Karate Masters, Some of the Things They Did, and How You Can Become One!
Whap, bam and pow! We watch TV and the movies, and we see kung fu flips in the Matrix and sword standing and eye gouging in Kill Bill and we know we have seen the real masters! Wake up, dude, that’s a movie, and what the real masters do is a lot different than what you see on TV!
Gichin Funakoshi is considered to be one of the more important karate masters. He taught karate to Japan, and then to the whole world. If that isn’t considered feat enough to be considered a master, why don’t you go stand on a rooftop during a hurricane and hold a 3 by 6 sheet of plywood?
That’s right, to make his stance totally immovable in every way, he battled the very elements, and word has it he never sailed off to Oz. And, if you want one of the older masters, try Sokon Matsumuri, an Imperial bodyguard of old Okinawa, who made a bull run away just by giving the bull a serious stare. The trick was that he went out to the bullpen during the dark hours and jabbed a pin smack in the middle of that old bulls nose!
Of course you may think intelligence is cheating, and that to figure out how to beat a bull without bashing him is not much of a deal. So try something simple, try grabbing the beams of a ceiling, not hooking the fingers over the beams, but just grabbing them with your gnarly, old fingers, and hand walking across the ceiling. This is something that the karateka in old Okinawa were doing just for kicks and grins!
One of the best masters of old karate was Mas Oyama. Oyama became known for chopping the horns off of charging bulls, and he ended up dispatching three of the poor animals. Now, cruelty to animals, even big, old bulls, is not something we advertise, but this was a while ago, and think about the muscle, the intelligence, the brute strength, and the sheer artism required to kill a bull with your bare hands. It’s not something I would try if I were you,not even on your best day!
Okay, you’ve heard my spiel on the old legends, so let me give you a simple trick to do, and you can start becoming a karate master all on your own. Learn one of the forms of Karate, maybe Bassai, or something like it, or maybe you might want to start off with a simpler form like Pinan One. Now, let the garden hose run for an hour on that bare patch of ground behind your house.
Now, the ground is soft and gooey, yucky and messy. So it is time to do that karate form, heh heh. Whap, bam and kazowie!
Your feet go over your butt and your face plants in the mud. Up on your feet you lazy good for nothing! Did you think the Karate masters of the legends would whine just because they got a little mud on their face?
Al Case has studied Karate, and wing chun and a lot of other arts, for 40 years. A writer for the mags since’81, he is the originator of Matrix Martial Arts. You can find out about his training methods, and even get a free ebook at Monster Martial Arts!
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