musing

I remembered an old martial arts teacher's ideal-dream idea of developing an apartment complex into a sort of fitness community. People would live in the apartments, and as part of their rent they would get their choice of general-personal training or fitness classes, and various martial arts (I think he very grudgingly conceded a need for a yogic aspect at some point). As a community - community building was something he was big on, something I looked up to him for - they would be able to support and maintain each other's practice, and enjoy having like-minded people around.

I definitely understand the like-minded people aspect being in yoga school now - I've never really found myself in a setting until now where mulitple people were actually having the same thoughts as me (at least in regards to a yoga/personal development side of things); individuals, yes (my roommate and a couple ex-girlfriends, say) but not a community before. Anyway, that's a tangent from what the original point of this musing was to be, that as much as he had something of a cool idea going, I'd maybe back it down to this: an analagous school for martial arts.

Right, I understand the Japanese arts have their own traditions and whatnot of almost purely physical training and specific ways of how things are done. But, interestingly, the yoga school I attend considers the idea of lineage just as important as the dojos I once attended did. And they still have classes that attend to the purely physical. But, in the actual school aspect, there's a more holistic approach - philosophy, language, anatomy, nutrition, etc. It would be amazing to see the effect of that applied to martial arts, in my mind - zen and Musashi instead of samadhi and the Bhagavad Gita, Japanese instead of Sanskrit, anatomy with a different focus...I'm not saying it would necessarily make the students better fighters, mind, but rather, I think certain students would find the discipline immensely more interesting and valuable, and be much, much more effective at the supposed non-physical aims of martial arts, which are usually brushed quickly by, if mentioned at all. Which, in the end, is a sad thing in the case of styles like aikido, where they should be focus, instead.

"Context is very important. Without context we can never really master yoga or any other art or science. For example, artists learn all the classic principles of their form before learning to improvise and find true creativity. Without training in the classical skills of their art as well as understanding how their art has developed, there is no ground on which artists can base their creativity. Most of the great masters have developed their mastery in this way: by first learning the context."