Do it right !!!!!

I am often wrong. It rarely comes as a surprise.

People a lot smarter than me are often wrong, too.

Isaac Newton was wrong about a lot of things. Very wrong. Fundamentally wrong.

Albert Einstein was wrong, too.

Just pick somebody. I bet they were often wrong about things.

Suppose somebody tells you something, and you are in a group that encourages you to believe them. What do you do? Also, let’s make it be a situation where you can’t really ask them for proof, or evidence, or an explanation. What do you do?

If it’s me, I listen and accept it for now. If it makes sense in terms of my general understanding of the universe, I’ll just plain-old accept it.

But what if it doesn’t fit at all? Or it might fit, but I can’t tell?

The only answer that will work is to find the truth.

The other day, I saw somebody do something wrong at Karate. It was something they probably learned their first day as a White Belt student a long time ago. They would have been doing it ever since. I learned it as a White Belt, too.

What I had learned was different. It wasn’t one of those difference-of-opinion things, or one of those variation things. It was fundamentally different.

One of us was wrong. Seriously wrong. Technique-not-workable wrong.

How could this be? Didn’t the wrong person get corrected by their Sensei? The only answer is that somebody’s Sensei was doing it wrong, too, and maybe the Sensei before that.

This is the big danger in Karate; the unquestioning learning. The learning that only comes from one source. Learn it, accept it, and pass it on unchanged.

The founder of Shotokan was Gichin Funakoshi. He started training as a young schoolboy in Okinawa. He studied two different styles. He taught one, which was not a copy of either. He created Shotokan, which he took to Japan in 1922.

He clearly did not practise unquestioning learning that only comes from one source. He didn’t even choose from one or the other of his two original styles. His Shotokan does things quite different from either.

The next head of Shotokan was Masatoshi Nakayama. He started training the year he turned 19. He went to live in China between the ages of 24 and 33. I’ve never read of any Karate instruction he received while there, so let’s call it self-training. He returned to Japan in 1946, and when the JKA was founded, he was made its Chief Instructor in 1949. This guy, with 5 years of instruction before the war, and 3 years after the war, was the Chief Instructor. Funakoshi was a 5th Dan, and young Nakayama was a 2nd.

Did this young, 36 year old, with Nidan rank, and 8 years of instruction dedicate himself to passing on verbatim the teachings of his Sensei?

Nope. Almost immediately the JKA began to change even the most basic Karate movements. The very first thing many people learn is front stance, and it was one of the first things to be modified. Nakayama introduced an entire new kick, called reverse roundhouse, that he'd picked up in China. That's right, a Chinese kick. Funakoshi was not impressed with all the changes, but they happened anyway.

I question things all the time. I've found tons of things that don't work, or ways to make them work. I see flaws. Not being a Newton, or Einstein, I don't always find cool workable answers.

The rigid teachers think that this is wrong, and that we should all do Karate exactly like Funakoshi and Nakayama.

Which is what I’m doing.