Kim Taylor

the best ones are when someone (usually a beginner...) slags off a really famous guy who is actually beyond most of our abilities to copy... I love those ones...absolutely crack me up.

The question works just as well the other way.

A failure of instructors in teaching the people under them about reishiki?

People's miscomprehension that while they know the outside form of a kata and can do it youthfully and athetically leads them to think they have a deeper understanding of budo as a whole than they really have. This leads then, I think, to the illusion that they can judge and evaluate koryu that they know nothing about.

A failure of instructors in teaching the people under them about reishiki?

Even with this teaching, you will still get people who can only see 'black and white iai'... mine is right, this is wrong...

Sorry, I am going to lay on a bit more thickness onto my previous response. I seriously think that people get delusions of grandeur concerning the amount they know about their own koryu (and thus giving them the right to critisize others). I have met people who so quickly switch onto the "teacher" mode just as soon as they have learned the outside details of the form.

I'm not trying to set myself an image of "ideal student" although I do consider myself an eternal one but if I cannot count the times I have gone through relearning all the koryu as if from fresh. There is just not the time or mental capacity for anyone to learn and understand the inner points of a kata without an extended period of training, assimilation, research, self discovery etc.

I thought I understood how to do Kasumi from Okuden for example. It looks fairly simple, right? From tatehiza rise into nukitsuke, reverse the blade, cut across, follow up with kirioroshi while continuing forward movement - simple! Then a couple of years back our patron sensei asked one of his senior students to teach me and another lady the "kotsu" (bones or inner secrets) of the kata. It took almost an hour to explain, demonstrate and only start to incorporate the inner principles of that kata alone and I'm sure this was just the easier parts to understand. I do not claim by any means to have improved to any signicance in this form despite my attention to that lesson and training in the principles that I tried to understand to integrate into my kata. This was, I should add, only the kotsu from one version of this kata, there are of course kaewaza and they all contain an additional amount of kotsu.

So now, after 15 years of training, I now know SOME of the inner principles of ONE version (among an average of three versions per form) of ONE koryu kata among from ONE of the sets of FOUR koryu levels; so if I set my expectations low and aim to get the same understanding in the entire curriculum (and assume that I am halfway there already) it should only take me some 4,725 years to get the entire koryu.

How on earth do people get themselves to a level of koryu critique extraordinaire after say 5 years? By being unconsciously incompetent of course, that is by not knowing what they don't know. After 15 years (and probably 1/3 into my useful martial arts life until my death) I have risen to the lofty heights of being somewhere between conscious incompetence and unconscious incompetence.

a little knowledge is a dangerous thing... So stand well back, because I'm almost dangerous!