Shu-ha-ri
Break the form only after you can hold it.
Three stages of holding a form, carried over from the martial arts. Shu — you keep the form exactly as it was given, before you have earned an opinion about it. Ha — you break from it on purpose: you ask why each part is there, try another house's version, and adapt it to your own ground. Ri — the form is so far inside you that it no longer constrains, and you can make new forms and teach them.
The rule it yields is one sentence, and it resolves a tension that would otherwise be paralysing. Everything here is Current Best Understanding and open to improvement by whoever uses it — and yet a beginner's improvement is almost always a misunderstanding wearing an improvement's clothes. Shu-ha-ri says both things without contradiction: yes, change it; after you can run it as given. The newcomer who keeps the form is not being obedient, they are gathering the experience that will make their eventual objection worth hearing. The one who alters it on day one has not disagreed with the form; they have not met it.
It also tells you what stage someone is at, which is more useful than it sounds. A person at shu who is asked to improvise will freeze or invent badly. A person at ri who is required to follow the form exactly will comply and waste. Handing someone the wrong stage of freedom is one of the commonest failures of teaching, and it is the same error as missing The Zone Of Optimum Development in the other register.
Two cautions. Shu has an end — a form held forever becomes an idol, which is the anti-pattern of institutional idolatry in miniature, and Spirit Precedes Pattern is the standing corrective. And ri is not licence: the one who can make new forms is also the one who owes the most careful account of why, since others will follow.
Also called: shu · ha · ri Stands on: Mastery · Discipline · Apprenticeship · Current Best Understanding Opens onto: Belt Progression · The Zone Of Optimum Development · Continuous Improvement · Spirit Precedes Pattern · Institutional Idolatry · Proposal In play: table · Gate · Room Sources: Player+ Modules Lexicon — shu-ha-ri (canon-grade for the module layer; the three stages and the rule, in the wording carried here) · How a Module Lives (Player+ Modules; draft) · The LIØNSBERG Belt System (wiki root — degrees of one continuous progression) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VIII (Fable synthesis — "a form is broken only after you can hold it") · lionsberg.wiki: Shu-ha-ri Open: The concept lives in the Player+ module lexicon and the seed; there is no page for it in the wiki canon, and the belt system does not name it.