 10 years. Outside of seeing a great slide in karate ability, there was a corresponding growth in Masters. Incredible as it may seem, there is a West Tamaqua (the tournament being held in Tamaqua) and they were advertising an upcoming tournament there with literally dozens of masters names (from the area) to be in attendance, none of which I had ever heard of when I lived in Pa. Well perhaps creating masters is one of our better skills?


Of late I’ve done a share of battle with the disbelieving BJJ folks on the virtue of kata study. My discovery how world wide disbelief in kata’s value is. In part I looked at the available literature and realized nothing was written in some detail showing how kata should be a life time practice. In part for my students, and in part for my ego I guess, I’ve been working on compiling my thoughts. Unfortunately it seems to grow larger and larger the further I go. I’m wondering if I put what I’ve compiled in your Files section, would any of you be interested in throwing your thoughts on this to help me create something of a little merit?


In any case, thanks for waking me up this morning,


Victor Smith
Bushi No Te Isshinryu


“Hit ‘em hard,
 Hit ‘em fast,
 Hit ‘em low
 So they don’t last!”