The ‘Classical Mess’ and reinventing the wheel.

The martial arts – is it desirable, or necessary, to wipe the slate clean and start again?

In 1967 embryonic Kung Fu superstar Bruce Lee asked a friend if he could make him a miniature model of a tombstone to promote his ideas and philosophy of his newly formed school of martial arts, called ‘Jeet Kune Do’. The model was supposed to represent Lee’s dismissal of the traditional schools of Chinese Kung Fu. Inscribed on it were the words, “In memory of a once fluid man, crammed and distorted by the classical mess”.

The condition of the Chinese martial arts – according to Lee.

There are several ways of looking at this and it has to be understood by noting the context and the world in which Bruce Lee was operating.

If you were generous, you might say he was taking a swing at the woeful state that some traditional schools had gotten themselves into at the time. So, he may not be indicating that all schools have gotten themselves into a ‘classical mess’. Also, remember that he himself was the product of a fairly traditional school of Chinese martial arts; Wing Chun.

This doesn’t mean that he spent all of those years training in Wing Chun and then threw it all away, but I get the impression that he didn’t find the answers he wanted within the confines of the style.

The school/philosophy that Lee developed (Jeet Kune Do) was interpreted by some as being iconoclastic, a ‘style without being a style’, but that is open to interpretation. Did he really ditch everything and start from scratch? Can that even be done?

Taken to extremes.

I have seen online examples where people have pushed this idea to its furthest limits. Stating that martial arts students would be better avoiding anything that looks like formal training, abandoning all tradition and just do what comes naturally, making it up as they go along.

If this is intended as personal protection, it’s a very risky strategy.

This reminds me of a homeless man I once saw, who had clearly found or been given a guitar and thought he would get more sympathy as a busker. The only problem being he’d no idea how to get music out of a guitar or be able to tune it. So he just banged away at it hoping that he might get lucky and just randomly, accidentally create some sound that resembles music.

So, in an attack situation, just ‘banging away’ with your fists and your feet you might accidentally be defending yourself? It might work.

Accumulated wisdom.

In the broadest sphere of human intelligence and invention, some of the cleverest people who have ever lived were aware that their personal intellectual development and knowledge were limited to their own lifespan, and thus realised the value of communicating their ideas to other people, either face to face or by writing it down.

Since the Great Library of Alexandria, the most significant repository of the ancient world; libraries (and now digital sources) have given us access to some of the greatest minds across the whole of history. The ideas of Darwin, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the geniuses of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky are all available through books, as if they achieved immortality in real terms and are speaking directly to us.

This is exactly how it is supposed to work with long-established martial arts. In the various fighting systems access to the accumulated wisdom of past masters saves you time; you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; it just jumps you right in on the continuum. If they have got it right, the hard-fought, hard-won real experiences of these old long-dead experts in their field is there at your fingertips. As long as you are prepared to put the work in.

Where things go wrong.

A reverse checklist for instructors.

It is possible to avoid Bruce Lee’s ‘classical mess’, as long as the torchbearers keep an eye on the big picture. Their job is to be wary of the phenomena of being like the frog who is unaware that the water he has been placed in is gradually being brought to boiling point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Or, like the simplified version of Plato’s Cave, where shadows are mistaken for reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

Here is a basic list of things that can mess up the transition; where the chain breaks:

1.       Complacency and laziness.

2.       Smugness; too much reliance on standing on the shoulders of giants.

3.       Worshipping the ashes, not the fire.

4.       Degraded or partial transmission.

5.       Not setting out your stall properly and misrepresenting your art.

Example.

There are numerous examples of all of the above within karate (and not just Wado karate).

Just one example, (number 4 ‘Degraded or partial transmission).

This is a karate instructor who cut out on his own, breaking away from his original teacher, a fellow who originally made his reputation as a tough and able fighter in karate competition. He was tall, strong and aggressive with long legs that gave him an advantage on his kicking skills.

His success was such that he figured he was good enough, by the standards of the day, to split away from his root system and form his own style, albeit loosely based on his original root.

It took a long time for some of his most senior students to realise that he had built his new syllabus on what he himself could do well, and left out much of the stuff that he didn’t understand (I heard this from one of these same senior students). In a way he took very literally that other Bruce Lee quote, “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not and add what is uniquely your own.” But in doing so, he couldn’t really say his creation was an evolved continuation of his previous root system – this was not ‘Shu Ha Ri’.

In a nutshell; there is considerable value in understanding and appreciating your system as a long-established stream of knowledge which has accumulated over time and continues to be refined as it passes through the hands of successive generations.

To just ignore this and think that it is better to build a system from scratch is just pure folly.

To be clear, I don’t think that was what Bruce Lee was suggesting, but in writing this I wanted to highlight the benefits and the pitfalls surrounding the whole subject.