I hate to have to tell you this but...

[Flying Crane]

...my art is NOT better than yours!

This thread is inspired by an occasional trend that I notice in the discussions here on Martialtalk and the sister site, Kenpotalk. It has to do with comparing different arts, and more often, different branches of the same or closely related arts.

What I see happening often begins with someone posting about a certain branch of an art, and perhaps the discussion delves into how this branch split from another art, resulting in changes to the curriculum. Some elements are dropped, others are added, still others are simply altered. It's sort of a "new" art, but not completely. Maybe it's really just a different take on an existing art.

Sometimes people sort of jump on the changes and state that if the Splitter really understood the original art fully, he wouldn't have needed to split and make any changes. It becomes implied and suggested that the splitter's training is somehow sub-par, and his resulting methods must therefor be inferior, and the art is now bastardized and it's just a cop-out to "real" training.

Then, proponents of the newer method advocate in favor of the changes, and how they have made the art better, at least for themselves.

I dunno. Maybe in some cases, either side of the discussion could be correct, but having not trained in the art in question I certainly cannot pass that judgement. And if I could, I feel my judgement is only valid for myself. I believe very strongly that what works very well for one person may not always work so well for another, no matter how properly and thoroughly it is understood. People are simply different, and it affects how they train and how they do their art, and what art they choose to do.

I guess I'm thinking that people need to understand that just because they might admit that someone else's art is good, in no way takes anything away from their own. Seems to me that people have a tendency to get a bit sensitive about these things, maybe there are some insecurity issues, I dunno. But I think when these discussions go down this path, they just propagate a lack of respect. Make your decisions for yourself, but that doesn't mean you are right for everyone else.

 

[Drac]

The last sentence of the last paragraph says it best, Bravo

 

[SFC JeffJ]

Hear hear!

 

[Carol]

Oh yeah, Flying Crane?

Well my art is NOT better than yours, either. So there.

:roflmao:

Seriously...bravo to you for saying that.

 

[Brian R. VanCise]

Nicely said!

 

[Kacey]

Make your decisions for yourself, but that doesn't mean you are right for everyone else.

Ain't it the truth? And that applies to so many other things besides martial arts, too.

Great post - thanks for taking the time to write this out.

 

[tshadowchaser]

I have to agree.
Well said Flying Crane you have hit the nail on the head with your post

I may have split from the organization that I was with for over 30 years but my art now is no better than theirs just a little diffrent in the way it is presented

 

[LawDog]

Flying Crane,
Agree with you I do.
:cheers:

 

[Sukerkin]

Why am I not surprised to find such a disgracefully ...


... open minded, even handed, insightful and above all accurate observation to come from the 'pen' of FC :Sensei Rei:.

 

[NDNgirl4ever]

I agree Flying Crane. We're all martial artists no matter what, and if someone wants to study a particular art, they shouldn't be belittled for it.

 

[bluemtn]

Sure! Everybody's art is the best- for what they make of it... Excellent post, FC!

 

[kidswarrior]

Nothing left to say. Great post. :asian:

 

[Xue Sheng]

Well... my art is better but then nothing can compare to Xuefu :mst: :uhyeah:

Well said crane :asian:

 

[stone_dragone]

Flying crane, your art is TOO better than mine. Thats why I'm going to study yours for three months before I move on to someone elses who's art is better yet.

Seriously, I like your thinking...

 

[IWishToLearn]

Fine! Then don't tell me!



Well said sir.

 

[charyuop]

Flying Crane, my Art IS better than yours...but I am not better than you so you will kick my butt anyway hahahahahahahaha.
I will never change my Art, I will stick with Aikido forever...why? Easy, not because it is better or worse, just because I have a special skill: whatever Art I embrace I ruin it hahahahahaha.

MARTIAL ART <-----here 10 milion miles ME <------here

 

[mjd]

it's all in the people, we'll said

 

[Shaderon]

Well said that man!

Someone hand the man a drink! :drinky:

 

[exile]

Okay, so now let's ask another question: given that Flying Crane's point is true&#8212;and I think we all accept that it is true, and has ever been&#8212;what should we make of the people who publically declare that their art is `better' than any other, or some particular other, art? What are they actually thinking when they make this assertion?

First of all, there's nothing new about this kind of claim, and it's not confined to bullshido-level yobs. There are a number of descriptions of a famous fight that Anko Itosu, the patron saint of Okinawan karate, engaged in earlier in his career. A succint account is offered by Redmond (http://www.24fightingchickens.com/2006/01/29/funakoshi-man-vs-myth/)

[Itosu] went to Naha and while there fought to defend the Karate of Shuri. The Karateka of Naha felt their major style, Go-Ju, was better suited for battle and warfare than the Sho-rin style of Shuri. Upon hearing some men discussing the failing of his style, Itosu decided to challenge the champion of Naha. He went to the huge rock in Naha, a notorious place to issue a challenge. The rock has been named &#8220;Ude-kake-shi&#8221;. At this place, Itosu defeated three opponents, two with weapons, before the Naha Champion, &#8220;Tomoyose&#8221;, chose to face him. When Tomoyose attacked, Itosu struck Tomoyose&#8217;s outstretched arm, snapping the bones and ending the fight.

A number of sources agree that Itosu deliberately provoked Tomoyose, who hadn't been one of the original detractors of Shuri-te, into initiating the attack, and also that he intentionally induced three less impressive fighters from among the Naha karateka to fight him for no other reasn than to attract Tomoyase's attention and make himself appear to be too credible a challenger for Tomoyase to ignore. And this was, from other sources I've come across, far from an exceptional event in Itosu's career; he had many fights in his long life, and appears to have sought out some of them as part of a systematic effort to establish the supremacy of the Shuri style. This kind of kakidameshi challenge between different budoka was nothing more than a continuation of an old tradition of fights to the death between representatives of fencing ryu in samurai-era Japan, and it occurred to me that a lot of the trash-talking that FC's comments are aimed at isn't really about what it looks like&#8212;`my style is better than yours'. My guess is that the whole tradition is really more like, `my school is better than yours'.

My thinking on this is based on the idea that once upon a time&#8212;the kakidameshi era&#8212;people didn't talk about different `arts'; there were different schools, training organizations with strong canons of loyalty and obedience, and each school taught a variety of techniques which were, in a very real sense, trade secrets. The foundation of the style, the school of thought, was the actual training institution itself. We see echoes of that in the modern era: the major Japanese style of karate, Shotokan, is literally Shoto Kan&#8212;`Shoto's house', with `Shoto' being Gichin Funakoshi's nom de plume (he was a poet and calligrapher, so plume in both senses), meaning `waving pines'. Same with the Song Moo Kwan, one of the original 5 kwans of TKD, a literal translation into Korean of `pine tree martial training house'. Styles, once upon a time, were the particular arts practiced in a particular school. And so kakidameshi was simultaneously a duel between representatives of two different schools, and a mortal fight between two `styles'&#8212;two different training regimes uniquely associated with two different ryu.

My idea is the impetus behind these endless, pointless, usually contentless arguments as to which style is better isn't just another of the endless forms of hostile drivel people use to make themselves feel better at someone else's expense. It's something built into the culture of the martial arts over much of Asia, in which survival required technical mastery and technical mastery required that you put your skillst to the test, to keep them sharp, and see what your enemies&#8212;not opponents, not competitors, but enemies, the guys from the next school over&#8212;had up their sleeves.

Not all physical skills work like this. Skiing doesn't, for example. But skiing also isn't to the death (though racers sometimes seem to forget that); you find out at your very next race what techs the opposition has, and this quickly leads to percolation of top-level skills throughout the elite racing community, and from there, down the instructional pipeline to the teacher on the hill with twelve beginners or intermediates in tow. Same with tennis, for identical reasons. Different arts, and different styles within arts, are as as far as I can see projections of differences at the level of individual schools, something we know about from the era of the castle lords in Japan, certainly.

If I'm right about the foregoing, the MAs have a kind of built-in culture of challenge and testing whose mildest expression is dissing everyone else, and whose most savage&#8212;kakidameshi&#8212;was alive and well in both postwar Korea in the 1950s and 60s and, from what I've heard, in North America as well. When I read some longwinded denunciation by some blue belt of someone else's art, it sounds to me like nothing more or less than an expression of that somewhat harsh aspect of the culture of Asian fighting arts...

 

[Flying Crane]

Wow, thank you everyone for jumping in and expressing validation of my point here, I'm glad I'm not the only one who can step back and see things in this way.

I want to clarify a little bit just what I was aiming at in starting this post. It actually isn't exactly the basic trashtalking and badmouthing that goes on from one style to the other, or one school to the other. While that is a part of it, it's really something that I think is a little more subtle, and I'll see if I can explain it a bit.

It's really about the perspective of outsiders, when discussing a different art. I've seen threads discussing a particular art, or a particular branch of an art, what aspects of that art make it good. This is easy to do for those who train in that art. But when others join the discussion, esp. if these others train a closely related, yet different art, it is difficult to cede the point that the subject art is in fact good, effective, and well designed. It seems like outsiders are simply afraid to admit that for fear that it implies their own art is somehow lessened by doing so. And that is the attitude that I just cannot reconcile. There is just no reason to circle the wagons and go into defensive mode, just because there might be truth in the idea that X art is a good thing. Instead, people have this automatic defense reflex that says "if I admit that X is good, then my own art Y must be less good", and the discussion then turns into "Your trying to say X is BETTER than Y, and that's crap" and now it turns into an argument. But the discussion was never about X being better than Y, it was just about what is good about X.

I just want to say, when a discussion is really about X, don't confuse the points being made with an attack on your own art. The relationship of X to Y was never the point of discussion. It doesn't matter if you train Y, Z, or A, B, or C art. That is irrelevant. X is a great art. But still, so is Y, Z, A, B, and C and any other. X being great doesn't mean Y, Z, A, B, and C are not also great.

Hope this clarifies where I am coming from a bit.