Bunkai & Kata Revisited

 

 

Written by Guss Wilkinson 2005

 

This article expands upon themes of previous articles on this site…

 

Bunkai is the term given to applications of techniques within kata but there is often much confusion about the nature of bunkai taught. This article attempts to clarify some of these issues in the hope that you will be able to better understand what you are learning and why.

 

Most people training within our club know that katas originated with some person, or persons, putting together a set of techniques that they wished to be able to remember.

 

Stringing them together in the form of a kata allowed the martial artist to practise the co-ordination necessary to make these techniques work without always having to have access to a training partner to practise with.

 

Practising these techniques in this fashion also allowed the martial artist to polish the stance discipline, breathing discipline, basics discipline and concentration discipline in order to optimise the effectiveness of the techniques within.

 

With a few exceptions, the katas within our style of karate, Goju Ryu, originated from the southern part of China (the exceptions being Gekisai dai itchi, Gekisai di ni, Tensho and Suparinpe – which were invented by Chogun Myagi in the 1940’s).

 

No body knows who originally developed these kata, when they were developed, why they were developed, what they really looked like, what techniques the individual moves actually represented or if those techniques were actually any good.

 

It is doubtful if these techniques were ever written down at the time and if they were, it is even more doubtful if these records are still in existence.

 

It is quite probable that all these kata didn’t actually have a single source at all and if we were able to trace each kata right back to its origin, we would probable find several people in several different locations at several different points in time.

 

Because each individual is unique in stature, build, strength, speed, intelligence, aggression, flexibility and age: transferring knowledge of this sort becomes really quite problematic.

 

In nature, fighting is learned while fighting. Those animals that come away unscathed enough to fight another day take away something that may help them fare better the next time. It can often be seen in nature that older animals can overcome younger, stronger and faster animals through superiority of wisdom & experience.

 

Similarly at what can be called the dawn of  martial arts, there would have been a hand full of battle hardened individuals that thanks to their natural skills, physical attributes and sheer luck; survived long enough to become “good”. There is bound to have been a scenario whereby they were asked by a wide-eyed admirer to pass on those skills.

 

Humans are unique in being able to learn skills from people who have simply picked up the knowledge through experience: i.e. learning to fight for survival without actually having to fight for survival themselves. A modern analogy would be learning to fly a plane using a flight simulator without actually having to get into a plane.

 

Martial arts is therefore leaning how to fight using a “fight-simulator” – your martial art.

 

It takes a hell of a lot of self analysis to pass on knowledge, that comes quite naturally to you, to another person – and this would be what lies behind the birth of all these various drills and exercises that can be found today. These have all been devised to help the student overcome the incessant problem of “bugger-me, it works for him/her, but why not for me?”

 

Ok then, back to katas  – each time a kata (representing a body of knowledge) has been passed on it undergoes a process of reverse engineering and modification in order for it to produce techniques that work for that individual.

 

Therefore, every time a kata/bunkai is passed on, something is lost and something is added. This evolution is probably one of the main reasons that the katas taught today do not very closely resemble the bunkai and why so many martial artists have lost the connection between kata and fighting.

 

A lot of effort has been made by modern day karate organisations to standardise kata and quite a bit of effort has been made to standardise bunkai for several reasons:

 

 

This in turn has led to the conception of the sport, the competition, the tradition as well as the concept of right and wrong, and creates a number of hurdles that must be overcome if you wish to retain the original goal of learning how to fight as a form of self-protection.

 

Sport karate has knowingly let go of most of the techniques contained within the bunkai in order to ensure the safety of competitors but in the pursuit of self-defence. We may not be all that concerned over the safety of an aggressor(s).

 

There is nothing wrong with working from a standard set of kata and standard sets of bunkai (there are very many) as a template from which your own martial arts investigation can begin.

 

To make it easier to learn the “template bunkai”, each student learns techniques to defend against attacks initiated from a long stance.

 

Sometimes the combinations of techniques within the kata can seem quite contrived and unworkable.

 

It is therefore important to understand that most of the bunkai are not really designed to work from such attacks; they are in fact what I call opportunist techniques. By this, I mean if an opponent’s body happens to be in a certain position with their arms and feet in a certain position in the course of an altercation, then this is the technique I would use; i.e. a snapshot of the situation is the stimulus for a given technique, not launch of an aggressor’s attack.

To force that bunkai to work from a long stance and a lunge punch seems at first to be very unrealistic – and from that "long stance" scenario it usually is unrealistic, but given the right set of circumstances: that unrealistic technique suddenly becomes deadly efficient.

 

That is why a student must go through the process of reverse engineering the kata; examine all the variations of available explanations; work out what modifications that student needs to make to the technique in order to make it useful for that individual and then work out what scenarios make it the technique of choice. Failing that, it is quite OK to make up your own bunkai.

 

The student then needs to go through an exhaustive process of what-if scenarios surrounding that technique. In other words: what do I do if my technique doesn’t work because my opponent does this, or does that, or does that?

This is what should make up the majority of karate training, once the basics have been mastered.

 

If the student is not given the flexibility to play with the kata and the bunkai in this fashion, karate will never make a particularly good form of self-defence – it may be adequate for the most part, but not good.

 

The importance and limitations of sparring has already been covered in other articles but it must be remembered that in original Okinawan karate (and the Chinese martial arts that lead to its development) – there was no sparring whatsoever. The question a student needs to answer for him/herself is why?

 

To round off this article, I would like to point out that there is a limited number of ways that the human body can move. There is a limited number of ways in which it can be hurt or manipulated and there are a limited number of targets. If all martial arts knowledge were to suddenly disappear, it would probably reinvent itself in an almost identical format.

 

This is why the notion that martial arts originated in Egypt, or in India and travelled from there to China and then to Okinawa, and then to Japan and then to the rest of the world is probably incorrect. Martial arts almost certainly evolved more or less simultaneously in all parts of the world and any cross fertilisation has resulted from travellers inspired by what they have seen and experienced.

 

Many beginners within different martial arts focus on those differences, but the more experienced exponents see only the similarities.