by Andy_S on Fri Jun 26, 2009 9:42 pm
Secrets? There are secrets in this stuff?!? Quick tell me some...
IMHO, secrets are particularly predominant in CMA: It is a cultural thing. The Chinese have always been opaque, and you can see this cultural influence continues to exist in NEAsia, in both business - the lack of transparency in Japanese and Korean corporations - and politics - the workings of the Chinese communist party, and well, as for North Korea...
This issue has affected many, many areas of the culture. There were traditional teachers who, for years, would have their students practice the basics of calligraphy, but not actually teach them what the characters meant! Point being such students had beautiful form, but had no communicative writing function. In Korea in the 17th century, King Sejong invented a very simple script that could have made universal literacy a reality, but the aristocracy suppressed it, in order to maintain their hold on power via Chinese charaters (which the slaves and peasants did not have the resources to learn). Chinese chefs and Chinese medics have been (until relatively recently) very secretive about their recipes and medicines, respectively. Compare this to the West, where medical techniques are disseminated in books and schools, and where chefs actively produce cook books detailing their finest recipes.
There is much to be admired in traditinal Chinese culture (and by extension, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese) but this business of withholding information is not part of it, IMHO.
I suspect this is a significant part of the degradation of CMA as a fighting art in recent years. Other cultures - such as Thailand and Brazil - do not have this "personal knowledge is power" hangup, and look at the way their MA has been disseminated.
As for teachers believing that there are no longer any students who are "worthy" to receieve what they have received:
This is shear arrogance, elitism and dogmatism.
If they consider current generations beneath them, they might profitably consider that times changes; lifestyles and teaching methods must too. Maybe they should examine their pedagological methodologies to find out their lack of decent students. IMHO, a lack of flexibility in being unable to make arts teachable or relevent to the 21st century indicates a problem with either the art or the teacher. In such cases, the death of both is not necessarily a great loss.
The Hong Kong segment of the 'Way of the Warrior' docco had a Hung Ga master lamentnig the laziness and old-fashioned teaching methods of the then-current crop of CMA instructors, who, he said, were driving modern Hong Kongers toward the more modern-minded and diligent Korean and Japanese MA teachers.
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