Teaching one corner

"If I have brought up one corner and he [the student] does not return with the other three, I will not repeat..."(Huang 1997, in Takagi et al., 2010, p.91)

I am currently reading a very geeky book on Buddhist thought co-written by a colleague and former sempai (actually, once a sempai, always a sempai). It was so difficult for me to follow, that I read the entire glossary first, in preparation, so I could pick my way through discussions of the Three Mysteries, the Six Elements, and endless references to the Mahavairocanabhisambodhi-sutra. I am convinced that somehow this is good for me; but even if it isn't, I promised my sempai I would buy the book, and, having bought it, I feel compelled to at least try to read it.

In wading through some of the more obscure discussions, however, the above quote hit me like a vajra. The reference was made in the main text and the above quote in a footnote from the Analects of Confucius. If I ever needed a metaphor for teaching a martial art form that consists only of kata, this is it.

Kata, in koryu, is theory. It holds out hypothetical situations of attack, defense, counterattack, and counterdefense. I have met more than one practitioner of more "combative" martial arts (i.e., ones that allow free-sparring), that a kata-based practice is somehow "impractical" - that kata is boring and repetitive, and that sometimes the hypothetical situations make no sense. The pedagogical sensibility of kata is forgotten in the rush to make practical sense of it.

The biggest criticism of iai, for example, is that the first set of kata in many ryuha begin from the kneeling posture of seiza. Actually, there are many practical reasons for using this posture for beginning students, but of course the criticism settles on the idea that swordsmen did not sit in seiza while armed; therefore, this is a bogus and "inauthentic" practice.

Then there are the scenaria themselves. I remember a mid-level student leading a new one through the unfamiliar steps of a particularly challenging sword kata. The new person asked the meaning of one of the movements, and the mid-level guy replied, "I don't know - it's kata - it's not supposed to make sense." Overhearing this, I responded, loudly enough for everyone to hear, "Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it makes no sense!" Grr.

This mid-level student was never a favorite of mine, actually, because, unlike the suggestion in the above quote, he could never bring himself to consider what might be beyond whatever he was actually shown, like the dummy in The Analects. I could not bring myself to repeat anything beyond the movements of a given kata, which he already knew, because he was too lazy to figure out the other "three corners" of the kata on his own. As a result, he never got beyond memorizing the movements of many of the kata; their meanings were in the other three corners, which he could not be bothered to figure out. Eventually, he became incredibly bored.

There's no question that beginning students have their hands full just trying to follow and ingest the most basic aspects of kata, the physical techniques. Some, who have become acquainted enough with basic kihon, may be astute enough to figure out where the kihon and its variations fit into the scenario of a particular form. This is, actually, as it should be. No teacher that I have ever met ever expected a student to come back with the "three corners" of understanding during the first week of practice, or even the first year. In fact, the occasional person who infers meanings too early in practice is, in all likelihood, wrong. At best, she will have to discard these early inferences; at worst, she will be stuck with them, unable to change her thinking even as her understanding deepens. But sooner or later, the teacher will expect the student to be able to take kata and figure out what its underlying meaning is, and in the case of iai, there are many, many meanings layered underneath drawing, cutting and resheathing a sword. Of the three corners, after 27 years of practice, maybe I can get two, but I would not bet the farm on it. Figuring out the three corners can take a very long time.

I notice the writer of The Analects did not attach a time frame to "returning the other three," so I won't either. But I hope it happens eventually. Swordsmanship is not just about swords.

The book: Takagi and Dreitlein, Kukai on the Philosophy of Language, 2010, Keio University Press.