by Phillip
“Pete” Starr
When I
was finishing my first book, “The Making Of A Butterfly”, I asked
my literary agent about the odds of finding a publisher who might be
interested in it. He chuckled. “Authors often worry a lot about
whether or not they'll find a publisher who will accept their work.
The truth is that publishers are always on the look out for good
writers! They need you as much as you need them.” As years passed
and I published more books, I realized the truth of his words. I now
pass them to aspiring authors.
The
same thing is true of martial arts teachers and students. Students
seek instructors who are eminently qualified. At the same time, good
martial arts teachers are looking for students who have what it takes
to learn what they teach. This is a terribly difficult task, much
moreso than the student's search for a good instructor.
At the
time that I wrote this, I lived in southern China. To be quite frank,
real martial arts in China are, for all intents and purposes, dead.
Anyone who says differently is either lying or has never lived here.
There is a tiny handful of teachers who are skilled in the authentic
martial ways still alive, but they are as rare as hen's teeth. I
was recently contacted by another American who's presently living in
the nightmare of Beijing. He's been here for quite a number of years
and has been training with an older gentleman who is likely one of
(or perhaps, the) highest authorities on the Yin style of baguazhang.
The
teacher is on the wrong side of eighty and his health is beginning to
fail. My friend tells me that he's not sure how much longer his
teacher will be with us. This highly knowledgeable instructor has
only four students and two of them are foreigners! How sad. My
friend sighs and says that his teacher has a great wealth of
knowledge but because of the lack of dedicated pupils, he'll probably
take much of it with him to his grave. This how martial arts systems
slowly die out.
My old
friend, Master Seiyu Oyata (dec.), a 10th
dan in Ryukyu kempo, had a similar story. As a young man, he had
learned tui-te from the legendary Chojun Miyagi. It was, he was
told, the form of tui-te that belonged to the Miyagi clan (of which
he was actually a member, but that's a story for another time).
Oyata said the only other form of tui-te that he knew of was from the
family of Motobu. There were three Motobu brothers, the youngest of
which was Choki. The two older brothers disapproved of Choki's
penchant for fighting and wouldn't teach him the family tui-te
system. Instead, they passed it down to one of their students whose
family name was Uyehara. When I first met Master Oyata, Master
Uyehara was in his 90's and still living in Okinawa. According to
Master Oyata, Uyehara had no worthy students to whom he felt he could
teach the Motobu clan's method of tui-te. In any event, Uyehara was
much too old to teach it at that time... so, Oyata mourned the loss
of another martial art system. It died for lack of worthy students.
Good
teachers and good students need each other.
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