Intergalactic Summit

Eh, I don't quite get all that 'nurturing the soul' thing that martial arts disciplines preach alot on. As a former member of a military organisation we were educated on the nature of self-defense, the importance of prioritising safety over confrontation and how to break someone's jaw with open palms and how to lobotomise somebody with a screwdriver in a combat situation.

Absolutely none of those things about 'souls', 'mind and body barrier', 'self' and etc were ever talked about. CQC was treated as another option for resolving a situation, especially the ones with a high chance of escalating into violence, another tool in a toolbox, if you will. In a civilian situation, we are encouraged to try to de-escalate a potentially violent situation first. Try to get it resolved in as peaceful manner as possible. If that fails, we are encouraged to either disengage and call backup or, if that fails, use our CQC training to safeguard our lives, neutralise the foe via incapacitation and resolve the situation. Actually killing someone with a utensil is to be treated as the absolute last resort.

As you can see, we approach the subject on a purely utilitarian viewpoint rather than a spiritual one, which is surprising since our CQC training is heavily based on the Brutor traditional martial arts, which does make a big deal about spirituality.

I find my mental focus in assembling things by hand, truth be told. Nothing brings me the feeling of joy and satisfaction like fixing a burr grinder or reattaching the servos of a MTAC or improving the response time of my Breacher's missilery suite.

I also find great satisfaction and contentment in spoiling my dear until she starts pawing at my face to get me to stop.

I think that catharsis can be found in any physical activity that connects oneself to his environment.

Well-- spiritual training that uses this sort of technique isn't really about hurting people, at all. That can be seen as a side-effect. Even an undesirable one.

Combat is a natural method of encouraging focus, though. There's nothing quite like it for creating a keen sense of immediacy, and at the same time driving people to excel, to become stronger. Certain practices, such as dance, might allow for the same erasure of division-- but also lack the same sense of impact and importance, so those aren't likely to be taken as far. Others, such as games of skill, are intensely competitive, but are too abstract to allow for any sort of spiritually-significant release, as a rule.

As I understand it, probably a lot of martial arts originated (at first) as something like you describe. The crescent, for example, came from a time when Achur fisher-folk weren't allowed to possess long blades (swords were the province of their feudal rulers), so they learned to use short ones. They passed their techniques on to allies, which often would have included the local monastery. In any age, the divisions between the spiritual and political spheres have rarely been as clear in practice as they've sometimes been supposed to be, and monks often got involved in local conflicts. "Warrior monk" was not at all a contradiction in terms in feudal Achura, and monks had a good deal more time to practice with these sorts of tools than the regular peasants did.

So, then, later, when times were peaceful, the monks kept practicing and developing their skills, even after the farmers and fisher-folk didn't see the point. More and more, we got to be the only ones who really remembered how; so the techniques common folk pioneered, the monks developed and refined into a spiritual tool.

The feudal lords' soldiers practiced with the modern weapons of their age: swords, spears, the latest armor. Plenty developed it to a pretty high level, but there was no reason to develop these skills other than to use their kit more effectively, do their jobs, and defend their lives. Probably they'd still be in charge today, except the Caldari showed up and the feudal aristocrats and their soldiers mostly got uplifted into an age of metal cities and warp drives.

That sort of left us. Achura's technically a theocracy these days. Achur nationals don't have a lot of power, even collectively, and we don't have a lot of cause to fight, anyway. At least for now, the Achura are a client people to the Caldari State. Our time for fighting wars is more or less behind us, for the moment, at least.

Even without bloodshed, there's still use for these arts, purely as a matter of spiritual exercise. That's mostly what they are to us.

That said, there's obviously not a lot preventing some malcontent from putting her religious martial training to its original, destructive use. It's a favorite plotline of half the action holos SuVee's ever made. It's not like lethal honor duels are wholly the realm of fiction, though. I gather that's how Jihun got his knife wounds: trying to bring my notorious piratical predecessor in the old-fashioned way. They dueled. He lost.

And I ... get to exist. So I can't feel too bad about that. I'd rather not fall back into old habits in this area, though.

I probably got over death itself when I once watched a man die and thought to myself, "Well here's a man who probably lived a life, had a story to tell, likely had people to love him and love in return. Yet there he is lying in a pool of his own **** while he chokes on his blood." That's when I realized death is just one of those ignominious things that can't be avoided -- from one who has already died a few times.

It might actually be a reprieve for me at least if it's in one of my older combat clones. Most are zero-g atrophied almost to the point of constant muscle palsies, organ failures due to high-dose booster injections, and cell damage from taking numerous high energy bursts with an exposed hull to space. The joys of multi-billion ISK wetware ownership.

If you want to become more Amarrian, Lady Jenneth, then instead of relearning Achuran martial arts, you should learn to fight like a Paladin...or a Crimson Paladin.

I confess this made me roll my eyes.

Templar Vadam? The PIE Paladin? Teach Archuran-style martial arts? No.

Only two guesses as to what style and tradition he is teaching, and the first does not count.

Thanks, Utari.

Well, I can't talk about Achura martial arts and neither can I speak for all Amarrian martial arts: But I can speak from the vantage point of the martial arts system of Destrasaj and thus from what seems to be reasonable to assume if one takes martial art to mean something universal:

"The veritable art of swordsmanship", as "E Verdhart Destrasaj" might be translated, doesn't deny that in all martial art, there is and needs to be the potential to hurt. It is a fact - but it is also a fact that life in itself contains that potential already. We always can hurt people with what we do or even with something we say. In fencing - or any other martial art - this propensity for hurting others just becomes more clear: And that clarity allows us to pay special attention to it, to take it up as a challange to ourselves and to learn to put this piece of the puzzle of life in the place it belongs.

Part of that is to understand that hurting people is something secondary: It's something we can only do based on people being there, based on people being comparatively well. The same is true in fencing: But not only does thinking about this within the light of reason show us something about our potential opponent, it also shows us something about ourselves. Any martial art doesn't primarily aim at hurting people. It can't, as a precondition for me to hurt someone I need to live. The main objective of any artful martial practice and thus the highest principle of any martial arts (that means: the highest principle of universal martial art) is preserving life, rather than death or hurting. Hurting people, in any artful martial practice, can only be something that is subservient to preserving life.

This is why I have to disagree with the following sentence: There is no original, destructive use of martial art: There only seems to be.

A soldier gets to learn about this only as much as they need, qua being soldier. Others here have summed that up nicely. It's got quite the pragmatic bend to it. This isn't all we can learn in a martial art, qua being human, though.

This is where the outward struggle becomes an inward one.

Emerita, with very great respect, as seems to be usual in conversations between us you seem to want to draw bright lines and say, "Thus it is." Let me give you a few reasons why I might feel otherwise.

Swordsmanship is something both Caldari and Achura tend to admire, even if it's a few centuries out of fashion as a practical combat method. While there are a lot of styles, both cultures developed schools that are extremely aggressive in both philosophy and technique. (We're sort of spiritual cousins; it's a lot of why the Caldari didn't just run roughshod over our iron-age culture.) Common maxims of strategy in this area are that you should always be either cutting your enemy or about to cut your enemy, and that the surest way to lose your life is to try to save it.

Properly trained, fighters of this sort engage the enemy with little regard for their own lives. They think of themselves as already dead. Survival is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

You might think it strange, but this kind of philosophy is one I sympathize with a lot, and associate closely with myself. My predecessor feared death, and held her own existence dear. I wanted to be able to face unknown places and settings without fear, and to face my own strange existence without constant dread. It's this sort of perspective that inspired me. (It's inspired numberless Caldari and Achura for generations; it's a broadly-applicable approach to much of life.)

It's my own lack of concern for my existence that brought me to your door, the first time, and, later, to PY-RE's. It's gotten, well, a lot harder, as I've become more caught up in this world, though. There are things, and people, I value, now-- that I don't want to lose. This makes me care whether I live or die.

This world of ten thousand things, this world of illusion-- it really is terribly seductive. I expect I'll suffer for letting myself be drawn in like this, but ... if it means I get to be with people I care about, at least for a while, I guess I'm okay with that.

These arts are distinct from my own formal training; a well-adjusted monk should not live in fear of death, but she's not an assassin, either. Even my short-blade training, taken as martial technique, is meant to give a fighter a defense against swordsmen, not a path to insight through slaughter. It may seem strange, but it's these more self-defense-oriented techniques that I associate more with self-regard, and thus with outrage and actions full of hate.

As a side note, there have been attempts (not in my sect, but in others) to take the "martial" out of "martial art" entirely, to turn it into a pure from of spiritual practice, sort of a cross between meditation and dance. If I understand it right, the typical approach is to take the more mystical principles ascribed to the local martial arts and focus on those to exclusion. The resulting practice is a sort of spiritual health and well-being exercise, but if you speed it up it mostly turns back into a combat style.