Starting this month's focus on the karate kata known as naihanchi/tekki, I wanted to mention something that all good kata have in common, that is, their construction is a work of absolute genius.
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When you first work on kata, they all seem mostly alike. Mostly just shadowboxing. Sure, some of them seem to have a little different focus than other ones, but that mostly seems like artistic license.
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Then you delve deeper into kata and you see that some of them really are as superficial as you previously thought. Sure, you could pile more and more meaning onto these kata, but it seems to slide right back off, like trying to pile sand into a pyramid. There's just not much to some kata.
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Then you study some more and a few kata come forward as being significantly more profound and complex than you first thought.
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Then suddenly you realize that one or two kata stand head and shoulders above the rest because of the sheer genius that went into their construction and the sheer volume of information encoded in them. Naihanchi is one of these few, rare kata of genius.
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How could a person have created this thing that has no extraneous motions? How could a person have created this thing that can be looked at through a dozen lenses and it gets more and more profound no matter the angle you look from? How could a person have succeeded in encoding an entire system of strategic thought and combative motion into one exercise with so few movements that take less than a minute to perform?
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Let me stop before this gets to sounding too much like ancestor worship. I'll summarize with the simple statement that the genius that it must have taken to construct this exercise is staggering.
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Patrick Parker
