Kata

Kata, or forms, lie at the heart of the martial art. They are set pieces in which the practitioner, alone or in a group, parries attacks and moves through the stances and postures of a fight. Kata are specified in immense detail and there are no superfluous postures or gestures. There is no precise analog of the kata in Western culture for it combines elements of theatre, of martial tradition, and of Zen and Shingon meditation. Kata are memorised by repetition, and it is thought that about three hundred repetitions of a form will allow one to perform at least the sequence of it without being slowed down by thought. After the three hundred or so, the practitioner can settle down into the form, and work on adapting the body to the details of expression, breath and focus that each technique requires. It is a feat of memory which takes place outside of memory, and it has often been my experience that, in teaching kata, I can perform the movements fluently, but am unable to remember them and lose my place as soon as I have to use words to explain. I may then have to retrace my steps, or even perform the entire kata from scratch. There, the form waits to receive me, and for the duration, it performs me.

Randori

As an instructor in the Goju Ryu style of Karate, I have learned to read bodies in a certain way. “Stop thinking, Mike. I can see you thinking,” my master, Sensei Jack Matthews would say, over and over. It was not clear to me how he could see me thinking (or how I could stop), but, over the years, and finding myself in the position of one taking the class, I learned to look at the bodies, moving or still, and not to interpret but to know immediately what their intentions were as they expressed through gesture, posture and movement. What we look for is called hara which refers to the belly, to stability and grace and to the settled mind.

In randori or mock-combat one moves very fast with a partner, attempting and parrying acts of extreme violence with all four limbs and yet never making other than the lightest contact. The action is improvised in response to the partner, and the atmosphere required of randori is light and co-operative, even at times humourous, rather than aggressive or competitive, although all everything one does in randori is expected to be firm and focused, from the hara. In this situation, the karateka must use, without thought or memory, techniques which he or she has learned through repetitive action in the Dojo. I can vouch that the remembering mind, like the conceptual mind, is slow and cumbersome, so that by the time one has recalled and compared some prior situation to the current one, with the hope of, perhaps, recycling a response that worked before, the situation has moved on. The memory, far from being useful, delays the response and perhaps opens us to an attack: “Stop thinking, Mike, I can see you thinking.”