Teaching martial arts is like walking a tightrope

There’s this problem with teaching Americans; most of the time you can’t just tell them things that are easy for them to understand and give them things that are relatively easy for them to do, slowly pushing their boundaries, but you also have to be careful because if you tell them something they don’t understand they will decide it’s gibberish and give up, and if you give them something that’s too hard to do which they can’t currently do they will decide it’s too hard and give up. As a teacher you have to try and spoon feed them ideas that are just a little bit of a stretch and give them forms and sets (Kata) that are just difficult enough that they can kinda sorta do them. Most of the time, you can just forget about them understanding the subtle points of the art whether in technique or in the philosophical/strategic aspects.

Make no mistake, almost always there is a direct application of either technique (tactic) or strategy to every piece of philosophy in martial arts. Sometimes they are more subtle than that and apply to how you live your life so that it will be more pleasant, work better, and you will be less likely to have to use your martial skills. Many statements will have an “obvious” meaning, but the true meaning is buried much deeper and can only come to be truly understood after many years of practice. Many times, it’s like having to explain a joke. Until you have the whole picture though it doesn’t make sense.

I told a joke to one of my teachers once but he didn’t get it because his english wasn’t good enough, so I worked on helping him with his english for a year and in the process I worked in every concept I had used in that joke. Only then did I tell him the joke again, and yes, he laughed. If all the parts of a concept are not connected, you can’t get the big picture and sometimes the small pictures aren’t good enough, they just aren’t complete. The first sentence in this could easily be broken apart into a bunch of individual sentences, but the whole thing together creates one concept. This is how forms (techniques) and sets (kata) function. You work on learning the set or the kata while learning techniques in class which cover not just the techniques in the kata but the techniques related to a particular technique in the kata so that as you come to understand the parts, you are also coming to understand the big picture.

While this can be done with the physical parts of the art, it frequently cannot be done with the deeper mental aspects of an art. Like many Zen Roshi have said, explaining the concepts that you want the student to understand can actually stand in the way of progress and understanding. On the simplest level if a student does not learn to pay attention and work out for themselves what they are looking at then they will never acquire the skill that allows them to analyze the subtle aspects of what an opponent is doing and how to defeat them by merely looking at how they stand and hold their hands.

Most students will not practice techniques at home let alone meditate. The percentage of students who continue on to truly master an art has always been low, but in the modern world where people don’t see the value to martial arts (to be honest, most people through history have not understood the value of martial arts.) and 75-90% of students drop out before achieving yellow belt or the equivalent, even most instructors do not truly understand what they are doing.

Forms and sets (Kata) teach you how to move. Bunkai teaches you how to use the movement as applications. Two-man forms teach the feel and flow of combat, blinding, timing, and to use the techniques you learned in class in combat. Sensitivity exercises like sticky hands, push hands, Filipino Hubud Lubud Drills, and Chi P’ing Tao’s slippery hands teach blinding, timing, to find openings, natural flow of combat, how to deal with varying amounts of force and speed, among other things. Chi P’ing Tao’s Three step drills teach continuous attack with broken rhythm. Sparing teaches students to overcome fear and build ego at the cost of forgetting to use the techniques you learned in class in combat, building ego, and ingraining repeated mistakes. Chi P’ing Tao’s Counter drills teach you to see into the heart of combat and to understand that everything as a counter. If you have to always be told the bunkai and don’t think it out yourself you still have not learned to defend yourself. If you have to always be told the bunkai and don’t think it out yourself you still have not learned to defend yourself. Think for yourself. Ironically, even practicing martial arts poorly changes the way you move enough that it massively decreases the likelihood that you will ever have to use them.

Even the most devoted and studious student, who learns from a teacher who lacks understanding and whose techniques are sloppy who was passed on by another teacher who was the same, is at a serious disadvantage. Even if you don’t lose students by going over their heads when they say to themselves, “Ooh, an incomprehensible mystical statement,” they have put it in a category where they don’t have to think about it. For the vast majority of people if they don’t have to think about it, they don’t. When you add to this the difficulty of trying to operate a martial arts business and make enough money to keep your school going it is not surprising that there are so many McDojos and black belt academies where the only concern is making money. Flash is often the fastest way to die; but it is also how you get students.