the naming of shorinji-ryu

Back in 2018, during one of my trips to Okinawa, I had the chance to visit the site of Joen Nakazato's (1922-2010) former home and dojo in Chinen, Nanjo City.  On the property stands a monument to the naming of Shorinji-ryu, the style founded by Nakazato sensei in honor of his teacher, Chotoku Kyan (1870-1945).  This monument, shown in the photo below, followed by a translation of the monument’s kanji, is regarded as an important historical site of the Shuri-te / Tomari-te lineage of Okinawan karate. ​

Monument to the Naming of Shorinji-ryu, on the grounds of Joen Nakazato's former home and dojo, Chinen, Nanjo City.  © 2018 Nicholas V. Sherbina
Translation:
Karate-dō
Monument to the Naming of Shorinji-ryu
Named on an auspicious day in May, 1955
Sōke (Founder): Nakazato Josen

At that time, I already had a good sense of why Nakazato sensei chose that name, thanks in large part to material my own teacher, Hitoshi Oyakawa, had given me the year before, in 2017.  Oyakawa sensei—himself a direct student of Nakazato—laid out the reasoning in a one-page document titled “Seven Kata and One Kon of Mr. Chotoku Kyan (Our Great Teacher)”:
 
Mr. Chotoku Kyan was given seven Kata of Okinawa karate by Mr. Sokon Matsumura and some other masters, and he valued non-revisionism that he kept and passed on the Kata just as his teachers had given them to him. 
That is, he didn't add any color to the seven Kata he learned; he kept them faithfully, and he [passed them on] to his students.
Many people came to think highly of this non-revisionism considering Mr. Kyan's ambition that he never tried to put his own originality [into] the Kata, and this school was named “Shorinji-ryu” based on the idea that everything should go up to the origin.  Shorinji-ryu was named after Shorinji-Kenpo in China that is said to be the beginning of Chinese Kung Fu and is also considered to have given much influence to the development of “Te” in Okinawa.  In addition, the main reason for this naming, “Shorinji-ryu,” was to distinguish between the Seven Kata that Mr. Chotoku Kyan learned and other Shuri-te (a kind of Shorin-ryu, in fact).
[Hitoshi Oyakawa, “Seven Kata and One Kon of Mr. Chotoku Kyan (Our Great Teacher),” given to the author in 2017.]

Two ideas are at work in that passage, and I've come to see them as really the same idea told twice.  The first is about Kyan sensei's own practice: having received seven kata from Sokon Matsumura and other masters, he declined to add anything of his own to them, and he passed them on faithfully just as he had received them.  The second is about the name itself:  “Shorinji” is the Japanese rendering of “Shaolin temple,” regarded as the wellspring of Chinese kung fu and, through it, a major influence on the development of “Te” in Okinawa.  To name a style after that temple is to point past every teacher in between—Kyan sensei included—all the way back to where the art is understood to have begun.
​
Put together, Kyan's refusal to color the kata he inherited and Nakazato's choice to name the resulting style after the art's most distant point of origin are two expressions of the same conviction:  that what matters more is fidelity to the source, not the imprint of any one generation along the way.  A separate source I came across while researching this piece describes the same naming in different language, attributing it to “the Zen teaching of pouring one bowl of water into another” (“Shuri/Tomari-te Lineage: The Shorinji-ryu Naming Monument,” Okinawa Karate Tourism website), which is a fitting image, I think, for the same idea:  transmission without loss, without addition, without spilling.

A short distance from the naming monument stands another stone—this one dedicated not to the style, but to the Chininwēkā, the household that stood on this same property long before it became Nakazato sensei's dojo.

The Chininwēkā Fukugi Grove monument, on the same property.  © 2018 Nicholas V. Sherbina
Translation:
Chininwē-kā Fukugi-en
(The Fukugi Grove of Chininwēkā)
The head of the Chininwēkā household, surrounded by fukugi trees several hundred years old, was a locally rooted, wealthy landowning family that served for generations as jitō (district steward) until the abolition of the feudal domains and establishment of prefectures. 
Their descendant Nakazato Joōichi served as the second headman of Chinen Village, and his eldest son, Nakazato Joen, served as the thirteenth headman of Chinen Village from 1982 to 1990. 
This is a family of long and distinguished lineage. 
Written on an auspicious day in May, 1995, by Chiyoko, wife of Joen.

While this monument has nothing to do with the naming of Shorinji-ryu, it says something about the ground the naming monument stands on.  The Chininwēkā were jitō, district stewards, going back before Okinawa's prefectures existed; Nakazato's father served as the village's second headman, and Nakazato himself as its thirteenth, from 1982 to 1990.  This wasn't a plot of land he chose at random for a dojo—it was his own family's home, held for generations.  Certainly, this is a fitting, deeply rooted place for something as significant as the naming of a karate style, particularly a style that preserves the teachings of one of the great founders of Okinawa karate. 

Near the entrance of what was once Nakazato sensei's dojo stands one more stone worth mentioning:

The dojo monument marking Joen Nakazato's attainment of Hanshi, 10th dan.  © 2018 Nicholas V. Sherbina
Translation:
Kyūdō
(Seeking the Way)
In commemoration of attaining Karate-dō Hanshi, 10th Dan
November 26, 1989
Nakazato Josen

Kyūdō—“seeking the Way”—is the phrase carved above Nakazato sensei's own name on this stone, marking the day in 1989 he was formally recognized as hanshi, the highest teaching rank in Okinawan karate.  It's a fitting phrase to find outside a dojo founded on the ideal of tracing everything back to its origin:  even at the highest rank, the practice itself is described here as a search, not an arrival.

Importantly, this idea of preserving fidelity to an origin, rather than any teacher’s improvement on it, turns out to run much wider in Okinawan karate than Shorinji-ryu alone. The 1st Okinawa Karate International Tournament, which I wrote about in an earlier post, was organized explicitly “to preserve and pass down Okinawa karate’s precise techniques […] which have been handed down until today” (Takeshi Onaga, Governor of Okinawa Prefecture, greetings letter to tournament participants, August 1, 2018).  In addition, a version of the same rule circulates among other Shorin-ryu lineages unrelated to Joen Nakazato’s own:  for example, Minoru Nakazato Hanshi of Shorin-ryu Shorinkan (no relation, despite the shared surname) is said to have told students in Okinawa something close to, “No change the Kata. If you change the Kata then you are no longer practicing that Kata. You are practicing something new.” (As recounted by Steven Franz, a Shorin-ryu Shorinkan instructor, on his dojo’s blog, 2018.)  Hermann Bayer also discusses the "Never Changing Kata Principle" of Okinawan karate throughout his book, Analysis of Genuine Karate:  Misconceptions, Origins, Development, and True Purpose (2021).


Indeed, this is part of what separates dentou, or traditional, Okinawan karate from the karate that took root in mainland Japan, where kata were often reshaped for group instruction, and from sport karate further still—a divide that Hermann Bayer explores at length in Analysis of Genuine Karate, which I cited in an earlier post.  So, what stands out to me here is that Shorinji-ryu—which, alone among the styles descended from Kyan sensei, was built specifically around fidelity to his teaching rather than a synthesis of it with others—also stands at the heart of traditional Okinawan karate’s purpose of preserving and passing down the art’s original, self-defense-oriented techniques.  Joen Nakazato held true to this ideal in passing down Kyan sensei’s kata just as they were taught to him, and in the naming of Shorinji-ryu.