Dear Kata...

Now I want to speak you about Kata.In chinese is Tao Lu.

In this article, I am going to refer to it as Kata, anyway!

What is the Kata, and what is its importance in learning Martial Arts?

The first thing I want to note, is that the necessity of fighting is born  much time before the creation of the Kata.

Fighting is as old as the human beings are. Probably, at the time of the cavemen, those arts were not so refined as today! And more likely, for a lot of time ,in any case, fighting was something related to instinct more than to some kind of martial studies!

I suppose here that only with the growing up of the human societies in the history that someone found interesting, for some reason, cultivating some kind of skill in fighting.

Obviously, we have not any document about the primitive times.Sometimes we can read somewhere about  ancient greek people(warriors, or peoples participating to Olympic Games) who trained movements alone, and this is, in a certain sense, as performing a Kata.

Otherwise we hear sometimes that in the ancient India (maybe already colonized by Alexander the Great) there was the tendence to imitate animals or, more in general, the nature, to enter more in symbiosis with the nature itself, in order to appropriate of the fantastic power of the same in a kind of fusion (it was time of Pantheism)to be one with it (a concept that we find a lot in Taoism, too, when taoists say about following the course of the events; incidentally we can say that this is quite similar to the concept of interdependence in Buddhism), for health and for fighting. It is also said that he was Bodhi Dharma (28th patriarch of the indian Buddhism but first patriarch of the Chan/Zen, also), between the 5th and the 6th century, who brought this indian knowledge in the buddhist temples of China, using sequences of movements imitating 5 animals, and other physical exercises, in order to strenght the bodies of the Monks, always dedicated to Meditation and spiritual exercises.Maybe this was a base for the development of martial exercise similar to the Kata as we know nowadays.At a very beginning, there was a stage in which there was the imitation of  natural phenomena and the behaviour of the animals, like snakes, tigers, cranes, eagles , praying mantis, crocodiles, monkeys, etc.From this animals was taken movements, concepts, strategies..and so on, in order to fight.

More recently, people, less pantheist than in the ancient times, referred always less to this concept, and the most of this parallelism have been lost.

We know that Kata was used in the last centuries to transmit the knowledge, sometimes inside of families, or inside the military classes.

Since the spreading of guns, martial arts lost a lot of their importance, maybe all. If first they were useful for rebel people, or for some military class, it was senseless, at a point, to teach this combat techniques to resolve conflictive war situations.So in many eastern countries, the Masters became vagabonds, or began to do exhibition on the streets. In other cases these arts turned to be a Do (something like a path for enlightenement) or a hobby/sport (altough the most of people is not able to distinguish the Do from the sport).Then the sport has become professionism in the last days.

To be more clear, martial arts separated from their "humus", the war!So the kata followed the evolution of the martial arts, as hobbies, sport, or whatever.

The modern tendence is to see the Kata as something built from humans for humans, maybe using the science as reference point, more than pantheistic points of view.It means that now martial arts are more secularized, in a sense.Jigoro Kano in Japan, and Wang Xian Zhai in China, begin more than others, to show the effect of the incoming western culture on the eastern martial arts!

I apologize for this long digression, but I think it was also necessary to understand what we're talking about.

To explain the Kata, I needed to say what were martial arts before.Why this?Because martial arts are a Kata.

Kata is not only the vehicle of transmission of many eastern martial arts, but is confused with the martial arts, which carries as well.It is both the messenger and the message!

Nowadays people is confused, because they see Kata as simple ( more or less) sequences from which to begin the comprehension of martial arts.But Kata, as refination of fighting techniques and strategies, is born after the fighting in itself.What before was a method to vehiculate the Qi, and the Intention (but people must already have and show some kind of warrior virtues, and the training, conducted by few persons and controlled by the Master, was very hard), now Kata is the start point of beginning, in a commercial vision of the martial art, as opened not to a few, but to the mass of the public!Someone modified the Kata to create some kind of physical education with martial background adding the word Do, someone else created championships using always the word Do (the confusion I spoke before), someone else tried to create a system with physical and moral targets but preserving the tradition, others entered in a really religious vision of the martial art as a way of life!

In all these cases, the destiny of each single martial art influenced heavily the Kata.

So what the Kata is, for us?Today often they are sequences to pass examinations, not really related to the culture and the historical period that created them.It' s a kind of self defense related to condition that don't exist anymore, altough those arts, if well trained , have their own effectiveness, showed in the ancient times and today at the right time.Kata were born with a why, whithout the knowledge of wich, they are useless.

Kata are vehicle of techniques, concepts of movement, strategies, like sports, but useful not in nowadays no holds barred tournments, but in weaponed and not weaponed conflicts when guns didn't exist and skill was a necessity.Not jokes! So this is about the question: what is more logical and useful for survival and victory in these conditions?

When Kano, who had a very analytical and western spirit, created  Judo at the end of 19th century, he spoke about Kata and Randori.Kata for him was the way to study the correctness of the mind attitude as well as the body postures and movements.In his Judo in perfectly visible what the East means by Kata.Is about the attention to the details.Kata and Randori influence one each other, alternatively.It is not about passing from the Kata to the Randori, extrapolating techniques!It is a compromise between the possibility of the self- body movements and the possibility to use them concretely in combat or sparring.Of course the judo has taken pretty at the beginning, an attitude sport and competition oriented, preserving the study of the ancient techniques, and so, of the ancient kata.But This is not important.Here we are defining what is Kata.It' s like a sport, when there is not so much ceremony (something that seems to come from a new age martial spirit, commercial oriented)and you study the best way in order to be effective; only change the field of application.You can think about that!