and your training must reflect this. The internal side is essential in Martial Art but is impotent unless accompanied by the external.2 The External School. People who practise in these types of schools believe that training for martial sport is the same as for Martial Art. One of the greatest crimes that the Western world has committed towards Martial Art is imbuing it with a sense of sport. All over the West, ‘martial artists’ compete for glittering trophies, glory and adulation in Martial art competitions when in fact scoring points in a tournament has very little to do with either real self-defence or developing the finer sensitivity inherent in artistic training – a mugger is not going to recognize the fact that you have just scored three points for tapping him in the ribs. If you only train for scoring points then that is all that will ever emerge when you are in a real situation. Training in this manner also tends to engender arrogant mental and emotional habits that can spill over into your daily lives. This school of training has come about largely because the Western world’s first real introduction to Martial Art came via America and so was filtered through their powerful sense of sport. We will deal with this topic in more detail later.
3 The Street Fighter School. This is proliferated by people who see themselves as ‘hard’. Their attitude is that Martial Art has to be as aggressive as possible because street fights are so bloody and brutal that you can only win if you are ‘hard’, and think that the best way of training is either for you to beat people up or to get your fellow students to try to beat you up. From one point of view, this is probably the safest of the misrepresentations and the closest to the truth but it is two-dimensional and these people are dangerously missing the point: actual physical confrontation for most people is fairly rare, but conflict exists everywhere. It can also be a very dangerous attitude to take because it increases Yang energy (aggression, anger etc.), which increases the chances of you starting an unnecessary fight and getting hurt or seriously hurting your opponent, consequently increasing the chances of ending up in prison with plenty of time to contemplate what you have lost. I therefore reiterate my point that physical confrontation for most people is a fairly rare event, but conflict is a natural part of life and is present much of the time.
The Media
The misrepresentations proliferated by the media are too many and varied to go into here, but the most dangerous are the ridiculous types of fight scenes we see in movies today. These lengthy scenes comprise bodies flying, jumping and running along walls, and I am sorry to say that real street fights are never like this. Instead, they tend to be brutal, messy and quite short. It is important to understand that the roots of Martial Art are very far away from the acrobatics and gymnastics portrayed by the entertainment industry. Moreover, you must be clear in your mind what it is you are training for; if you want your Martial Art training to have an effect in your life then you must spend time studying the situations and scenarios that you may encounter.
The Difference Between Martial Art and Martial Sport
So, having looked at some of the more common misrepresentations of Martial Art let us now look at what it actually should be. As mentioned previously there is a great difference between Martial Art and martial sport; in fact, most things described as Martial Art are actually martial sport. Martial Art deals with the art of expressing the human body and develops man's innate sense of harmonization, adaptation and exploration. Martial sport, on the other hand, is far more concerned with domination and emphasizes winning as the primary objective; this can have a very detrimental effect on those who practise it as it breeds a very limited two-dimensional perception of the world. It does not teach the human being how to evolve or how to accept Yin and Yang with equal respect or how to accept winning and losing with the same spirit.
Nor does it teach of the presence of the third dimension: balance. The tradition of Martial Art teaches us how to respect our bodies and exercise them in a manner that will preserve them in older age. Martial sport uses the body as a vehicle for glory and utilizes high-impact exercise to get the quickest results possible. The martial sport practitioner seeks material affirmation of their worth as a martial artist, which might include building bigger muscles, acquiring as many trophies as possible, wearing the most elaborate clothing or breaking the most boards. This is a highly dangerous form of training as it tends to build a false image of oneself and bring an overestimation of one's abilities. If correct focus is not taught, the mind will learn to daydream repeatedly seeing itself always as the “star” of one's own show, but anyone who has a modicum of experience in street fighting knows how crippling this image of oneself can be. The pure barbarity of real combat wipes out this illusion mercilessly. The most common effect when faced with an actual conflict is that the practitioner will freeze and engage in negative internal conversation about how they should be doing better or what friends are thinking of them. I have seen many skilled martial sport practitioners freeze and be reduced to the most basic form of body mechanics when faced with a drunken, little delinquent who was not afraid of violence.
Another aspect of martial sport, which I personally find astounding, is that so many practitioners end up with serious injuries, which can never really heal. These include destroyed knee ligaments, broken and arthritic hands, various back injuries, detached retinas, fallen arches, and breathing problems caused by broken noses and poor posture. Such injuries usually occur in competitions or regular training that allow full-contact sparring or from trying to attain a material goal such as large muscles or the next coloured belt. By training in this way, the wish to learn how to defend oneself ended up with the practitioner being even less able (due to injury) to defend himself than when he or she first walked in the dojo’s (Japanese word for training room) door.
It is also true that training in martial sport tires the body and makes it age quicker. It takes many years to build something of quality and authenticity, and your body is no different. Remember that the term ‘Kung Fu’ means time spent working on yourself (which means body, mind, and spirit), so patience and perseverance need to be cultivated in the practitioner in order to build a quality ‘vessel’ or body that is integrated and whole.
Key Concepts in Martial Art
An intelligent warrior should begin cultivating the ability to express themselves from the inside outwards, not to seek an image of themselves from the outside in, as if looking in a mirror, or imagining yourself as if playing a role in a movie. Similarly, they must cultivate an understanding of discipline as a self-imposed (or by a teacher) set of parameters that helps attain goals, and not as an outside force beating them into shape or a bitter pill that has to be swallowed. The Chinese use the analogy of pruning a tree, for if it is pruned correctly it will bear greater fruit in the spring; so too, if we curb some of our overextended branches (such as putting a stop to engaging in negative emotion or thought) we will gradually develop more internal power. Martial Art should work to develop the body in a holistic manner in accordance with nature, which means evolving the body, mind and spirit harmoniously so they gradually can manifest as one force.
To understand this further we could represent this in a symbolic form, as symbols were originally used to bypass the intellectual functions and represent to the unconscious mind the ideas in question in an energetic format (see Figure 2). The dot in the middle of the symbol represents the centre or Tan T'ien, the point that we are first trying to stabilize so that everything else can orientate itself around it. The three circling tadpole-like shapes represent the primary energies: the body, mind and spirit. These are dynamically represented for they are continually moving in a cycle of imbalance and rebalancing. The circle that encompasses the Tan T'ien and the three energies is the outer level of your body, which includes your skin, eardrums and eyes. It is at this level that vibrations from the outside world actually enter your inner world. The energy of the body deals with our physical nature and encompasses the physiological, biomechanical and biochemical aspects of your body. The energy of the mind represents your thought processes and other functions controlled by the cerebrum. The energy of spirit deals with the emotions and a gradual refinement of emotional reaction into feeling. The Chinese character for spirit does not lend itself to direct interpretation into Western language; however, in the context
