Form and Function

Most recently during my travels, I wandered into a situation wherein I was offered a chance to join a kendo school. Being the type that enjoys new experiences and seeking the opportunity to expand my knowledge of sporting swordplay, I accepted and paid my way into regular classes.
After a few months of study, I have come to understand a great deal of the nuances of the form that drives the functions of the art to such a high level of refinement. Only through the adoption of methods and practices that were not simple and natural for my body to perform was I able to understand the degree of refinement to which the art aspired.
Kendo is well established as a sword art throughout Asia due to the fact that it wastes no time with lavish displays or excessive movements, nor does it purport itself to be a ‘combat art’ as seems to be popular with martial arts instructors these days, thereby avoiding a mentality disproportionate to the art’s capability.
That said, it still seems more than capable of cultivating the warrior mindset of enduring self-sacrifice as well as the physical prowess necessary to wield the associated weaponry with speed and accuracy.
In recent years, the western world has seen a rise in the popularity of the more refined martial arts, especially those of a more arcane nature which retain only an objective relationship with modern armed combat. However, this popularity gives rise to an increase in casual practitioners who have little interest in the cultivation of the art or in swordsmanship in general. From what I have observed, these people are often dismayed or disillusioned when they realize that arts such as Kendo are not the mail-order self defense arts that a person learns over the course of 6 months by attending class once a week. While this does little to prevent the spread of the art in general terms, a casual interest can result in an ‘ends justifies the means’ attitude toward training. This attitude is as subtle as it is common, resulting in the loss of form despite continued practice – which brings me to the beginning of this note.
Proper form is developed in martial arts for the sake of instructing students in the myriad nuances of proper function without necessarily needing to verbalize every detail of the given stance or motion. The odd stance in kendo, and the methods by which one is trained to strike, when employed properly, give rise to increased efficiency of movement. This efficiency allows for an experienced practitioner to move a greater speeds than the average person and strike with greater force, despite the possibility that said practitioner is not far from average capabilities.
Too often, a young student, realizing what he or she wants from training, focuses on a particular element rather than the development of proper form. This can be seen in the novice who desires greater speed (for example). In order to match the speed of his upper-classmen, he will force his body to move faster at the expense of proper geometry. The result is the appearance of greater speed, but since the technique is not performed correctly, it is only faster in the isolated training environment. The expense of such a trade is that the novice either suffers injury during training, or finds that the accelerated movement is detrimental to his performance of other aspects of the art. With respect to this common oversight, one might be able to reason that adherence to proper form would result in very efficient, but somewhat predictable function. Despite what one might expect, I find no grounds for disagreement; however, most thinkers visualize ‘predictable’ things to resemble simple math problems or the mechanical behaviors of clocks. The predictability of martial arts is more like that of a chess game – while the movements are such that they can be accounted mathematically with no unknown factors, there are few who can predict an opponent well enough to win by anticipation alone. If one imagines a chess game that can be won or lost in a matter of 2 or 3 seconds, one can easily see how quickly one’s actions and reactions must take place. Proper form lends itself to the ‘mapping’ of these actions and appropriate reactions, allowing the swordsman’s body to engage the opponent as the mind focuses on the opponent’s state during the match.
The function can be achieved without training in form, but only at the expense of awareness. There are hundreds of ways to strike the same point on a target, but only a few might be best for a given situation and only one could be considered the best of those. Over the thousands of years that human beings have been using swords for the resolution of conflicts, martial arts were developed through which skilled swordsman were able to further refine and expand upon their most successful techniques. As time passed, generations of swordsman through endless wars determined what worked most often and the best way to achieve the desired result with the weapon of choice (hence the dichotomy of cut and thrust in sword arts). As mastery was achieved, the creative elements of the ‘arts’ were focused on further refinement and upon development of new students whose skills had not yet been tested in battle. Through this process of refinement, generations of practitioners with greater and greater skill emerged, parallel with the collective inherited knowledge of techniques which together combined to create what is known as ‘Proper Form’. Through the use of the proper form in a given school of swordplay, one is able to profit from generations of battle experience without having to put one’s life on the line learning lessons the hard way.