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SHU, HA, RI: Karate Diverging to Independence October 10, 2005
The Japanese saying “SHU, HA, RI” - which is typically translated as “Obedience, Divergence, and Transcendence,” gives a model for maturation within the martial arts. In the very loose translation provided to us by many supposed scholars of Japanese language and martial arts, we find a very mystical, spiritual experience of obeying what our teacher tells us, diverging only a little to more fully explore the art we have been taught, and finally transcending the art through to some state of enlightenent in which we now fully understand the art. It is an extreme view of martial arts study that true understanding awaits us only at the end of a life of loyalty and deep, narrow, focused, and unchanging repetition and memorization.
In other words, what we find is that SHU, HA, RI is probably a Japanese military slogan, probably reinterpreted from its original meaning from Japan’s experimentation with imperialistic conquest, which basically tells us to remain forever obedient and that we will eventually come to full understanding of The Way, The Rules, The System, The List, and The Curriculum. Should we fail to obey, we might not ever reach the enlightened state waiting for us at the end of the tunnel of obedience we follow. Not that it would matter, since that enlightened state supposedly results in finally understanding why the only reasonable approach is composed of little more than repeating this cycle of control, obedience, and stagnation within a craft. It doesn’t sound like a very promising road to travel, does it?
But let’s take a second look at how SHU, HA, RI has been translated and what this slogan actually says, because, unbeknownst to anyone without a Japanese dictionary and a working knowledge of the language, this phrase has been, in my opinion, poorly translated from Japanese into English. SHU, HA, RI does not mean “Obedience, Divergence, Transcendence” as is insisted by so many who provide explanations of it.
 SHU/mamo(ru) - (v.) to protect; to obey. |
So, what does SHU, HA, RI really mean? The first character, SHU, is also read mamoru, and it means to protect or to obey. This is suitably translated as obedience. The second character, HA, is also read as yaburu, and it is more correctly translated as meaning to rip, tear, or break. The last character, RI, is also read as hanareru, and it is more correctly translated to mean separate or leave.
SHU, HA, RI in fact does not tell us to remain obedient, diverge slightly, and eventually become one with The Way we were taught through trusting and obedient repetition of what we were shown until we burst through to full hypnotized happiness. It does not ask us to approach our martial art as if we were members of a historical preservation society. On the contrary, it tells us to do just the opposite.
SHU, HA, RI is probably better interpreted as , “Obey, begin to separate, and then leave.” This does not describe a dutiful apprentice following in his master’s footsteps for his entire life, eventually replacing him as the master of the same craft himself when I read it. Instead, it seems instead to describe a natural process of maturation and growth in which we go from being dependent upon our teachers to being independent and then finally moving on.
That’s not a slogan that you would think you would find thrown around in a karate organization where the sensei is to be followed always and all of us are expected to consider ourselves perpetual students on pain of being politically incorrect. I infer from SHU, HA, RI that we should obey at first, break away, and then go it alone as adults in our own right in our craft the same way that we do with our lives. And this has interesting implications to our study of Shotokan or any other form of karate, because it defies the very core of the control/dependency cycle which has, I believe, caused karate development to stagnate. It also has resulted in the former tradition on Okinawa of molding karate personally to suit the man being supplanted by a policy of militant preservation of the craft as-is for all time.
It has become politically correct for every karate practitioner to declare himself publicly as “just a student” no matter how many years of training he has. We are expected by our community to subordinate ourselves to the art not just for the purpose of becoming expert in it, but for a lifetime, so that we may become enlightened. Our highest priority is expected by most to be pursuit of this single martial art in the single way we were instructed - to preserve it against change. But should that be our highest priority? Do we study karate to fulfill someone else’s mission for our having learned it, or do we study karate to fulfill a purpose that is personal to us?
Learning a new skill begins with us doing as we are told. Different cultures place different limits on this obedience and how far it is taken. In older societies where young men were apprentices under master craftsmen, the young men might almost live as slaves while living at the feet of their master and learning the craft. Note the Japanese legends of apprenticed students sweeping the dojo floor for months on end before being allowed to so much as watch a lesson, much less actually practice with others.
Today, remnants of this obedient phase of learning exist in our behavior in that when we walk into a classroom on a topic we realize we know nothing about, we tend to be very humble in our approach and attempt to follow the instructions of the teacher carefully. Obedience is the first stage of learning anything. To learn how to do what our teachers can do, we must subject ourselves to following the instructions of our teachers to some degree.
This obedience today is less than in previous days, for if a teacher of math were to insist that her high school students wash and wax her car, they would likely refuse, assuming that she had given instructions outside the scope of her authority. They might even file a greivance against her and the school, and parents might complain. These days, the scope of authority which a teacher is granted is limited by the rights of the people he is teaching. As the acknowledged rights of human beings increase, the limits on the authority of teachers increase.
 HA/yabu(ru) - (v.) to tear; to rip; to break. |
After obedience, the next stage in this slogan is to break away. In this stage, we are no longer just an apprentice doing everything the master says. We have begun to go our own way, to modify our approach to our craft so that it is unique and personal to us. We see this stage in graduate students in universities, as they work on their dissertations and then present them to a board of senior professors who challenge the ideas but do not insist that the accepted dogma be followed letter for letter. It is natural that as our expertise increases, our uniqueness as human beings will begin to express itself in our work, and our creative process will begin to creep in where before was only blind faith and following.
Out of curiosity, I surfed around the Internet a little to see what others were saying this phrase meant, I found that almost all were claiming that it meant something like “break through,” as in to break through to a new and deeper understanding. Let me assure you that this word cannot be interpreted to mean “break through,” and if someone chooses to view it that way, while they have every right, it is not an accurate and correct translation of HA. HA means “to rip, to tear, to break.” HA is a destructive act in which a sheet of people is torn in half, a vase smashes on the floor, or apron strings are pulled until they shear and come apart. Any other interpretation, I believe, looks suspiciously like a rationalization intended to talk students out of striking out on their own. But breaking away is a natural result of growing in expertise, both at life, and in a particular subject or craft.
Finally, we come to the last stage of development, RI, and this means “to separate or leave” in Japanese. When I wrote that sentence just now, I had a vision of a karate student packing up his bags, shaking his instructor’s hand, saying, “Thank you for all you have taught me.”
I can imagine the instructor putting his hand on his student’s shoulder and saying, “I’ve taught you everything I know, and you have done well. Now go out into the world with what I’ve taught you, and teach others if the urge strikes you. You are no longer my student. You are my colleague.”
And the student goes out the door and becomes a teacher in his own right.
Very romantic, and unfortunately for all, very unrealistic. Were it true that our instructors were all so enlightened as to acknowledge that any martial art is a limited topic, and that at some point our learning curve begins to plateau, and support us as we become more colleague than apprentice!
In this final stage of the development process, the teachings that were given to us are part of our history, and what we do today is truly our own. In this stage, we do not merely tweak the process that we use for our own purposes – we feel comfortable creating our own craft and going beyond what was done before. We leave our teachers behind. The craft might not even be the same one as our teachers taught us, but we have grown and matured, and our understanding cannot be denied. We are now equals with our teacher. We have obeyed, we went through a process of breaking away, and then we set off on our own path. We matured.
 RI/hana(reru) - (v.) to separate; to leave. |
These three principles have been argued to work in the learning of karate and other martial arts by many different people. I believe that if we wish to view our karate experience through this filter, it may reveal something to us which more than a few karate instructors would perhaps rather not acknowledge. In fact, I might argue that these three principles are at work, but only in a chaotic and sometimes explosive fashion amongst karate enthusiasts, largely because of our over-focus on obedience, which consists of control and dependence. In fact, I would even argue that because of the way karate organizations are structured and operate these days, preaching a philosophy in which the student never becomes a master and forever is beholden to the man to whom he is apprenticed, that the maturation process from obedience to separation is being unnaturally suppressed for all of us who are not interested in serving as a vehicle of historical preservation for others.
As an example, take a look at kata training. In the beginning, we do as we are told, and we learn the kata from scratch, following our teacher’s instructions to the letter. We do our best to perform the kata to his liking, because from him our next rank promotion will come. As we begin to advance, we continue to learn more and more kata, and we again follow the instructions to the letter. This stage of obedience is a good thing. It gives us a solid body of knowledge that our predecessors have worked hard to amass that we can draw upon later on for whatever reasons we may have.
But there is something dysfunctional about the fact that after we have finished learning a kata, and we have performed it many hundreds and perhaps thousands of times, that we are not encouraged to begin changing that kata, to suit ourselves. We may tweak the kata ever so slightly, but we are encouraged, by the rules of competition, and by the examination criteria for higher ranks, to continue to stay in the obedience stage for the rest of our karate training experience. Viewing things this way, I have come to see rank promotions beyond a certain level to be little more than rewards offered for compliance and obedience – motivation to toe the party line. Tournament trophies from closed events with strict rules serve the same function – they encourage obedience and preservation of the craft as-is.
Even after long years have passed for many, perhaps even as many as it would take to complete an entire lifetime of education and become a physician, we are discouraged from diverging in our approach to kata more than just the tiniest bit, all for the sake of keeping everyone doing the same thing. This seems to me to be a suppression of the natural maturation process.
Were the natural process of maturation to continue, would not the expert of karate begin not only changing anything and everything about his martial art to suit himself, but wouldn’t he also even create his own kata and techniques from scratch? Does the natural human tendency toward creativity not begin to express itself at some point when one is expert in the original teachings?
I believe it does, and yet we suppress this tendency, for the sake of control over others, for the sake of having standards, for the sake of maintaining a recognizable similarity that gives us a common identity, for the sake of… what? Keeping everyone in a karate organization obedient to a template accomplishes what? I will give a possible answer to this question later on.
Some might argue that submitting oneself to a higher authority during the obedience stage is imperative to learning. I agree with this, as long as we are talking about the beginning of training. Obviously others agree with me, too. I note that some senior karate instructors have begun to create their own kata and allow creativity to be expressed. However, I am disappointed to see that they are not encouraging this same expression of creativity amongst their students who are also well beyond the need to follow obediently along behind a teacher. Instead, the instructors doing the creating apparently reserve this practice to themselves alone. Why?
If we accept the saying SHU, HA, RI as a valid slogan for learning any craft, including karate, then it seems that we must also accept that divergence and transcendence are a natural state of affairs, and that experts of karate will move from learning the creations of others to becoming creative themselves. It seems to me that kata would be one of the first places for this creativity to express itself, and that the mass creation of new kata by thousands of experts would contribute to the world the same way new paintings and musical compositions by thousands of experts adds to humanity’s accomplishments. With more content to share amongst ourselves, are we not enriched and given a deeper and broader pool of choices from which we can find what suits us best?
What kata have we missed out on because very talented experts were encouraged to only practice what they were shown and never engage in creative expression of their karate skills? What price have we paid in suppressed development and creation for preserving 26 kata as they were in 1960’s?
Some might argue that we could never hold tournaments again if every black belt in the Shotokan world started doing kata his own way or making them up himself. They point to inelegant demonstrations of kata out in the free-style karate community performed to dance music as an example of how creativity can turn the equivalent of a lovely pond and garden into a smog-filled red light district. They are concerned that creativity, if allowed, will result in enthusiasts coming up with crowd pleasing performance art rather than kata which are based upon the fighting technology of Ye Olden Days on Okinawa. They might even argue that only those with 20 years of experience could possibly come up with anything truly meaningful. And, of course some would argue that the kata we have are based partially on lost, ancient knowledge, and that anything created today would be somehow less than what we were given.
I think these are valid concerns amongst a karate community that sometimes conducts itself more like a historical preservation society than it does a craftsman’s guild. But I would point out that the Okinawans did not approach their karate in this controlling, militaristic fashion of attempting to force obedience from those ready to be creative in their own right. Had they been this way, then we would not practice karate kata at all. We would be doing Chinese quan using Chinese methods. The Japanese were also originally accepting of creativity, as today the very popular Sochin kata was probably created by Funakoshi’s son who based it loosely on the Shito-Ryu Sochin kata. Unsu certainly did not contain a large spinning jump on Okinawa. How did we end up with two Gojushiho kata? Kanku-Dai does not resemble Kushanku of Okinawa exactly. Through obedience all of this happened? These are examples of breaking away and leaving, not of the operation of a historical preservation society.
Creativity has been suppressed on since the rise of the karate organization and the karate tournament. Historical preservation and keeping everyone doing the same thing and dependent upon those higher up the food chain for instructions on how to do things correctly are recent developments. Perhaps if we acted more like a true historical preservation society, we would dump the ranks, dump the uniforms, stop marching in lines, and get creative.
I believe that we could hold tournaments and still survive to wake up the next day if 1st and 2nd dan black belt enthusiasts were allowed to create their own kata. Too soon? 3rd dan? Where do we draw the line at allowing breaking away and separation to take place? I believe these are natural processes that are ready to begin far earlier than the average Japanese martial artist is willing to admit. Some researchers into human development might agree that we are not exactly at our most creative when we enter retirement years. Allowing only the very old and aged to be creative does not seem like it will serve the whole population of obedient enthusiasts of karate very well.
Perhaps rather than arbitrary lines which must be crossed by demonstrating full obedience, we should allow maturity to simply express itself in each pupil as they begin to have enough confidence to do so. Through this approach, we could encourage and guide, and remain an influence, rather than a control, in their growth in learning the craft of karate, and perhaps reduce the incredible levels of churn amongst our apprentices.
Dependence
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Independence
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Interdependence
Maturation is a natural process that happens of its own accord. Stephen Covey’s maturity continuum agrees with this Japanese saying of SHU, HA, RI. He suggests that maturity is a continuum of dependency upon others.
Dependence -> Independence->Interdependence
When we first begin our karate instruction, we are dependent upon our teacher to provide us with all of the answers, and we are expected to perform to his liking and according to his rules. We are dependent upon him for what we practice. He provides – we use. He dictates, and we obey.
Covey suggests that as we mature, we become more independent. We get a job, we get our own income, we become responsible, and we stop leaning on others for our needs. We become able to provide for ourselves and go our own way. This happens in life on a grand scale, and it happens on a smaller scale as we learn new skills and mature within this larger development cycle.
As we continue to mature, Covey suggests that after the requisite stage of learning independence, we begin to become interdependent. That does not mean being dependent on others, but rather to understand fundamentally when it is appropriate to solicit help from others and when it is appropriate to stand on our own two feet. A sense of teamwork, if you will, develops within us if we continue to mature.
I find this interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the Japanese and Covey’s model are both suppressed by organizational standards, examinations for higher ranks, and competition rules. I believe that my karate students cannot become independent if the teaching method is such that independence is punished and dependence is rewarded. To lead a karate club in this manner would be the same as trying to keep unemployed forty year old children at home with me. A parent’s job is to teach their children obedience, give them basic principles for living life, and teach them independence. We do this so that they become able to apply those principles in their own way after they move out of the house. A child who had everything done for them never wants to leave. And if the child never leaves, we parents will go quite insane.
I note the way many families continually dysfunction as a result of parents who do not encourage independence amongst their children. This seems to be more and more of a problem today. They buy their children cars, they try to cover for their children’s mistakes, and when the children come home with laundry from college, parents dutifully wash the clothes. This coddling keeps kids dependent on parents and perhaps gives the parents an inflated sense of well-being from the illusion of being needed.
This seems a valid analogy to the karate world, since here we see dependency being used perhaps to control others, because ultimately, for such a business, dependency equals money. Don’t think so? Do you think that your students would continue to send you money if you put them through a training process which had a definite end to it? What if you told your students that they knew all that they needed from you, and that they were ready? Would they keep paying you?
What other motivation would an instructor have to prevent students from becoming, as so many love to say, arrogant and un-humble enough that they thought they had learned enough and were ready to move on?
I have also seen parents who try to control their children by suppressing their independence. Invariably, when the child leaves home for college, their independence finally asserts itself, and the child explodes in a torrent of dysfunctional behavior which expresses as taking up smoking, drinking binges, promiscuous behavior, or narcotics use. These behaviors seem to be almost rebellious against the previous control that was exerted against these children who finally find themselves free, and yet have not been given enough independence previously to have been trained to manage themselves as free adults.
Doesn’t this also happen in the karate world?
I think we can all agree that karate organizations invariably begin to fall apart when the leader dies. I believe this is because karate organizations and the current thinking about proper karate instruction and practice encourage the suppression of independence amongst karateists to such an extent that when the leader of the organization dies, those who remain have never learned to work together as a team while respecting each other’s differences. A healthy sense of individuality and togetherness in the face of unique approaches to karate is supplanted by the desire to work within and have a simple, easy, unifying standard. This dependence on similarity plus a leadership personality to hold a group together ultimately is what undoes so many karate organizations.
And since interdependence is on the continuum of maturity after learning independence, few, if any karate instructors have any notion as to how to work together with one another as a team without creating another model of dependency. We see this at work when so many disaffected karate instructors resign or are dismissed from their karate organizations turn around and found their own karate organizations which use the same dysfunctional suppression of independence among members. The leader is free, the rest simply detach from one group and reattach to another, still obeying their instructions and never assuming responsibility for creating and adding to the system of karate they practice. In other words, they never diverge and transcend. SHU, HA, RI is suppressed.
What can we as karate instructors and karate experts do to put a stop to this endless cycle within which our students remain apprenticed to us forever and the subject matter becomes frozen in time for no other reason than observance of the requirements of a few people who fear losing control over the rest of us were we to explore these upper reaches of martial arts practice? Are we a cultural preservation society? Or are we trying to develop and improve ourselves while personalizing a system of karate to ourselves?
I guess the answers to those two questions determine whether or not the gentle reader finds this article offensive to his sensibilities or potentially expanding of his understanding of the process of mastering a martial art. I personally am not interested in helping a few old men preserve what I learned from them as a member of a historical preservation society. Perhaps others are. That is fine for them, but my interest is in experiencing karate training to the fullest for my own reasons and developing my karate to meet my needs and the needs of those I teach. I had my own reasons when I first entered a karate club as a child.
What can I do, when I am the teacher, to put a stop to this enforced stagnation – this belief that the kata must be performed only as instructed, that stances and techniques must always look exactly like someone else’s, and that everything from my uniform to my class structure must be similar to others?
I believe the first step that I took down this path was to realize that at some point in my training, receiving rank promotions from others was perhaps more detrimental to my development than it was a helpful motivation. For what is the motivation behind the offering of a karate rank if not to fulfill obedience and meet the approval of others? At some point, I began to play around with the curriculum that I practiced as well. I dropped a few of the supposedly sacred kata from the unchangeable list handed down to me, and I stopped practicing them. Why should I preserve them? They are not preserved for me in their original state, and some were created a mere 60 years ago by others with half of the accumulated training experience that I have today. I choose to let others preserve them, if that is their wish.
Obviously by doing this, I put myself outside the The System. If I ask for someone to observe my karate and award me another rank, then I will be refused if I cannot perform The Kata from The List. It’s too bad that The System even has The Kata and The List. Too bad it is not A Kata and A List.
I also began to practice other kata from other systems which I found that I enjoyed. I found that much as I enjoyed Shotokan’s Sochin kata, I enjoyed the Shito-Ryu Sochin upon which it is loosely based. The practice of this kata was also outside The Rules, The System, and not on The List. I had become disobedient, I guess, but isn’t this what the HA stage is all about? Not mere rebellion while only a beginner, but asserting my own methods and my own twist on things as an expert in my own right for my own purposes is divergence. A teenager getting ready to leave home?
I have also taken a queue from some others, and I have experimented with making my own kata. No, I did not pull out a stereo system and put on a fancy outfit while dancing to modern music. I created a couple of kata that were based upon Shotokan’s point sparring system – kata built using our currently embraced method of fighting. I also experimented with variations upon the kata I had learned. And I played around with creating them out of whole cloth.
I have also revisited some of my fundamental assumptions about karate performance in general. I find much of it to be opinion and supposition, since almost no real testing has ever been performed on whether or not the methods used by this style of karate or that one produce strong techniques. Since it is little more than someone’s opinion and supposition, should I too at some point form my own opinion and do things my way?
Why should I not do this? Because it is against The Rules? Because others will not approve? Because it is not popular? Because I will not fit in?
Are those not the rationalizations that we warn our children about, because so often trying to fit in, be popular, be accepted, and engage in unhealthy seeking of validation from others might result in our jumping into a lake just because the neighbor’s child does it?
When I have expressed these thoughts surrounding the maturation process and the learning of karate to others, some nod in agreement, because while they still wish to compete with their friends and fit into a group, they are secretly engaging in the same practice I am. Some have expressed revulsion, imagining me wearing a stars and stripes uniform and performing some nutty dance routine to music. They say, “I don’t care what you do, just don’t call it Shotokan.”
To be honest, I really do not call it Shotokan. I just call it karate. And I think I understand why Funakoshi just called his karate by a generic term and used no connotations of style. He put the system together himself. It was his personal system. He did not impose it on others, he offered it to them, as karate was offered to him on Okinawa. But I continue to use the word Shotokan in discussions because that is where my solid base of obedience is – that is how I was trained, and everything I do is either original from that training or modified from it.
I doubt someone from Shito-Ryu would look at my karate and think it was anything other than Japanese Shotokan as taught by a large karate machine in Japan. What I have done with it is not very dramatic or astounding, just a little different – I do what suits me now. I am not anyone’s apprentice. That does not mean that I do not have things left to learn – we all do. But it does mean that I am done obeying as no apprentice in history has ever been asked to obey before. I will not adhere to a prepackaged template of karate training any longer, and I will work to encourage those of similar experience who are experts in their own right to stretch themselves to do more than make others obey them.
The last karate instruction that Katayama Sensei gave me in Nagoya was to say in his excellent English, “You will go home, and you will do karate your way, not my way. You can do whatever you want. It’s yours. It’s like a gift. I gave it to you. Now you enjoy it, and if you choose, give it to someone else.” I don’t think I really ever understood what he meant by that until recently.
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The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey September 2, 2005
One of the concepts I have challenged the karate community on repeatedly in my many writings has always been what I feel is a passive approach to personal growth and self-improvement. Without defining what character is, without taking a benchmark of individual good and bad qualities, without setting out a plan for what to do about each of those bad qualities and how to emphasize those good qualities, karate instructors proudly strut around claiming that karate builds character and changes the participant for the better.
I do not believe that.
I do not believe that passively sitting back and waiting for age and random experiences to shape me into a better person. I don’t think that with someone like me that playing baseball, doing some karate, or riding my Jeep off-road will have enough character building impact to make me into the man that I wish I was.
There are ways to improve your character, however, and they are many. None of them is easy. There are many such programs out there. One of my favorites is Stephen R. Covey’s philosophy. What looks like a book you read and put down is actually more of a reference that you study and study until your brain begins to hurt.
While there are no exercises within the book or the audio version, this program of self-improvement and life change can be undertaken with conscious effort to adopt its principles for oneself. Reading the book once will not do the trick.
However, reading the book, memorizing the Seven Habits, and listening to his message of taking personal responsibility for everything that we might experience are a source of great improvement.
Many people attend a Seven Habits seminar for a day, and when I mention this book to them, they say “Oh yeah, I did that once.” But you have to work it, and work it every day. Slowly, over time, I have found that my tendency to scold myself has dropped, my perfectionism has abated a little, and my blaming of the people around me for my problems has practically disappeared.
Because of this book, I have experienced big changes in my life that I cannot imagine having happened otherwise.
There are no easy answers here. No easy advice you just follow and everything changes. This stuff is hard. It is not for timid, fearful people who are afraid to look inside themselves and find something that they are ashamed of. This program is about doing things that other people will not want you to do. The hardest thing to do as a social human being is to change, because we surround ourselves with people who like us the way we are. Those people will actively resist any attempt to change you make.
People fear change. Unfortunately, most people who read this will not have the guts to actually order the book or listen to the CD’s in their car repeatedly and begin following the principles. But I guess those folks are right where they need to be.
I am grateful that I found this book, and I would like the opportunity to pass on something I feel I benefited from to you.
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