Taikyoku is a Japanese term for some of the beginning karate katas. Katas are choreographed patterns of movements used for practicing proper fighting techniques and general strengthening of the body. Taikyoku are a set of very basic katas whose movements transverse the floor in an I-shaped pattern.
I’ve heard Taikyoku translated variously as “Great Education”, “First Cause” and even “First Course”. Google translations tells me that the English word for it is… “Taikyoku”, which isn’t especially helpful.
What is the best translation of Taikyoku and what does it mean? I assume that the term has nothing to do with Thomas Aquinas.
I’m really not sure. Without seeing the characters it’s hard to say. For example, depending on how it is written, “taikyoku” could mean “great melody” or “antipodes” or diverse other things.
The characters shown in the Wikipedia article “太教育” simply mean “great education”. But as I said, those characters wouldn’t normally be pronounced “taikyoku”. I suspect these are not the correct characters.
A more likely possibility is that it is the Japanese reading of the characters for “Tai Chi” - 太極. These characters mean something like “great culmination”, and my on-screen lookup dictionary (Rikaichan) defines it as “taiji (n) In Chinese philosophy, the principle that embodies all potential things, inc. time and space”.
That seems to be what this guy thinks: his translation is “Grand Ultimate”. Do the characters he provided correspond to yours? They look slightly different to me, though I have no background in Japanese. Incidentally, wikipedia is my only source for the “Great Education” translation, not that I’ve researched this topic thoroughly.
Neither 太教育 (taikyoiku) nor 太教 (taikyo) paired with 空手 (karate) produce any results.
As to what 太極 means, as has been noted, “taikyoku” is the Japanese pronunciation for these symbols, where the Chinese pronunciation is Taiji:
But let’s note that Taiji is the base of the name of Tai Chi Chuan (or Taikyokuken in Japanese), which is quite famous for its practice forms.
Remember that Karate is an Okinawan martial art. Until perhaps the 80s, Okinawa was never really part of Japan. Even in modern day, I’m not sure if most Okinawans consider themselves Japanese. As such, if you look at the list of names of kata on the Japanese Wikipedia, they’re all Okinawan words or Okinawan pronunciations of Chinese words. This page is saying that “taikyoku” are recent additions made for beginners. Going by the name, it seems likely that they were developed by the Japanese, not Okinawan, schools. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but if you’re expecting that there’s anything deep, mystical, or historical about the term as it relates to Karate, there really probably isn’t. More likely, the word was recently stolen from Taikyokuken, because some Japanese sensei thought that it was evocative of something slow and easy for beginners.