There’s a question that I’ve been wanting to ask for a while, so here goes. When I attended the BJJ (Brazilian jiu-jitsu) school, I saw a very curious thing — these guys would get a new book or video and would sit down on the mat and read the descriptions and then try out the moves right then and there. In other words, they were learning a part of their art directly from books and video. Isn’t that surprising?
So my question is this: why would that be okay in the BJJ world while it’s considered totally illegitimate in the CMA community? Why the difference?
I have my own answer, but I’m looking for other opinions.
10 responses so far ↓
1 mo // Mar 1, 2007 at 11:17 am
i think it’s because BJJ is a technical art. as far as i know, they don’t have any special body alignments or what not going on that have to be taught face to face, or by touch and feel. cma techniques can also be taught by book or video, it’s the shen fa and other skills that can’t.
that being said, I wouldn’t want to learn from a book or vid, even if i were doing a technical art.
2 tim // Mar 1, 2007 at 1:42 pm
when you fight you find out for yourself what works very quickly. so you learn to watch someone, then figure out how to imitate their technique. if a person can do that, they can see something in a book, fool around, try it, and maybe eventually make it work in an alive environment.
3 wujimon // Mar 1, 2007 at 9:51 pm
For me, I’ve actually gained the most understanding through physical corrections. From a taiji perspective, you cannot get this from a book b/c we often distort our self perceptions. For more, check out The Transmission of Touch
However, from a technique perspective, why not? I’ve perused very qinna books and hapkido setups and counters and found them to be useful in shedding some light on the form and body method.
4 Q // Mar 1, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Probably because those bjj books are written w/ the intention to teach people that don’t know the techniques while the IMA books tend to be reminders for things already learned. Chinese books also tend to be written relatively. Telling a stiff guy to relax a bit is ok but telling a limp guy to relax more would cause him to fall on his ass. Even then the bjj guys can probably learn better from an instructor than a book.
5 chessman71 // Mar 1, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Yes, of course they could learn better from the teacher than from a book. But I was amazed at how much they picked up from books and videos. They would really take the material and then try it out right there on the mat. They would take what worked and incorporate it into their game. I thought it was fascinating.
I agree that it was the live element in their training that made it work, as Tim brought up. They have shenfa, etc. that IMA has but none of that prevented them from getting this stuff.
Honestly, I would say that they had fewer limitations and restrictions on them regarding what they supposedly not supposed to do. They didn’t have to worry about lineage, hidden or secret techniques, nor did they have to guess at how to apply something. The technique was right there in the book. All they had to do was drill it and make it their own, which they did. I was a bit jealous at their freedom.
Those of us in traditional arts should perhaps retool some things in light of this.
6 Casey // Mar 2, 2007 at 3:09 am
It reminds me of something John Wang said on EF about how after his Longfist class the students would all just draw a big circle and spar, trying out all the moves in their forms to see how or if they worked. I think CMA needs a lot more of that attitude. Many people nowadays think of the applications as these great secrets which must be transmitted in a sacred ceremony, but in reality, you don’t have to dig that far to find most of them once you know a form pretty well and have some basic concept of fighting reality. It’s mostly a matter of fooling around with an opponent till you figure out the mechanics of it. And the more experience you have with actually fighting a live opponent, the faster you’ll see and understand the apps in traditional forms. I would definitely be willing to bet if you taught a Judo blackbelt LF forms he would start seeing and understanding the shuai-type applications much faster than most students. Of course, a teacher’s correction is invaluable, but that fact shouldn’t prevent us from trying stuff out on our own.
7 james // Mar 2, 2007 at 6:15 am
I remember my xingyi teacher saying that is exactly what he did. He had done 15 years of hung gar with Jim Uglow and so when he came to the IMA he did so with that background (he was very patient with me - my background is yoga! The fighting stuff was alien to me and now I am in Chile with a school where no-one wants to learn that). I was initially a bit surprised and thought that you had to learn that sort of thing, but on reflection once you have the skill base then it is largely a question of experimentation, isn’t it (I am generalising from things that I AM good at!)
James
8 Yuxian // Mar 4, 2007 at 10:44 am
Arts like BJJ, wrestling, Muay Thai etc are “alive” in that they are constantly being tested in a variety of environment that are constanly changing and evolving. This combines with the fact they are less concerned with lineages and “traditional” thinking/ attitudes prevalent in CMA means that they constantly are looking for things that gives them that edge over the opposition. If this means looking at books and trying out what works then so be it. You cannot argue with results.
Didn’t Guo Yunshen learnt beng quan by spying on Li Luo Neng’s training initially? What about all the legends of a kungfu style being created by a person discovering and learning from ancient manuals? Learning by watching or from books/ videos is not a new idea in CMA, but somewhere along the way it seemed to have become a taboo.
BTW, I love this site. Looks great and good reading. Keep it up!
Yuxian
9 Formosa Neijia - Exploring Taiwan’s Martial Arts » Learning from books and legitamacy // Mar 4, 2007 at 12:16 pm
[...] A quick question [...]
10 chessman71 // Mar 4, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Yuxian,
Welcome to the site. You’re quite right to bring up the fact that quanpu, martial manuals, played a big role in CMA history. There’s lots of legends about some guy reading the secrets somewhere and then training them hard. But you’re also quite right that that idea seems to have died out. Interesting.
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