This post started off in the good WC, best WC thread, but then I realized it was diverging a little too much, and didn't relate much to R5A's original intention.

I'm going to go against the grain for a brief moment and say that coming from a reputable lineage is of limited importance.

To someone just starting off in the martial arts, and to many who have been doing it for a while, lineage probably means a lot. Perhaps it is the same subconcious elitist attitude that drives people to trace their geneological roots to some famous knight or lord or other form of nobility, regardless of how benevolent or ignoble that ancestor was. Or the fact that dog breeders keep incredibly detailed lists of their dogs' pedigree, despite the fact that their is a ridiculous amount of inbreeding and exploitation.

For the martial artist, it shows a link to the past, to some great teacher or fighter; and the idea that if this ancestor (be it legendary like Yim Wing Chun, or factual like Leung Jan) was so darn good, their art must be pretty darn good. That is probably why you see some people out there claiming to teach "original" or "authentic" [insert style name].

But as has been mentioned in the previous thread, your teacher being great, or your lineage being pure doesn't mean anything to you unless you do something with it. Perhaps people, being lazy by nature, assume that as long as the source is good, they will become good just by drinking from it; go to class a couple times a week, go through the motions, maybe you will get good. Of course, we all know that is not true.

So what should lineage mean to us? Instead of being a way to validate our respective arts, or a means of rationalizing to ourselves that what we are learning is good, I think it should be a way of challenging ourselves. If our lineage is good, we should take it upon ourselves to uphold the level of teaching that has been passed down. Because if not, we are giving our lineage-- our sifus, our si-gungs, all way up to our si-jos-- a bad name. (especially if we spend less time training than spouting on and on in an internet forum about how great our lineage is)