Almost as predictable as the glamour photographs of martial arts celebrities grimacing while hurting someone else were the cover stories that compared one martial art to another. “Shotokan vs. Tae Kwon Do: Which is More Powerful?” is one example. It seemed to me that at least three issues per year were dedicated to discovering which martial art empowered its practitioners to pummel and beat the enthusiasts of other arts into submission.

I rolled my eyes as I read the essays inside those magazines which always came complete with photographic evidence that if the Shotokan practitioner dares to attempt a reverse punch, the Tae Kwon Do artist will obviously kick him in the face. As I remember these articles in my mind, I see an endless stream of photos proving how obvious it is that if a Tae Kwon Do artist dares to attempt any kick, the judo practitioner will simply throw him. The scenarios were always the same. Person A does this, therefore person B will do that, and obviously it will work every time.

Never mind that the scenarios were staged using a couple of guys who looked like they belonged behind the cash register of a grocery store rather than instructing at a karate school. These situations never had anything to do with comparing one art to another so much as showing possible counters to possible attacks. Of course none of these articles ever came to any conclusion other than to show that the author had practice one step sparring perhaps a little too much.

I used to find these articles infuriating. I never learned anything from them, and I could never believe that the grocery clerks in the photos were being paid to take pictures of themselves in karate uniforms and write these defensive justifications as to why one art is better than another or at least as good. I think it was reading those sorts of articles in martial arts magazines that motivated me to come up with my self-titled axiom.

Axiom: Karate is not a person, place, or thing. Karate is only a set of instructions. Until those instructions are executed by someone, they exist only in the abstract. Karate has no philosophy. Karate has no shape. Karate has no effectiveness. Karate has no qualities at all other than as a set of instructions. The person doing karate gives it all of its qualities way a glass gives water shape, the way computer hardware gives software speed and reliability.

I believe that I was the first writer about karate to ever put forward in a concise way the reason that it is pointless to compare Shotokan Karate to Tae Kwon Do. Others have clearly said, “it depends on the person” millions of times before I came along, but I don’t think any of them ever elaborated as to why it depends on the person. Because I believe that I was the first to write about this concept, and also because I have an ego the size of Saturn, the planet, not the car, I named the idea after myself: Redmond’s Axiom of Platform Dependency™. Not that it stuck, as I have rarely seen anyone else refer to it by the grandiose moniker I coined for my little theory. Please don’t think ill of me for naming it after myself, as it might be the only original thought I’ve ever had.

The basic concept is simple. I believe that martial arts are like liquids. They take the shape of the glass they are poured into. I believe that martial artists are the glasses. Take a person, add a martial art, and you get a result that is dependent on that person’s unique qualities and experiences. Take that same martial art, add it to a different person, and you get something else. I can teach two people exactly the same and get two different results because the martial art is just principles applied by flawed and unique human beings. In short, a martial art depends on the person. That is the basic concept of platform dependency. I am painfully aware that it is not exactly rocket science, but if you read on, you might find that there is a little more to it than you are expecting.

In the world of information technology, we have our own special jargon and buzzwords. When we are referring to different kinds of hardware that can set up to run programs, we call the hardware a "platform." A Sun Sparc machine is one kind of platform. An IBM AS400 is another kind of platform. A desktop PC is a different platform from a Macintosh with its different hardware.

The platform is the hardware, but to do anything, it needs software. Software is basically programs: sets of instructions that tell the computer to do this or that and what to do with the results. Software is loaded on the platform, and it performs about as well as that platform can make it perform. If I put a simple program on a weak platform, like an old desktop PC, it will run very poorly. If I put the same program on a better platform, like a Cray Supercomputer, it will run much more quickly.

The same is true of your karate skills. Karate is not good or bad, weak or strong, or effective or not. Karate is just a set of skills and ideas. It is an instruction set for your body to execute. It’s kind of like a suit. It looks good on you, but it looks bad on me. Too bad for me, huh? It depends on the platform as to how it performs.

This principle has changed the way I have viewed various martial arts in comparison to one another ever since.

Once I accepted this principle, age-old questions were finally resolved forever. "Which is better, Tae Kwon Do or Shotokan?" Neither is better because no martial art is inherently anything. The correct question is, "Who is better, the TKD guy or the Shotokan guy?" Having them fight or perform side by side will provide only a comparison of people, not concepts. Therefore, asking which martial art is better is pointless, because the answer will always be, “Depends on the person.”

There are other phrases like that which start to sound silly after we accept that it is the person that makes the martial art. For example, “I like Shotokan because it has…" doesn’t make any sense at all. Shotokan doesn't have anything. It doesn't have a car, it doesn't have a bad cold, and it doesn't have freckles. Shotokan is just an idea – a set of instructions that you follow in order to do something. You like your instructor's methods. You like what you do in your class. You can't like or dislike Shotokan itself, because it is not a thing.

Some might argue that Shotokan might be an inherently bad set of instructions. For example, if the instructions told you to curl up in a ball as you leap from a tall building in order to achieve enlightenment, those would be some pretty bad instructions, and the instructions for Tae Kwon Do might be arguably superior to them. But, I do not believe that the instruction sets for martial arts have been demonstrated to be significantly superior to one another. They all seem to be highly developed as far as instruction sets go, and as a result, it seems impossible to see a variance that cannot be explained away by the variance between the platforms. The differences in skills of the individuals performing the martial arts always corrupt the results of any attempt to compare two martial arts to one another.

People are not entirely unique, but they are different enough from one another that the same set of instructions performed by two different people can bring out some surprisingly different results. I have seen people performing karate kata who, despite not making any technical errors, simply looked horrible doing it. I have also seen people who were obviously a little sloppy in their performance who became something incredibly beautiful when they performed the exact same kata.

And this brings up an interesting point. Technologists have another buzzword that might prove useful here, and that is the concept of porting programs from one platform to another. You see, a program written for a desktop PC will not run on a Cray supercomputer because the different platforms have different wiring in their “brains.” So, a program must be altered slightly to account for these small differences for it to be usable on both platforms. The process of taking a program that has been written for one platform and changing it to work on another platform is called “porting.”

This is probably seen the most in the computer gaming industry. When a computer game becomes very popular on the X-Box or Nintendo platform, it is often ported to the PC platform so that more people can buy it.

What happens when we apply this concept to martial arts? If we consider martial arts to be programs (sets of instructions) that our brains run to make our bodies do something, then we might consider that individuals are different enough that the same instructions will not port very well from one person to another all the time. An example of this might be that I can tell one person how to punch, and they might execute a perfect punch. If I use the same training method for another person, they might throw terrible punches because I am not getting through to them. Eventually, if I change my approach as an instructor, the second person might suddenly yell, “Aha!” and run the different set of instructions correctly, performing a proper punch.

But it goes farther than that. Just changing the instructions that I give to the person as to how to make a punch is not enough sometimes. Sometimes, I might actually find myself altering the instruction set for a particular person. An extreme example might be someone with no legs. Giving them an instruction set dependent on proper stances will not execute on their platform properly. An altered set of instructions will, so I port the program to fit their needs.

But if it is OK to alter the instruction set for someone in a wheelchair, then why wouldn’t it be OK to alter the instruction set for someone with a less severe set of unique qualities? Why can the instruction set not be altered by someone with a reasonable level of expertise to suit any particular person’s requirements, goals, objectives, aspirations, flaws, and strengths? Because it would violate “tradition?” I note with interest that Funakoshi’s technical performances do not look very much like Nakayama’s. I also note with interest that Nakayama’s students have taken considerable liberties with the instruction set that he standardized for them – personalizing their karate tremendously. Surely no one would argue that Asai, Osaka, and Yahara are doing the exact same standardized Shotokan Karate? I see large differences in their technical methodologies. It seems to me that the tradition is that after expertise is achieved, the instruction set is pulled out by the expert, reviewed, and edited as pleases the expert.

Certainly the argument can be made that if someone who is not an expert starts editing the instruction set for themselves, they might not do a very good job of it. And even if the experience is a positive one for them, they will miss out on what is believed to be an essential part of the karate experience – learning to do something that we cannot yet do. At the earlier stages of learning, we are dependent upon the instructions we receive and work to become able to execute them capably. This causes us to grow.

But at some point, as we mature, we start to reach out for independence, and for our growth to continue, we must do more than follow what others say simply because they say so. We begin to edit the instructions for ourselves, and we begin to grow again. This is a different stage of growth, one where we stop trying to become the art and instead make the art become us. I believe both stages of maturation are important if we are to continue to grow after having done what we can to make ourselves able to execute the standard instructions as well as possible.

Why not do this for myself as well, as I have put in a few years executing the standard instruction set for Shotokan, and like any good operator, I have learned to read the code for myself and modify it where it might be better ported to my particular platform? I have added in whole sections of instructions and removed others as my confidence has grown. Through this process, I have made the standard release of Shotokan Karate, which is basically the same set of instructions handed to just about everyone I know who does Shotokan, into my own personal version of it that has been ported to me. I think I had reached a point where my platform was running Shotokan Karate’s standard loadout as well as it could, so I began to tweak it so that it would run even better. It runs pretty good on my platform. I have no idea if your platform could run it well or not.

Any martial art is basically a set of instructions, and that those instructions cannot be judged without seeing them executed by a person. People are unique and different, so when two different people perform the same instructions, they produce different results. Because people are unique and different, their results can be optimized by porting the instructions to their specific abilities, producing an even more different yet more effective result.

This means we cannot blame or credit Shotokan, karate, judo, or martial arts as concepts for anything. They are different instruction sets, and little else. If we accomplish something while executing the instructions, we could credit the people who wrote the instructions we followed, we could credit ourselves for executing the instructions well, or both. Saying things like “karate helped me learn something” suddenly seem to make no sense, because “karate” didn’t do anything. You did karate. I did karate. Karate was done by us. It is in how we did it that the answers lie.

I once read, "Shotokan saved me from becoming a hoodlum." Given Redmond’s Axiom of Platform Dependency™, we know better. Shotokan did nothing. This person saved himself from becoming a hoodlum by doing Shotokan, or at least that is what he should believe. Whether or not it is actually true that doing Shotokan saved him or not is irrelevant. I believe it is important that we take responsibility for things that we do wrong and equally important that we take credit for things we do right.

What about the frequently heard statement, "Shotokan doesn't have any weapons training."? Is this true? I guess we could say it is true that the standard release of Shotokan that most people are taught does not contain instructions on performing weapons. However, there is no reason that an expert cannot edit the instructions he uses to eliminate or add content that suits him to make the instructions make more sense for him. As a result, it is possible that some people’s Shotokan contains weapons training.

I believe that Redmond’s Axiom of Platform Dependency™, which I doubt I will ever succeed in convincing anyone to call it, was a very important personal discovery for me. It has been one of the building blocks in my exploration of personalizing karate for my own use rather than fulfilling someone else’s mission for me. This concept has further emboldened me, in my advanced stage of training, to drop kata I never enjoyed, learn kata from other systems I do, and to adjust my performance of karate so that it works better given the many flaws and unique features of my body and mind. Maybe the changes don’t always work better for me, but that’s for me to decide and experiment with, and I can learn from the mistakes I make as well as from my successes.

Some will disagree and suggest that we should all consider ourselves students forever and not mess with a good thing. Apparently, the most senior instructors disagree, since they have clearly messed around with Shotokan Karate until they no longer do the same thing that their teachers did. I believe there is a difference between being willing to learn and open to new ideas and being dependent upon others to dictate what those new ideas will be.

Being dependent is OK for a beginner, but in the intermediate and advanced stages of our training, shouldn’t we stop kidding ourselves that our ankles will suddenly become more flexible or that we will suddenly become much faster? Shouldn’t we instead take responsibility for our karate, be proactive, and tweak the rules so that the art better suits us instead of us suiting it? After all, “it” is just a set of instructions.