they do not tutor them. Instruction is viewed as a gradual, developmental
process in which teachers help students to internalize the key precepts of
doctrine. The teacher presents the precepts and creates an environment in
which the student can absorb and comprehend them, but understanding—
mastery—of these precepts comes from within, the result of the student’s
own efforts. The overall process might be likened to teaching a child to
ride a bicycle: Children do not innately know how to balance, pedal, and
steer, nor will they be likely to discover how on their own. At the same
time, no one can fully explain any of these skills either; one can only
demonstrate them and help children practice them until they figure out for
themselves which muscles are doing what at which times to make the ac-
tions possible.
Pattern practice in martial art also bears some resemblance to me-
dieval (Western) methods of teaching painting and drawing, in which art
students first spent years copying the works of old masters, learning to im-
itate them perfectly, before venturing on to original works of their own.
Through this copying, they learned and absorbed the secrets and principles
inherent in the masters’ techniques, without consciously analyzing or ex-
trapolating them. In like manner, kata are the “works” of a school’s cur-
rent and past masters, the living embodiment of the school’s teachings.
Through their practice, students make these teachings a part of themselves
and later pass them on to students of their own.
Many contemporary students of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean mar-
tial art, particularly in the West, are highly critical of pattern practice,
charging that it leads to stagnation, fossilization, and empty formalism.
Pattern practice, they argue, cannot teach students how to read and re-
spond to a real—and unpredictable—opponent. Nor can pattern practice
alone develop the seriousness of purpose, the courage, decisiveness, ag-
gressiveness, and forbearance vital to true mastery of combat. Such skills,
it is argued, can be fostered only by contesting with an equally serious op-
ponent, not by dancing through kata. Thus, in place of pattern practice
many of these critics advocate a stronger emphasis on free sparring, often
involving the use of protective gear to allow students to exchange blows
with one another at full speed and power without injury.
Kata purists, on the other hand, retort that competitive sparring does
not produce the same state of mind as real combat and is not, therefore,
any more realistic a method of training than pattern practice. Sparring also
inevitably requires rules and modifications of equipment that move trainees
even further away from the conditions of duels and the battlefield. More-
over, sparring distracts students from the mastery of the kata and encour-
ages them to develop their own moves and techniques before they have
fully absorbed those of the system they are studying.138 Form/Xing/Kata/Pattern Practice