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…