TRADITIONAL MARTIAL ARTS

TRADITIONAL MARTIAL ARTS

Thursday, May 25, 2017

GOOD TEACHERS, WORTHY STUDENTS

by Phillip “Pete” Starr

     When I was finishing my first book, “The Making Of A Butterfly”, I asked my literary agent about the odds of finding a publisher who might be interested in it. He chuckled. “Authors often worry a lot about whether or not they'll find a publisher who will accept their work. The truth is that publishers are always on the look out for good writers! They need you as much as you need them.” As years passed and I published more books, I realized the truth of his words. I now pass them to aspiring authors.

The same thing is true of martial arts teachers and students. Students seek instructors who are eminently qualified. At the same time, good martial arts teachers are looking for students who have what it takes to learn what they teach. This is a terribly difficult task, much moreso than the student's search for a good instructor.

     At the time that I wrote this, I lived in southern China. To be quite frank, real martial arts in China are, for all intents and purposes, dead. Anyone who says differently is either lying or has never lived here. There is a tiny handful of teachers who are skilled in the authentic martial ways still alive, but they are as rare as hen's teeth. I was recently contacted by another American who's presently living in the nightmare of Beijing. He's been here for quite a number of years and has been training with an older gentleman who is likely one of (or perhaps, the) highest authorities on the Yin style of baguazhang.

     The teacher is on the wrong side of eighty and his health is beginning to fail. My friend tells me that he's not sure how much longer his teacher will be with us. This highly knowledgeable instructor has only four students and two of them are foreigners! How sad. My friend sighs and says that his teacher has a great wealth of knowledge but because of the lack of dedicated pupils, he'll probably take much of it with him to his grave. This how martial arts systems slowly die out.

     My old friend, Master Seiyu Oyata (dec.), a 10th dan in Ryukyu kempo, had a similar story. As a young man, he had learned tui-te from the legendary Chojun Miyagi. It was, he was told, the form of tui-te that belonged to the Miyagi clan (of which he was actually a member, but that's a story for another time). Oyata said the only other form of tui-te that he knew of was from the family of Motobu. There were three Motobu brothers, the youngest of which was Choki. The two older brothers disapproved of Choki's penchant for fighting and wouldn't teach him the family tui-te system. Instead, they passed it down to one of their students whose family name was Uyehara. When I first met Master Oyata, Master Uyehara was in his 90's and still living in Okinawa. According to Master Oyata, Uyehara had no worthy students to whom he felt he could teach the Motobu clan's method of tui-te. In any event, Uyehara was much too old to teach it at that time... so, Oyata mourned the loss of another martial art system. It died for lack of worthy students.


     Good teachers and good students need each other.  

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