Was -> Book me dudes! Now -> Martial Arts Discussion

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atreides

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Hey all

Lately I have been shopping around alot for books, found some on ebay and amazon, but when it comes to books that are like actually important or useful, amazon is really lacking. Or at least as I have found.

Anyway, so the topic of interest for me is Martial Arts, I.E. war/strategy and pugilism, I have all the prerequisite translations of the Prince, Art of War (Sun Tzu and Machiavelli), the Bubishi etc. But some of these I would really like in the original language, I would so jones for Sun Tzu in Chinese, I can't really read Chinese, but it's you know...

Since we have readers and users from all over the world, I am wondering what books you know of in your native languages about all things martial, especially older texts of Jousting, Hand to Hand, Strategy etc, that I might be able to find translations of, or maybe a copy in the original language. I am not looking for anything about Karates or Jutsus, unless of course they are more than 70 years old. So maybe you can reply to this thread with book names, or if you are really super cool, you can send books to the QFG address and they'll get to me. What would be really cool is anything on jousting, or northern european martial arts. Greek martial arts are also super cool, and Russian. Non Japanese/Chinese martial arts philosophy is also cool, unless said stuff was written before the 20th century, in which case, book me.

Chime in if you know of any titles, or have some you wanna give me :)
 
What about Brazilian martial arts? ;)

P.S. I am going to continue our dialogue tonight. I apologize for the somewhat excessive delay. My life tends to swallow me from time to time.
 
imua lua? unrealz bra, send me dat wikiwiki.
wen you and da wahine gonna hop tha Moana for a visit and suck um up witme? tha ohana is missin u both too bra, wen you get our package, lemmeno k?

On the topic of brazillian martial arts, yeah there are some really good ones, not really thinking about Gracie stuff, but Cap and some of the knife/stick stuff from the various tribes round there look interesting. Also, saw some stuff about Apache knife fighting, which got me thinking about Native American MAs, which I think would be interesting, I have heard some stories about their training methods, don't know if they are for real or not, but they sounded good.
 
lolz, inokea you call me j good fun bra, oh ya, howz tha kamali'i ?
/Iakona
 
atreides said:
... not really thinking about Gracie stuff ...
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I understand it's probably not of much interest to you, but what do you think of Gracie Jiu Jitsu?
 
No, not that at all, I have alot of respect for the Gracies, and I personally recommend anyone looking to round off their defensive skills with locks and ground work to check their material or visit an affiliated school. When it comes to jiujitsu, my personal opinion is that the Gracie system is one of the most elegant. But, I have already looked into, I am not looking at modern systems, due to their inherent nihilism, I am more interested in martial arts with some semblance of the spiritual systems still in tact etc. That's my main interest. As well as having information to compair techniques etc.
 
I only ask because I studied the Gracie system for a few years (my instructor learnt under Carlos Gracie Jr for 10 years, in Carlos's garage actually) and although it is probably one of the most effective forms of self-defence (if not the most), it is, as you said, completely devoid of spiritualism. But to walk into any martial art school today, you are learning an incomplete system, focused on physicality. A fragmented teaching, if you will.

atreides said:
I am more interested in martial arts with some semblance of the spiritual systems still in tact etc.
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I have minimal knowledge of the spiritual side of martial arts, but would be very interested in exploring it further (i.e. the right use of energy, as Don Juan put it). Have you found any material in this field that appears to compliment the teachings of Castaneda, Gurdjieff, etc.?
 
atreides said:
No, not that at all, I have alot of respect for the Gracies, and I personally recommend anyone looking to round off their defensive skills with locks and ground work to check their material or visit an affiliated school. When it comes to jiujitsu, my personal opinion is that the Gracie system is one of the most elegant. But, I have already looked into, I am not looking at modern systems, due to their inherent nihilism, I am more interested in martial arts with some semblance of the spiritual systems still in tact etc. That's my main interest. As well as having information to compair techniques etc.
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Well, I know that the school I'm studying, Jissen Kobudo, is based (in part) on scrolls from half a millenium away:
http://www.cassiopedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Jinenkan

The techniques using Jo and Hanbo are from the more peaceful periods in Japans history, as they are inherently non-aggressive weapons, whereas the Bo, Katana, Naginata, etc. techniques are from other more violent periods in Japans history. It also includes tai jutsu and nin-jutsu forms (which are absolutely hilariously silly to practice!), as well as pressure points for incapacitation and control.

Jinenkan, the organisation behind Jissen, broke away from the Bujinkan form (which has a massive number of followers) mainly because the masters of Bujinkan were unable to teach their Ri understanding of the techniques to their Shu level students, thereby ruining the essence of the art. It can be compared with having students learning to write by copying the most exquisite calligraphic forms of masters instead of learning what each letter means. A classical disconnect between Shu and Ri and an incapacity to teach across these levels. Recognizing this problem, in Jissen Kobudo there is therefore a strong focus on basic training (Shu level) and a clear distinction between that and later more applied levels of kata and finally free-form randori.

As for spiritual systems Manaka Sensei, who founded the school some ten years ago (so the school itself is fairly new), does indeed seem to have a strong philosophical leaning, which our Dojo-Cho communicates fairly well, but his military background seems to give it a rather blunt form of expression, or so it seems. I have not yet met him, so this will be interesting to see for myself.

Finding the original scrolls that our training is based is not really possible though, as far as I know. The idea is to ensure that students practice the various schools in a precise order, to learn to crawl before one walks, which I think makes sense.
 
No, not as yet, most of it tends to be more towards black magick and what I have dubbed crowleyism. Like a chic black magic that's nothing more that cheap parlour chicks and chicanery.

You gotta be really careful around those guys, they have no idea what they are messing with half the time.

As for gracie jiujitsu being the best self defense wise, I am not so sure I agree with that assessment, from a theoretical standpoint the system is essentially flawed by favoring a lock/takedown strategy which is great for a one on one on level and not to coarse environments, but in a common mutiple attack scenario, or even a one on one on inclined terrain you start to run into some issues, throw into account broken glass, and rocky terrain and you start to find some problems. I am not saying that all of gracie's tactics are these, however I have noticed that purests and those who practice predominantly gracie/other jiu jitsus and locking/grappling arts tend to favor takedowns and locks. Which is a time waster and isn't practiceable in a multiple attacker situation especially when taking on multiple angles across 2 or more vectors, like a 3 way over under middle attack which I have seen alot of lately as psychopaths/idiots tend to not obey attack priority when they are in certain circumstances that are energetically charged, like parades, and sports matches.

If I had to compose a list of say five of the best arts to learn if you want good self defense knowledge

1. Kali/Escrima/Modern Arnis
2. Systema
3. JKD (The Innosanto way, which kind cover 1 and 4)
4. Wing Tsun
5. Jodo

Jodo made because a cane is easy to carry, and there are alot of situations when you can get at a stick. Every person should carry a stick, it's rule number one in the unwritten book of martial arts. "1: Walk softly and carry a big stick."
 
I'm disappointed to hear that most of the spiritual stuff is rubbish, but then again I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.

You have made some excellent points regarding GJJ, atreides. The reason why I stopped learning GJJ in the end was because I realised, although takedowns can be effective, they are useless if there's a second attacker there to kick you in the head once you're on the ground. I've yet to find myself in a situation where it has been one-on-one, so I started Wing Tsun a year ago, perhaps it will fair better against 2 or more opponents? Thanks for the list there, though. I'm not familiar with Systema or Jodo but will read up about it. :cool:
 
As I understand it, the premise behind Wing Tsun is to direct the force of an attack against the attacker. i.e. to borrow the energy of the attacker, "charging up" one's own body and then redirecting the energy back at its source. This was one of the things that attracted me to WT in the first place. This appears to be strikingly similar to Aikido, where one moves with the flow of the attacker. This seems to also correlate with what Bruce Lee said: "My technique is the technique of my opponent".

Something that I have been thinking about a great deal and would be interested in hearing other forum members' opinions on is:
Wouldn't martial arts become redundant if you were to find yourself in a 4th density environment? Or perhaps just the martial arts that focus only on the physical would be redundant?
 
Nathan said:
I've yet to find myself in a situation where it has been one-on-one, so I started Wing Tsun a year ago, perhaps it will fair better against 2 or more opponents?
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How often do you find yourself in a situation where you have to fight? Just curious because it sounds like it's something you do after brushing your teeth in the morning lol, no offense :P

Personally I'm fascinated with efficiency, regardless of area of study. A big one being computer programming - just change the algorithm and other things within a program, and you can make something run faster on the same hardware - sometimes by orders of magnitude. G's 4th was vs the other 3 ways for example, etc. The C's say there are no shortcuts, and while I agree that you cannot "cheat" or skip any requirements, you CAN do things more efficiently, maximize results and minimize time and effort required to achieve those results - where possible. In other words, do only that which IS required to be done to achieve something, eliminate as much "extraneous" activity due to ignorance as possible, and within the effort itself, find the most efficient way to apply it. Like a network is a much faster/efficient way to "wake up" than by yourself. It's not a "shortcut", as you still have to do all the required work to wake yourself up and stay awake - but it is much faster than all by yourself.

I was never interested in combat techniques, but now I'm just intrigued after reading this thread. I have heard people argue many times about which fighting technique is "better" or "stronger". It seems they all have their strengths/weaknesses, but like computer processors, some are very specialized for one particular task/situation/enviroment and are very very good at that situation and really terrible in other tasks/situations/environments, and some seem more generalized towards all situations, although I'm not sure if they will fair well in a particular situation vs somebody who specializes in that particular situation.

I wonder if it is possible to list from best to worst the best "general" ones (maybe like Systema), and then the best situation-specific ones?

Or another question might be, are there any martial art techniques that simply suck? Like maybe something that is a combination of something else that should not have been combined? Or something that is created recently that never had any spirituality or "substance" behind it etc? I also wonder, when someone breaks a huge stack of blocks, are they really focusing energy? Or did they just train their hand really well, and the explanation is purely physical/training? I guess it would be easy to test - give another person of comparable strength a protective glove, and have him whack the same kind of stack. I mean as long as his hand, which is untrained to withstand impact, is protected - the force of the impact should theoretically be the same, if you discount any actual channeling and attack with pure energy. So if the blocks break, the explanation is physical force combined with training to withstand the pain of impact. Well there's also the speed of the hit, but I guess the test could also be replicated with a machine. Measure pure strength of the fighter and the speed with which he hits, and replicate that force/speed with some machine. Has anyone done a test like this? It seems simple enough..
 
I used to study a martial art called Poekoelon Tjimindie Tulen. It is a mixture of Indonesian and Chinese martial arts. Strange as it may sound, there are a lot of "esoteric" concepts buried in the teachings.

It's pretty rare though, and to my knowledge there haven't been any books written about it. The closest you could come would probably be Pentjak Silat.

There is a lot of focus on animal forms and certain geometric figures and such, as well as the requisite breathing techniques.
In one of the "snake forms" the handwork is all based on triangles and the footwork is based on triangles as well.

Roughly translated, the name of the art means "to hit like a beautiful flowing river".

Don
 
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