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The old guard is always, so it seems, expressing the value of traditional martial arts but the issue that seems to bother me is that traditional or classical like everything changes. In my early days the senpai and sensei talked about the traditional forms of martial arts as if they held some special status and they were right. Those who were raised and trained with that traditional mindset had value and purpose but in the effort to hold on to that belief they held is on a pedestal is if it were royalty but we all know royalty and social organizations do fall sooner or later.
Today, when I write or talk about traditional karate I have a certain era I look to but now I realize that traditions and traditional martial arts are also evolving and therefore as time passes they create new traditions and therefore create a new perception of traditional. Today, folks look back fifty to a hundred years and call it traditional. The traditions and traditional views of my time are slowly fading into the historical deep past to be viewed in that way as a means of holding on to an every growing martial heritage. It is adding another layer to the ancestry tree that will take luminaries like Matsumura Sensei and push them across that line away from the span of years one considers in their time as the traditional or classical era of martial arts.
One day very soon those efforts in modern sport oriented competitive martial arts will look upon that era as the new traditional martial arts era while the older traditions will be something studied in a more historical history lesson way, still with value but held in abeyance as an influence to the new traditional way. You know, like we do with the ancient classics of the Bubishi, the Art of War and the other Buddhist and Confucian ways, interesting but less relevant to the modern traditions even if those ancient teachings are the very essence of the modern traditional martial ways.
Traditions and the traditional are all in transition, much like yin-yang they evolved holding the old in essence as the foundation on which the new is built. It is a transition dictated by practitioners who analysize the old, discuss in the dojo how that can be the new and then synthesize and create new traditions to create a new traditional way of martial arts.
There is a difference between traditional and original, yes?
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1 comment:
I like the terms "traditional" and "classical."
Something that is traditional is something that's been done in more or less the same way for a long time. How long is an open question.
It was a tradition in my wife's family that all the daughters with their families spend Christmas morning at their mother's house. It was that way for maybe a couple of decades, until she decided that she was too old to host it and so one of the daughters hosted. Then she got busy and a different daughter became the host.
Tradition changes.
Every martial art out there was once the new kid on the block, so traditional is relative.
Something that is classical; that is classic is timeless and represents the epitome of something. While music changes all of the time, classical music; the classics, may be studied and enjoyed on their own.
I don't practice Japanese koryu arts, but I get the idea that that is a part of their attraction. Of Budo arts, perhaps Kyudo or Iaido are most classical.
Does it matter? Perhaps to clarify one's purpose for studying.
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