Question: Sensei Hanula, can you tell us what you think are the most important aspects of karate?
Answer: By learning karate, and how to win a fight without fighting, a person can free themselves from the every day gravity and weight of worry and fear that holds them down, and once freed they have the opportunity to rise to their full human potential. They become empowered to enhance their own life and the lives of people around them, as well as contributing to a more peaceful society and world. They can live on a higher plane of existence.
Question: Isn't karate about fighting?
Answer: Physically, karate is a method of self-defense and defense of your loved ones, or some other person. It is about going all out for the purpose of survival and saving or rescuing human life. This is extremely important but the potential of karate goes beyond this. What I meant by my previous answer is that life has a way of keeping us busy, weighed down and worried. Through karate training a person can gain more self-confidence, and once a person is more confident about their physical safety, they are freed up to focus on more than just getting by another day. This freedom permeates through a person's life, and at the very least provides stress reduction.
Question: How?
Answer: Among traditional martial artists there is a saying, Ken Zen ich'i Nyo, which translates to "The Fist and Zen are One." The Fist means the practice of karate, and Zen refers to a way of vibrant, happy and full living. The Zen that I am describing is a process which synergizes a persons mind and body in such a way that their life is made better. A karate practitioner who pursues this ideal is on the path known as "karate-do," which translates in English to empty hand way.
Through proper karate training, a person can attain the highest levels of strength, power, and wisdom. A person can develop strength and power in many ways, but wisdom is not so easily found. In traditional karate, the emphasis is on the inner aspects of a person developing outward, although the process begins on the outside and is manifested by physical action. In time, it is inner and outer, mental and physical.
Despite the haste, noise, and never-ending rapid changes of modern society, one can find in karate a peace of mind that is completely unshakeable. Through karate training one gains a better awareness of their inner passion but at the same time acquires stoicism and self-control which will prepare them to cope with life's many challenges and better enable them to fulfill their responsibilities. Karate training is an empowering path of self-development and self-realization. Karate training requires a person to make a total commitment. Complete and unswerving focus in karate practice helps a person to understand who they are because they are required to unify their entire being through physical motion. Because the whole self must be totally committed in karate training, the ability to commit the self and excel will also carry over into all aspects of life.
Question: Do you have any final thoughts?
Answer: My life-long journey on the path of karate-do has brought me a limited understanding of something so profound that it can never be fully realized by anyone, but I hope to share my experience with others. Hopefully I have given some idea here of my approach to teaching and the potential of karate training. I have attempted to use words to describe things that cannot be fully described with words alone. Karate must be experienced to really be understood.
