[David Kopel] The martial arts are arts

Students stand in formation before wushu practice at the Tagou martial arts school in Dengfeng, China. (Nicholas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)

This post is based on David B. Kopel’s “Self-Defense in Asian Religions,” [2 Liberty Law Review 79 (2007)]. 

In a recent speech denouncing President-elect Donald Trump, Meryl Streep announced that without Hollywood, “you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” Although Streep won a well-deserved award for an outstanding acting career, the award did not confer on her the unilateral authority to define what are “the arts.” The martial arts are called “martial arts” because they are generally recognized to be arts, even though they are not the particular arts at which Streep and Hollywood excel. The hauteur exemplified by Streep was well-known to the ancient Taoists:

In the space of one generation, the cultural and the martial may shift in relative significance, insofar as there are times when each is useful. Nowadays, however, martialists repudiate culture and the cultured repudiate the martial. Adherents of cultural and martial arts reject each other, not knowing their functions according to the time. [Thomas Cleary, “The Taoist Classics” (vol. 1, 2003), p. 314]

Watching the martial arts, including mixed martial arts, can be entertaining, as Sonny Bunch pointed out in a recent Post article. More important, the martial arts, when properly followed, foster good character and transcendence of selfishness — virtues which Streep and Hollywood often congratulate themselves for promoting via the cinematic arts.

According to tradition, the martial arts were founded around 520 A.D. by Bodhidharma, a great Buddha who brought Zen Buddhism from India to China. During the journey to China, Bodhidharma was carrying valuable documents, and learned of the dangers to travelers posed by robbers. He meditated, and experienced a revelation that he should study animals. So he began to do so, and from the study, eventually developed the “18 movements of Lo Han.”

At the Shao-lin Temple in China, Bodhidharma saw that many monks fell asleep during meditation. He felt compassionate pity for the monks whose bodies were wasting away through purely mental meditation exercises. So Bodhidharma decided to teach the “bodies and minds” of the monks. He invented Kung Fu (or Chuan Fa), a form of boxing used for systematic exercise.

There was another benefit to the Bodhidharma’s martial arts: because the monks had undertaken vows not to use weapons, gangs of soldiers or ex-soldiers would often rob the monks who traveled outside their monastery. After learning the unarmed combat techniques of martial arts, the monks could journey safely, and so they traveled around China, Okinawa and Japan, disseminating the martial arts. The ideal martial artist was a Scholar Warrior, a person whose mind and body were well-trained and well-integrated.

For practical self-defense, the martial arts have been especially important to people who are persecuted by the government. For example, when China was ruled by the Mongols, the arms prohibition on the subjugated Chinese was so severe that only 1 out of 10 families was allowed a carving knife. The martial arts have also been important for cultural defense. As Thomas Cleary described the period of the Ming Dynasty in China:

It would seem that one of the concerns of the time, therefore, was the “deposit” of knowledge that would allow humankind to