In Praise of the Empty Hand: A Meditation
An empty hand is not a hand without a weapon. It is a hand that needs nothing.
Shai Hai spent more years in karate than in anything else in his life. Then his heart stopped on an operating table, and for a few hours he was in a place from which there is no promise of return.
This book was written from that place.
In Praise of the Empty Hand is not a book about karate. It is a literary meditation on the body, the breath, strength, fear, pain, time, tradition, and death. Karate is only the doorway. What waits on the other side is a single question, the one the book asks from its first page and does not name until its last: what are we, when there is nothing left in our hands?
Across twenty-four short chapters, a man looks at the things he spent a lifetime practicing and discovers he had misunderstood all of them. That he was not training to fight, but to stand before what cannot be won. That strength is not what you can do, but what you can bear. That the emptiness he had feared was never a lack, but the only thing that stays whole when everything else is taken.
Spare, unsentimental, and quietly devastating, this is a book for anyone who has ever held on too tightly, and wondered what would be left of them if they let go.
Shai Hai is a Renshi, sixth-dan, in Uechi-Ryu Karate-Do and head of the Uechi-Ryu Israel federation. He trained in Okinawa under Shinjo Kiyohide Sensei.
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