First and foremost RESPECT makes a martial artist, and seperates us from common street thugs, the second aspect is PHILOSOPHY, cause without philosophy we are just stylized brawlers...
--josh
I have a huge Honeydew list today, so you'll just get the short version.
First, not one in a thousand martial arts teachers knows the square root of diddly about philosophy, either homegrown or traditional. Rather fewer are qualified to instruct it. What passes for philosophy in most martial arts schools is few platitudes, some warmed over Zen by someone who has never spent a day sitting and staring at a wall, maybe a few quotes from the Tao Te Ching and speculations on the dojo kun.
Any practice taken far enough will lead one outside the purely physical and technical. You'll get insights and gain perspective about the outer world and the inner. If you know people who've gone through the same thing many will have reached similar conclusions through a similar process of development. When you're a student they will teach you things to keep
you headed in the right direction. This is true for any worthwhile practice from botany to barrel making.
If you're bumping up against mortality, profound emotional trauma and having to do terrible things on a regular basis it will be a lot more acute. That's why the Janissaries were tutored by Bektashi Sufis and why the Samurai practiced esoteric Buddhism. People like that need to find a way to live with these extremely unpleasant realities and maintain their humanity in the face of horrors which they may have to perform. There's also nothing quite like getting shot at to get you considering the bigger questions even if it's only "What happens when we die? Why am I holding this spear? Why didn't I stay on the farm, grow rice and marry the neighbor girl like Momma wanted me to?"
Of course, most people will not be professional soldiers or get in more than one or two life-threatening situations. Like the physical training the philosophical should be appropriate to your situation, your goals and your capacity. That's why there are different yogas for soldiers, peasants and priests. If you are going to be in combat every day for the next five years you need one thing. If you are taking up Oriental boxing as a hobby, a sport and a social activity you can probably get by at the fortune cookie level or use it as an excuse to study other interesting things. There's no need for the trauma of the other sort. And there's no reason to spend inordinate time and energy on it. If you're a competitive athlete you need the things that coaches have been doing for millenia. And if you want to be a conscious, complete, fully awakened human being martial arts can be a wonderful vehicle for that. Unless your teacher is also trained in an appropriate spiritual discipline it can be a very tough row to hoe. The overwhelming majority aren't no matter how many stripes they have on their fashionably frayed black belts.
Then there is the matter of "respect" and "humility". A lot of martial artists take great pride in their humility and are pretty arrogant about how humble they are. Unlike mere brawlers they are Martial Artists. They know the True Meaning of Respect. Hai, Sensei!
Big. ****ing. Deal.
Don't strain your arm patting yourself on the back.
If your school derives from mass physical training for soldiers there will be an emphasis on military style discipline. That means tearing someone down and destroying him so that he can be rebuilt into the sort of competent Pfc. who will stay in line, perform predictably and charge into cannon fire without a second thought. If that's what you want, the US Army is looking for people who want to serve their country. And they'll do a much better job because the training is designed by the best professionals in the business. You'll get the whole thing, not just bits of PT from someone else's army sixty years ago. Part of that training is reflexive obedience to authority. In many martial arts schools that constitutes "respect". "Salute the uniform, not the man" turns into neurotic performance and exaggeration of rituals connected with the training when it's divorced from actually going out onto the battlefield.
Outside of that it's mostly a matter of not being a complete *******. That's something that's harder than most of us imagine. Be polite and respectful to elders. Don't cause fights. Don't give offense that could cause fights unless you have a really good reason to start one. Be kind to those weaker than you. That's what a lot of this comes down to. It gets formalized because people want to make sure everyone's reading off the same page and because there are some pretty dimbulbs out there who need to have things made really really clear.
Look at wild animals. If they are hurt, they can't forage. If they can't forage they die. The more social they are the more mechanisms they have to keep from fighting unless they really have to. There are threat displays, dominance and submission displays, Don't Screw With Me displays, displacement gestures, appeasement gestures and all the rest. They're all ways of communicating intention and avoiding mistakes. It's not just the predators. Wildebeest do amazing jumping displays when predators get too close. They're saying "See how athletic I am? If you hunt me you'll get tired and won't eat today. So let's avoid the unpleasantness. Go eat him over there. He's kind of lame and scrawny."
Respect in this case means an understanding that the other guy can be dangerous. Because of that it's best not to underestimate him or get into a situation unless you've got a reason that outweighs the risks. That's what most of this comes down to, making sure people don't get into fights that they don't have to or shouldn't. Well, that and not being a jerk so that you will be able to function in the world. Different cultures have different ideas about exactly what that means, so there are different forms of respect and different standards about proper human relations. And they can look pretty weird when they're applied outside that culture.
Hell, here's a better example close to home. I spent a summer living with some friends. They had a cat. He was a huge, muscular small-animal-killing kind of ur-cat. He hadn't had his spark plugs since he was a kitten, but the queen cats would come around when they were in heat to look for him. He'd look at them as if to say "I don't know what you want from me, lady."
He wasn't a house cat. Definitely outdoors. And he would do things like push his food dish out so that birds would come and eat from it while he lay in ambush.
One night we heard sounds like something out of the Christian hell. He was in the garage pretty cut up. There was his orange fur. There was gray fur. There were cat claws. There were bits of racoon claw. After that this young boar racoon would come in every night. He wouldn't attack the cat. He'd go over to the food dish. He and the cat would exchange a look. He'd take two mouthfulls of kibble and head off. The cat respected the fact that the coon really could have killed and eaten him. The coon understood that if he did he'd be too badly jacked up to find food and would probably starve. In the world of combat that is the essence of respect.
People always bring up trash-talking MMA competitors. Some athletes are good people. Others are prima donnas. Others trash talk to establish dominance over opponents or as a marketing ploy. They are all tactics for competition, part of the game. So a lot of the whole "They are not Martial Artists who understand Respect" is really asking the wrong question. Besides, a lot of the really Great Masters of Old were arrogant, nasty, spiteful, violent, drunken skirt-chasing sons of bitches.
And that is about all I have to say now about philosophy and respect.
