Many Factors, Many Reasons

Intra-culture

There are many reasons for the mis-tranmission of a martial art over its lifetime.  From generation to generation, even within a shared ethnic culture, these might include:

• Difficulty in passing on objectively, the subjective experience of real combat garnered by an individual master fighter.
• So too, there is often a mis-match between a master’s physical ability and degree of talent for articulation.
• Withholding of information until student of sufficient character/talent may be found is also a common practice, the downside of which is that it may not be possible to find a student who lives up to the standards of the teacher.
• Then again, the founder of a new system/variation on old system may have unique set of attributes, not shared with any student acquired during lifetime -  the founder of Serak Silat, Pak Serak might be viewed as a fine, though inverse example of this difficulty, given his art was at least partly defined by his adaptation to having one withered arm, and one crippled leg, on opposite sides of his body.
• Lack of documentation – particularly significant in case of death of headmaster of any system, prior to full disclosure of knowledge to a successor, and where tradition is oral transmission i.e. the case for the vast majority of arts prior to the 20th Century.

Inter-culture

In the case where an art is being promulgated in a culture not its own, other specific difficulties arise.  Perhaps the first, and most obvious problem in this category is that of language difficulties – the barrier posed by teacher and student not speaking (or speaking imperfectly) one another’s native tongue gives rise to many opportunities for misunderstanding; though the obvious gulf is the one between occident and orient, the dilemma may be equally severe between oriental cultures e.g. Okinawan & Japanese cultures.

There may well be a lack of motivation to fully share between cultures – often natural suspicions exist, especially the representatives are from cultures and nations that have a history of conflict.  This is not only significant from the donor side of the relationship – the receiver may be equally wary of fully assimilating or converting to a foreign form.

Sometimes there is a lack of context when an art is taught in a wholly different culture and physical environment.  Here are two quite different, but equally pertinent examples:

- An excellent Kalis teacher of our acquaintance, studies under a very famous Muay Thai Ajan.  This Kalis teacher lives in a city in the American Mid-West, where snow and ice on the ground is the norm for at least half the year.  He loves Muay Thai for its combative attitude and effective training method, but cannot bring himself to tell his teacher he cannot imagine applying this art in his own home environment.

- Shotokan karate – in the early years of promoting his personal version of Okinawan te in Japan, textbooks show Gichin Funakoshi Sensei’s form to be relaxed and relatively very small frame (as Shorin systems go, that is).  In the post-war era, Funakoshi made a decision to follow Jigoro Kano Sensei’s lead (the founder of Judo) in attracting the young to his art, by introducing competition.  At the same time, his system and other Japanese martial arts, such as Judo began to acquire many Western students amongst the occupying powers’ troops.  American students in particular were, on average, larger than their Japanese counterparts.  The art rapidly changed to become more tensile, power oriented, devoid of its pressure point technique and much larger in frame, presumably to suit the cultural expectations held for a ‘powerful’ art by both Westerners and the young people of Japan whom he wished to attract to training.

Radical differences between racial somatotypes can force changes to technique also. The average American is not only considerably larger, but like all Western Europeans, generally lacks the lateral flexibility in the hips common to most Oriental people.  This is mostly due to the relatively sedentary nature of Westerners, combined with the availability of more living space in the average Western home and the design of Western chairs.  This has to affect the training of kicking techniques and low crouching postures and techniques, such as Silat’s generic sempok and depok techniques and the ground hugging techniques of Harimau Silat.  This can lead to altered teaching order of the progression of technical material within the syllabus, thus altering the weight or status given to techniques, or the changing of technique to accommodate Western students.

Too Much, Too Young

In the early days of teaching Westerners in the West by Orientals, teachers were able to restrict students to a stricter diet of basic techniques e.g. if you were a Caucasian karateka in the U.K. in the 1950’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, you would have noticed in training, and even in competition, many fewer techniques in use.

The dominant kicking technique in those days was the maegeri, or front kick.  One of the truly great early British karateka, Terry O’Neill, one of Enoeda Sensei’s senior students, caused a sensation in the early 1970’s when he pretty much introduced the mawashigeri (roundhouse kick) into competition.  He won several tournaments with this surprise tactic before other fighters learned to guard against and counter it adequately (not that stopped him winning, by the way – after all, talent will out).  Another example would be, that teachers in southern California in the 1980’s and 90’s must have felt under pressure to:

a)  make stronger claims for their arts than they might otherwise, or

b)  present advanced, or exotic, techniques as fundamental in their efforts to compete for students; southern California could be characterised as the navel of the martial arts universe in the latter half of the 20^th Century, having as it does an extraordinary proportion of the world’s most senior martial arts teachers.

Another factor giving rise to less than ‘authentic’ transmission from the late 1950′s and early 1960′s was the overly rapid promotion of Western students in order to have representation abroad.  Since that time many martial arts have been going the way of Ju-Jutsu in the latter half of the 19^th Century, when Jigoro Kano took his decision to create Judo as a result of seeing Ju-Jutsu dwindle to a handful of traditional ryu, most with no more than a dozen adherents at the time.  Naturally when an art is threatened with extinction, teachers will strive to keep it alive by whatever means necessary.  If that means presenting the art in radically altered form to people for whom it is a culturally alien artifact, who can blame them?  Teachers are, after all, human, and tend to have developed the habit of eating regularly, just like their students.  And who is to say, that an accomplished artist shouldn’t hope to prosper as a result of all the blood, sweat and tears shed in the acquisition of their mastery of the art.  Anyone who has been around the arts as long as I have, will naturally have heard all the stories of Americans, particularly in the post-Korean war period, getting on a plane in Seoul as a 1^st Kup or Kyu, or even a 1^st Degree Black Belt, and getting off the plane a 4^th Degree Black Belt.

In many cases this may have been sanctioned only by the individuals themselves, or by their teachers, and certainly need not have been motivated by any wish to misrepresent or defraud.  After all, Occidentals are just as status conscious as Orientals, particularly when purchasing a service such as tuition; the criteria and cues establishing that status are however, not necessarily the same.  How many Americans or Europeans, searching for tuition in the arts will go to Bill at one end of town, rather than Fred at the other, simply because Bill is a 6^th Degree Black Belt, while Fred is say, a 4^th Degree?  The fact that they may practice entirely different arts, subject to radically different grading structures is irrelevant to Joe Public, who will generally choose the teacher of apparently higher status, meaningless though that may be.

On the more negative side, two further points are worth considering:

a) many oriental teachers in the past gave inflated ranks to Westerners, on the basis that this would not compromise their standing in their own community.  Firstly, it didn’t matter what paper they signed, their students were aliens, and no other Oriental person would recognise the rank on the strength of the certificate alone.

b) Secondly, no other Oriental would care what rank another Oriental had bestowed on a foreigner.  The perfectly valid thinking behind this says why shouldn’t a teacher who, by Western material standards has been poor all their lives, effectively sell supposed ranks (that would only confer status amongst other Westerners), when they themselves couldn’t ‘buy’ their skills by anything other than discipline, hard work and suffering?

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Other civilisations favoured wrestling also.  A statue depicting a shaven headed warrior, known as the Olmec wrestler, in a squatting fighting stance, dates wrestling in ancient Mexico to at least as early as 200 B.C.  The wrestler has a deformed head, which may indicate the Mexican form of wrestling was more brutal than the Egyptian art.  Early Afghani folk legends speak of a giant wrestler, standing 9 feet tall and weighing 650 pounds, called Rustum Zoal.  He snapped the necks of hundreds of opponents in a long career, and only retired when he unwittingly killed his estranged son.  In Japan, Sumo, deliberately in-bred in ancient times over many generations for greater strength, fought each other as early as 23 B.C.

Wrestling was never more popular in the ancient world than in Greece.  Greek legend is full of accounts of epic bouts between heroic fighters.  Hercules versus Antaeus, and Ulysses versus Ajax were two of the most famous.  Such battles were much more bloody affairs than the Egyptian sport.  Theogenes, who lived around 900 B.C., was credited with an unblemished record of 1,425 clean kills.  A Greek kylix of the period depicts a pair of wrestlers attempting to gouge out each others’ eyes.  Another man, presumably the referee, stands by with a pronged stick, which we assume he would have used to separate them.

Over time, the sport was toned down and the wrestling school, or palaestra became a feature of normal urban life.  By 700 B.C. approximately, the sport was integrated into the Olympic Games; victory was established now not by a kill, but the familiar three falls.

In terms of sporting contests, the Greeks were also amongst the first to devise a form of boxing.  There is a fresco dating back to 1520 B.C. on the island of Santorini, which appears to show two boxers wearing rudimentary gloves, and there are a number of accounts in Greek literature of matches that sound very similar to the brutal, bare-knuckle boxing of Regency London.  The hero, Theseus is credited by the Greeks with the invention of boxing; he was a very blood-thirsty hero, of whom it was said that his pulse quickened at the sight of blood.  He was supposedly responsible for the attempt to replace the soft leather straps, used to protect the boxers’ knuckles, with spiked gloves – predating the Roman caestus by several centuries.  Theseus’ invention was not very popular however, and the ox-hide thongs continued as a feature of Greek boxing until the end of the 5th century B.C.   One of the most famous of all statues of Greek athletes is of a veteran boxer, sporting one of the trademarks of the profession, a cauliflower ear.

The Olympics of 688 B.C. saw the introduction of boxing, and it quickly became a very popular event.  Boxing and wrestling became so popular with athletes and fans alike, that a third form of sport combat was devised by the Greeks, pankration, which first appeared in the Olympics of 648 B.C.  Where contestants in a wrestling bout seek to unbalance and throw their opponent, in pankration the aim was to win by:

• Gaining a submission, as in modern professional wrestling;
• Immobilise the opponent by breaking one of his limbs; or
• Kill him, usually utilising a strangle

Certain tactics, such as biting and gouging were banned, but pretty much anything else went, as in modern NHB events.  The sport was dominated for decades by Milo of Crotona, in southern Italy, who was the patron of Pythagoras, even giving over a sizeable proportion of his palatial home to the Pythagorean Brotherhood, the school run by the father of mathematics.

Milo was a giant of a man, said to be able to throw a 300 pound man twenty feet using one hand, tear up mature trees by the roots, and carry a full-grown ox around an arena prior to killing it with his bare hands and eating it raw that same day.  He was also renowned for killing opponents with a single blow.  Despite such terrifying opponents, pankration was a popular amateur sport until the 4^th Century B.C.  As time went on, the stadium became a venue for mass spectacles, and so the amateurs gave way to the professional fighters who would encourage the crowd’s appetite for bloodshed.  The records of prize monies that have survived show that the pankration had become the most popular event in Greek athletics.

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Unusually, we welcome this in our students, and tend to learn a great deal about our students by the quality, nature and frequency of their questions.  Two of the more interesting questions I’ve been asked – partly because they are rare in the asking – were posited by two of our St. Mary’s students, Enver and Ilan, very early on in their training.  These are respectively, “Is it okay to ask questions?” – nice indicator of good manners, and an intelligent ‘sounding out’ of where your instructor sits on the spectrum of tolerance/discipline/intelligence – and, “What are the best questions to ask?” – a definite indicator of intelligence in the student asking.

To the former I could only honestly reply, “Yes – I drove all of my teachers insane, in and out of martial arts, with my constant questioning; though I won’t always promise to answer you straight away.”  That qualifier is pretty important for a number of reasons; for one thing, if you allow the students to question you too freely and frequently, it can break the momentum and rhythm of the class.  Secondly, as I’m inclined to go off at a tangent in any kind of conversation at the best of times (though I’d argue I always find my way back), there’s a very real chance you will miss out on whatever ‘pearl of wisdom’ I had originally intended to share.  Sometimes it simply is the wrong time to answer the question, in that the answer, however well expressed, will remain inaccessible to the student before they have acquired a certain type of amount of experience that creates the context for the reply.  Lastly, as I believe in answering any sincerely put question to the best of my ability, we’d never get anything done, and the lazier ones amongst the sharper students soon suss this out and will be inclined to exploit it.

To the latter and more interesting query, I found myself having to encapsulate the key elements of an effective questioning strategy for martial arts (and perhaps many other fields of) study.  Essentially, it comes down to this: there are no stupid questions – if you had to ask it, I’ve failed to express it, at least in any way that you found accessible already, which is after all, my job; and more importantly, there are useful and non-useful questions.

Useful Questions

So, what constitutes a useful question in learning a martial art?  Well, any of the following would qualify when applied to any given technical area of combative science:

• What strategy/tactic/technique should I use?
• Where should I use it?
• When do I use it?
• How do I apply it?
• Against Whom will it work (best/effectively/at all)?
• Why does it work here (and not there)?
• And the negative version of each of the above

What do I mean by a useful answer?  Well, quite simply one that it’s possible to give a tangible, meaningful, coherent answer to, that you can imagine yourself applying.  In real martial art, utility is the key to what constitutes a useful question and answer.

Interestingly, the question that students ask the most is probably the least helpful of all, to the point that when I am emphasising to learners that they may ask questions freely, this one is barred, and it is quite simply, “What if…?”

Now, this may seem strange, as to the uninitiated it probably sounds like a pretty useful question – and indeed, it may well be, but only if asked of a teacher that is fairly limited in their repertoire, either through inexperience or because the art they teach is structured around a strictly limited number of defensive and counter-offensive options.

The problem comes when, as is the case in our art, we have both a huge arsenal of possible responses to almost any tactical situation, and we are very consciously trying to teach at the level of principle.  Imagine the following scenario: you are working with a partner on a simple attack/defence sequence, and I come along to coach you/help you refine your execution of the response.  Your partner then asks me, “But what if I did….?” (Fill in the blanks with any option you like)  My options are:

• to show an alternative response, for which neither may yet have the skill developed to find usable anyway, but even if you do, it’s just one alternative, and
• your partner will almost always now ask, “OK, so what if I did…instead?” We’re now on a treadmill we’re not getting off anytime soon, and meantime the structure and sequence of the training progressed you had been embarked on has just been de-railed.

The worst aspect of the ‘What if?’ scenario is this: as a martial artist who doesn’t pretend to be the ‘world’s greatest fighter’, but who is competent, and who has very consciously trained to be effective in a wide variety of circumstances, there is only really one truly honest answer to the question.  That answer will either be meaningless to the student asking, or tend to shock and appal, as it can’t help but sound very aggressive, even though that is not its intention.  The answer is this, “I’ve no idea; try it, and let’s see, and though I’ll do my best not to injure you, I can’t guarantee your safety.”

See what I mean?  That sounds like I’ve taken the question as a challenge and I’m rising angrily to the bait, doesn’t it?  But, I’m really not; I’m simply pointing out what is not obvious to the less experienced person, which is, if I am any good (i.e. my training for all these years has been properly focussed and effective), I can’t give a simple stock answer to your question.  I won’t know what I am going to do until you offer me the stimulus – how can I?  No two people will offer ‘the same attack’ in quite the same way, they will vary: speed; tempo; timing; angle; degree of tension; amount of force; extent to which they telegraph the move, etc.  I’ll handle even a ‘simple jab’ differently from one guy who’s my height, compared to one who is relatively taller or shorter, let alone if he is significantly more muscular or younger – the point of more adaptable training is to understand the technical parameters of what constitutes a ‘good’ technique and then factor in all the variables.

Bet you never thought asking a simple question could be so fraught with pitfalls – did you?

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

In both these cases, being able to predict an opponent’s response is the requisite skill for an intelligent use of feints and drawing techniques – misdirection is what’s required here, and you can’t practice mental sleight of hand, unless you understand what provokes a reaction from another human being or group.  Reading the opponent is not simply a case of reading body motion.  It requires reading the tell-tale signs of likely movement from the possible, represented by the body configuration prior to it, and an understanding of what kind of threat provokes what kind of reaction.

Such understanding has an external aspect – your opponent’s mental and emotional responses – and an internal one – your own reactions.  Most approaches to preparing the student for combat focus upon the training methodology; appropriately, for the modern student in particular, should be spending much more time in training than in combat.  This focus is centred upon the internal response therefore of the student, not the enemy.

‘Dignity’, Buddha and Me

My elder sister and I had always fought like the proverbial cat and dog all through our growing up.  Jacqui is three and a half years older than I, just the perfect age gap between siblings for each to irritate the other totally.  Words and fur flew when left alone for very long.

A common enough experience, and entirely normal, just as when she had moved away to the city to begin her independent life we began to get along a great deal better.  It’s always much easier to appreciate your close family when you don’t live under the same roof.  Now, there’s choice involved.  You see one another because you wish to, not because you’re obliged to.

Her first visit home for the weekend was the turning point.  After a couple of hours of trying all the verbal gambits previously guaranteed to provoke me into a fury, she gave up, remarking “It’s useless, you sit there like a little Buddha!”  Having functioned as an assistant instructor at my local karate dojo for a couple of years by this time, I was very conscious of my outward self-control.

All the images of the great masters had one thing in common.  Short, tall, slight or hefty, they all appeared utterly dignified.  And if you ever want to study the fragility of dignity, study a teenager.  So like most teenagers would in similar circumstances, I faked it.  Visibly I was all equanimity, even when my internal state resembled that of Krakatoa just before a particularly bad bout of indigestion.  The old masters all appeared unshakeably calm; that was all I knew from the few pictures I had seen in magazines and books.  A few looked sterner than the others – Gogen Yamaguchi Sensei being an excellent example – and some slightly amused at their own, or possibly mankind’s obvious foibles and weaknesses.

So for many years I attempted to mimic that Buddha-like calm of the true martial artist; the trouble was, that’s exactly what it was, mimicry.  I am indeed a much calmer person for all my training, but I had to learn to accept pretty early on that I wasn’t ever going to do a very convincing impression of the inscrutable serenity of the oriental artists.  Funnily enough, I began to discover that masters came in many guises, and wearing many faces, and not only didn’t they all sport the same expression, they weren’t the same way all the time.  It took me a great many years before I realised that individual personality dictated much of what was outwardly visible, and it was an internal coolness under stress that the individual had to cultivate.

When I teach, I tend to be something of a clown, as I find that a little judicious humour can tease a much better reaction out of a student than barking at them.  But then every teacher is different, as is every student.  I have had stern teachers, intellectual and technical teachers, irascible and jovial teachers – they were all effective in their own ways, and probably all suited the needs of some students better than others did.

“When I nod my head, you hit it!”

As a student too, I have found that it pays to vary my own mind-set dependent upon what I am trying to teach and whom I am trying to learn from.  A common approach amongst old-time teachers was to push the student mercilessly, lest they learn to give in to their own weaknesses.  There are pros and cons to this style of interaction with the student, well illustrated by the following personal experience.

It was my last night in the karate dojo where I had received my basic training.  The last but one activity was sparring, and I was paired off with a friend of mine.  Terry was a few years older than I, though lower in rank.  We had already had half a dozen bouts each with different partners before we paired up.

The session had been extremely tough and we were both exhausted – at least, I know I was.  Just before our three-minute bout was due to end, Terry threw a roundhouse kick at my head.  It wobbled.  I, in my arrogance, remember thinking “That will never hit me!”  It hit me and the next thing I knew, I was literally spitting teeth and fragments of teeth all over the floor.

I had never received a serious injury – or any obvious one, more of that another time – in my martial art training.  I was shocked.  My instructor took one look at me and said, “Right, kata training!”  The last twenty minutes I ever spent in that dojo was occupied with several renditions of the Goju-Ryu kata Sanchin.

I don’t know if you are familiar with that particular kata, though doubtless if you’re a karate-ka, even of another style, you will have heard of it.  It is often described as a dynamic tension kata.  Very slow movement under great tension is interspersed with fast, relaxed motion, all of it driven by Iboki, or ‘Lion breathing’.  Short, but deep inhalations are followed by long, powerful exhalations, timed to coincide with the movements under tension.  Now, with chipped and broken teeth, a couple of which were apparently whole, but twisted around in their sockets (they later shattered at a touch), every moment of every breath was agony.

When my instructor dismissed my injury so casually, I was angry – so angry that I can generate a feeling of near-homicidal rage simply by recalling the incident.  I determined I would show him the meaning of warrior spirit!  Through every instant of pain that the next twenty minutes of kata training brought, that anger was the only thing that sustained me – pure, channelled, focussed.  Distilled emotion of a frightening intensity, so refined that the merest drop of recall has brought me through many a real life-threatening engagement ever since.

To add to my distress, I was about to fly out to the Channel Islands, off the coast of France, approximately thirty-six hours later.  I intended to find work for the summer; assuming all went well, I would be attending university in the October.  Expensive dental treatment was not something we could afford, and indeed to this day I have not yet had all the damage repaired.

I went home and cursed maniacally for the next couple of hours, all the more remarkable as at eighteen I almost never swore.  It was some time before I was coherent enough to allow my father to understand what had occurred.  My mother had been out that evening, and returned home about an hour after me, and the whole cycle of rage began again, triggered by the retelling.  My poor mother had a tough time making out what the hell I was saying – due to the missing teeth – and was obviously shocked by here normally mild-mannered son spewing forth profanities!

In the thirty-five years that have passed since then, I have rarely been so angry as I was that night, and have never allowed myself the same degree of furious release.  Terry, one of the nicest people you could ever meet, was mortified, though certainly not to blame.  Accidents happen, and it was my responsibility as the higher grade to defend myself adequately, which does require treating even a junior opponent with sufficient respect.

I doubt I have entirely learned my lesson – my students could all tell you of other incidents where I have allowed myself to be injured in some minor way by them.  I like to think this is indicative of a lack of ruthlessness in myself.  But in truth, my own explanation to those students that it is my fault for failing to treat the threat they represent with enough seriousness, is probably nearer to the mark.

As a teacher, I cannot imagine treating the injury of a student with such casual callousness, but perhaps that wasn’t the intention behind the act.  Being somewhat of a coward when it comes to physical pain, I tend to be extremely safety-conscious when teaching.  I believe the student has a right to my effort to render training as risk-free as possible, but anyone who has ever trained in the arts know it is an inherently risky activity.  I am very proud to say that in thirty-nine years of teaching, I have a one hundred per cent safety record.

Would I put a student in danger?  Yes.  In a real sense I have done so many times.  Always the student has been properly prepared for certain key experiences where some of the reality of combat is lived for a short time.  This way, the undeniable danger that exists is, at least controllable.  I remember Guro Inosanto saying at a seminar in the mid-1980s that, ‘when it came to real combat, martial art was 70% attitude’.  He went on to explain that he felt technical drilling was so important, because when the adrenaline and fear began to pump in real self-defence, then 70% of your technique goes right out of the window!

When I was sixteen years old, I sold my guitar to be able to attend a course with some other members of my karate club.  The course was organised by the then owner of one of the older British martial arts magazines.  The lead instructor of the course, Eddie McGee, was something of a surprise to us all, for reasons I won’t go into here.  Mr. McGee was the then Chief Survival Instructor for the Special Air Services, soon to retire.  He later set up a very successful outdoor survival centre in the U.K.

He was, as you might expect, the sort of man who could be air-dropped into the Gobi Desert, with a toothpick, a little aluminium foil and survive the trip back to civilisation.  He could also kill you in a bewildering number of ways.  At one point, he had paired us all off, one of each pair with a short garrotte, made of fat, soft nylon cord for safety and two wooden handles; the other with a knife.

Those with the garrotte were to leave it inside the jacket of their gis, until they had successfully disarmed their opponent, whereupon they were to apply it – carefully?  For a moment or two, my partner and I (Terry again!) watched the many other pairs manoeuvre around each other.  They all seemed to be working in a way typical of the dojo, stepping cautiously and formally, blocking and locking the weapon-bearing arm.  Most used standard karate sweeps to take their opponents to the floor, before removing and using the garrotte.

Terry and I looked at one another and shrugged.  Then we got down to it.  About ten or fifteen exhausting minutes later, I became aware that someone was tapping me on the shoulder and the huge venue was ominously quiet.  I was astride Terry’s chest – what nearly everyone calls the ‘mount’ position nowadays.  I had the soft-toy version of the garrotte wrapped firmly around Terry’s throat, while he struggled simultaneously to throw me off him and get his hand under the cord to relieve the pressure.  By now, Terry and I had alternately held the same, or similar, positions about a dozen or so times each.

There were around a hundred or so people on the course, and they now surrounded us, standing looking down upon us, or rather at McGee Sensei who was saying, “Now that’s what I meant!”  The holder of 5^th and 6^th Degree black belts in Aikido, Ju-jutsu and Karate, Mr. McGee wanted us to realise that combat is often messy, and it’s often how well you approximate technique, combined with combative attitude that allows you to prevail.

So, did my instructor do me a favour by appearing so unsympathetic when I was injured?  Nowadays, I think the answer is a qualified ‘yes’.  I would have appreciated a few words of explanation afterward, but in those days instructors generally followed the old advice to leaders, “Never apologise, and never explain!”  One of the reasons that I am such an admirer of the Indo-Chinese systems is that they have a powerful emphasis on drilling for likely attacks and combination attacks.  If you look at these drills and their structure carefully, it is clear that they are designed to render combat, an inherently chaotic activity, into a predictable process.  When drilling is as comprehensive and well structured as it is within many of these arts, it is an easy matter to develop one’s ‘auto-pilot’; once that ‘auto-pilot’ is trained and engaged, you can ‘crank up’ the combative attitude with which a drill is performed in relative safety, but with a realistic feel.  This is where the attitude kicks in, and now all the psychological attributes for which a certain skill level is a pre-requisite can be trained.

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

So, what exactly does that mean?  Aren’t all martial arts concept or principle-based?  Well, ‘yes’ to both those characterisations, but regarding the older arts in particular, they wouldn’t generally have been presented or taught in that way; at least, not by the time of the student generation I was a part of.   Let’s make a brief examination of what’s involved…

Drivers of change and the roots of tradition

Once an art is broadly designed and created and has been taught for a few generations, it is generally true that change is incremental and each alteration small, a process of accretion and attrition in techniques.   And the big founding ideas behind the genesis of that system or style are no longer routinely taught to the students, other than say, describing Wado-Ryu karate as being fast and evasive, in contrast to Shotokan being powerful and stable, largely because they are deemed to be self-evident.

Also while many practitioners believe they are custodians of an unchanging tradition, I am not sure if this is entirely possible.  New skills and technology are acquired and older practices, skills, attributes, knowledge are lost through irrelevance (correctly judged or not), and simple lack of maintenance.  Equally, some very archaic practices are maintained – whether out of respect for tradition, or because they can be adapted to other purposes.  Within a ‘traditional’ school, where relatively new “traditions” are brought into being, a junior student would know no different, due to the nature of recording or lack of it in
martial arts and the convention of the relationship of blind trust in one’s teacher.

Plainly all discrete – that is, distinctive – styles and arts must begin with concepts and principles, though not always consciously in the minds of their creators.  All conceptual arts – if we must give them that label to distinguish them from others – are born out of self-conscious self-examination.  The reasons for this might be speculative (the pondering
of ‘what if?’ type questions, or other tactical musings), or they might be responsive, forced by failure or defeat.

Nonetheless, a senior practitioner, or one of sufficient talent, working within an art that
does not entirely suit his or her needs, might well generate many small technical alterations, which cumulatively significantly alter the practice and expression of an art to a degree that could represent a radical departure from the style they began with.  And all of
this, without necessarily fitting the model of a conceptual art.  So, given that all arts are based upon concepts and principles, what defines those we describe in modern times as being concept or principle-based?

Well, firstly I would argue that the new art should have been constructed as a consciously
significant departure from the base art(s) and from ‘whole cloth’, that is to say that it should be internally consistent in its approach and the expression of its differences from its forerunner(s).   In practice, what this means is that there would have to be a coherent
and strategic imagining integral to the process.

Working as a consultant to large corporations, I often find I encounter individuals and
whole departments who can’t – or won’t – answer my questions about their business processes; so, I ‘hallucinate’ them.  Knowing their basic remit, I draw upon my martial arts as well as my business background, and I imagine what their processes must be in order to fulfil that role, applying logic, common-sense and previous experience.  I then feed the process flow I have mapped out back to them, and ask them to edit the result.

Likewise, creative, imaginative martial artists have produced significantly individual
and idiosyncratic arts out of such flights of the imagination; Prof. Wally Jay being just one of them.  When Prof. Wally began developing Small Circle it was in application to his Judo, and in response to his team being consistently beaten on the West Coast circuit as he
established himself in San Francisco after moving from Hawaii.  He had been given one of the key components to what later became Small Circle Ju-jitsu by his Judo teacher, Kenneth Kawachi some years before back on Hawaii, the key to what he would later refer to as ‘Two-way Action’.  This was what made Kawachi Sensei’s grip so effective, a core part
of his almost magical throwing skills, and it later became the corner-stone of Prof. Wally’s revamping of the entire mechanics of Prof. Okazaki’s Kodenkan system, producing Small Circle Ju-jitsu.

Here is a fundamental example of the role of the imagination in two ways: to posit a
possible weakness/problem (in this case, the problem was apparent, his Judo team were being consistently beaten); or to generate responses and extrapolations of likelihood of success i.e. what could he do differently, and how might that turn out?  Having imagined how he might comprehensively apply the principle of ‘two-way action’, Prof. Jay created the base of a thorough re-working of the body mechanics behind ju-jitsu with well-documented results.

Concept

Now let’s illustrate the process of development with a hypothetical example.  We’ll start with the Concept/Strategic Idea/Urgent Need that will drive the construction –‘I need to develop the ability to grapple against an armed opponent’.  Regardless of your level of confidence in what you already know – ‘I am competent with my primary weapon’ – remember the radical change may not be driven by a failure or defeat, just an awareness that such a defeat is conceivable, ‘I know that I may be disarmed, as I have been trained to disarm others’.  The underlying assumption of this strategic question is therefore that you are a weapon-user, which may be the same or a different weapon you anticipate facing, or that your experience is biased towards unarmed combat facing other unarmed fighters.

Method

Having conceived the need, and the possible solution to that need, you have to have a method, both to explore the limitations of the strategy chosen to answer the tactical dilemma and the physical expressions of the technical changes/innovations posited.  Here is a suggested methodology: practise controlled sparring against armed opponent, after drilling in single, then combination attack/defence sequences.

Alternative

The first tactic and the technique(s) underpinning it that you imagine may be
enough to meet the need, but an experienced martial artist is likely to want to
test out multiple approaches, so you would expect there to be alternative methods envisaged.  Here one might be to first learn how to grapple with or otherwise contain an opponent with and without first holstering/sheathing own weapon.  The advantage of this approach is that it a) builds awareness of possible contact with/use of the opponent’s weapon in application, and that knowledge of threat allows for the design of effective counter-technique(s).

Structure/Shape

This is where you will begin to see the overall practical result of the alteration of tactic and technique. Where either you are a weapons stylist accustomed to a quite different weapon you wish to train to counter, or you have little or no experience of weapons use, you will need to be able to envisage how the strategic approach you have decided upon, and the methodology of training for it, will express itself as a technical change:

In the scenario above, we might reasonably assume/hope that the resulting structural
change – the shape of the resulting skill-set in action – might consist of:

Greater Fluidity – fluid (or more fluid) technical handling of weapons; no staccato/linear motion, constantly changing and interlocking arcs, circles and spirals, because –

• it is easier to change direction/speed once already in motion
• ‘Pacing’ – it’s easier to first ‘blend’ with opponent, before
• ‘Leading’ – neither Aikido nor Small Circle move until opponent does; first they adopt a neutral/shared position as opponent; what my old Aiki sensei used to refer to as ‘Getting on the train’, before taking control of the attacker’s movement.

Naturalism –

• A more naturalistic, less formalised style when grappling, with more rounded shapes to the techniques and smooth transitional flow, because practising against a weapon quickly teaches that sudden, more linear decelerations generally increase one’s danger of injury from the weapon.

Now we have a working description of how and why an art might qualify as conceptual, what drove its creation, and how it might have been imagined, expressed, tested and structured, at least in very broad brush strokes – we can go on to develop more specific examples, or examine development case-studies in greater detail.  But all that’s for another time…

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Most martial artists see their system or style as unique, and on a certain level this is true.  Certainly the experiences of any given artist in training are unique – no one else can truly share the same experience as another. This is true on a number of levels. To begin with, we bring to our studies unique sets of previous experiences.  These prior experiences are part of what makes us unique individuals.  So, when presented with the experiences of learning an art, we cannot truly start on a level playing field.

Next it is true, that two individuals when presented with the same external experience will not perceive that event in the same way.  Biology plays a key role here – it is not possible to perceive exactly what another sees simply because each of us has individual characteristics to our eyesight, and our brains process the incoming signals from the optic nerve quite
differently to that of another person.

Additionally, our prior experiences have led us to make a number of generalisations, and
these will act as filters on our perception of the experience, leading us to different conclusions about the event and what, if anything, we can learn from it.  I will discuss the role that these internal filters take in our learning experiences at a later stage, but suffice it to say, that these pre-conceptions can be both negative and positive depending on how and when we apply them.

Despite the uniqueness of the individuals involved, martial arts can be, and generally are understood as being able to be categorised into systems and sub-systems, or styles.  These systems and styles, these general and specific approaches to the challenges posed by the chaotic process of combat had to come from somewhere – nothing grows in a vacuum.

This brings us to the starting point for my analytical model of the martial arts.  Even though all arts were created by an individual, or group of individuals working together, or developing further the work of previous generations, I believe that we have to start with the macro level.  Try thinking of it this way:

• We share a physiology, neurology and anatomy with our fellow human beings that stretches back in time, much further back than we need go to observe even the most ancient of surviving martial arts
• The laws of physics act on that shared physiology and anatomy more or less equally – true, some artists are so athletic or so skilled that they appear to
  transcend those laws at times, but they don’t!

So, why do individuals create radically different martial arts at different points in time?Why do they, or their successors, develop them along particular lines? It is true that the human body is only capable of certain types of movement, even allowing for all types of
external and internal factors.

Within that range available, we have a freedom to choose some tactics and techniques
over others.  Why and how do we make those choices? Well, in learning, as in so many areas of life, context is as crucial as content.

Within my martial arts family, we delineate the external factors that form our model of martial arts creation thus:

• Physical Anthropology – before anyone mistakes this as a racist statement, I would like to emphasise that all cultures, regardless of race or religion, have created highly effective martial arts.  I simply wish to acknowledge that the group
  genetics of a person’s background, as well as their personal genetics, have some influence over the type of creative choices they are likely to have the option of making.  We will explore this more deeply later in the text…
• Physical Geography – the environment in which you live, its climate, and the way you adapt to that environment.  Where physical anthropology affects the tool-set you start out with (nature), the physical terrain, in which you live and fight, cannot help but partly shape the art you practice (nurture).
• Physical Laws – even though there is a relatively wide band of human performance at any activity, we are all ultimately subject to these laws.
• Social Anthropology – the history of the culture of your society and its current state.  The way that people organise themselves socially in its broadest sense.  This encompasses such factors as political, social and economic arrangements, religion and ethical values.
• Technology & Resources – regardless of whether the technology is high or low  by conventional measures, the sophistication of weaponry lies in the appropriateness of its use in the circumstances prevailing.  One of those factors may well be the availability of certain metals, or horses, either of which would partly define preferred weapons, tactics and strategy.
• Methodology – this is usually defined in part by the philosophy, technical understanding and specific experience of the exponent e.g. how much exposure to what level of combat does he/she have?   What role did they play in that experience; what kind of prior training for such circumstances did they receive, and was that training effective?  A police officer will approach a confrontation differently to a soldier, and therefore has to train for that confrontation in a significantly different manner.

My grandfather used to say that a martial artist had to question everything in the course of a lifetime’s training.  He also used to say that some questions can be more useful than others: where, when, what, how and why?  All of their negative versions are useful questions to ask too.

Kalis teachers will often characterise combat as being reducible to three variables: range, angle and technology of the weapon.  Sounds simple doesn’t it?  It’s not only valid, but also an elegant statement of core principles.  These three variables form the basis for a highly complex, mathematical and geometric model of the arts, and how specifically to train for them most effectively.  I havel referred to this highly effective model previously in past blogs and will again – repeatedly – during the course of the book and coming blogs.

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

In martial art we would, of course, refer to this practice by many names, the most commonly used being the Japanese term, ‘Ki-ai’, which translates approximately as ‘Spirit Shout’.  This has been practiced in the Japanese – and many other – martial arts for pretty much forever, but I’m not sure that all modern students have the purpose, or the mechanics, of the shout explained adequately to them.

There are, in fact, several reasons for the ‘Ki-ai’, and they span the areas of anatomy, physiology, psychology and basic physics.  For the beginner, shouting loudly in a war-like fashion, even with little focussed technique behind it, has the effect of ‘psyching’ themself up, and the opponent out in equal measure– two useful outcomes in themselves.

Getting a little more sophisticated about it, learning to fully expel the air in one’s lungs at the moment of delivery effectively makes the body heavier – really less ‘buoyant’ – and therefore places the mass of the practitioner behind the technique, creating a stable base from which to apply leverage, and rendering it more powerful.  Having taken a deep breath prior to the shout fully oxygenates the blood, necessary to the process of allowing maximum generation of muscle tension (physical focus) while fully exhaling as a technique is delivered.

Fully expelling the air from one’s lungs has the further benefit of making the intercostal muscles (the stomach muscles between the individual ribs) contract strongly and suddenly, effectively creating a solid ‘shell’ of the lattice-work of the ribcage, making the internal organs much more protected.   This is significant in striking arts where there is the possibility of what, in karate, is termed ‘Ai-uchi’, or a simultaneous strike i.e. the practitioner is struck at the same moment as delivering his or her attack.  In such a situation one’s softer and more vulnerable vital targets are better protected.  This is equally useful in a throwing oriented art, such as Judo, where your own throw may be turned into a counter by your opponent, and you need as much protection as you can get when being slammed into the mat, or worse the pavement.

So when you are next watching a martial arts class, or even Wimbledon on TV, what previously might have seemed an odd, even slightly ludicrous practice should make a little more sense!

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Traditionally, virtually all martial arts masters were polymaths, and amongst their many skills were healing and health promotion skills.  This was a matter of some practicality; anyone who has trained in a truly combative art – and without any disrespect to them, I’m not referring even to the toughest of combat sports, such as Judo, MMA or Muay Thai but to battleground arts, would be expected to learn certain battlefield medical skills.  It was also intended to be a counterpoint to the potential spiritual and psychological wear and tear involved in immersing yourself in a warrior lifestyle.

As part of my early training in Sicilian Fencing, I was educated in basic herbalism for the
treatment of wounds as an adjunct to the bone-setting I was also expected to learn; both practical forms of  knowledge, not just for combat but for the all too real possibility of injury in training.  Later, as I began my career in karate and other oriental arts I was introduced to various health practices such as shiatsu.  Shiatsu – for anyone not familiar with the term – is an acu-pressure method; the tsubos – or pressure points – correspond to the sites along the meridians used in acupuncture.

Over the years I’ve acquired a good deal of practical knowledge of the application of shiatsu, but I can’t claim the proper traditional training in the practice, though I have had the privilege of working with some wonderful exponents of the discipline.  Whatever your views on energy-based treatments, direct experience of certain ancient practices will confirm their validity.

I can fully understand why many ‘alternative’ therapies are given short shrift by the western scientific and medical communities; however, some such as acupuncture, and by extension, shiatsu are I believe mistakenly lumped in with many others and labelled non-scientific.  Specifically the charge laid against such disciplines is that they are not grounded in what is termed, ‘empirical’ science.  Now, what could be more empirical than
observing that stimulating a given point on the body – either with a needle or the tip of a finger – produced a given response; particularly when that same point is stimulated millions of times on a large variety of individuals of quite differing body types over millions of instances throughout several millennia?

Part of the problem for Western scientists and medics, I believe, is that we have a quite different basic paradigm and so we are always talking ‘at cross purposes’ when discussing such things with someone from the East.  This is particularly observable in any discussion of chi, ki, pranayama or ‘vital force’ with martial artists.  The Westerner confronted with, for instance, an Aikido-ka, or Tai Ji stylist’s ‘explanation’ of ki/chi isalways going to be disappointed by what they are presented with.  What, to the Easterner, is an explanation is
what the Occidental can only understand as a description of certain observable phenomena, rather than an exposition of a testable theory that fits those observable facts.

We sometimes forget that even in our own experimental tradition of science – and I wouldn’t wish to eschew it, by the way – some experiments are deemed more ‘elegant’ than others.  That is to say, that some experiments are better constructed to more clearly isolate cause and effect than others, thereby rendering them better quality evidence that our theory can be proved to describe an underlying reason for the phenomenon.  The Oriental is sometimes happier to take the apparent end result and exploit it as applied science and worry about the proof afterwards.

My Tai-Ji teacher, Nimara Braddell, like all the best teachers I have known, was the epitome of the polymath martial artist.  A senior student of Herman Kauz, himself a disciple of Chen Man Ch’ing, Nimara was clinically trained as a psychologist and was a qualified shiatsu practitioner, as well as having trained in one of the tougher dojangs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in Moo Duk Kwan Tang Soo Do, which she once described to me as ‘kick-ass karate’.  I was particularly impressed by her ability to read the 12 pulses – 6 in each wrist – to discern my entire past medical history on only our second meeting.

In a small village, Lynton on the north Devon coast, I was surprised to learn that a young, former ballerina whom I knew, Rachel had graduated from her formal training as a shiatsu practitioner.  The training was rigorous, both in theory and practice, conducted largely by Japanese masters of the art, and many conversations about the subject convinced me of her knowledge and ability.  Shiatsu is very effective, and being a ‘massage’ form, the benefits are felt pretty much immediately, as I can personally testify.

It’s also a very appropriate discipline from a martial artist’s point of view; after all, in the original Okinawan versions of karate, the tsubos are exploited to harm rather than heal, so we can’t deny the validity of the concepts of energy flows and the method of accessing them.  Rachel Frageley, as a former ballet dancer, has an excellent understanding of the stresses that intense training places the body under, and has begun to work on helping to prevent injury in athletes and to enhance their performance, rather than simply repairing them when hurt.   Rachel’s contact details are at the end of this piece, and I would encourage any martial artist to take some treatment with her, or group to invite her to teach a seminar – in my first karate dojo, we used to end sessions with a brief neck and back shiatsu-based massage as part of our warm-down.  For the teachers out there reading this, trust me, your students will be forever grateful and you will rise even further in their estimation as a direct result.

Turning to the purely mental aspects of training now, I would like to recommend another practitioner from the same area, this time in the field of hypnosis/hypno-therapy.  This may seem a little surprising, but after a life-time of studying a variety of meditational disciplines, and modern western techniques, such as NLP and Sophrology, it has been my contention for many years that practices from Zen meditation, to Yogic forms of internal training, to modern hypnosis-based regimes are all more similar than different.

I must confess that this viewpoint generally goes down like ‘a lead balloon’, as the old saying goes, with practitioners of each and every one of these arts in general, but as far as I can see, all of these apparently very different techniques really just exist along a spectrum.  Essentially they are all trying to access similar mental states and processes – true they might go about it in ways which are distinct, but this is largely a matter of detail.

Whether you study Zen, or Raja Yoga, or Autogenics, the aim is first to reach a state of profound physical relaxation, allowing the mind to free itself from both the sensory bombardment of the physical world around it, and to ‘quiet the internal dialogue’ as the technical term has it.  We live in an increasingly ‘noisy’ world in every sense of the word, and while we might attribute this to the compression and over-stimulation inevitable with over-crowded urban life, much of it is entirely self-inflicted.

I try wherever possible to create a little time and space apart each day for myself, and frankly, find it near unbearable when I can’t – even without any special routine I may wish to practice from the many mental arts I have trained in, it is just good to have time and leisure to think.  In later blogs, I hope to create some simple explanations and examples of some of the many methods I have learned, which I hope will be of use to everyone.  Returning to hypnosis, I would like to make a couple of really simple, but crucial points for all those who may be feeling particularly sceptical about the process.

The first thing is that, as the great medical hypnotist and psychiatrist, Dr. Milton Erickson, who more than any other individual made hypnosis a credible medical discipline, famously said, “Everything is hypnosis, and there is no such thing as hypnosis!”  What did he mean?  Well, if I understood him correctly, the first point refers to the fact that we are
profoundly affected by our sensory and emotional experience of the physical world and the people around us.  If you are sufficiently absorbed in this piece of writing – and selfishly and egotistically, I’d like to believe you were – then you are in a ‘trance’ state.  Of course, there is no such thing as a ‘trance’ in the sense that most laypersons understand the term.  However, for the sake of discussing this apparent phenomenon, perhaps the most useful way to understand the word, is to say that a trance is a deeply concentrated, yet relaxed state maintained for a relatively – perhaps unnaturally – long time, focussed upon a particular internal task or subjective experience.

The ‘trance’ induced by the stage hypnotist is, perhaps paradoxically, an excellent example in one regard – because you cannot ‘put someone in a trance’, you can merely encourage someone to co-operate with the process of deciding to relax their inhibitions, and thence to experience a subjectively different reality.  The context of the stage show – ‘all just harmless fun’ – is a perfect example of how the hypnotist merely ‘gives permission’ to the subject to focus on one part of experience (internal) to the exclusion of all else.

In a very real sense, the medical or therapeutic practitioner is doing something quite similar – but here the skill lies in discerning the needs of the subject (not always what they may have come to the therapy session stating as their conscious aims) and guiding them through what is, always in my view, self-hypnosis.  This is done by teaching them through breathing, relaxation and visualisation techniques, a way to use their sub-conscious mind to either deal with a particular problem, or develop some part of their personality or skills.

Such techniques, whether derived from a base in hypnotic or meditational skills has been applied frequently in a variety of elite athletic and sports coaching since the late 1970s – ‘Inner Golf’ being one of the first books to appear on such an approach.  In many physical disciplines some form of ‘mental rehearsal’ has become common place as part of the coaching skill-set, and part of the beauty of this from my point of view is that it is not necessary for me have a background that closely mirrors the individual I am trying to help in order to be effective.  I have worked successfully with a variety of professional and elite sports-people; one example being tennis players, despite having played only around 20 hours of tennis in my entire life, and having very little idea about their specialist field.

A relevant, but little known example from the world of the martial arts goes back to the 1960s.  Gogen Yamaguchi, ‘The Cat’, as the great karate sensei and founder of Japanese Goju-kai, was known decided to investigate the degree to which mental training could affect outcomes by performing an experiment with his own advanced students.  He took a group of a dozen Sandans, 3^rd degree black-belts, whom he deemed of a largely similar technical ability level, and split them into two groups of six.  For the next six months he gave one group, additional technical and calisthenic training, over and above their already intense tutoring.  With the other group, he added half an hour of breathing, relaxation and mental visualisation techniques to their daily martial arts practise.

At the end of the six months, he pitted one group against another repeatedly in ‘jiyu-kumite’, or ‘free-fighting’ practise.  To his surprise the group who had undergone the mental training consistently dominated those who had simply had ‘more of the same’.

My friend, Heidi Hardy, has completed comprehensive training in Solution Focused Hypnotherapy and has set up her own practice.   She uses this solution focused method to help improve skills development.    We often speak of her work, and having performed a similar discipline, I can tell you that she has a number of excellent strategies for guiding an athlete or sports-person to improved performance.  As an advocate of – and a thoroughly convinced believer in – the value of such training, I would recommend that you contact Heidi to arrange either an individual consultation or a group workshop in your dojo, kwoon or club.  I believe you will reap the benefits that a skilled practitioner can bring to the learning curve of you and your students.

You will find the contact details of the professionals concerned below:

In the first instance, you can email Heidi Hardy at: hypnotherapy@heidihardy.vpweb.co.uk
and her other contact details can be found on her web-site, where you can further investigate her services and background.  The address is: http://heidihardy.vpweb.co.uk

Rachel Frageley can contacted at: rachel.shiatsu@gmail.com, or by phone on: 01598 753415 and mobile: 07595 151077.

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The metaphor above has been attributed to a number of intellectual ‘giants’ over the centuries; most commonly to the great scientist, Isaac Newton, but it’s earliest recorded attribution was to Bernard of Chatres.  ‘John of Salisbury. In 1159, John wrote in his Metalogicon:

“Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.“

On Sunday, 29th May, 2011 the greatest grappling innovator and teacher and one of the most influential martial artists of the last century, Prof. Wally Jay passed away after a short illness.  He was one of the great martial arts teachers of all times, and there are many of us who can truthfully say he carried us high and raised us up.

Professor Wally was my friend and mentor, as he was to so many others, including the late, great Bruce Lee. He was an extraordinary individual: driven; focussed; hard-working; ambitious; utterly confident in the quality and significance of his art and his work, and yet without a trace of arrogance.

Indeed, once you spent any time at all around the Professor, his humility was perhaps one of the most striking things about him. A flawless technician, he might have been forgiven for being impatient with lesser talents, such as myself, but he was unendingly patient, taking the attitude that his consummate competence shouldn’t bestow any particular special status, and that he was a human being like any other.

But those of us who had the privilege to get to know the man behind the martial arts master will testify he was quite the opposite – there was no-one quite like him, nor will there ever be. His son and successor, Prof. Leon Jay is a different individual, entirely worthy to succeed his father as the second generation Headmaster of the Small Circle Jujitsu system. Father and son, though different people, are nonetheless alike in drive and talent, and I know that Prof. Leon will continue to develop his father’s original concepts and, if it’s at all humanly possible, to go on as he has begun, continually improving upon them.

Prof. Wally could perhaps best be described in every way as a ‘thoughtful’ individual; he was always thinking, musing, considering and creating. We were on a train journey – the Professor, his lovely wife, Bernice and I – from London to Edinburgh about 24 years ago. It’s quite a long journey – at the time nearly 7 hours – and once or twice the Professor, then about 70 years old, appeared to doze off for short periods. Despite apparently being asleep, I noticed that his right hand, in particular, continually made repetitions of his trademark wrist and grip motions, as if applying a finger-lock over and over again. When he roused a little while later, I asked him something that had been bothering me for the couple of years or so that I had known him at that time, “How is it, Professor, that such a nice, gentle soul like yourself, can spend every waking hour thinking of ever more efficient ways of inflicting pain?” He didn’t reply right away, plainly considering the question in his usual thoughtful manner. The minutes stretched on, and finally he said, “You know, I really don’t know; it’s just what I’m good at!” Well, all I can say is, thank the Lord that he only ‘used his power for good’!

The question was only half in jest – this charming, dignified, good-natured man I’d come to know, respect and love had never shown a hint of intolerance, let alone irritation or ill temper while I had been around him. If you’ve experienced what the Professor’s students came to call the ‘Dance of Pain’, where you appeared to become a marionette with a few thousand volts running through you, as he made you stand up, lie down, roll over, flip to your feet, somersault, run in a crouched position etc., for what felt like hours, but was probably only a couple of minutes, all of this using only finger-locks, and even more impressively what he called ‘palming’, where he didn’t even bother to keep hold of you, just sensing where you were going and redirecting you while using only the pressure of his open palm, then you’ll realise that the mis-match between the excruciating pain inflicted by his art, and the charming, gentle creator of that art was downright surreal!

I have had the privilege of training with many great martial arts teachers, but the Professor remains the one I will continue to try to emulate the most. There are some wonderfully talented teachers out there, but often when one attends seminars with an acknowledged ‘great’, they spend half the time telling you about how extraordinary their art is, and by extension, they are! If you’ve been to Prof. Wally’s seminars – and he spent a good 30 years post-retirement running around the world for 10 – 11 months a year demonstrating and teaching his art, so there’s a fair chance you may have done – then you’ll doubtless recall he began each session by telling you briefly how he came to devise Small Circle Jujitsu, then getting straight into the teaching which he delivered with remarkable openness.

The story of how he came up with the technical innovations that define Small Circle as a significant development in Jujitsu typifies the man. No single apotheosis, no ‘Eureka’ style epiphany with himself at the centre, bathed in the spotlight of reason, so typical of many other self-aggrandising masters’ stories. Instead a simple story: he is taking his blue-belt grading in Kodenkan Jujitsu (itself an innovative art taught by a great, non-conformist teacher, Prof. Okazaki), and despite the fact that he made a mess of one particular throw, which he had always struggled with in training, he finds that he has still passed the test. A perfectionist even then, he resolves to refuse the rank, but is persuaded by Ken Kawachi Sensei not to do so, with the promise that Kawachi Sensei will teach him how to be an effective thrower.

For those of you not familiar with Judo throws in any technical sense – and at this point in Judo’s development, it is not significantly different to Jujitsu, except for the reduced focus on particular skills – throwing techniques are problematic. Every individual finds some throws more difficult to execute than others, and some will remain entirely impractical for any given person no matter how long they train. For instance, it is generally an advantage – despite modern Olympic Judo being contested in weight categories – to be smaller than your opponent. The majority of the throws in Judo are based around the basic mechanic of first ‘scooping’ your attacker’s pelvis with your own, before directing where you want them to fall using your arms and the degree of rotation of your waist and torso. Therefore, it is generally more difficult for a taller man – and Prof. Wally, though not hugely so, was nonetheless fairly tall for a Chinese person of his time and lean in build – to throw a smaller, stockier person.

Ken Kawachi Sensei however, in addition to studying Okazaki’s Kodenkan Jujitsu was All Hawaiian Judo Champion, and regularly took on and trounced all-comers, of all weights, sizes and backgrounds, from huge American body-builders, catch-as-catch-can wrestlers to other Judo Champions several weight categories heavier, despite being a small man.
Kawachi told the young Wally Jay that the ‘secret’ lay in the wrist-action he used – instead of the push-pull mechanic employed by the arms, he used this ‘two-way action’ within the grip itself of each hand. Wally continued to work with the action and it transformed his performance of throwing techniques.

Fast-forward some years, and Prof. Wally is married to the lovely Bernice, with whom he has a young family and they have emigrated to the mainland, living in San Francisco. He continues to teach Kodenkan Jujitsu and to develop and teach his own style, while creating and coaching a Judo team. Unfortunately, the Judo team is beaten again and again in tournament – he knows that their technique is good, but the typical American opponent they face is significantly larger and stronger – and Wally has to suffer the good-natured ridicule of his Judo teacher friends and rivals.

The Professor makes no bones about this; he is quite clear that, good-natured he may be, but no-one likes to be humiliated, particularly not again and again. So, he went back to the drawing board and further developed the ‘two-way wrist action’ first taught to him by Ken Kawachi. He worked equally hard on the footwork – to the non-Judoka this may seem less significant, but if you’ve watched Olympic Judo for instance, you’ll have seen many tedious, indecisive matches where the opponents remain in ‘jigatai’ for the entire proceedings.

Jigatai is where the contestants appear to be grappling around an invisible column that sits between them, so that they are bent over double at the waist with their arms fully extended and their hips and feet as far away from the opponent as they can manage while remaining in physical contact. This is a tactic designed to prevent that crucial scooping of the hips and pelvis, but it is a ‘counsel of despair’ as, although it prevents the opponent from delivering a significant throw, it also prevents the user from doing so too. In short, it is about ‘not losing’, rather than ‘winning’.

He understood that in order to ‘win’, it was necessary to commit yourself to the technique; not recklessly, but when a clear opportunity presented itself, or could be created. Wally Jay’s solution to the problem was two-fold: he cut down the mechanics of the footwork entry – if you can’t put yourself in place to deliver the technique, you’ll never get to perform your throw – and the refined mechanics of his hands, in combination with sensitivity training, created relative safety on the upper-body entry by virtue of his control over his opponent’s mobility. The ability to minutely read an opponent’s movements when in contact allows constant redirection of his force, defeating them with very little energy.

There is a common drill performed by Judoka: pairs work in contact with one person initiating entry footwork, and the other ‘riding’ each attempt by slipping out of range, or foiling it by altering the angle of their own body to match the opponent’s. This is hugely refined in Small Circle, with relaxation being the key. Keeping the knees soft, and the grip light, but firm, a good Small Circle stylist is incredibly difficult to ‘shake off’, always there and at the same distance and orientation no matter how much you move.

With the Professor’s innovations in technique and training method, his teams soon began to win and become dominant in West Coast judo tournament circles. Characteristically, instead of becoming resentful of the ribbing of his fellow teachers, he used it as a spur to his creativity. He was honest about his competitiveness and his ambition, but it was directed at the perfection of art and self, not focussed narrowly against the relative development of any other individual, which leads me to another aspect of this remarkable man’s character.

This is Prof. Leon’s story really, but I feel sure he won’t mind me passing it along. Several years ago, we were talking about his Dad, as we often did, and considering what made him the special man he was. That combination of dignity and humility he had was something we both admired hugely. Leon recalled attending many a large martial arts gathering with his father. Now martial arts is not exactly devoid of ‘Type A’ personalities, and Prof. Wally’s world was full of highly competitive contemporaries – particularly as it is probably true that Hawaii and California are home to the majority of the advanced oriental martial arts talent the 20th century has seen. Many of those great masters were in direct competition for students and kudos – or at least their styles were – and this sometimes led to ill feeling and fallings out. As Leon puts it, “All that stopped the moment my father entered the room”; Prof. Wally was held in such high regard and affection, no-one wanted to be seen acting in a petty fashion when he was around.

He and his contemporaries were and are an incredibly tough generation of martial artists. I was made especially aware of this when I visited him with Leon in 2000, shortly after he had endured a major heart by-pass operation. I had never seen the Professor down-hearted, but it was hardly surprising given he was 83 years of age, had always been a picture of health and vitality and then experienced this sudden brush with mortality.
He and I were discussing writing his biography, and knowing he was thinking about this, I had brought a voice recorder. Sitting in his living-room in his pajamas, he transformed the moment he began talking about his martial arts life. He recalled the fun they had with martial arts demos both in Hawaii and California, and how he introduced a great deal of humour into the proceedings in the days when this just wasn’t done. Naturally irreverent he even wrote comic songs to accompany the ‘sketches’ that he used to demonstrate martial arts and self-defence moves; he recalled and sang some of these for me as he told me about the ‘old days’.

It was good to see his spirits rise, but what happened next shows the degree of resilience of a man who, perhaps two to three weeks earlier, had endured major heart surgery. Out of the blue, he asked me if I knew Bruce (Lee) had studied Judo for a short time, something I had never heard from any other source. He told me that Bruce had even competed on the West Coast circuit briefly, just for the experience. “Here,” he said, indicating I should stand up, “this is the first thing I taught Bruce”. Before I’d even registered that he had gripped me, I found myself high in the air, head pointing directly at the floor, before being slammed into the Jay living-room carpet – Leon nearly wet himself laughing, mostly because of ‘the look on your face!’

By contrast, a little over two and a half years ago, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and I’m ashamed to say, I felt truly sorry for myself for a few months, before one day I heard myself moaning – I thought of the Professor and all that stopped! That was Prof. Wally for you; he just made you want to be a better person and live up to whoever it was he seemed to see when he looked at you.

A couple of days later, I had the singular privilege of teaching a session at the Jay home dojo – as far as I know, the only European instructor ever to do so. The walls are covered by signed photographs of the cream of Oriental American instructors who have taught there, not least of whom was Bruce Lee, so it was both a great honour and extremely daunting. Prof. Lee Eichelberger, who runs the day to day teaching at the dojo, and all the regular students were extremely welcoming. Norman Johnson, a senior student and a long-time friend of the family, and Leon’s friend since high-school, acted as my uke. Prof. Wally had taken the back stairs down from his office – the dojo is behind and beneath the house – and was sitting in his pajamas with a tracksuit over it and wearing his big, sheepskin slippers that Leon brought back from a teaching trip to Australia.

I wanted to put a smile on his face – as well as, truthfully, to impress him if I could with something he wouldn’t have seen before. As ever, Norman (probably the only person who has endured ‘the dance of pain’ as often as Leon!) was the one to suffer as I demonstrated a technique I’d created only after hearing I would be teaching a few days before. It’s called the ‘baby-crawl’, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. I asked Norman to just ‘punch me in the face’ as quickly as he could, then dropped below him onto all fours and, with one hand on the floor either side of his lead foot, proceeded to crawl forward at speed. Predictably, Norm was felled like a tree and various parts of his anatomy ‘tenderised’ as I made my way over the length of him on elbows and knees. I looked up to see Prof. Wally laughing so hard there were tears running down his face. It will remain one of my fondest memories of a great teacher and an even better human being.

Another of Leon Jay’s favourite stories about his Dad highlights Prof. Wally’s attitudes to his own, and all other, martial arts. The Professor was preparing to teach his part of a combined seminar with GM Remy Presas, his good friend. Remy was teaching and Prof. Wally was in the next room when an excited junior Small Circle student came to find him. “Come quick, Professor, Master Remy’s stealing all our techniques!” Prof. Wally leaned forward and in a conspiratorial whisper told the young student, “I know – we’re stealing all of his too; we call it sharing!” That was the essence of Wally as teacher: utterly confident in his ability and in the value of what he was teaching, but totally open to learning from others. GM Remy was typical of the type of talent Prof. Wally attracted to him; George Dillman sought him out because Bruce Lee told that “Wally was the best teacher in America!”

Rank was pretty much meaningless to the Professor. He was a genuinely democratic man – happy to teach as long as you had the desire and the capacity to absorb, and with the judgement to know when and where those limits lay. He was equally happy to learn from anyone else – if you had something to offer, then he was receptive, and indeed eager to learn.

For those of you wondering about the title of this piece – and American readers may well be puzzled by it – I wanted to address the issue of transition. In European tradition, the cry of, ‘The King is dead, Long Live the King’ was heard when the crown passed from one generation to another, and it’s an expression of continuity. Well, Prof. Wally handed over the reins of the system to Leon some years ago, but I wanted to talk about the long process that preceded it as yet another illustration of Prof. Wally’s character.

A small aside here – a few years ago, when I had moved to the opposite side of the country, an old friend and student whom I had lost touch with was trying to search me out over the internet. Googling my name, he found me mentioned on Leon’s website. Calling Leon, he was able to get my new phone number and called me one Saturday morning. Telling me how he had tracked me down, he became more excited as he told me about speaking to Leon Jay, “martial arts royalty!”

Given that the whole family trained in the family art, Prof. Wally could well be forgiven for taking the dynastic route that so many founders of styles and systems have taken, but this wasn’t for him. He was a meritocrat to his fingertips; when Leon and Sandra moved to the London area in 1987, and Leon decided he wanted to be his father’s successor, Wally was pleased but determined that no-one would be able to cry nepotism. So, Prof. Wally decided Leon would need to prove his commitment. Now, I’ve experienced that traditional process of approaching a teacher who refuses to teach you, going back again and again until finally they decide you are sincere and accept you as a student, and I suppose this was a variation on a theme. In order simply to be taken serious as a contender to succeed him, the Professor told Leon he ought to come and train with me.

Leon lived on the opposite side of Greater London, about a seventy mile round-trip, but good as his word to his father, he made the long, tedious trek to my place to train two and three times a week for about three and a half years, at the end of which Prof. Wally told him he would now be ‘considered as a possible successor’. Now, I don’t imagine for one moment that the Professor had his son train with a lesser martial artist in order to improve his technique! The point was as much to test Prof. Leon’s ego as it was his commitment, a test Leon passed with flying colours. Like his father, Prof. Leon doesn’t presume upon any entitlement to respect – he expects to earn it and prove himself on a regular basis, which is part of what makes him his father’s successor and plainly his father’s son.

Prof. Wally made me his ‘Technical Advisor’ in the late 1990s, though I was never sure what, if anything, of a technical nature I was equipped to advise him on, but from the day I met him and forever more, the mere fact of his friendship and the honour of being taken seriously by him will remain the greatest compliment I have received – or ever could – in my martial arts career and my life in general, with the exception of my wife agreeing to marry me, of course.

Having the opportunity to simply spend time with the Professor outside of the dojo was a particular privilege. He was always ready to listen and to offer sage advice, and he had a way of offering it that made needing it less of a failure – you were just two old friends ‘shooting the breeze’; he might just ‘happen’ to tell a pertinent story from his own life that seemed to offer a lesson. As a mentor he was – I won’t say a father-figure, for that would dishonour my own much-loved Dad – certainly a wise uncle, and I’m sure an ‘older brother’ to his many friends and contemporaries.

That comfortable way of his made it very easy to learn from a great master while getting to feel that your ideas had real validity, that you were holding your own in admittedly exalted company. That relaxed facility gave all his interactions with his students a genuinely empowering, nurturing quality. I’ve been to seminars with great performers of their arts, and felt discouraged afterwards, feeling I’d never replicate their skills. Yet, despite his technical virtuosity, you always felt with Prof. Wally that if you paid enough attention, practised assiduously enough, for long enough, you might – just might – be able to do some, at least, of what he could. I’m speaking for myself when I say that is probably an illusion, but as I continue in my journey towards mastering Small Circle Jujitsu, at each small step I’ll know he’s somewhere smiling and I’ll hear his voice, saying, “That’s it, you got it!”

Leonardo da Vinci once said, “The greatest sophistication is simplicity”, and Prof. Wally always said that his art was simple. Of course, once mastered that’s entirely true, but understanding what he meant is the difference between complicated – which his art was not – and complex, which it most definitely is.  Perhaps one of Wally’s greatest achievements was to make his art uniquely accessible in spite of its level of sophistication.
He always said to me that he was “a slow learner”, in contrast to his much adored wife of 71 years, Bernice. Bernice apart from being perhaps the prettiest grandmother in existence is an extraordinarily talented martial artist; indeed she is one of those people who can just see movement, intuitively break it down and immediately replicate it, and martial arts presented no more difficulty in mastering than dance at which she is equally adept. Far from being a ‘slow learner’, as he characterised himself in typical deprecating fashion, Prof. Wally was a deep thinker; he was one of those artists who had to feel he understood something before he did it. Bernice Jay was the linchpin of Prof. Wally’s life – her support was crucial in his ability to devote time and study in creating the art, and he often gave her credit as his sounding-board as it developed. Her combination of abundant common-sense and technical insight made her his most important advisor.

So, I won’t say goodbye to you, Professor; it’s more of a farewell – we’ll meet again, I hope and in the meantime, it’s as if you’re just in the next room, you’re always just at the edge of my vision and I know I’ll go on hearing your gentle encouragement in my head whenever I need it.

Those of us that had the honour to know him will always miss him, but no matter how hard, better that then never having known such a remarkable human being. God Bless, your friend and student, John xx

Although personally I am a practicing Catholic, many of the teachers I have trained with have been either of another faith, or as is the case with most people I know, either agnostic or straightforwardly atheist. Just as I feel no need to impose my beliefs on anyone else, none of my teachers have required that I have converted to their religions, even those who have been extremely devout. Where other martial artists have wanted to discuss our respective religions – or even lack of them – I have been quite happy to engage.

What denomination is your style?

However, that isn’t what my student was getting at – he had read, at my urging, one of the very few credible martial arts historians in the English language, Donn. F. Draeger, and he was alluding to a passage where Mr. Draeger explained that some of the Indonesian and Malaysian teachers he knew would not teach their art to a non-Muslim.

Another factor underlying his question was that he knew I had trained across a wide range of arts, and had the opportunity to do so before most mainstream Western martial artists had even heard of many of them. He knew also that I personally held religious beliefs and considered martial arts to be composed of more than just their techniques and tactics, and their formation was heavily influenced by factors of social anthropology, such as a general cultural world-view, part of which would be the religion espoused by the people who created and practiced any given art.

It’s all in the Context

I explained that firstly that it was a misunderstanding to characterise any given martial art as being ‘of’ a particular religion. Though the founders of some arts may well have had religious motivations in the creation of an art form, or the revision of an existing one, it’s mostly the case that religion forms part of that ‘world-view’ – in effect a mental and emotional context or framework within which the art and the artist operates.

My original martial arts training was in a Renaissance battlefield fencing system – a family form of Sicilian Fencing – and obviously its moral and ethical context was essentially Catholic, even though Sicily has an extremely complex and varied set of cultural influences through a long history of being invaded by just about every power existing in the Mediterranean over the last 3,000 years or so.

Taking the specific issue that prompted the student to ask the question, I would stress two particular points. Mutual respect is crucial to the process of really learning a martial art, and even when working with a teacher from a radically different belief system to my own, I’ve always found that a willingness to understand, and however temporarily inhabit, their mind-set has purchased the required credibility to be accepted as a sincere student.

After all, I have no problem with most of the people I know, both inside and out of the martial arts world, who either don’t share my own beliefs or are atheists. We all struggle to understand the world we live in, the lives we lead, and I’ve found it generally more productive to accept that people are acting in good faith and doing their best to be a decent person and live a decent life.

For one thing, those of us who believe we have something to teach, would be completely devoid of students if we didn’t – at least initially – take people at face-value when first accepting them into training. I have done the classical thing of requiring a student show enormous patience and perserverance in persuading me to accept them. If we’re honest however,we know that it takes a great deal of time to develop any significant skills in martial art, which gives us the luxury of taking our time in coming to judgement, and it’s generally more useful to examine the student’s character during the teaching process. Creating the mutual trust that is necessary to an effective student/teacher relationship takes time – I’m not about to rush it, and I’m not giving you the most powerful material until it is established!

The second facet to the answer I gave my student all those years ago is this: there are a number of arts that are characterised as being of a particular religion, and with very few exceptions this is a complete misunderstanding. As I said earlier, a religion might have been a motivating factor in the creation of a martial art, or the world-view of which it would have been a major part, may well have had a big influence on the formation, if for no other reason that it would be the source of many underlying assumptions held by the person or people constructing that art.

The currents of Migration and Belief

Indonesian and Malaysian silat forms are a good example of this. Most the peoples of the hundreds of islands forming the world’s largest archipelago have undergone several large and many smaller waves of migration, with all the attending poly-cultural influences this entails over the last 3 – 4 thousand years.  The majority of the islands will have had Hinduism and/or Buddhism as their dominant religion for many hundreds of years prior to the genesis and rise of Islam.  Islam – and Islamic people – have since played a major role in the development of the cultures of the archipelago, particularly through two major waves of migration through the various island groups over the last 1500 years, but this is not the same thing as saying an art is ‘Islamic’ or belongs to any other religion.

Having made that distinction, if you are a teacher of silat in Malaysia, which is now predominantly Islamic (as are many parts of Indonesia) and you yourself are Muslim, a natural ‘cultural’, as well as religious, qualifier in looking to evaluate the relative morality of a prospective student is their faith. Islam is a particularly disciplined religion, evidenced by the need to pray five times a day, and so a prospective student from your local community known to be practicing and devout has already displayed some of the qualities you are seeking.

The pragmatism of the Warrior

In Malaysia, where the generic term for the art is Bersilat – rather than Pentjak Silat as it is referred to in Indonesia – the traditional versions of the art have retained the teaching and practice of sympathetic, animistic magic.  There are aspects of these practices also which survive in the Philippines, a predominantly Catholic country.  If you ask some of the older Filipino masters about these matters, they will mostly shrug then refer you to the practical nature of the fighter – if anything might give him an advantage in a life or death situation, and he can see no evil in it, why would he discard it? 

This could well be a problem for devotees of any of the world’s major religions, but having said that my wife tells me that when she stayed on Samosir Island in the middle of Lake Toba (which is a lake occupying the caldera of an extinct volcano on Sumatra) the exterior of the local Catholic church was covered in intricate carvings of lizards.  As a Catholic I know this is not that unusual – the Church has always assimilated many local beliefs by relating them to existing parts of doctrine – and if you don’t believe me, go take a look at Mexico City Cathedral richly adorned as it is with similar motifs.

On the island of Bali, as on many of the larger islands of Indonesia, there are a number of distinct styles of Pentjak Silat, some tend to be identified as Hindu, some as Islamic, some as Buddhist, and one, Bakti Negara, was founded by a Catholic priest.  This last has a requirement that anyone who wishes to teach the art must do so for free.

It is true that some arts do have especially clear influences – the three main ‘internal’ arts of China: Tai Ji; Ba Gua; and Hsing I show very clear signs of Taoist roots, both in the philosophy of application – redirecting the opponents’ force back at them, rather than opposing it with your own, or in the theoretical models they use – the Yin/Yang symbol of duality and integration and the trigrams of the I-Ching. Likewise, early Shaolin shows its underlying Buddhism in its primary use of the staff and the empty hand – pragmatic pacifism with limits allowing resistance towards aggression once certain conditions are met. There is less clarity as to the ‘Buddhist nature’ of later Shaolin, given the many influences of the various groups who sheltered within the temples during the periods of political unrest in Chinese history.

The student who asked that question so long ago made an understandable, though erroneous, assumption: that one must share the assumptions about people, society, morals and the cosmos of the originators or current curators of an art. What is necessary is to make the effort to understand and empathise, to take the trouble not to challenge or scandalise their sensibilities, to honour and respect those you train under and with. If you make this effort and succeed, just as when attempting, however haltingly, to speak a local language when abroad, you will be surprised at the generosity and trust you may be gifted by people from a very different culture and world view.

Certainty and Separation

It’s really not that hard to do – I am a very opinionated man, but hopefully I am also intelligent enough to know that, no matter how carefully formed and well researched a view I may hold is, there is always the real possibility that I’ve simply gotten it all wrong! Keeping that in mind makes it a great deal easier to share martial arts experiences with others of significantly different backgrounds and viewpoints – I recommend it.

Defining ‘faith’ more broadly, it is necessary at the very least to believe in the art you are trying to learn, and to trust the teacher you have chosen to absorb the art from, even if both you and they are completely non-religious. In a secular sense, it is still an ‘act of faith’ to place yourself in the hands of any teacher of the martial arts, given the inherent physical danger of training, let alone applying the art in defence of your life outside of the training hall. Where what you learn may ultimately mean the difference between life and death, the motivation, morality, technical knowledge and ability and general trustworthiness you assign to your teacher is crucial to how well you learn, and how to much confidence with which you will feel able to apply the art you acquire when the chips are down.

Atheist, agnostic or true believer – faith of one kind or another remains an issue of significance for the martial artist.

©John Mellon M.A., and The Martial Arts University, 2011.  Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to John Mellon M.A. and The Martial Arts University with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.