What Is Martial Arts?
MARTIAL ARTS, THE ART OF WARFARE
The following three components encapsulate what defines martial arts, the art of war, or warfare:
SEEKING WEAKNESS - the constant and never ending quest to find our own weaknesses, in skill, technique, timing, etc and the overlying goal of shoring up these weaknesses once found. The mats, dojo, wu guan, training hall, garage, backyard, firing range, or wherever we train, this environment informs us of where we are deficient, not only in hand-to-hand combat, or weapon combat, but likely it reflects and translates directly to psychological and emotional weaknesses we have outside the training environment and in our day to day life. This constant struggle and exploration within, allows us a vehicle to continue to improve who we are as fighters, warriors, and human beings.
ORGANIZING CHAOS - the idea of a martial art itself as the organization of chaos. Fighting another human can be defined perfectly as ‘chaotic’. It describes succinctly the randomness, challenge, and disarray that happens within combat with another human being. In this engagement we cannot possibly know definitively what the adversary will do, or how they will go about attacking us. Through training martial arts skills and techniques, we can limit the options available to an opponent, thereby reducing the number of possibilities, and organizing the chaos into a more manageable state. If we can train ourselves effectively, we limit the options the opponent has, thereby narrowing the possibilities. Once we achieve the limitation the possibilities, we train the appropriate defenses and counter-attacks to each. This makes the final definition even more crucial to success.
INOCULATION TO METHODS OF VIOLENCE - the third definition of martial arts is the inoculation to methods of violence. Through trust in our partners and teammates we engage in the act of inoculating ourselves and one another, to the wide range of possible attacks that could happen to us on the battlefield. This raw exposure allows us to learn and adapt appropriate responses to these acts of violence through repetition, and train effective means of mitigating and possibly dominating these risky scenarios. Martial training environments ‘should be’ a safe environment where we can engage in such practices with the intent to build skills to deal with circumstances that could otherwise kill us, rather than induce stress which inhibits growth and the gaining of new skills.
A martial art that fails to meet these three criteria leaves the practitioner feeling insecure in their abilities, or provides a false confidence in one’s capabilities, thereby creating a ‘skills fantasy’ versus ‘skills actual’.
