Another Chance to Seek Your Essence

“во всём мне xочеться дойти до сумой сути”

The above words were written by the great Russian author and poet, Boris Pasternak. They mean “In all things, I seek to find the very essence.” In his seeking, he produced the literary classic, “Doctor Zhivago.” If you haven’t read the book, or at least see the movie, you are missing something wonderful.

(I had to read it in Russian, many, many years ago, and my head still hurts.)

That essence, or foundation, or core, or even hidden beginning, is the key to studying the martial arts.

We in fact seek the very essence of the martial arts in order to find our own essence, or foundation, our core, to find out who we are. Bruce Lee once said (paraphrasing here) that we need to find the cause of our own ignorance.

Take any martial art, for instance Goju-ryu. Many practitioners might say that it is a Japanese style of karate, and point to Gogen Yamaguchi (“the cat”) as one of Goju’s foundational masters.

And yet they would be only partially correct, as Goju-ryu comes from Okinawa, and the style was originally named “Hanko-ryu”, meaning “half-hard” school. The great karate master Chojun Miyagi (April 25, 1888 – October 8, 1953) named the style as such, due to the influence of softer Chinese Boxing techniques that had been added to the native Okinawan te (or as the Okinawans called their systems di.)

But Miyagi wasn’t the one who did the adding of the Chinese Boxing techniques. That man was Miyagi's teacher, Kanryo Higashionna, March 10, 1853 – October 1915), was an Uchinanchu (the Okinawan term for an Okinawan person) who founded a fighting style known at the time as Nafa-di or Naha-te, meaning “Naha hand.”

But he didn’t technically create the style, as the te techniques had existed on Okinawa for many hundreds of years. As far back as 1393 A.D. with the arrival of the “36 families” on Okinawa, te methods had already been practiced for some time.

And Higashionna didn’t create the Chinese Boxing methods; but he did learn them in China, as far as we can tell, from two masters; Xie Zhongxiang (also known as Ryuryu Ko) and Wai Xinxian (also known as Wai Shinzan). Ryuru Ko was the founder of Whooping Crane Boxing, and Wai was a master of Shaolin Monk Fist boxing and Hsing-I Boxing.

But Higashionna didn’t begin his training with those two men; he was an Okinawan and to the Chinese he was a foreigner and an outsider. He could not read, speak, or write in Chinese.

He wasn’t allowed to train with Ryuru Ko and Wai Shinzan until 1877. But Higashionna had traveled to China in March of 1873 as a sort of foreign exchange student. What did he do for those four years?

He had received a letter of introduction from Monk Fist boxing master Seisho Aragaki (1840-1920) to the Cai school of martial arts (also known as the Kojo school) in Fuzhou, China. Aragaki had been a student of both Wai Shinzan and Ryuru Ko.

So it is believed that he trained at the Kojo school for four years, then was introduced to Wai Shinzan and Ryuru Ko, and trained with them for another six years before returning to Okinawa in late 1882. He didn’t call his accumulated knowledge “2nd generation Monk Fist Boxing” or “2nd generation Whooping Crane Fist.” Instead, Master Chojun Miyagi said that Master Higashionna only ever referred to his martial arts system as “Quan-fa” which is Mandarin for “Kenpo/Kempo.”

This would suggest that while he had trained hard and mastered the skills his teachers presented to him, he never received any teaching licenses.

But (and there’s always a but) Ryuru Ko was a student of Pan Yuba, who in turn was a student of Lin Shixian, who was a master of White Crane Boxing. (remember me saying that Ryuru Ko was the founder of Whooping Crane boxing? Whooping Crane is also called Singing Crane and is one of the five derivations of White Crane Boxing.)

Wai Shinzan was all allegedly a commissioned officer in the Qing dynasty. Not much else is known about him other than his passing on of knowledge to his various sudents, all of whom became great karate masters.

How much further back could we go, in a quest to find our “essence?”

You can start with the Bubishi, the Okinawan “Bible” of Karate, especially the versions by Patrick McCarthy, Mark Bishop, and Fujita Seiko. They are all well-written, with Master McCarthy's version being the most complete.