The Nijukun, Part One: Courtesy, and No First Attack in Karate

The twenty precepts are recited in a great many dojos and examined in very few. That is a shame, because read slowly they are considerably stranger and more argumentative than their ceremonial use suggests.

Courtesy first, and last

The opening precept holds that karate begins and ends with courtesy.

It is easy to hear that as decoration, the sort of thing a founder says because founders say such things. Read as an instruction it is more demanding. It places the bow at both ends of the practice, which means the training is bracketed by an act of deference rather than framed by aggression, and it makes courtesy the container rather than an ornament on the outside of one.

There is also a practical reading available. A room where people hit each other needs a hard boundary around the activity, and a formal act at entry and exit is an efficient way to mark one.

No first attack

The second precept is the famous one: karate ni sente nashi. There is no first attack in karate.

It is carved on Funakoshi’s memorial, which is a reasonable indication of how central he held it, and it has been argued about ever since. The narrow reading makes it a rule of engagement: do not initiate. The broader reading makes it a claim about what the art is for, and rules out the entire category of using it to get your way.

Neither reading is comfortable for a school selling self-defense, and both are harder to live with than the version where it becomes a vague sentiment about not being a bully.

Spirit before technique, and knowing yourself first

Two more from the opening group, and they belong together.

One puts spirit ahead of technique. The other says to know yourself before attempting to know others. Between them they describe a sequence in which the student’s own honesty is the first subject and the physical skill is downstream of it. That is an unusual thing to put at the front of a martial curriculum, and a reliable thing to skip past when reciting.

What is not in them

Techniques. Applications. Anything about winning.

For a document produced by the person most responsible for karate becoming a global practice, the Nijukun are remarkably uninterested in the things karate is usually sold for. Whatever else that tells us, it tells us what Funakoshi thought he was transmitting, and it sits awkwardly beside the schools that recite the precepts weekly while advertising a black belt in eighteen months.

Reading the first precept the way it is actually used

The first precept, that karate begins and ends with courtesy, is the one most often quoted and the one whose use is most worth examining.

Read as a description of how to train with people who can hurt you, it is straightforwardly correct and practically load-bearing: the bowing, the queueing and the formality exist because a room full of people throwing techniques at each other needs an agreed protocol, and protocols are made of manners.

Read as an instrument of hierarchy, the same words do something else. Courtesy in that mode always travels upward, from junior to senior, and the reciprocal half quietly disappears. A student who asks an awkward question can then be corrected for a failure of etiquette rather than answered, and the precept has been used to close a conversation that it plainly does not forbid.

Both readings are available in the text, which is what makes the line so serviceable. The way to tell which one a school is using is to watch whether the courtesy runs in both directions when something goes wrong.