The Timeless Wisdom of Mr. Miyagi: Lessons Learned by Caleb Cheak
Do you remember why you first started martial arts? Maybe you wanted to feel stronger or learn to defend yourself. Perhaps you sought to increase your strength and flexibility. Or maybe, like me, you saw something on TV or in a movie that captured your interest.
When I first saw The Karate Kid (this will likely date me a bit), I was enthralled. I especially loved Mr. Miyagi. I still find the maintenance-man-of-a-low-income-apartment-complex-turned-sensei plot appealing. For one, he was wise. He could see Daniel’s situation better than Daniel and knew exactly what was needed. Second, he was unassuming, humble, and kind, yet could take care of business if the need arose. Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Miyagi was so awesome because he was given his superpowers through a tradition passed down from father to son for hundreds of years.
I instinctively felt that this combination of a good and kind nature, paired with the ability to kick ass, was the height of what I wanted to be. It was a truly powerful archetype. You could say he was wise due to his age and good due to the hours he put into training, and you would be right. But not all people of advanced age are wise, and as far as the training goes, he had to be told what techniques to train and how to train them. In other words, he wasn’t born awesome; he got that way with the help of all those who came before him. He was shaped, in part, by tradition.
Looking back, this idea of training in martial arts as a way to plug into a centuries-old tradition is what really appealed to me. I think this has been the case for many people who have joined martial arts, especially in the 80s. Although we’re talking about a fictional character here, there’s no denying that this movie and its characters captured the imaginations of millions of moviegoers. A piece of art doesn’t become iconic if it isn’t tapping into something real. I believe that the fact Mr. Miyagi is tied to an ancient tradition speaks to a deep need in the human soul.
What is tradition? One way Webster defines it is “an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (such as a religious practice or a social custom).” You could look at tradition as data passed down from one set of people to the next through time. In our individualist American culture, we tend to downplay the importance of tradition. It is seen as restrictive, stultifying, an impediment to progress. Artists are praised for being “original” and doing things no one has done before. Uniqueness is praised, and conventionality downplayed. It seems that the entire goal of our culture is to continually topple old traditions and progress to new ones. We have a tradition of distrusting traditions.
Although this attitude has its place—traditions are never perfect and need to be questioned and changed over time—it can lead to problems. For one, you are just one person who has only been around a few short years. Traditions generally evolve over time. The amount of information you can attain is minuscule compared to the amount of information it took to develop the tradition over time. Ideally, you would enter the tradition and add your own knowledge and experience to it, increasing the wisdom contained within it. By completely doing away with tradition, you are, in essence, starting again, at square one—having to re-learn all the lessons of the past. Also, the data contained in a tradition is often hidden and only accessible through the practice of the tradition. Generally, this is because the information they are relaying can’t really be taught in the same way as book knowledge. A clear example of such a tradition in martial arts is forms.
My first day in class, I was ready to go. I had been practicing moves in front of the mirror for a few months at that point, and I thought they looked pretty good. I had even gotten on top of an electrical box down the street and practiced crane kicks and punches based on the training montage in Karate Kid. I was good. Some of the neighborhood kids thought I was weird, but they didn’t understand the mysterious nature of my training. With all this skill I had been developing by myself, I was kind of surprised to find that I still needed to learn stuff—pretty much everything.
The bottom line was that I didn’t know what I needed to do to properly learn martial arts. This is where forms came in. Although I was excited, I remember feeling extremely awkward for the first few months. Not only was I learning moves that engaged my muscles in completely alien ways, but I was also trying to do what my instructor said: “Bend your knee more,” “Don’t bend your knee so much,” “Feet apart more,” “Don’t make your stance so wide,” “Back straight,” “Head up.” I wondered if Mr. Miyagi’s instructor was this picky.
When I watched the black belts, they moved so effortlessly. They flowed and seemed to have no restrictions stopping them from throwing beautiful techniques. I, on the other hand, ran into a restriction with every step. Everything I did was wrong in some way. As it turns out, my training sessions on the electrical box hadn’t really taught me much.
Everyone who has trained in martial arts for any length of time can relate to this initial awkwardness. We have all experienced this gap between how we envisioned ourselves moving when we signed up for classes and how we actually move. Bridging this gap requires instruction, practice, and a willingness to plug into ancient tradition. Over time, I was able to make my forms look the way the instructor said they should. But what was I gaining by making my forms look good? I was imprinting movement patterns into my mind and body. By getting the perfect front stance, I learned to put my weight forward into strikes. By bringing my fist back with every strike, I was learning to counterweight and put my hips into strikes. By trying to make my uniform snap, I was learning to move while my muscles were relaxed and only tense up at the right moment. There is no way the instructor could teach me this directly. It had to come through repeated practice of the tradition. Kind of a wax on, wax off style.
Tradition contains data. A good tradition will deliver that data in a form best suited to propagating itself. But traditions also serve another purpose—they connect us to others and thus ground us. Humans are nothing if not good at deceiving ourselves. What if I had continued to practice moves on my own rather than joining martial arts class? I could have created an entire world where I was the best martial artist ever. I would never have to go to class when I didn’t feel like it, or do pushups, and I would get to feed my ego. It would be great, except it would be a lonely reality where I was the only one participating.
Left to our own devices, we can spin off into unreality. We can, in some sense, resemble the people plugged into the matrix in the 1999 movie of the same name. We are given artificial stimuli and connection, but in reality, we are living in our heads and we are alone, cut off from reality and other people. Gone far enough, we lose the ability to know what is and isn’t real.
By participating in a tradition, we connect with those who came before us and those who are participating with us. It not only grounds us, it gives us strong roots that help us grow. But traditions are not always perfect. Earlier I mentioned that they sometimes need to be questioned and changed. There are good reasons why Americans are distrustful of traditions. Indeed, traditions can become stuffy, stagnate, corrupt, and even tyrannical. They can, rather than being something that grounds us, spin off into unreality themselves.
When a tradition loses all relevance to the current world, it has gone the same way as the kid who becomes a martial arts master without going to class—it has spun off into unreality. This can happen if it is full of people participating for perverse reasons or if it is full of people not grounded in reality themselves. The tradition and those participating in it are bound together in a symbiotic relationship. They both feed into each other. The participants keep the tradition grounded in reality while, in the same way, the tradition keeps participants grounded in reality. Either they all spin off into clown world together or grow in wisdom and relevance.
We should remember that a tradition was formed in the past and is thus always a bit out of date. The continual job of the steward of a tradition is to update the tradition properly. This requires honesty, wisdom, and love for the tradition. You must approach tradition with humility first and participate in it before you can contribute to it. If you are entering a tradition just to change it, you will contribute to its destruction.
We add a bit of ourselves to everything we are part of. The traditions we participate in end up being just a bit different because we were there. I truly believe that what we add to our traditions is part of our legacy and will make the future world a better or worse place. May we take them seriously and approach the task with wisdom, love, and humility.
