Traditional Martial Art vs. Modern Martial Art

In our efforts to understand the traditions of those masters long since passed we cannot truly see unless we attempt to understand those men of ages past, their customs, their perceptual worlds and more. Our present day perception of the art we inherited will always be incomplete and only an approximation of the originally masters interpretations and applications as well as that persons perceived philosophical perspective.

The greatest fault in our attempts to connect to the time, person and place long gone is that in our search we will end up seeing that old world with an overlay of the world of our present. Our interpretations as they grow from study will always be influenced by our current state of perception, our perceptive world.

We will have to be satisfied with our approximation of the past, its context and intent as it is molded by our dominant perception, context and intent of our now, our presence or perceptive world. We can get a feeling of what it "might have been like" but must accept that it will always be now and forever an approximation of the original. We will never truly know the past. We can come close and hope.

When we do we must assume full and complete responsibility for re-interpreting their thinking, their beliefs, and their culture, customs and intentions.