Quote Originally Posted by Scott R. Brown View Post
Hmmmm........let me see if I understand this correctly.

The Shaolin Temple monks are/were Buddhists, they taught the martial arts and trained in the martial arts, but taught no morals or ethics?

Taoist monks trained and taught the martial arts, but had no morals or ethics either?
1) A lot of MA didn't come from Shaolin or the Taoists.

2) A helluva lot (emphasis on 'hell'! ) of martial arts in the Buddhist and Taoist sects came from gangsters, bandits and murderers. Think about it: in the West we had the same religious laws: asylum. Felons and lowlifes seeking asylum from the authorities were granted clemency by the monasteries, and in return they protected the monasteries and helped keep their martial traditions alive with new ones.

3) Again related to the above. Think of the Crusades: a lot of moral instruction was not based on improving people but damage limitation. That's why there are so many ecclesiastical treatises to fighting for the power of god: if you get a group of largely celibate, solely male, 50% or so criminal people in a confined space and teach them fighting you're gonna need to use it. In China it was mainly defending themselves, in the West we could attack the Moslems!

These are just a couple of thoughts, not especially backed by any evidence. Feel free to point out flaws in the arguments.

Even the Samurai were generally expected to follow moral and ethical codes regardless of whether some or many actually followed the codes.
That's a very interesting point. Most of the samurai codes were Confucian, and yes of course were moral codes, but more to the point they were societal codes, enforced by and generated by the mores of the society around them. The written codes that we now know as samurai ethics like bushido and the Hagakure, were all written in peacetime, again as constraints on a bored, powerful, dangerous and often borderline or out-and-out criminal class of unemployed warriors.

So I think the moral codes in all of these societies weren't based on: 'Do this because it makes you good,' just on, 'Don't do this or youll go to hell'. More of a plea for restraint than a moral instruction. Look what's happened to many of the soldiers in Iraq who're highly trained to kill, without the moral component: you have dehumanization on such a scale as Stephen Green who gang-raped and murdered a 14 year old girl and killed her family because according to his own testimony, there was no thrill in just killing people any more.

The moral instructions of the warrior-monk castes in medieval times and in the orient did as much as they could to build in those restraints, but of course sometimes the killer urges were subjugated by saying, ah well, it's OK to kill them cos they're Moslems... oh bugger, perhaps this is the same now, and perhaps this post is taking a disturbingly political angle...!

To the OP: don't be ridiculous, of course not. And welcome to the forum! Of course, in this modern world where everyone's supposed to be personal responsible for their actions nobody teaches morals anymore. Can anyone see the breakdown in logic here?! You're supposed to know what right and wrong is, so nobody teaches you, so of course you don't know...! ... which is why you get a huge breakdown in the church and society, and even the church's moral education has ceased to preach social responsibility outside a very small circle, and now preaches only personal salvation and personal responsibility. I blame the parents.