(recently posted on Facebook by the American Society of Kenpo Karate)
We have a saying in Kenpo: “you don’t know what you don’t know.” And we have many, many reasons for that saying.
Kenpo is much like a spring pouring clear water into a stream; the further away from the source it flows, the more diluted it becomes. If you are thirsty and go to the stream for a drink, only to find muddy water, do you condemn the stream? Leave to go look for another stream? Do you place a bucket and wait for rain? Do you try and swear off water altogether?
Or do you journey upstream to find the spring itself?
Modern Kenpo is too often afflicted by two distinctly-different types of practitioners: those who blindly accept the muddy water while believing it's pure, and those who reject the muddy water while also confusing it with the water at the source.
One embraces blind faith, the other embraces blind skepticism. Both are equally and woefully wrong, as neither realizes there is so much more to know beyond what they know (or think they know).
My first Kenpo teacher raised me up as an Iron Worker, and while I could scrap hard with the best of them, I lacked technical knowledge. My second teacher was a Watchmaker, who spent a few years correcting a lot of my bad habits and refining my skillset. When I became frustrated with a particular piece of material, he would remind me - “if you work something and dislike it or think it altogether faulty, then you should assume you really don’t understand it well enough.”
That ideal has guided me to greater levels of knowledge and understanding, with the full awareness there is still so much more to learn - most of which means, seeking the water closer and closer to the source.
Fact is, what Mr. Parker did and what he taught en masse were two different things: The former was a carefully-developed practice of blueprinted biomechanics for power, speed and precision, while the latter was a conceptual model that could be successfully disseminated to a worldwide audience. So, over time, after a few got the blueprint, while most got the personalizable-concept, what do we end up with three, four, or five generations down the road?
The result is, the vast majority of practitioners around the world received the ‘your way, right away’ version of the Art, then made up their own minds as to what works and what doesn’t; what they desire to keep, and what they choose to discard - which could be a good thing, except that they’re still confusing muddy water with clear spring water. To find that clearer water, we must first look far beyond ourselves, our ambitions, our egos and our personal beliefs.
We must look instead toward principles, toward structure, toward cause and effect. We must learn to separate preference from principle, opinion from function, and habit from truth. Kenpo was never meant to be a collection of tricks one keeps or discards based on comfort or convenience; it was meant to be a living laboratory of motion, governed by laws, whether we acknowledge them or not. Gravity does not care if you “like” torque. Anatomy does not bend to ego. Physics does not negotiate.
This is where the danger lies for both camps.
The one who drinks the muddy water and calls it pure never questions why something works—only that it seems to work for them, right now, under friendly conditions, against cooperative partners. Growth stops there. The other, who rejects what they see as flawed or ineffective, often throws out entire systems without first understanding the mechanics that made them viable in the first place. They mistake incomplete transmission for flawed design. In both cases, the failure is the same: a lack of humility before the depth of the Art.
True Kenpo study requires the courage to assume we are wrong—often—and the discipline to investigate why. It requires us to revisit basics not as beginners, but as technicians; to re-examine techniques not as sequences, but as vehicles for principles; to look at motion not as choreography, but as engineered human movement. The deeper you go upstream, the more you realize how little of the spring you have actually tasted.
Mr. Parker did not build Kenpo for shallow waters. He built it to scale—from the novice who needed simple concepts to survive, to the advanced practitioner who would eventually uncover the underlying blueprint. The tragedy is not that the Art evolved; evolution is inevitable. The tragedy is when evolution occurs without reference to the source, when mutation is mistaken for refinement.
If Kenpo is to remain viable—functional, not merely traditional—then we must relearn how to learn. We must stop asking, “Do I like this?” and start asking, “Does this align with anatomical truth? With biomechanical efficiency? With the logic of motion under pressure?” We must stop assuming that discomfort means error, and recognize that discomfort often signals growth.
The journey upstream is not easy. It requires unlearning as much as learning. It requires setting aside rank, titles, and cherished narratives. But the reward is clarity—clear water, cold and undeniable. And once you’ve tasted it, you realize something profound:
You were never meant to settle for the stream.
You were meant to find the spring.
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