The Doctrine of Karate
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About this ebook
An indepth discussion about the founding principles that led to the creation and continuing study of the art of karate as a self-defense.
James Brumbaugh
James Brumbaugh lives in northeast Ohio where he spends his time writing sci-fi, fantasy and suspense novels, training at karate, building a Japanese garden in his back yard, and taking walks in the local metro parks. He has spent more than sixty years studying various martial arts, the last thirty focused on Shorei-ryu karate, eventually attaining the rank of hachi-dan. He continues to mentor others on their karate journey.
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The Doctrine of Karate - James Brumbaugh
Dedication
This paper is dedicated to all the sensei who helped me along my karate journey and to all those who will come after me on their own journey, both my students and those who are training under someone else. Karate is a personal journey that can last a lifetime. I hope the discussion within this work will spur others to think about the fabric holding karate together.
Included are three related essays, Doctrine, Strategy, Tactics: Who Cares
and Styles: Marketing Tool or the Foundation for Learning?
and The Mind and the Martial Artist.
I hope readers will find these writings thought provoking.
Introduction
What is karate? What is the basis for it as a martial art of self-defense? These questions are repeated over and over in dojo around this country. Often the answers are unsatisfactory. Students want knowledge, and yet the truth is not easy to pin down. On the surface, karate appears to be a simple art that involves punching and kicking. It seems to be about learning unique mechanical motions called techniques. As students train and learn more than the basics, what seemed simple begins to take on a complex nature. The more complex it becomes, the more perplexing the true nature of karate appears. As the karateka advances, similarities to other martial arts are observed. Asking questions about karate's roots and trying to trace the history of the art only leads to more confusion. The history of karate seems irrevocably intertwined with other martial arts so much so that the demarcation between arts has been lost, if it ever concisely existed. The more one searches for clear-cut answers, the more the question becomes whether karate ever actually existed as a separate entity.
And yet there is something unique about karate, something distinct. There is a different feel
to it. When did karate separate from other arts and why? If karate does exist as a separate art, then there must be a distinctive foundation of general, underlying principles that provide the groundwork for the art. So, how can these principles be discovered? Searching the literature for clues to the nature of karate reveals no simple answers. The principles that guided the founders are vague or unrecorded. Despite the confusing and contradictory information found in most of the literature, it is possible to reach certain conclusions by extrapolating.
Karate is generally accepted as an antique martial art that was formulated, or translated from, various Chinese martial styles of chuan-fa through a few Okinawans who blended the Chinese styles with the Okinawan art te sometime between the late 1700s to early 1900s. It is also generally accepted that karate was initially a self-defense, either for palace guards as suggested by Choki Motobu¹ or for the nobility as suggested by Mark Bishop² or even for the general populace as suggested by Peter Lewis.³ The best-known early masters studied chuan-fa by traveling to China personally or from Chinese practitioners who visited Okinawa. While in the case of the earliest Okinawan masters there is sometimes confusion as to the exact details of their training, it is apparent that the roots of the martial arts they practiced are traceable to China. One such example is Sakugawa, one of the most important early karateka. Depending on the source, he was reported to have either traveled to China to learn Chinese boxing⁴ or he learned it on Okinawa⁵. Kanryo Higaonna, another important figure in Okinawan karate, is reported to have done both, learning from experts in Okinawa and visiting China to further his training and knowledge.⁶ If so many of the early masters who were instrumental in the formation of karate trained in chuan-fa, then when and how did these Chinese systems become karate?
Simply identifying its origin is not enough to define karate since the art has certainly not been static. In the last seventy-five years, karate has evolved beyond the status of a little-known yet practical self-defense, into a way for self-refinement (do), a sport, and now into various fitness/conditioning programs. The relation between karate and self-defense has blurred to the extent that many respected karateka are asking if karate as it is now taught contains the necessary elements of a useful self-defense. Vince Morris notes in the preface to his book on kyusho-jutsu that there was the proliferation of Japanese-centered styles post World War Two which concentrated on developing and promoting the newly emerging sporting aspects of karate with little attention to, nor knowledge of, the more profound and dangerous non-sporting, self-defence constituents.
⁷ Many authors feel this transition away from karate as a self-defense was initiated at the beginning of the 19th century by Ankoh Itosu. A. S. Rench suggests, "By the late 1930s, the majority of karate practiced was