Why Shorin-Ryu?

Serendipity is the main reason for most people’s choice of style, no matter how they rationalize it later. I started my classical training in Motobu-ha Shito-Ryu, and it was a fine direction. When I moved to Minnesota, what was available in the same quality category was Yamashita-ha Shorin-Ryu, so that is what I committed to, and it has been a gratifying journey. It has been so gratifying for the decade I lived in Chicago, I traveled to the honbu dojo in Milwaukee two and a half hours away rather than to take up a different style. By the time I moved to Eastern Washington, I had been a practitioner of shorin-ryu so long that it was the center of my art - I was not going to abandon it just to have a studio to go to.

Different names of styles primarily indicate different lineages of teachers. For instance:

Motobu-ha Shito-Ryu starts as a system name with Kenwa Mabuni, who taught Choki Motobu and Koke Kuniba, who taught Koke’s son, Shogo Kuniba, who taught Richard Ballairgeon, who taught Tola Lewis, who taught Kevin Gurganus, who taught me.

Yamashita-ha Kobayashi Shorin-Ryu starts as a system name with Anko Itosu, who taught Chosin Chibana, who taught Shugoro Nakazato, who taught Tadashi Yamashita, who taught Daniel Schroeder, who taught me.

Related to this, and more important to understanding the waza, the different style names indicate different emphases, alternate foci, all stemming from the fact that each individual artist, once a master, brings his/her own individual approach into teaching what the art is and what it means. Moreover, many artists have had more than one teacher, and each has many students, a few of whom become masters and teachers.

Also, the roots of any one style may come from different regional or stylistic syntheses than others. For instance, the traditions of the towns of Naha, Tomari, and Shuri are quite different as they had different socioeconomic strata and different exposures to foreign influences. Over generations, all of these particularities make for a huge range in style differences.

When a master feels that his/her style has become substantially different from the one(s) s/he learned, s/he will often start a new system name. This is different from someone who spends five years each in four or five studios, then “invents” their own style. Many people who do this cite Bruce Lee as the progenitor of their approach. These people misunderstand what he was saying and what he knew. Although he was young, Bruce Lee was a master in a traditional Kung-Fu, having spent twenty years training in it intensively before he ever committed to creating a new style. His initial classical journey is what gave him the discernment to be able to invent legitimately. When he said that all style you learn becomes your own, he assumed a kind of discipline in classical training that most of us can hardly imagine.

Moreover, he was a prodigy. Very few people in the world can expect to have his kind of commitment combined with his kind of talent. What he was questioning was the notion of tradition as the justification for things in and of themselves, which was an important element of what was happening in the 1960’s generally. Tradition is a slippery concept at best, and Bruce Lee pointed that out for the martial arts community. He may have overemphasized the point, as a reaction to the hidebound traditionalists who wanted to use tradition as a justification for secrecy and as a sole test for authenticity. Had he lived into a different time and to a more advanced age, it is easy to imagine him clarifying the value of classical training/education as subtly separate from the straitjacket of hidebound thinking. They are different things that lead to different ends. Bruce Lee was more akin to the masters in classic arts who, in starting to use a different name, took quite seriously the systematic differences that have accumulated between them and their roots over decades of classical training and reflection.

Yamashita-ha is a style in that tradition. It is that karate taught by Tadashi Yamashita (a friend and colleague of Bruce Lee, in fact), who has seventy years of full-time training and studying Shorin-Ryu. Sensei Yamashita’s emphasis changed enough based on his talents and experience that he added his ‘ha’ to the style for explanation of how his students’ karate would be systematically different from students his teacher.

All Kobayashi Shorin Ryu, from Itosu down through Yamashita, is a general art. The philosophy is one of pacifism, but wide-ranging defensive capability. We learn to get out of the way just enough, and quickly. We train balance and flexibility and rapid movement. We also are supposed to learn to strike hard, fast, and with surgical precision with arms or, when necessary, with legs.

However, we also train locks, throws, pushes/pulls, and some grappling. We learn about chi. We get exposure and practice in the principles of all of these ways. There is no commitment that “grappling is better” or “legs are the thing” – Shorin- Ryu recognizes that they are all valuable tools, and training holistically serves the bigger purposes of karate best. Shorin ryu is called a “soft block, hard counter” style, so yin and yang are both present in equal measure in training.

Of course, karate is for self-defense. In Shorin-Ryu, self-defense is a term read widely: it goes far beyond the idea of being attacked by other people. In Shorin ryu, defense also means defending against accidents and the ravages of age. Balance is good against an attack, but it is more likely to be used on an icy sidewalk that could permanently hurt your back. Good nutrition is helpful to your chi in combat, but it also enables you to live in good health for longer.

Because of this life and longevity issue, Shorin practitioners do not cultivate the internal hard pressure of sanchin that is a goal in styles like Gojyu-ryu. Shorin masters tend to live long lives, even by Okinawan standards, and tend to be physically active right up to the end of those long lives.

If you want trophies and the adrenaline rush of competition, classical Shorin-Ryu is not your journey. As a Shorin-ryu practitioner, I am free to sign up to spar where I will, but there is no concern with sparring in and of itself. It is merely one of many training tools in a dojo.

The same is true for many things you will see in more commercialized forms of martial arts. We can break bricks, but we don’t spend much time on it, so if you want to smash through inanimate objects to look like Superman, Shorin-ryu is probably not your journey.

If you want explicit spirituality, Shorin-ryu is not your journey, either. The connection between mind, body, and soul is a gradual, personal, and implicit process in classical training. We talk about making proper form, and the end result is a piece of the larger do.

However, if you want kinetic education and help in life’s journey, you might want to try Shorin-ryu if you can find it.