Originally Posted by
taai gihk yahn
exactly; all that stuff about good character, integrity, honesty amongst TCMA practitioners - bollocks; that was all reverse engineered onto it to make it appealing to the more respectable "weekend warrior" types who wanted to be "gentleman scholar / fighters" (nothing's really changed, LOL); this made it more in sync w/Confuscian value system (Taoists, OTOH, would be the first to tell you that "life is thievery" and would laugh if you started preaching morality); it was further propagated within the wushu construct; but go back a bit in time, and you see that most TCMA, especially the really good fighters, were survivalists, not ethicists...