the Outer Sanctuary: Three Books on Karate, Kabbalah, and Empty Center

The Outer Sanctuary reads the inner life of the martial artist through a single, unlikely lens: the medieval Kabbalistic texts of the Jewish esoteric tradition, laid alongside the kata of Uechi-ryū Pangainoon karate. What emerges is not a comparison but a structure that seems to have been waiting in both traditions all along.The first book, The Book of the Mysteries of the Kata, ascends through seven firmaments in the manner of the ancient books of mysteries, mapping each heaven, each named angelic camp, and each rite of preparation onto a degree in the body of the fighter, and arriving at a secret that overturns the entire ascent: that there is no ladder, and the sun sought at its summit was burning in the belly from the first.The second, The Book of Contemplation of Seisan, sets the thirteen powers of the medieval Sefer HaIyun beside the thirteen movements of a single kata, and finds in both the same law: that what is given out is never subtracted. It closes with a complete method of training in the water of the sea, in three depths, that cannot be taught on dry land.The third, The Tract of the Forgotten Firmament, turns the same framework toward the lights seen in the sky in our own time, and asks not what is out there, but what is in the eye that sees.Written in a spare, luminous register that moves between the archaic and the plainly modern, the book offers both a system of thought and a practice. It is a work for the serious practitioner, for the student of comparative mysticism, and for anyone drawn to the point where the body and the hidden meet. The author is careful throughout to distinguish what is drawn from the sources, what is his own interpretation, and what is offered as conjecture. He claims no historical link between the traditions. He claims an identity of structure, and leaves the reader to feel its weight.About the author: Shai Hai is an Israeli martial arts master and writer. A sixth-dan Renshi in Uechi-ryū karate, he trained for some twenty years in Okinawa under Master Shinjō Kiyohide, and is credited with bringing the Uechi-ryū lineage to Israel. Alongside his life in the dōjō he is a public figure, actor, columnist, and the author of works that draw together Okinawan martial philosophy with Jewish mystical and esoteric thought, among them 108 Mountain Peaks. He lives in Israel, and keeps his ties to Okinawa.