Brief History of Karate

Basically, ch'uan fa (in mandarin) is more properly known as kung fu, which was the predecessor to karate and is first mentioned in the history books in around 520 ad..
There had of course been various bare handed arts in existence prior to this but sadly there is little to no documentation/information about them.

Around this time a Buddhist monk named Bodhidharma travelled from his home in Madras, India as he thought that Buddhism outside of India proper was in a state of decline and he felt that he ought to do something about it.  So he began an epic journey to China where he visited and spoke to many of the Chinese nobility including the revered Emperor Wu, eventually making his way to the Shaolin monastery in the Honan Province of China.

As a member of the Kshatriya or warrior caste, Bodhidharma was exposed to all existing forms of weapon less fighting forms in India from boyhood but a bare handed art which is little known today called vajramushti appears to have been the main bare handed influence.
There is some discrepancy here as to whether it was Bodhidharma personally or one of his students that introduced a series of movements to aid the mental and physical well being of the monks who were in such a poor condition but it is Bodhidharma that is credited with the implementation of the "18 hands of the Lo Han" or "Shih Pa Lo Han Sho" to strengthen their bodies and minds sufficiently for them to be able to study the intense requirements of Buddhism.

It is this first set exercise that historians bestow the creation of martial arts per se to Bodhidharma.

Several decades after his death a certain ch'uan fa master named Ch'ueh Yuan Shang-jen verified that the shih pa lo han sho did exist and combined this with moves of his own style to create the 72 moves of Shaolin Ch'uan Fa.  Many years were spent developing and popularising the system and Sheng-jen eventually met up with another martial arts master named Li.  Between them they enlarged this system to 173 moves and gave the best of them names such as dragon, tiger, snake and crane.  Many of which are still foung in kung fu and many other Chinese disciplines.
It transpires that when the monastery was attacked by some undesirables one of the monks who had become adept at the new shih pa lo han sho defeated the attackers with a barrage of kicks, strikes, punches and blocks, impressing the other monks to the extent that all were trained in this new defensive martial art.

Karate as we know it today took many centuries to evolve and we rejoin the story on a small island called Okinawa based in the RyuKyu Islands off the coast of Japan.  History shows that there has always been brisk trade between Okinawa and both Japan and China with a strong element of cultural exchange, this included martial arts which had evolved from those practised above into a form of kempo.  It was only when China changed their civil envoys with military representatives, of which many were skilled in kempo (circa 1600)  that the Chinese form of Kempo was combined with the native island fighting arts to form Okinawa-te.

From here we again find ourselves in an historical blip as very little formal records were kept of the flourishing Okinawa-te.  The following extract from "Karate- The Art of Empty Hand Fighting" by Hidetaka Nishiyama & Richard Brown relate an important aspect of the development of karate and goes to explain the reasoning behind the lack of formal records...

"...About 500 years ago, the famous King Hashi of the Okinawan Sho dynasty succeeded in uniting the RyuKyu Islands into one kingdom.  To ensure rule by law and to discourage any military rivals, he seized all weapons in the kingdom and made the possession of weapons a crime against the state.  About two hundred later, Okinawa became part of the domain of the Satsuma clan of Kyushu, and for a second time all weapons were seized and banned.  As a direct result of these successive bans against weapons, it is said that the art of empty-handed self defence called Okinawa-te underwent tremendous development."

Karate and imparticular Shotokan was developed by a former school teacher named Gichin Funakoshi (born 1869) who came from Okinawa and had practised karate under two renown karate masters from being a very small boy.  It is to this celebrated master that we owe the existence of Shotokan Karate and who is accredited with changing the very nature in which martial arts had been taught for over fifteen hundred years.
He was asked to leave his home in 1917 and again in 1922 to give demonstrations of his karate to the Ministry of Education sponsored physical education expositions in neighbouring Japan and as a direct result of these the start of a lifetimes work publishing karate and its virtues began.  He was asked to travel the country giving lectures and demonstrations of his karate and quickly amassed students in their hundreds who had received his tutelage.

Sadly, in 1957 Funakoshi died at the age of  eighty eight but the tens of thousands of students who learned under him have ensured through correct and proper teaching the art still lives on.

Oss

Steve Mason