Читать книгу Empty Hand - Kenei Mabuni - Страница 9

I was born in 1918. I have been happy to spend all my life with karate. My father, Mabuni Kenwa, who founded the Shitō karate, always said: “Anyone can practice karate, young and old people, men and women.” Karate can meet different needs of different people. It can be used to take care of the health and to maintain beauty and fitness, and of course it can be a means of self-defense or of real fighting. But that is not all. In particular budō2 karate is not only a system of physical techniques, called taijutsu, but also rich in mental techniques, called shinjutsu. Once during a kata performance by an experienced karateka, I heard a bystander saying: “Just by feeling this spiritual energy, I understand that karate is something of great value.”

Other people like karate as a means of artistic expression. For example, at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 the Austrian team in synchronized swimming caused considerable public discussion because they included a karate kata called Heian yondan into their performance. In August 2001 in the Nihon Budōkan the 3rd Shitō Karate World Meeting took place. I met a famous Japanese dancer there who told me: “I can see a connection between karate and dance.”

To my mind karate can be compared with a huge mountain that can be climbed via many different paths, which will reveal very different sights according to the point of view or to the season. Neither the aims nor the paths of this mountain hiking adventure are fixed. Some walk slowly up the hillside to build up their physical strength, others, the ambitious mountaineers, want to climb the highest and steepest summits at any cost.