Do you think the spiritual or the fight is more important?
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Do you think the spiritual or the fight is more important?
Greetings and Welcome to the forum, HeroFightWarrio,
Neither is more important.
For the warrior, it is the achievement of the goal/objective that needs to be accomplished that is important. Accomplishing that goal/objective may take spirit and/or may take "the fight" as you put it. Neither stand for anything if the end result is failure.
mickey
Nothing is important until you give it importance.
What is important to you may be meaningless to another.
What do you want to be important? When will you decide to be accountable for your life and choices made?
Ommmm mafa.
A victory can be over anything- bad thoughts, poverty, sickness, a life and death situation, etc.
Maybe the question can be rephrased like this:
Suppose an angel appeared and told you that if you put in the effort you will suceed at becoming either:
One of a handful of the very best fighters and martial teachers of your generation (in whatever form of martial art you like)
or
A holy or truly wise person (in whatever religion or philosophy you believe in, a Saint, a Bodhisattva or Arahant, Enlightened being, born-again-saved, Spocklike ultimately rational, Taoist sage or whatever).
But the angel says you can’t be both. The one would exclude the other. In fact gaining the one would make you at best mediocre at the other.
Which would you choose?
If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
The angel too.
All I know is it is better to win than to lose.
If you want spiritual growth better to visit a Church or whatever you want to call it than a martial arts instructor. Although, the MA teacher may in fact be the more Holy of the two.
I don't really see anything "spiritual" about martial arts at all. The fact that fight training is necessary at all is just a miserable failure of our abject species. The only connection might be that when gorillas are trained to use violence to protect the peaceful chimps from bandits, it’s good if they believe in some ethical principles so they don't misuse what they know. So some cultures put a thin spiritual veneer on warrior training. There isn't much in life that can't be understood in terms of Planet of the Apes.
Titties, bro. Titties.
All species fight. Fight to survive, fight to procreate. The ideal that fighting is bad is faulty in my view. Stress is how all things grow in the universe as far as we can observe.
With Kung Fu, it is becoming more clear to me the connection between buddhism and martial arts which at first seems to be a conundrum until you think about how do the strong protect the weak in moral virtue if there are no strong to protect the weak and if there is no way for the virtuous to become wise and discerning.
We accept the dual nature of almost everything in existence except ourselves.
I can practice zen. I can practice destroying evil. There is no distinction as Gene stated above. It is not a failing to be a warrior. However, it is a failing to be a coward or to capitulate in using necessary force to end evil.
Buddha had a protector. Jesus had a protector. These two great men of peace had protectors who would make violence on their behalf where necessary. Why would these two icons of peace allow for that if not for the understanding that it is indeed a necessary thing?
One side of me thinks like that, but perhaps the conundrum you are describing is the conundrum of the world, not of spirituality. Buddha walked alone without a protector when he converted Angulimala in the forest. He conquered Angulimala with compassion and wisdom. It may take such a - from a worldy point of view insane - level of faith in and commitment to peace, love and understanding to enter spirituality, which really is otherworldly. Otherworldly in the sense that it is made of our aspirations and possibilities as a rational species capable of enormous compassion and sensitivity rather than being made of worldly desires and conflicts. Sure, everywhere we look biological nature is war, but we are capable of aspiring beyond that. The biosphere is nothing but a paper-thin skin on a roughly spherical gigantic rock in a humongous universe. Why uplift the scrabbling imperatives of tiny components of the biosphere viewed in isolation to the status of guide to reality?
I am not Asian but maybe I can still join the Templars. Maybe then I can be on a true path to enlightenment. At the very least, like all other Enlightened Ones. I can get rich as ****.