Originally Posted by
Grumblegeezer
Sanjuro, I too believe it to be a sad statement, but nevertheless true. Perhaps it is a cultural thing. As a westerner and an educator by profession, I believe that any teacher is ethically compelled to teach honestly and straightforwardly. Not everyone shares this belief. Some (and not just martial arts instructors) believe that you always keep some things back for yourself, and perhaps also for a few select family members and friends. This may even imply misleading those you teach publicly to some degree.
Perhaps I can illustrate this with an example from outside of the martial arts. Many years ago when I was freshly out of graduate school with my MFA in sculpture, I briefly worked for another artist and friend helping him fabricate bronze casting for a large commission. We built a small sand foundry to complete the work and developed a stream-lined and technically simplified process for quickly making castings.
When the commission was completed and there was no more work (or money) coming in for a spell, I suggested that we contact our friends on the faculty at the local university and give a workshop demonstrating the techniques we were using. As a person with a life-long calling to teach, it seemed a natural thing to do. But my friend was appalled by the idea. Coming from a family of tradesmen, he saw this as "giving away hard-earned trade secrets to our future competitors".
Similarly, my old sifu knowingly held back certain information and even made minor mis-representations of some of the movements in his version of the forms as published in his books and posters sold to the public. Like my sculptor friend, my sifu felt that just "giving away" such hard-earned information to future competitors was naive and, in his own words, "breaking your rice-bowl". In fact he felt that the minor errors published in his books (including one co-authored with Yip Chun) were "very clever", since they were like a signature that could be used instantly to tell who had the real training. He pointed out that all the really clever masters (including by inference, Yip Man) did the same. Only a stupid person wouldn't understand this. Clearly those few of us present to hear this were meant to be flattered since we were part of the "inner circle" getting the real stuff.
Unfortunately I'm a "stupid person" who ultimately could not accept that way of thinking and now train independently with a man of perhaps less skill but ethics more in line with my own.
If we can't mean what we say ( or do) then we can never say ( or do) what we mean.
In short, one can NOT trust the dishonest.
Psalms 144:1
Praise be my Lord my Rock,
He trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle !
