The Shapeless Journey

Are words just sounds? No real meaning is associated with a sound...apart from rare exceptions. Words, letters and symbols are only vehicles for concepts, which are by definition indipendent from language, culture and time. Infact letters and books are the tools we use to understand concepts and facts. The same happens in martial arts. Karatedo means "Empty Hand Way"; Kung Fu means "Realized Person", Quan Fa means "Punching Method"....Thus what are Karate, Kung Fu and Quan Fa?? Maybe just sounds or..not. I would say both.

The way we read those characters depends on what language we speak. So while sounds can change concepts associated with them do not. Furthernore if we read differently those ideograms maybe we are dressed in a different fashion with different outfits, but our bodies abide by the same natural rules. Indeed what we have in common is more important than what separates us. Eastern or Western , Northern or Southern doesn't matter, because ancient romans and ancient japanese are not that different from people living today!

Martial arts are the tools we use to deal with physical violence. Being a tool they trascend space and time, thus once again what was valid in the past is still valid nowadays. To deal with self defense you need 2 toolboxes: body mechanics and habitual acts of physical violence study. Body mechanics is trained with solo drills and two people drills, so we can conclude that martial arts are nothing more than the study of the best way to move our body to overcome physical confrontations. Movements and body mechanics, like the principles vehicled by letters and sounds are indipendent from everything except the nature of the human body. Martial art contain "set of tools, developed with various excercises, to learn the most efficient way to use human body to manage civil violence". Historically we know Karate is a complex reinterpretation of chinese practices of Quan Fa, from Fujian and ultimetely from Shaolin and continental Asia. It means Karate contains all the original principles studied and developped in China, so Karate is no more Japanese, than Chinese (as the original name pointed out!!!). Infact the word "Kara", before 1920s, used to mean "chinese" and it used to have another reading "To" or "Tang". So before the complex japanisation process, taken place during 1920s in mainland Japan, Okinawans used to call that fighting method "To Ti" "chinese hand", because anything from China was cool and older.....Older because the original methods were created in China (primarily Fuzhou Hequan or Yong Chun Quan) after hundreds of years of study and practice, in some cases culminated in war manual like the Wu Bei Zhi, known in japanese as Bubishi (translated in English by McCarthy Sensei). The bubishi was the ultimate and secret knowledge in most of the okinawan Toti "schools". The bubishi is the treasure presented by Shaolin monks and other chinese warriors in centuries. All Karate and basically any fighting method is contained in the Wu Bei Zhi so Karate, Ryukyu Kenpo, Fujian Quanfa, Tang Soo Do or Koryu Uchinadi are more closely related than you think. Learning immutable principles via drills and solo forms has not a specific style, it is just movement without nationality or time period.

If you look carefully enough the similarities are more than evident.. So once again karate and "kung fu"are the same set of tools just performed in a different fashion by different people. In the end what remains is just us as humans, that's way the martial pathway (Do, Dao/Tao) is shapeless and it depends just on our selves. I'm not saying we should destroy history and cultural differences, but rather we should use them as base to improve the communion between different arts to let people grow freely and reach at the end of a shapeless journey: the Kung Fu in self perfection.

Muay Boran (Thailand)

Kyokushinkai Karate (Japan)

Shaolin Quan (China)