I still have a lot of unanswered martial arts questions. Here are some of them– if anyone has ideas about these, I’d love to see some speculation in the comemnts.
1. Why isn’t there more shuaijiao (wrestling) practice in Guangdong? What happened? Shuaijiao spread throughout the North East, along with Shaolin. How is it that it didn’t go south to Guangdong and Fujian? And if it did, why don’t we see it practiced in the Overseas Chinese communities?
2. What about weapons? What about sparring practice, flow drills and two person sets? Who practiced those in China? Especially for the spear, clearly the battlefield weapon of choice?
And why did the weapon curricula disappear so quickly?
3. Just how much Indian influence is there in the martial arts of S. E. Asia? Many people have implied that silat is just a result of Chinese influence. But we know that Muslim traders from India were very influential.
4. Why did the Kodokan stop teaching the tanden/immovability material that they clearly had before WWII (see Harrison’s book, the Fighting Spirit of Japan)?
5. Rumor has it that Wang Xiangzhai trained a Chinese sport boxing team using yiquan. Does footage of this exist?
Dave over at Formosa Neijia has tagged me with this “7 weird/interesting things about you” chain post. I’m going to keep these all martial arts related because this is, afterall, my martial arts blog.
1. I did judo as a kid ( age of 8 ) but quit because I was weak and it hurt.
2. As a kid I hated Bruce Lee movies. Hated them. Yes, Gino and Jeff, you can come and pull my yellow card now.
3. For about a year I sadly believed in too deadly to spar.
4. When I came to my senses I trained about 6 days a week, and sparred regularly at escrima and judo. For a while I thought this was not useful, but in the last year I realize that it gave me a lot of clues that only started to make sense after getting into Aunkai. Now, I’m grateful I could do that when I was young.
5. I don’t have the patience right now to do an hour of standing meditation. I guess I’m not cut out for Yiquan.
6. I’d say about 75 percent of the book learning I did on martial arts happened in the UC Berkeley libraries. I’m including interlibrary loan in that number. They have a lot of rare and out of print books.
7. It was at Berkeley that I first found E.J. Harrison’s book where he talks about meeting the aiki master, and that people in the Kodokan had something that allowed a small old man to keep a young guy from pushing him over in a contest of ‘’strength.'’ That’s what planted the seed in my mind that maybe, somewhere out there someone had the answers. Interlibrary loan also is how I got to read the Katori Shinto Ryu book set. Pretty cool– especially the section on in-yo and five element theory. It was important because it hinted at the proximity of Chinese martial arts theory to Japanese classical martial arts. Despite what all the haters would say…
Do you want to get better or not? I can’t remember the first time I heard that phrase. It must have been in my last year at Cal. We started saying it all the time, usually in response to someone complaining that practice was too hard. “We” meaning the 2 or 3 guys that were my regular practice partners. In retrospect I should have kept that to myself.
Today I realize that that the value of the phrase is more in finding motivation within myself. Every time I feel like slacking off of my workout, I just ask myself the question “do I want to get better or not?” And that seems to keep me on track.
When I started martial arts, one of the first things that everyone talked about was that technique was more important than strength. Everyone fixated on developing the perfect, unstoppable technique that could let them beat the stronger, bigger opponent.
The theory was that it was technique that let the smaller person overcome a larger, less skilled opponent. Examples? Some tiny old judo masters (like Mifune Kyuzo) or the aikido masters like Shioda Gozo. Or unnamed tiny Chinese kung fu teachers.
In retrospect that was a well intentioned but fundamentally misguided point of view. There are actually three questions here:
1. What do people mean by technique?
2. Is it enough?
3. If it isn’t, then what else do we need?
What do they mean?
Often when I talk to someone about ‘’technique'’ they are talking about a person’s ability to make the proper shape, at the proper time. The idea is to keep practicing the shape until it’s ‘’perfect'’ then work on the timing.
Is it enough?
It isn’t. Making the shape is not simply a function of repetition. If the practitioner isn’t strong enough, he won’t be able to make the shape under stress. Having timing is great, but what does that mean? It means the ability to recognize when the time is to apply the technique. Again, if the practitioner can’t hold the shape, all the timing in the world is meaningless because he can’t execute. I have a hard time understanding why anyone would be opposed to people making themselves stronger through hard work and dedication. It’s almost as if certain people actually fear strength and efficacy in themselves or others.
What else do we need?
We need to be stronger. The issue then becomes, how to be stronger? Many people who claim to teach martial arts like to talk about how there’s no need for strength. That’s completely ridiculous– I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work. It simply doesn’t– because The question is, what kind of strength? The simple answer, is for people to lift in a program like Crossfit. The advantage of this is that it’s well understood– plenty of MMA and grappling folks train this way, and it’s well documented in the sports science literature.
The more difficult path is to do something like Aunkai, that develops the body in a different way.
Whatever the approach, technique alone is not enough. Not nearly enough.
It doesn’t matter how skilled your teacher is. What matters is if he is willing and able to teach you what he knows.
I was talking with an old friend a few days ago about ‘’self defense.” We agreed that it’s a myth– all there really is, is dominating or controlling the situation.
That does not necessarily mean using violence. For instance, if Bob is walking down the street and a passerby sneers at him, Bob could beat the sneerer. However, in that case, since it was unprovoked and Bob was under no threat of violence, he’d probably be charged with a crime, and be liable to a civil suit. Therefore, by choosing not to strike the sneerer, Bob is actually dominating the situation, because he is dominating the legal realm. This is not to mention dominating the moral realm as well– I think most people would agree that it’s not right to strike someone for sneering.
Now if a few moments later, the sneerer escalates to a physical threat with a knife, and Bob shoves the sneerer headfirst into a parking meter, then Bob has again chosen to dominate the situation, physically. Alternatively, if Bob steps into a waiting SUV and drives away, again, he has dominated the situation because he has the initiative.
Staying in the self-defense mindset, creates victims who are “waiting” to respond to others. It creates fearful people who spend their time thinking about giving their initiative to someone else. That’s why I think it’s a mistake to talk about self-defense. There’s only dominance of the situation.
So true. I had a minor failure yesterday of a movement I thought I understood. In the end it was good because it forced me to see what I was doing wrong. And I didn’t get hurt either. So yes, failure is the best teacher.
AKA 南拳
Kind of like…karate? But different than the karate you see here in America, for the most part.
