Your shit is fake

To badly misquote Tim Cartmell in Neijia Quan, Jess O'Brien's book of interviews with internal martial arts teachers,  "People are just about ready to kill each other over styles. It’s ridiculous. There's no such thing as styles, there are only practitioners."

(I don't have the book with me, so if you know the exact quote then please post it in the comments section and I'll get it updated).

It's a very good point. A lot of the stupid Internet flame wars on forums are because somebody used the name of a style to describe a video or something, and that causes offense to other practitioners of that style who don't recognise what's in the video as being an "authentic" or "orthodox" presentation of their style. The weight isn't 50/50 between the legs like it should be, or their back heel is up when it should be down, they have the wrong "Shen Fai", they lean when they should be upright, etc.... You know the sort of thing. They're all essentially different versions of, "You're not doing it like my teacher does it, and I know he's right because he does it like a picture I have of Master XYZ doing it in a book published in 1934, which means I'm right and your shit is fake".

Largely it’s pathetic. Totally pathetic. In fact the phrase "your shit is fake" has become something of a martial arts forum joke because of it. People use it ironically now all the time. But still these sorts of arguments happen so often it’s worth looking at closely.

You see it across all styles. Practitioners of Japanese Daito-ryu are as equally likely to engage in this kind of bitching as practitioners of Chinese XingYi Quan. In fact, it's not limited to martial arts. You see the same thing in large, organised religions. The splits in the Christian church are variations of "Your shit is fake and only I, and my followers, have the true faith". People who fly planes into buildings for religious reasons also believe your shit is fake, and they're prepared to die for it. In fact, as soon as you "believe" in anything there must be a counter position that you now think is false. But this is taking this post off into other realms. Let's get back to martial arts.

Image by germeister via Flickr

When I practiced Jeet Kune Do for a couple of years (the martial art that Bruce Lee invented, which translates as the "Way of the Intercepting Fist") there were these same style divisions. Perhaps because the founder hadn't been dead that long and was so famous, and still is, these splits were a lot more visceral than the splits that happen in arts based on the teachings of founders who died a long, long time ago. Maybe, maybe not. In Jeet Kune Do, at least when I was doing it, instructors were generally divided into two camps. I say "instructors" because most students were completely unaware of style wars, and could really care less. They just wanted the training. There was the "original JKD" camp purists, who taught strictly only what Bruce Lee actually practiced and got his students to practice. And there were the "JKD Concepts" people, who mixed what Bruce Lee taught with various other arts, like Muay Thai, Filipino stick fighting, Silat and grappling. They had adopted Bruce Lee's philosophy of "take what is useful, reject what isn't" from different arts, meaning that they had to study lots of different arts to find what worked for them. Of course, the "original JKD" guys saw a lot of people doing kick boxing and flashy stick techniques or flamboyant Silat takedowns and couldn't understand how that gelled with Bruce Lee's ideas to whittling techniques down to their bare essentials, refining and refining seemingly simple movements over and over again until the very last redundancy had been removed in the quest for supreme efficiency. Either side regularly spouted various versions of “your shit is fake” to each other. Over the Internet, of course.

To be honest, I can't say which approach to JKD is right. I think both approaches to JKD have merit.

The same thing is happening with Yi Quan. Master X's style doesn't look like his teachers, who was a student of the Founder. If you look at Master Y's style you'll see it is much closer to what Master Z taught", and so on, and so on. Basically more "Your shit is fake!". Again, usually over the Internet.

So where was I going with all this? Ah yes, Styles. Do yourself a favour and don't get trapped in the style wars. It's not worth it. Your time would be better spent actually improving your attributes. Seriously. Why the need to put other people down all the time from behind the safety of a keyboard? Why do you expect other people to be perfect at everything anyway? Are you perfect? We are all learning and improving as we go.  

If you're studying a traditional martial art you'll come up against this at some point. You'll see somebody doing your "style" who doesn't do it like your teacher. Are they wrong? Is your teacher now wrong? Can you really perceive what they are doing correctly from your current point of view? Will that change over time as you learn more? Perhaps there's more to it than you thought.... Your teacher can open a door for you, but you have to walk through it yourself. Ultimately, you have to leave them behind. You are the only one who can figure this stuff out for yourself.

Image by taminator via Flickr

There is a saying I read once that I really liked:

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise men of old.
 Seek what they sought.”
- Matsuo Munefusa (”Basho”)