Hold on, don't misquote me
Quote:
It is too bad the Shaolin is abandoning him as is suggested by Gene's post elsewhere.
Shaolin is NOT abandoning Tamo at all. Let's read a little more carefully here. Shaolin now acknowledges that Tamo is mythological, but they are far from abandoning him. They are taking the same stance that most Zen scholars take on Tamo - that he was a legend and just be treated and RESPECTED as such. It's only either/or if you're a Decartean thinker. Thankfully, zennists are anything but.
As for Yue Fei, it's ironic how he ties into the Tamo myth. In one of the earliest, if not the earliest (17th century), documentable versions of Yijinjing, there is a preface by Niu Gao. The preface states that Yue Fei was instructed in this method and alludes that it contributed to his success. The preface is clearly a forgery, so only the most naive of martial researchers would place any lineage value on it. It reeks of influence of the popular novel, as does a lot of Yue Fei origin myths in the martial arts. This doesn't invalidate us venerating such legendary figures as our progenitors - legend is legend and has its place - it's just that you can only take such metaphors so far until reason forces you to acknowledge that their value is symbolic, not literal.
But you can tie all sorts of things together if you just dig deep enough. You can look at Wu Jingzi's Unofficial History of Scholars which attributes Yijinjing as a major factor in the training regimen of Feng Mingqi, a knight-errant loosely based upon a contemporary of Wu's Gan Fengchi, the allleged founder of BSL. That would be an inappropriate tie, but there's such a tradition of making founder claims in CMA that it's not too far fetched.