in the other post. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=26130&p=445081&sid=0d299a9a7b79d2127641349f94bb0d83#p445081
everything wrote:As Steve pointed out on some thread, everyone agrees 99% of tai chi is fake, bad, just forms, watered down, misguided, a sham, unicorns, etc. The problem (even on RSF) is no one agrees on the other 1%. People won't even agree on 8 energies. Perhaps people think it's Taoist fluff on top of a village art.
noted the post and thought some might find the reading interesting.
Having to deal with some of this among some of those I work with, often wondered why so many are concerned with
what they do not do, or practice.
Not a recent phenomena.
We have all encountered the debates before. Who was a “closed door” student of whom? Who can really claim to be a true inheritor of some style of Kung Fu? Of all of the criticisms that one can make of the Chinese martial arts, a lack of interest in politics will never be one of them. At the end of the day all sorts of debates in the modern Chinese martial arts seem to devolve into attempts to criticize or illegitimate the quality of someone else’s instruction.
https://chinesemartialstudies.com/2013/ ... s-part-ii/
An interesting reading that might shed some light IMO the reasons behind a lot of the discussions here.
One result of many historical factors.
In short, our current martial arts institutions are an outgrowth of modern capitalism. They are a natural extension of our social and economic world. However, early 19th century China was not really a “capitalist” place according to our current understanding of the term. For the most part the economy was not monetized. Except for a small group of very wealthy individuals, most people rarely had access to cash. The Qing government didn’t even bother to consistently mint coins as they accepted tax payments in raw one ounce silver ingots or Mexican silver dollars. In short, while there may have been groups of people who wanted to learn the martial arts, there usually was not a really easy way to pay the teacher.
It seems that later generations of hand combat students, more concerned with identity formation than survival, came to see “traditionalism” as a goal in itself. This is a very different attitude than what we see exhibited in the lives of most of the early 20th century martial arts masters. While some of these individuals may have been socially conservative, as a group they are better characterized by their pragmatism.
Pragmatism, interesting word. meaning "what works"
the old guys, the MMA guys of their day,
they had to be.