Cultivation through Asian form-based martial arts pedagogy

In this chapter, we argue that ‘forms’ (variously known as poomse, hyeong (형, 품새 (pre 1987) 품새 (post 1987), 틀), patterns, kata (型 or 形), formas or tàolù (套路)), constitute a particular and important type of pedagogy common among the traditional Asian martial arts (and their global derivatives), which are used as powerful body ‘pedagogics’ (Shilling 2017) for self- and cultural cultivation. Drawing on the work of Yuasa (1987, 1993), we provide an intercultural illustration of this pedagogic and philosophical practice with reference to three martial art settings: Japanese budō (武道) -based arts, Chinese tàijíquán (太極拳) and Mexican xilam. Despite their differences in technique, language and culture, they all focus a great deal of class and personal training time to the learning, practice and refinement of forms (in Japanese as kata, in Mandarin as tàolù and in Spanish as formas). While mindful of oversimplifying potentially deeper meanings when translating the East Asian terms, for the purposes of clarity, we use the generic English word ‘forms’ as an umbrella term to focus on the shared body pedagogic strategy used in these arts: the form-based martial arts pedagogy as a unique way to develop bodymind dispositions, personal and cultural development. The examples are based on our respective research and practice of: Japanese budō (Dodd and Brown 2016), Chinese tàijíquán (Brown 2016; Brown et al. 2009, 2014) and Mexican xilam (Jennings 2015, 2016, 2018). Each art makes extensive use of form-based training and draws on the key idea of the efficacy of using form as pedagogy, and, as a consequence, each are included to illustrate different things. Japanese budō based arts are exemplars of this kind of pedagogy in a highly evolved state, tàijíquán predates budō -based arts and serves as an archetype of the use of forms as a self-cultivating body pedagogic, while xilam is a late twentieth-century art that has imported this pedagogy for its own cultivation purposes.