The Kata Cycle: A Tradition of Insight

For many years—several decades—our group has completed the full kata cycle four times a year to coincide with the equinoxes and solstices. The thought was that without rituals, traditions would be lost; and that without traditions, values would be lost. To maintain something true and important about our traditional karate heritage, this ritual made sense. We anticipate it, prepare for it, look forward to it, benefit from it, and enjoy it.

Our code is "same thing, different way." We have organized cycle night in a variety of ways. We have gone sequentially from Heian Shodan up through Unsu, and sometimes in reverse, from Unsu back. We have begun with the Shorei forms and ended with the Shorin. We have assigned numbers to the kata and done all the odd numbers followed by the evens, and also the other way around, evens first. We have done the cycle in families: the Heians, the Tekkis, the Ji family, the Bassais and the Kankus, the Gojushihos. We have also done them randomly, without any particular order.

However, we had never done the kata cycle according to derivation—until this winter. We researched dusty, brittle tomes to determine when the kata "emerged," either through interpolation from a prior Chinese style such as White Crane or through the invention of an early Okinawan instructor and his atelier. The earliest mention is in the 1630s when Samada-sensei brought Enpi and the three Ji kata "into being." By following the chronological breadcrumbs, we were able to track the emergence of the forms inherited by Funakoshi-sensei and reassembled into the sequence we now have in the Shoto-ryu styles.

As the kata were regrouped achronologically, new meanings emerged from the repurposed bundle, leading modern practitioners to varied and meaningful insights into the internal mechanisms of the forms, their essential relationships, and their new and ahistorical connections.

However, to reverse the process—to move from the modern technical sequence to the original chronological sequence—reveals many hidden treasures as well. We can only surmise what the "original thinkers" were tinkering with regarding combat intention, integration of the many land- and sea-based fighting arts and sciences, and early "formal" concerns, but we can discern great invention and much creative struggle.

We'll keep this method of running the kata cycle in rotation in years to come—a welcome addition, not easy to do, but leading to critical understandings.

Written By JT Sensei