The Nijukun, Part Two: the Aphorisms and Who Gets to Read Them

The first few precepts are quotable and reasonably clear. The rest are where the document becomes genuinely difficult, and where its use inside a dojo becomes worth watching.

Aphorisms are not instructions

Several of the later precepts run to a handful of words. One holds that fixed positions are for the beginner and that later movement should be natural. Another warns against thinking that karate is practiced only in the dojo.

Compressed like that, they are closer to riddles than rules, and that is almost certainly intentional: a line short enough to remember and open enough to keep yielding something is a good teaching device across a lifetime.

It is also an open door.

Who decides what they mean

In practice, whoever is at the front of the room.

The precept about fixed positions is the clearest example. It is quoted constantly by people arguing that deep stances are a training exercise rather than a fighting posture, and explained away just as constantly by people whose syllabus depends on deep stances being fundamental. Both camps are reading the same sentence. Neither can be refuted from the text, because the text is nine words long.

This is not a flaw in Funakoshi’s writing. It is what happens to any short code in an institution with a strong hierarchy and no appeals process, and karate is far from the only place it happens.

The test worth applying

Not what does this precept mean, which has no settled answer. Ask instead what happens when somebody in the room disagrees with the reading being offered.

If the answer is a conversation, the precepts are doing what they appear designed to do: prompting thought over decades. If the answer is that disagreeing is disrespectful, then the code has stopped being guidance and started being a source of authority, and the twenty lines are being used for the opposite of what the first of them recommends.

A note on the last one

The final precept is generally rendered as an instruction to be constantly mindful and diligent, and to keep at it.

It is the least quotable and the most honest thing in the document, because it concedes that none of the preceding nineteen resolve into a method. There is no completion here, no point at which the practitioner has finished. For an art whose commercial version sells a finish line at eighteen months, that is worth reading twice.

The document’s own history is the missing context

The twenty precepts are usually presented as a fixed text handed down complete, and their transmission is less tidy than that.

They were compiled from Funakoshi’s teaching by people around him rather than published as a numbered list by him in that form, which is why the wording and even the ordering vary between the versions in circulation. Translations then add a second layer of interpretation on top, and Japanese aphorisms of this register are genuinely hard to render: a line can be turned into a rule, a warning or a description depending on choices the translator has to make and rarely explains.

That matters when somebody quotes a precept at you as though reading from statute. What they are quoting is one English rendering of one compiled version of remembered teaching, and a different organization’s rendering may support the opposite reading of the same line.

The useful response is not cynicism. These are the recorded opinions of a specific teacher about how to train, and they are worth having as that. The trouble only starts when an opinion is upgraded to a commandment, because a commandment cannot be argued with and an opinion can.