Читать книгу Martial Arts Training in Japan. A Guide for Westerners онлайн

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Returning to the oral traditional of karatedo, we might ask if Bodhidharma was a real man. Did he actually initiate martial arts training at Shaolin temple? Was he instrumental in the founding of Zen Buddhism? Was he a major influence on Hui Neng, the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China? Who knows! Hui Neng’s name, by the way, does not even appear on lists of early Zen masters in China and no proof exists that someone named Bodhidharma arrived in central China at the time the legend states. (These observations are from a Chinese scholar from Columbia University who was in Japan translating antique Chinese Zen texts and comparing them to Japanese texts). But, as Hanada Shihan suggests, these are not the important points to stress when considering the origin of karatedo. Read the Bodhidharma tale this way: karatedo was created from an ancient system of mind/body/spirit coordination that has taken its specific form from the cultures in which it has traveled, being influenced along the way by Indian yoga, Chinese Taoism, Ch’an Buddhism, and kempo; and Okinawan and Japanese martial arts, philosophy, and culture. Linear history is an impossible ideal. Buddha suggested that to attempt to trace history was like following the tracks of a bird as it flew across the sky. Hanada Shihan noted that the value of an origin tale is found in how it affects the behavior of those who accept it, and not in scholarly questions as to its reality.