The Martial Spirit — Combat Operational Ready or Art-Focused

I hear martial artists proclaiming that martial arts or kungfu is profound and deep (“功夫博大精深”[gōng fū bó dà jīng shēn]), but how many of them really understand what it means. Some assert that martial arts don’t work. Yet they failed to ask — how did it work in the battlefields for millenniums? Soldiers and warriors in the past don’t get to leave the battlefields alive if their methods did not work. If students blood-test them in combat, they know what would work and what do not. Falsehoods and vainglory only imperils the combatants. They either evolve or extinct. It is that cruelly direct. There is no consolation in defeat. They were penalized with their lives. In short, martial arts like Kungfu were baptized in battlefields. The art tasted blood, and it was blood-tested. These are considered as historical treasure because not only was it forged by time, it was paid with lives.

Upon further discussions, I realized many people don’t have indepth understanding how modern martial arts are not longer taught and trained the same way. To address this, people have to first understand how combat methods and military arts come into being, and how it was innovated and evolved over time.

When people claimed prematurely that martial arts do not work, what they mean is either that
(1) They do not have sufficient knowledge of what it was invented for and how it came into existence, or
(2) They may be inadequately trained, i.e. being Combat Operational Ready. (3) Worse of all, they may not even be taught the right things or the right way, giving them a false sense of security and delusional preparedness.

Every technique is refinedly reflexed, and then blood-tested, else it is just scripted dancing.

Kungfu without battlefield testing is ballet and circus.

These students may learned it later the bitter way, and sometimes with irretrievable damage. Eventually, they turned embittered iconoclasts indignated to the feeling of betrayal by the sham beliefs and false teachings they were once given. Unbeknownst to them, it was just a tragedy of misinformation and miseducation by charlatans who are either intentionally deceptive or delusionally intoxicated themselves.