In a recent speech Meryl Streep announced that without Hollywood, “you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” Although Streep won a well-deserved award for an outstanding acting career, the award did not confer authority to define what are “the arts.” The martial arts are called “martial arts” because they are generally recognized to be arts, even though they are not the particular arts at which Streep and Hollywood excel. Anti-martial hauteur was well-known to the ancient Taoists:

In the space of one generation, the cultural and the martial may shift in relative significance, insofar as there are times when each is useful. Nowadays, however, martialists repudiate culture and the cultured repudiate the martial. Adherents of cultural and martial arts reject each other, not knowing their functions according to the time. [Thomas Cleary, “The Taoist Classics" (vol. 1, 2003), p. 314]

Watching the martial arts, including mixed martial arts, can be entertaining, as Sonny Bunch pointed out in a recent Post article. More importantly, the martial arts, when properly followed, foster good character and transcendence of selfishness — virtues that Hollywood often congratulate itself for promoting via the cinematic arts.

According to tradition, the martial arts were founded around 520 A.D. by Bodhidharma, a great Buddha who brought Zen Buddhism from India to China. During the journey to China, Bodhidharma was carrying valuable documents, and learned of the dangers to travelers posed by robbers. He meditated, and experienced a revelation that he should study animals. So he began to do so, and from the study, eventually developed the “18 movements of Lo Han.”

At the Shao-lin Temple in China, Bodhidharma saw that many monks fell asleep during meditation. He felt compassionate pity for the monks whose bodies were wasting away through purely mental meditation exercises. So Bodhidharma decided to teach the “bodies and minds” of the monks. He invented Kung Fu (or Chuan Fa), a form of boxing used for systematic exercise.

There was another benefit to the Bodhidharma’s martial arts: because the monks had undertaken vows not to use weapons, gangs of soldiers or ex-soldiers would often rob the monks who traveled outside their monastery. After learning the unarmed combat techniques of martial arts, the monks could journey safely, and so they traveled around China, Okinawa and Japan, disseminating the martial arts. The ideal martial artist was a Scholar Warrior, a person whose mind and body were well-trained and well-integrated.

For practical self-defense, the martial arts have been especially important to people who are persecuted by the government. For example, when China was ruled by the Mongols, the arms prohibition on the subjugated Chinese was so severe that only 1 out of 10 families was allowed a carving knife. The martial arts have also been important for cultural defense. As Thomas Cleary described the period of the Ming Dynasty in China:

It would seem that one of the concerns of the time, therefore, was the “deposit” of knowledge that would allow humankind to survive in the future. Geniuses everywhere from Europe to East Asia seem to have deposited part of that knowledge right in the infrastructures of conflict (such as the martial arts), and then moved to balance this by developing culture to a high pitch . . . . This whole process itself illustrates a principle of the I Ching, whereby waxing and waning balance each other. [Thomas Cleary, “Classics of Buddhism and Zen" (vol. 5, 2002), p. 97]

For example, when Japan conquered Okinawa in 1609 and disarmed the people, Okinawans practiced martial arts as a means of preserving their cultural identity. Unsurprisingly, genocidal tyrant Mao Zedong attempted to wipe out all knowledge of the martial arts in his campaign to exterminate all aspects of traditional culture, which might impede his efforts to enslave all the people of China under his totalitarian cult of personality.

Sometimes, the martial arts have been studied and applied in a morally degenerate fashion, as in 20th century Japan under the military dictatorship. More often, however, the arts have been used to build good character and self-control — including as a meditation practice. One advantage of moving meditation is that it is easier for the teacher to monitor the student’s progress. In sitting meditation, as long as the student maintains the correct posture, the teacher cannot see if the student is falling into error or bad habits. With moving meditation, the student’s physical actions help the teacher discern if the student is able to maintain calm and to overcome fear. The Zen master Hakuin (1685-1768) concluded that:

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The advantage in accomplishing true meditation lies distinctly in favor of the warrior class … mounted on a sturdy horse, the warrior can ride forth to face an uncountable horde of enemies as though he were riding into a place empty of people. The valiant, undaunted expression on his face reflects his practice of the peerless, true, uninterrupted meditation sitting. Meditating in this way, the warrior can accomplish in one month what it takes the monk a year to do.

There is a certain amount of technique that a martial arts master can impart by direct instruction. Yet much of the learning must come through self-discovery by the student. Masters speak of “a special transmission beyond instruction.” The student studies ji, the techniques of the particular martial art. True mastery, though, comes from ri, the ineffable truths of the universe.