LEGENDS OF KUNG-FU #30 Wu De - Living up to the Standards of Kung-Fu At a party last night, hosted by a kung-fu brother of mine, I was approached by a couple of his students. Since their teacher was heading out of town for a stretch of time, they were looking to further their studies with me. They were very polite, enthusiastic, and reputedly fairly skilled. Both of them are hard workers, devoted to studying real kung-fu. I turned them down. My rejection had nothing to do with the reasons you might suspect. It had nothing to do with finances, race, scheduling conflicts, or anything like that. It had to do with wu de. "Wu de" is the Chinese term for ethics held by martial artists. It's like an unwritten code of behavior that a good kung-fu practitioner should strive to live by. But it's hard to live up to that kind of a standard in the modern day. In modern society, consumerism drives life. Among martial arts schools, it's the same thing. Students are by-and-large just consumers. If they want to switch from one studio to the next, it's their right, their freedom. They pay money for their training, and they have the consumer's rights to take their money and go elsewhere if they're not satisfied with the level of service they're getting from their chosen studio or instructor. That's the law. But that's not the right way, not the traditional Asian way, not the ethical way among martial artists. By no stretch of the imagination am I saying that all Asians are ethical and everyone else is unethical. What I am saying is that the modern, commercially driven mindset of the average martial art student and instructor is grossly negligent towards certain ethics and values that have been and should continue to be an integral part of Chinese martial arts training. As the economy gets tighter, competition among martial arts schools for students will increase. There's no way around that. But how students and instructors choose to deal with that should be different. In the old days, no teacher would accept a student whom he knew had trained with another teacher without a letter of recommendation. That letter served as a letter of introduction for the student, as well as a guarantee from the original teacher regarding the student's character and a token of goodwill between the two teachers. Last night, I told those students that studying Chinese martial arts seriously was like how a man should treat women. When you're young or inexperienced, you might "date around," looking for the right match. But when you find someone who has the qualities that you've been looking for, you commit to that person, to that art, and to the highs and lows that may come with it. Commitment is a huge part of wu de. Maybe it'll help you if I tell you about my own story. I trained with a bunch of teachers when I first came to Los Angeles, over a decade ago. A couple of them were Black Belt Hall of Fame members, and most of them were fairly big names in Chinese martial arts. During that time, I served as a Tai-Chi instructor at Caltech and head instructor (sifu) of the kung-fu program at UCLA and became one of the contributing editors of Black Belt. But it wasn't until almost 10 years later that I had the good fortune to meet my master, David C.K. Lin, through his elder son, James. And I realized at that point that all my training up to that point in time was just a prelude up to training with the Lin family. I started over from the very beginning as a white belt, setting all my previous training aside to devote myself to learning the Combat Shuai-Chiao system as my master taught it, and eventually earned a black belt under him. That's wu de. When you can commit to one teacher, take the submissive role, serve without fanfare and do so consistently, and learn in a diligent manner, you demonstrate the foundation of wu de. If you talk about someone as your master, talk about how devoted you are to them, and then jump on the first chance to learn from someone else without the knowledge or consent of your instructor, you have no understanding of what wu de is. I know about all of this because I've made plenty of mistakes in conduct and commitment myself. Fortunately, there were people who set me straight on how to be and how to grow before I met the Lins. And fortunately, those people came along at a time when my mind and heart were open to their words of criticism and advice. When I explained the example of martial arts ethics in terms of a romantic relationship very briefly to one of the students, he immediately knew where I was coming from and promised to speak to his instructor before approaching me again. That showed me the moral quality of the young man. When I mentioned this to the other student, he started talking about how a man can have many women, and thus, can study as many different martial arts as he pleases with whomever he pleases. While that may be the case in modern society where promiscuity
of many sorts is the rule rather than the exception, it's the
responsibility of conscientious instructors with real martial
skill and lineage to guard the purity of their martial heritage.
There are so many squabbles today about who learned what from
whom because of all of this type of free mixing of styles and
techniques. Hsing-I no longer looks like Hsing-I, Shuai-Chiao
starts using sacrifice throws like Judo, and Wing Chun starts
adding spinning kicks like Taekwondo. While on one hand, you can
argue that it's just part of the evolution of martial arts, you
can also show clearly that this sort of situation leads to a degeneration
of traditional martial culture - the culture and training that
made individuals not just good fighters, but good human beings
with a strong moral fiber. And it's those people who've imbued
their lives with wu de that become the real legends of kung-fu. |