Buddha's disciples all gathered together to hear the Buddha teach one day, about 2500 years ago. Hundreds of them were there, and some had been present for many of his lectures. They expected a talk, but this time instead of speaking he held a flower up, and turned it slowly between his fingers. His entire teaching was contained in this single gesture.

 

Only one of all his disciples understood what he was teaching. In response to the turning flower, the monk called Mahakasyapa smiled. He understood. Nothing in the teaching was hidden from the other disciples there. They just did not have the ability to understand it. Yet.

 

It is in this sense that things are hidden in kata. There is no longer any need to intentionally hide things in the kata. In the days of the suppression of karate in Japanese-occupied Okinawa, karate practice itself was hidden from public view.

There were times when karate moves were encoded in dance and made to look innocuous or decorative or gymnastic, instead of martial. That these moves contained the means for martial training was hidden, in a sense, from the prying eyes of outsiders.

 

But with regard to the karate kata we have now, what many regard as hidden material is actually just stuff you don't know yet. We can know it, we do have access to it, if we know how to dig deep into the kata and see what is there, in the open, if you know what to look for.

 

You do need the tools. Orienting in the wilderness requires more than toughness and determination. It takes a map, a compass, the ability to read the land and the sky. The longer you spend at it, the more familiar you become with the subtle signs you would have missed earlier in your experience. What would be even more important, especially at first, if you could get it, would be the guidance of a native, someone intimately familiar with the territory who could — and would— show you how to find your way.

 

In discovering the terrain of kata we also need to have the right tools and to use them to explore. If we have a teacher who knows it all - fantastic. But if we don't have such a guide, we make ourselves helpless if we pretend to have complete knowledge, or, if out of hopefulness or willful blindness, we follow someone who claims to have it when they do not. We practitioners need to be scrupulous in our assessment of what we know, and what we don't know. Then we can proceed to discover. And then, when we come upon something new, we can be open to it, interpret it, and have it for our use.

 

Karate is an oral tradition. Even if we could record in words or on video all the movements and everything we know about karate technique, it would quickly be lost and nearly impossible to recover once human beings stop living it through consistent training in the company of other people.

 

Passing the skills on is an arduous task, and when that work is no longer urgently required by the practical demands of self defense, when cultures change, and there is no longer a large number of dedicated practitioners passing on and preserving unchanged the full systems pioneered in the past, that perishable knowledge perishes. Or at least recedes from view.

 

Most modern practitioners of karate and of other martial arts have not been taught what is encoded in the movement of their kata.

 

Martial artists in Asia and in the West have sometimes preserved the movements of the kata without knowing why they were doing those movements in that exact form. These faithful practitioners — some unfairly criticized for being hidebound and "uncreative" — were handed a time capsule. They knew that someday someone would recover the knowledge embedded in the kata even if they had not had the chance to learn it all themselves. They had faith that valuable knowledge was preserved within the kata.

 

In the lifetime of my teachers, there have been two changes that have deeply affected the oral transmission of Okinawan karate. One of these was the rapid change from a rural agrarian culture to a modern urban culture. The other was warfare on Okinawa during WWII.

 

Take a walk around the Peace Memorial, at the southern tip of the island, and you will see granite markers recording the names of the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their lives in the Battle of Okinawa - a third of the Okinawan people, as well as many military people on all sides of the war.

 

Among those names are most of the great karate teachers of that generation. Look at the 20th century genealogies of any Okinawan family or the lineage chart of any major style of Okinawan karate, and you will see the birth dates vary decade by decade but the dates of death all say 1945 and 1946.

 

The death of a generation of teachers and the poverty, despair and chaos that followed the war years damaged the living transmission of knowledge and slowed the practice of karate for years. Collectivization and the Cultural Revolution in China caused a similar disruption in the transmission of traditional martial arts there.

 

Much of the Okinawan transmission remained intact. More and more of the knowledge that had been is being reverse-engineered back into the kata. By getting the analytical tools that come from the study of grappling, tuite, throwing, kyushojutsu, target analysis, skillful internal and external energy production, chi kung, atemi, posture, Chinese medicine theory and breathing, it becomes a more and more natural part of karate practice to understand every nuance, the possibilities of every move and every moment of each kata.

 

The richness is unbelievable. The more you learn, the more evident it is that there is too much material in even a single kata to master in a lifetime. Discoveries continually open up new discoveries, like an endlessly blooming flower, turned slowly in the hands of a master.