Why we train kobudo:
The use of archaic farm tools – nunchaku, tonfa, kama – old style police weapons – sai – battlefield weapons out of date by the 18th century – bo – and oars – eku – familiar to tropical island people but not so much to us – give us unexpected advantages, in combatives and beyond.
- Increased strength and coordination.
Pre-modern people were more physical than we are. Many worked with their hands, all day, every day. They used hand tools to fish, farm, make clothing, cook and build. Most people now do not. To manipulate kobudo weapons takes strong hands. As you get into it, your hands and your whole body get stronger. Empty hand alone does not give this kind of strength training. Training to get your sai to whip or your bo to snap builds a level of strength and coordination that supercharges your empty hand combative ability.
2. Using improvised weapons.
If you come under attack by an opponent who is armed with an edged weapon or an impact weapon, we may need to create distance and pick up an improvised weapon. Some advise engaging empty-hand with an armed attacker. If you have to you have to. But if you don’t, don’t. Picking up a stick, a bottle, a broom, a shovel, a brick, a lamp, a pan – whatever – can be an advantage. This is especially so when your body is trained in the dynamics and range of kobudo weapons. Bo skill transfers to any long weapon. Sai skills apply to the use of a club, baton, or bottle. If you have a modern weapon handy, when you are facing the imminent threat of grave bodily injury or death, then that becomes an option. But if you do not have one, or you need to fight your way to it, then your kobudo training transfered to improvised weapons will serve you.
3. Response to improvised weapons.
If you are facing an improvised weapon you know the ranges and dynamics of the stick, bottle, brick or bat from kobudo. You have a better sense of what you can do, what the attacker can do, and what the dynamics are than an untrained person could, as you pursue your best course of action.
4. Preparing for WW4.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” -Albert Einstein
How would we prepare for WW4? They say we all be dead from World War III. Well, we might be. But we might not.
It may be that you or some of your students or your students’ students are part of the global elite. People who will be able at a moment’s notice to take refuge in the vast underground network of roads and caverns and invisible cities built down there. If the advocates of the advantages of global annihilation get their way they know they will need a refuge of their own for a while. I hear they have planned it all out. Vast cavern cities carved out of the depths of the earth are all ready to receive them. From their scale you would guess they have been built over centuries.
Miles underground, warmed by the mantel, whole neighborhoods, equipped with power stations, fuel sources and food enough to last for generations. Even an artificial sky.
People you are teaching or training with right now, or their descendants, may be living down there. They may actually live through WW3, as planned. They or their descendants may be the ones facing WW4. If they do, and Einstein was right, they may need kobudo.
Far in the future, after the survivors surface, as they and their children and grandchildren adjust to sunlight, as a bold few begin life on the surface, feeling the wind in their hair and the rain on their faces, who knows what brave new world they will see.
In the aftermath of the global nuclear event, when most everything that lived has been incinerated and what is left has been genetically modified, they will have to make their way in a world no one knows . There will no way to “get ready.”
With no more machines, no more tech, tools, phones, lights, motorcars, they will need to do what they can to stay alive. And if life in the human realm in the future is anything like human life in the past (or the present), one of the things they may have to deal with is interpersonal violence. Sadly.
One of them will reprise the brilliant primate’s insight, picking up a desiccated femur from a pile of bones in the ancient charnel ground (or battleground), swinging it high and and giving the earth a mighty blow with the old white bone. Again and again. Smash, smash, smash, in exaltation. The sudden ecstasy of power magnified. The quantum leap to leverage. The magic conversion of rotational momentum to linear force. A tangent.
Your descendants or those of your students many years from now, will have an advantage if they have maintained some memory of kobudo or maybe they will reinvent it – manipulating clubs and sticks, projectiles, levers and blunt instruments, with skill. People lived that way for millions of years. I imagine they will do it again, when they have to.
Of course, we hope they will find peace. Certainly, their happiness will depend on much more than the arts of war. Love and kindness, self-sacrifice and intrepidity, generosity and tenacity, wisdom and courage, a cool head and a brave heart, all will be indispensable. But they will know first hand: Si vis pacem, para bellum. It will not be Greek to them.
We train. Here and now. To elevate the day-to-day conduct of our lives, and to meet the unexpected head on. Of course, there are many other things we do too, which are more important in the long run. But we are only partly in the long run, at the moment.
5. There is a weak link in some preparedness plans.
It is easily overlooked but not hard to fix. For all the food, water, ammo, commo, medical, tools, supplies and other stuff stashed and stacked and shelved for dark days, the question remains: Can you use it?
Can you carry five gallons of water for a mile to the stream? Can you carry an injured neighbor or family member a mile to the road? Can you find your way over rough, unknown ground in the dark? Can you search a lot, a building, follow a trail? Can you find concealment? Can you stay until the time is right? Can you take your skills beyond the porch? And a thousand other unexpected challenges that will have to be met that depend on an intelligent body and a strong mind. We cultivate both under the pressure of training, armed and unarmed.
6. We connect with history and are in it.
We do kobudo to connect with people who lived long before we were born. Their lives continue. They influence us here and now. Our aspirations, manifest in the training we learned through them, deepens our lives. And also, we may need to live like them again someday.
We may want to.
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NOTES:
2001 A Space Odyssey
Gilligan’s Island
Latin
Einstein probably did not invent that quote; he may have used it.
Post copyright © 2024 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate, Saluda, NC
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