mr. kuhn, you're tying to shift me, aren't you?

As ubbt members, we are pretty comfortable with our role as teachers of the martial arts.  But one thing is starting to bug me: looking from the angle of a practitioner, what are the martial arts about?

'About' is kind of a weird word to use, but it fits.  We see the opportunities in teaching the martial arts, but where does our practice fit in?  What's the point?

As a physical activity, a sport, it lacks the usual rhetoric of competition, fair play, etc.  Some of that's there for sure, but if a school or organization takes it to the level found on a football team, criticism follows.  Maybe we're a bit elitist, but the black belts of the world by and large see ourselves as teachers, not coaches.  

The martial side of things can't be neglected.  Self-defense is a vital part of any practice.  But if all you do is fighting, you're missing out.  We can all agree on that.  It's just what you're not getting that I'm curious about. 

But our art doesn't look like other arts either.  We have a slavish devotion to craft rather than art.  Expression comes into it, but the way we practice the same thing over and over makes us look more like masons than scuplters.  No shame in that, of course--but there has got to be some reason we call what we do an art.  We do express ourselves.  The best kung fu or karate is more than beautiful, it's an outpouring of the self.  We turn ourselves inside out.  But definitely not in the same way a painter or musician does.  At least I think so.  I have my share of experience with other art forms and I can tease out similarities between them.  The martial arts are different.  Art is for the sake of itself.  It can have an agenda, but to be any good a play, painting or piece of music needs to be at least partially have no motivation beyond the art form.

Well, of course we do that.  We all start for different reasons: health, self-defense, maybe even something to do.  But we stick it out because we love it, plain and simple.  Yet the more I progress, the more my kung fu is about self improvement.  The point I make through my kung fu is one of character.  The martial arts, for many of us, exist as an uneasy allegory.  We're not actually learning to kick and punch.  That's what the ubbt is all about.  So maybe it is that simple.  students going to to class to hear fables, settled in a circle around sifu aesop. We get told the moral, but have to hear the story first for it to have meaning. In this case the story is another throw or block, another thousand reps.   

Somewhere in the middle is too simple of an answer. 

I'm beginning to think that we use the martial arts to make sense of the world.  Like a fable, we do pushups and throw punches to embrace a worldview.  But how?  And why?  No easy answers tonight.