I’ve yet to see anyone approach Bruce Lee‘s performance of Jet Kune Do.
I was thinking about this the other day. JKD is a principle that should be replicated, but not a technique or style that should. As I understand it (which is a surface-level understanding), JKD is a personal journey and not a specific art. For me, with experience in TKD, wrestling, HKD, and BJJ; JKD would be different than someone who started in BJJ and then learned wrestling, HKD, and lastly TKD. Even more different if they did completely different arts.
MMA seems to be the principle applied at the art level instead of the individual level. This is a concept that is appearing in many technical professions. For example, cybersecurity used to be about "security through obscurity". You can't beat my algorithm if you don't even know what it is. Lately, it's been more about security through peer review. You can't beat my algorithm if all of these other experts have helped me plug the holes in it. Another example is AI learning. CodeBullet on Youtube does videos in which you can see hundreds of AI simultaneously attempt to accomplish a task in a game. The AI that are most successful are copied into the next generation; what works is kept, what doesn't work is moved out.
TKD (at least in my organization) seems to be JKD applied at the school level. There are a minimum number of requirements from the organization. But the individual master or instructor can bring in their experiences and their curriculum. You'll get a much different experience at a TKD school which is focused on Kukkiwon material than you will on one where the Master is including their knowledge of Judo and Muay Thai. I imagine this is what happens with JKD classes as well. It's the teacher's JKD put into a single style that is then taught to all of the students.
This kind of goes back to the original question. Part of the question is "what is the art?" Is the art about teaching what the founder knows, or about developing in a way the founder developed?
If an art is all about repeating what the founder knew, then the art will inevitably deteriorate over time. You are not likely to add to it, because it was already considered "complete". But you will be taking away from it with every generation that missed something from the generation before. Similar to a game of telephone. I might tell you that "I like Taekwondo" and you turn around and tell the next person "I like Aikido" and by the time it gets to the end it's somehow changed to "Jessica and Chris are getting married."
Let's say I create an art that has a dozen techniques. I teach you this art. You learn four of them as thoroughly as I know them, four of them to an acceptable level, and four of them you struggle with. You then move on to teach your own students. The ceiling they have for these techniques is four they can do great, four they can do okay, and four they will never really learn, because you never really learned it.
But your students miss some things, as you did before them. This isn't an indictment on you or on them. Nobody is perfect. Nobody has the same aptitude with all techniques. But, your students learn my style from you, and they take two of the things you did great and only learn them to a mediocre level. And they learn two of the things you did well and don't really get it.
By the time we get to the third generation of schools, there are two techniques that are really good in the art. There are four techniques left that are okay. There are two techniques that "My master could do it better." And there are four techniques that they are already two generations removed from seeing any practical use of.
There are two ways to fix this. The easiest way is to trim what you don't understand enough to teach, and then add what else you do know. I said above that people have different aptitudes. Well, there's probably things you do well that I don't. Things I didn't include in my original vision of the art, but you can make work. The other way is much more difficult, is to reverse engineer and figure out why it worked before. If there's something you didn't get, maybe one of your students can figure it out. That might delay the degradation of the art. But without being injected with new ideas, a copy of a copy of a copy will eventually fade.
The other alternative is arts that develop the way the founder developed, instead of parroting the personal style of the founder. BJJ and MMA are great examples of this. There are constantly new techniques and strategies being devised. Old ideas are figured out. However, these run into other issues, which I don't feel like going into in this thread.
well, perhaps neural cytoarchitecture) but something beyond the physical that makes those founders, and their arts, unique.
) for most of us. But they give the flashy appearance of effective martial arts. But the premise still holds
