Martial Arts a Confidence Trick?
LURCH
One of the things that I find amusing is how hard headed
martial artists suspend critical disbelief when faced by claims of so called
Oriental masters, they can levitate, walk through walls, communicate with the
spirits of their dead instructors. I believe that there are more fakes,
charlatans and confidence tricksters in the martial arts than in any other
part of our society. I am young enough to remember katado, the martial art
where they broke tiles, struck metal plates on the ground and the systems
founder's claim that he as an Oriental had studied in a secret temple in
Tibet. If I remember rightly he ran off with the students money
after exhibiting more and more bizarre behaviour, he had scantly clad cadre of
female students as his body guards. People still followed him to the end as he
was an Oriental.
If martial artists in the past could levitate as they did in
the film 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon," then why did they have stairs in
their houses in China? Another thing I find disturbing is the art of kyusho
jitsu in Japanese, dim mak in Chinese, death point striking; I am sure that if
someone lets me I can hit them with enough force to a weak point in the human
body to knock them out, but the word lets me is critical; anyone who has been
involved in a real fight or even a fight with rules, judo competition or
boxing match will tell you the openings that these techniques require goes out
the window, your opponent will be reacting to you and you to them. The theory
behind these techniques is based on ancient believes of Chinese doctors
but Western medical doctors who know about human anatomy can do it too, they
don't do it, as they know how dangerous it is.
As P. T. Barnam said 'there is one born every minute" and
no one has ever lost money on finding out just how gullible the public can be.
Advertisements are found in martial arts magazines that claim to teach you the
ultimate martial art created by a special forces soldier who learned it from a
Tibetan monk in a secret temple, the system once mastered will make you
invincible. If this system is so good let me pay for it with my winnings,
having won the heavyweight boxing championship of the World using their system
or become the supreme cage fighting champion by the knowledge learned from
them; I think not if the system is so good why are they selling that knowledge
they would get more money by keeping the system secret and earning money from
their winnings.
As an avid reader of martial arts books it amazes me the
lengths to which martial artists, so long after the death of Bruce Lee try to
claim some lineage from him, from what I have read about Bruce Lee, he hated
to teach and left it to other of his senior students to teach. The majority of
the students who study jeet kune do, the way of the intercepting fist, which
he called his fighting method and jun fan kick boxing, Jun Fan Lee was
Bruce Lee's Chinese name, try to create a relationship between Lee and their
teacher the reality is their teacher learned off some student of Danny Inosanto,
especially if Philipeano martial arts are taught as jeet kune do, Lee's
student Danny Inosanto did the majority of teaching when Lee became famous as
he was a qualified teacher and was good at teaching which Lee hated.
Yours in budo
Ian
'Lurch' Durie.