When was karate formed?

Answer 1

The beginnings of karate are somewhat ambiguous. However, the art was developed as an empty-handed system in Okinawa during the time when it was forbidden to carry weapons. Modern karate is said to have been born during the early 20th century, specifically in 1922 when karate master, Gichin Funakoshi (founder of Shotokan style), brought karate to Japan from Okinawa and orchestrated the first public karate demonstration. From this point, karate spread to the rest of the world, becoming very popular.

Answer 2

Karate is one name for a kind of fighting that does not depend of weapons. Humans have been fighting with and without weapons for all of the existence of the species, and before Homo sapiens sapiens there were other species of the genus Homo, and they used weapons and also fought without weapons at least whenever they couldn't find a convenient rock or stick, and maybe lots of the time. So "karate" goes way back if you define it in one way.

Karate is the Japanese for one kind of martial art. Originally it was called 唐手， Kara te, because Kara is the Japanese way to write and to refer to the Tang dynasty of China (618-907). When Japan came into contact with China it absorbed kanji (Chinese characters), Buddhism, and lots of other things. One of the things they absorbed was the Chinese ways of unarmed fighting. So they learned Kara (Tang) te ("hand" or "fist"). They kept this name for it until very recently.

FUNAKOSHI Gichin (1868-1957), Japanese family names go first, lived in Okinawa. He decided to make karate available to everybody instead of being a secret guild sort of thing. (There's a lot of history there, so look him up or get his autobiography.) At the same time he decided that karate was more universal than just something imported from the China of a thousand years earlier. There is another word pronounced "kara" in Japanese, 空。and it means "empty" and so 空手 means "empty hands." He also added a word to the name of his form of Martial Arts, a word that is pronounced like "dough." 道 <i>do</i> (or <i>dao</i> in Chinese) means "Way." So karatedo (pronounced "kah" "rah" "tey" "dough") means "The Way of empty-hand fighting." But "The Way of empty-hand fighting" doesn't mean what most people think it means.

"Way" does not mean "method of doing something," as in "That is the way to tie this fly for the best trout fishing you ever can have!" It means "way" as in, "Do you know the way to San Jose?" So karate-do means "The way to get somewhere that involves empty-hand fighting." Where to? The answer is "to spiritual perfection," or, if you don't like the "religious" implications, maybe it means "the way to perfecting your total mind-body unity so that you are totally the best human being without anything left that will mess you up."

That idea is very weird but very important. Sometimes people use violence and they think they are doing the right thing for themselves or for their family or maybe for their community, but it can turn out that they were not seeing things correctly because their own minds were messed up. Maybe the "mess-up" was because of racial, religious, or other prejudices. Maybe the "mess-up" was just that they were afraid of things that were not there to hurt them. So what does that have to do with martial arts and with karate in particular?

Almost the first day that you go into karate class you will do a simple exercise called ten-attack sparring. I remember my first day. I was lined up with "Buddy," a guy who was several inches taller than I, weighed twice my weight, all muscle, had arms at least 36" long... The drill was that he would step in and hit at my face with his right fist. I was to step back as he stepped in and to block. The fist stopped about 1" from my chin. Then he would step in again and strike at me with his left fist. For some reason, the whole thing made my mind shatter. I could not, in the beginning, stay calm and see what was really happening.

If your mind is not free from preconceptions (and from fear) then you will not see what is really happening. If you can't see what is going on in time, then you will get hit. You have to get your mind free in order to see.

If you get your mind free by a single degree, then you are one step closer to what the Buddhists call Enlightenment, i.e., absence of delusion.

The formation of karate started way back before even the Tang dynasty. People wrote things that indicate an awareness of the psychology of martial arts success as early as around 350 B.C. Then Buddhism came in and enriched the technics you can use to get control of yourself (control of your mental reactions), then both of those kinds of knowledge traveled to Japan around 600 AD and more and more poured into Japan where they added to it. Then, in 1922 Mr. Funakoshi travelled to Japan from Okinawa and made what he had learned public.

Answer 3

Karate was not discovered. It was evolved over centuries and continues to evolve. Variations of what we call karate can be traced back several centuries.

Answer 4

1372

Answer 5

1984