the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

Hi

I came across some terms I´m not sure I understand right.

The terms are zibei (字輩) ) und yubei (宇輩). I think they mean a kind of more or less legitimization of a disciple.

Somebody knows more?

Thanks!

I believe that they are references to different generations of a teacher or system (usually in accordance with a written poetic outline of the succession of generations). The first character in each couplet gives the generation.

Traditionally a man had at least two names, Ming 名 - formal name, and Zi 字 - more casual name used by family, friends, and acquaintances. Typically in a family if everyone used two character Ming, within a given generation everyone's Ming will start with the same character (ex. zi 字or yu宇) . People would then refer to someone as part of zi generation (bei 輩) or yu generation.

In the cases where people use single character Ming, such as the case of my father's family, they cycle through radicals. In my grandfather's generation everyone had Ming with metal radical (金) and everyone in my dad's generation had earth radical (土).

Family hierarchies were extremely important in traditional society: between early age of marriage, high mortality rate of women giving birth, polygamy, remarriage, large families with huge differences in age between oldest and youngest male heir, etc, often the oldest grandsons could be similar age with youngest son, this is one easy way to keep track.

Since the end of feudal era most people just have one name (Ming), and this kind of tracking has fallen out of favor as well. Today one place where this practice is still in place is monasteries, for example in Shaolin, every monk of a generation has the same first character in their Buddhist name.

Martial art family systems are patterned exactly after traditional family systems, so it's not unusual to give disciples names (Zi) the way Shaolin monks do. In general though tracking is not a huge issue, as special attention is paid to not create chaos caused by overlapping age:

1. since in the old days (before 1911) martial art is a profession (vs hobby open to public), and most practices are very serious, so most disciples are young.
2. within a generation, until the oldest disciple is given permission to open his door, none of the younger disciples can open his door.
3. when the eldest disciple opens his door, the master closes his (so as to not interfere with disciples' teaching careers).
...

This way every succeeding disciple is younger (biologically) than more senior (years within the lineage) disciple.

Usually the only exception is caused by master's close door disciple: usually the master wants to finish his teaching career with the most talented, young disciple he can find. So here it is possible the close-door disciple is younger than eldest disciple's open-door disciple.

Thank you for the answers, it is getting clearer now.

Kenneth, ah, sounds also good, because there ist also the mentioning of ten syllables that were given with the succession.

kenneth fish wrote:I believe that they are references to different generations of a teacher or system (usually in accordance with a written poetic outline of the succession of generations). The first character in each couplet gives the generation.

Must be pure MA terms, both are not listed in the Zhongwen da cidian.

In my Bagua line, the row of characters dennoting desciples over generations has 8 only, before repeating themselfs again. The meaning reading them as a poetic sentence is obscure, lol!