Originally Posted by
taai gihk yahn
here's the "dirty little secret" about TCMA weapons - back in the "old days", if you were a serious, professional fighter (e.g. - bodyguard, mercenary, bandit), you used weapons - in fact, you used whatever weapon was the most efficacious and advantageous one you could find; empty-hand combat was NEVER preferable, especially against armed opponents in groups;
so, if you as a mercenary decide that you don't want to fight to the death for your supper every day, another way to make $$$ was to teach kung-fu; now, you can do it one of two ways - open a school teaching the weapon you specialize in, train people quickly and effectively, and send them on their merry way to teach others your hard-won "secrets", and possibly even come back and kill you; or, you can teach empty hand first for 10 years, then teach less lethal weapons like staff, and then, only after a few decades, how the good stuff to the people who have been around long enough that you can trust them;
over time, this whole myth about needing years of empty-hand training to "prepare" you to use a weapon took on a life of its own; but it's ridiculous - look at Japanese and European sword schools - it's sword from day one - not standing in horse stance for years before you are even allowed to smell weapons - I mean, honestly, if you were really training people to be effective fighters, you'd teach them the good weapon stuff first, and then all the other stuff later on, if at all;
so the current convention is basically a vestigial remnant of a legitimate approach from 100 years ago, but which now has no intrinsic merit