Friday September 18th, 2020
As of late, my karate-related reading has raised questions in my mind about both karate and Zen. I’m now in the section of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones that translates Chinese classic from the thirteenth century, the Gateless Gate. Perhaps its older, Chinese origins and ideas present more of a barrier for me.
Buddha twirls a flower in
another koan; also note the
flower is a circle around a point.
The first tale is short: a monk asks Joshu the master if a dog has Buddha-nature. From there, the stories grow increasingly strange: a former Zen master, unable to correctly answer a student’s question, is transformed into a fox for five hundred rebirths; Master Gutei chops off the finger of a boy imitating him; Kyogen’s fatalistic image of a man hanging by his teeth from a tree over a precipice. Yes, the fingerless boy finds enlightenment. The fox-master gains enlightenment and release through listening to another teacher. Kyogen’s caution against words, while acknowledging our human predicament of needing words to transmit Zen teachings, encourages us to engage koans at the level of experience rather than thought or language.
However, to me these stories feel less accessible than those within 101 Zen Stories. 101 Zen Stories includes anecdotes by Nyogen Senzaki, who lived much later, and helped bring Zen Buddhism to the U.S. So maybe the issue is really my lack of understanding and familiarity with Zen’s Chinese roots.
Karate’s Kempo Roots
in animals as well as plants
Oyama, at the end of This is Karate, considers karate’s debts to Zen and Chinese kempo. In fact, Oyama states of his day’s karate trends: “the tendency is to use the straight line and the sharp angle rather than the point and the circle” (pg. 329). Kempo’s use of point and circle, to his mind, is more effective. He writes, “Though it may appear weaker, the point and circle method is actually the more powerful of the two, and it has more advantages when you shift from one technique to another” (327). Accordingly, he introduced several kempo hand and fist positions, as well as tensho, into his students’ karate practice.
Oyama goes on to support his assertion of the strength of the point and circle methods. While in Japanese karate, the karateka blocks and stops an enemy’s blow, says Oyama, the Chinese kempo artist blocks and repels the enemy’s blow (327). According to Oyama, the point and circle survive through many effective karate techniques. He wrote, “…in all karate moves for the hands, feet, or for the entire body, the motion is centered on a point around which we make a gentle arcing move.”
Certainly all of my Kyokushin karate instructors emphasized using your whole body for strikes and blocks. From Sensei to the black belts who led class, they all agreed on this point. When you use your hips, you use your whole body to support a move. For advanced students, we emphasize the “hikite,” or opposite hand, as much as we do the the striking hand. Every strike is stronger with an opposite “draw back.” The draw back winds up for a strike or block. With every move, we engage the whole body. The whole body is a circle revolving around a point, focusing our energy to support punches, kicks, blocks or strikes.
Chinese Koans and Karate
This brings me back to the Chinese koans, which are just as much the basis of Japanese Zen Buddhism as kempo is to Kyokushin karate. They are intended to be hard and strange, in order to break the mind open for enlightenment. The author, reputedly Mumon, will often, in his commentaries, apparently contradict the point of the original koan. His ending poems, however, offer humor and a fig leaf back to the koan, and the reader. They circle about a point, like kempo, but the reader might need to use his or her hips, rather than head, for understanding.
