GOOD TEACHERS, WORTHY STUDENTS

 by Phillip 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 lookout 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 on 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 of this writing, 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 contacted by another American who had been living in the nightmare of Beijing. He'd been here for quite a number of years and had been training with an older gentleman who is/was likely one of (or perhaps, the) highest authorities on the Yin style of baguazhang.

The teacher was on the wrong side of eighty and his health was beginning to fail. My friend told me that he wasn't sure how much longer his teacher would be with us. This highly knowledgeable instructor had only four students and two of them were foreigners! How sad. My friend sighed and said that his teacher had a great wealth of knowledge but because of the lack of dedicated pupils, he'd 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 10^th 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.

Good teachers and good students need each other.