Heian Nidan 平安二段
Peaceful mind, second level
What Heian Nidan is.
Where the series stops walking and starts working. The opening sequence blocks high and low with both arms at once, and the form then adds the first kick, the first back-fist and the first spear hand. Its long back-stance passages ask for something the plainer first form never did: the ability to hold a receiving posture while the hands do two different jobs. In Itosu original ordering this form came first, and it shows — it is noticeably the more complete of the two.
Worth knowing. Funakoshi reversed the order of the first two forms of the series when he brought it from Okinawa, so the numbering here does not match the order in which the two were composed.
What it develops
- Coordinating two arms performing different techniques in one movement
- The side snap kick delivered from a stable base rather than a lean
- Holding the back stance through a long sequence without creeping forward
- Changing level between the head and the body without changing rhythm
MMAKF has not published a grading syllabus.
So this page tells you nothing about where Heian Nidan sits in an examination, because the federation has not decided it. There is a named, empty place in the library for that association, and it stays empty until the federation fills it. What the federation has published about belts and progression is on the belt system page.
The belt system & grading →The Japanese in Heian Nidan.
The words a student meets in this form, with the English beside them and an explanation of what each one actually is. These definitions are shared across the whole library, so they mean the same thing on every page.
| Term | Kanji | English | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| kokutsu-dachi | 後屈立ち | back stance | Weight sits back — around seventy per cent on the rear leg — with the feet at right angles and the hips half-facing. It is a receiving stance: the body is already withdrawn, so a block can meet an attack without the defender having to retreat first, and the front foot is light enough to kick with. |
| shuto-uke | 手刀受け | knife-hand block | An open hand, fingers together and thumb folded in, striking or receiving with the muscled edge below the little finger. Almost always performed in the back stance, it is a block that is already a strike, which is why so many kata use it to turn a corner. |
| yoko-geri-keage | 横蹴り蹴上げ | side snap kick | A sideways kick that snaps up and out with the edge of the foot and is pulled straight back. It is quick and light rather than heavy, aimed at whatever is exposed on the way past, and it is usually paired in kata with a back-fist to the same side. |
| uraken-uchi | 裏拳打ち | back-fist strike | A whipping strike with the back of the first two knuckles, the elbow acting as the hinge. It travels the shortest distance of any hand technique and returns as fast as it goes, which is why kata use it against the face and then continue as though nothing happened. |
| nukite | 貫手 | spear hand | A thrust with the straightened fingertips, the middle finger bent slightly so all three land level. It is aimed at soft targets only, and it is the technique that most punishes a hand that has not been conditioned, which is why kata drill it slowly. |
| uchi-uke | 内受け | inside block | The mirror of the outside block: the forearm sweeps from inside the body outward, taking the attack on the inner side and opening the opponent up. Beginners regularly swap the two names, and the way to keep them straight is to name the direction the arm travels, not where it ends. |
| zenkutsu-dachi | 前屈立ち | front stance | The long forward stance: front knee bent over the toes, back leg straight, roughly seventy per cent of the weight on the front foot. It is the stance that lets a technique carry the whole body behind it, and the reason the first kata a student learns is mostly walking. |
| chudan | 中段 | middle level | The middle of the three target heights, roughly the chest and stomach. Karate names the level rather than the anatomy, so one word tells you the height of both the attack and the defence, and most kata terminology is built from that pairing. |
| jodan | 上段 | upper level | The upper of the three target heights — the head and neck. Naming it separately matters because the same technique performed at a different level is treated as a different technique, with its own name and its own defence. |
The full glossary, and every kata that uses each term, is on the kata library index.
Watching Heian Nidan.
There is no verified video of Heian Nidan here.
MMAKF has not recorded a performance of each kata, and this library will not present another organisation's video as the federation's. Where the federation's own kata footage exists it is published below, described as what it is: training, not a performance of any single form.
This page would rather carry no recording than a guessed one. A video is published here only with the evidence of its check attached — the id, the channel it actually resolved to, the date and the method — and nothing that has not been loaded and read is linked as though it had been.
The federation’s own kata training footage — general practice, not a performance of this or any other single form — is listed on the library index.