History of Martial Arts

For one thing, Chinese martial arts weren't homogeneous. Many styles were developed independently from each other, while one could claim that on particular style may have had Indian influences, to say that all Chinese martial arts came from India would be a gross overstatement

>Early written evidence of martial arts in Southern India dates back to the Sangam literature of about the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD. The Akananuru and Purananuru describe the use of spears, swords, shields, bows and silambam in the Sangam era. The word kalari appears in the Puram (verses 225, 237, 245, 356) and Akam (verses 34, 231, 293) to describe both a battlefield and combat arena

Greek boxing, wrestling, and Pankration are all older. The first two being attested as far back as Minoan era. Pankration with the Archaic Iron age era.

What's that, a pic for ants?

It was completely useless at the time until Bodhidharma (Damo in Chinese) arrived and taught them proper technique and exercises that made them more flexible and stronger.

Maybe Indian arts were useless until Alexander the Great came and taught Indians how to box and wrestle.

The documents that attribute the development of Chinese martial arts to him were written long after his life and are most likely bullshit. While the Chinese probably got a lot of the knowledge of chi gong from India via Buddhism, these Buddhist monks were not bringing fighting techniques or weapons.

Yet he couldn't defeat the Indians.

Some how I dont think that would have had much to do with an art that emphasizes swords and spears

youtube.com/watch?v=gI6iNZ8Cfb0

Karate is a japanese phrase. Idiot. It means the way of hand and foot. It origins are well documentes.

You do realize that Bodhidharma is revered in Japanese Zen Buddhism right?

youtube.com/watch?v=gI6iNZ8Cfb0

7:50

Explain that, ignorant buffoon.

no it means empty hand, not empty as in not holding anything mind you-- the orignal okinawan art always included weapons-- but empty as in the void.

kara "empty" te "hand"

originally they used the characters for "Chinese hand" but they changed it to appeal to a Japanese audience

Karate is a martial art developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom. It developed from the indigenous Ryukyuan martial arts "hand"; tii in Okinawan) under the influence of Chinese martial arts, particularly Fujian White Crane.

>under the influence of Chinese martial arts

you realize Karate is from Okinawa and only got that name in the 20th century right?

You do realize that it was influenced by Chinese martial arts which predates it by several centuries right?

yeah, are you claiming therefore that it has a direct connection to Bodhidharma and Japanese Zen Buddhism?

the word karate has absolutely no connection to kalaripayattu

What happens when a Japanese tries to pronounce the "L" and "R (rolled") sound? How does it sound ike?

like*

>Apocryphal shit.
Let me tell you how martial arts developed among Buddhist Monks in China.
>Be Imperial China.
>Holy shit the empire is big and more than half of our population lives in the Rural Countryside how do we police this without spreading out soldiers away from their garrisons?
>Nigga: make a law based on collective responsibility. Encourage communities to watch out for each other.
>Most importantly: tell them to own weapons and form village militias.
>Put a prefect to oversee at least 3 villages at the county level.
>If there's a band of bandits, militias should form up and tag the prefect along to give the militia legal powers of arrest. If it's too much then call the nearest army garrison for help.

>Be Peasant of a village
>Have a day job/be farmer.
>Busy 24/7
>Your village head just gathers you for security meetings only once a month, wherein you discuss security matters and do paramilitary drills. Sometimes the month is so busy you skip it altogether.
>Realistically therefore your martial prowess is dependent on your own, private training. Which you can't afford/have no time for.

>Be Monk.
>Food & Clothing is practically free, granted to you via donations both from private and state entities from peasant to governor.
>Do nothing but meditate.
>Do nothing but chores.
>Time for daily exercise (read: paramilitary drills).
>This happens day in/day out.
>yfw you accidentally are a paramilitary force to be reckoned with.

Which is why it isn't just Buddhist Monks who were known for their martial arts: so were Taoist monks.

tl;dr Chinese martial arts emerged because people policed themselves and ergo have to defend themselves. Some people (monks) just have more time for training than others (peasants and private citizens). Not some mystic bullshit about an Indian master.

Karate wasn't even called karate until the twentieth century, it was just called te.

then it was called Chinese hand 唐手

Then empty hand 空手

This is modern Japanese, not some translation from Sanskrit, which the Japanese knew by the way.

Yea but they didnt have warrior monks or something is what they guy is trying to bitch about, though he completely forgets the Pythogoreans(Kroton). plus those are just southern india, northern india had a whole lot of other shit earlier like musti yuddha, kabadi and wrestling, but I dont reckon it created anything new in china, its all the same shit of addition to tradition from different cultures.

>Sanskrit
Kalaripayattu is not sanskrit.

>not realizing that Bodhidharma was a Buddhist monk
>not realizing the person on the left is actually a depiction of Bodhidharma, the Indian monk

There's a reason why there's statues of him all over Shaolin Temple.

sorry, my bad. tell me what is your evidence the words are related besides them sounding kinda alike--- assuming you pronounce L as R?

Because he is the semi-legendary founder of Chinese Chan Buddhism?

That doesn't say anything about his ability to fight the shaolin monks are monks, that is they practice a religion.

>northern india had a whole lot of other shit earlier like musti yuddha, kabadi and wrestling

Source

>I know he's a Buddhist monk
>Myth =\= Reality.
You're hopeless, Pajeet.

Furthermore the Chinese depicted themselves as a multiethnic bunch in art. So in works you have brown chinks and pale chinks just casually mixed everywhere.

Rig Veda and the Mahabharata.

No, it's very clear that the depiction in the original image is Bodhidharma considering his eyes are wide. According to the folklore, he meditated in a cave and fell asleep. Frustrated he went to sleep, he cut his eye lids off and they fell to the ground. From there, green tea plants started to grow.

Those are just plays. You might as well say Star Wars is real.

>Frustrated he went to sleep, he cut his eye lids off and they fell to the ground. From there, green tea plants started to grow.

Clearly everything the wrote about this man is true

>Pankration
>Swords and spears
"no"

So is most of greek source for wrestling, in fact there is no real proof that much of what any of the greeks wrote is 100% true, its all scholastic conjecture.

Even if you don't believe in that folklore for obvious reasons,throughout Buddhist art, Bodhidharma is depicted as an ill-tempered, profusely-bearded, wide-eyed non-Chinese person. He is referred as "The Blue-Eyed Barbarian" in Chan texts."

Post meant for

Wrestling is well documented in the Olympic games of athens in Ancient Greece.

Not the other guy, just stating that Kalaripayattu is not sanskrit. Also the modern Kalari is a bastardized form of local forms mixed with foreign moves and martial styles, there is nothing original about it.

The original ones were the Northern Style or Malabar Style, along with the vaunted Marma Adi and valkali, or swordplay, they died out after the introduction of firearms and British Crowns suppression of combat training when Kerala passed into British protection in the 19th century.

They were all just plays, you might as well say Rocky was real.

Often the oldest references we have to a nations combative culture are epics, poems and stories.

Historians use this stuff as sources all the time

I actually figured it was something like that. No martial art survives unchanged for 1400 years.

>Kalari is then given to the Chinese in the form of Kung-Fu through Bodhidharma.
That's just legend. Monasteries in East Asia defended themselves because they mostly live in remote places where help is a long way off.

You see the same shit in Japan and Korea.

They use it to reference text relative to the historic time period it was created and how it influenced culture, but do not take it as actual events that took place.

That image is a depiction that took place in 1570. The first patriach of Zen arrived in China in 600-700 AD.

That depends on the text. For instance we know some of the armor mentioned in the Iliad actually existed. The Nihonshoki and konjiki mention weapons we know that Japanese had. and at least seem to hint at real conflicts in their talks about grappling matches and fights between gods.

Historians can make extrapolations based on what is written and more importantly the context it was written in.

Kalaripayattu didn't survive 1400 years even changed. It died out completely, and was "revived" recently despite the complete lack of living practitioners or extant manuals.

>"revived" recently despite the complete lack of living practitioners or extant manuals.

Based on fucking what

I'm talking about the rationale why martial arts were developed within monasteries and citing cases where it happened elsewhere in East Asia.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_Kung_Fu
"Chinese historical records, like Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue, the Bibliographies in the Book of the Han Dynasty, the Records of the Grand Historian, and other sources document the existence of martial arts in China for thousands of years. For example, the Chinese martial art of wrestling, Shuai Jiao, predates the establishment of Shaolin temple by several centuries.[4] Since Chinese monasteries were large landed estates, sources of considerable regular income, monks required protection. Historical discoveries indicate that, even before the establishment of Shaolin temple, monks had arms and also practiced martial arts.[5] The establishment of Shaolin Kung fu is, however, the most important of these stories. In 1784 the Boxing Classic: Essential Boxing Methods made the earliest extant reference to the Shaolin Monastery as Chinese boxing's place of origin.[6][7] This is, however, a misconception,[8][9] but shows the historical importance of Shaolin kung fu."

As for Bodhidharma
"Some popular stories[13][14] consider Bodhidharma as the founder of Shaolin kung fu.

The idea of Bodhidharma influencing Shaolin boxing is based on a qigong manual written during the 17th century. This is when a Taoist with the pen name "Purple Coagulation Man of the Way" wrote the Sinews Changing Classic in 1624, but claimed to have discovered it. The first of two prefaces of the manual traces this qigong style's succession from Bodhidharma to the Chinese general Li Jing via "a chain of Buddhist saints and martial heroes."[15](p165) The work itself is full of anachronistic mistakes and even includes a popular character from Chinese fiction, the "Qiuran Ke" ("Bushy Bearded Hero)" (虬髯客), as a lineage master."

I am from the central Kerala area and you have no idea how much bullshit they spew for tourism and cultural cash, Kalari died with the old Travancore Crown when it handed over the title of protector to the english crown.

There is one old as guy I know who practices a rare northern style though, he is possibly dead now but I remember when I was younger I used to visit him for religious lessons and he would tell us about the artial tradition and caste duties; according to my grandad and the villagers he apparently faced down twenty communists and beat them all up and turned a couple of them into paraplegics back in the 50s using his super special powers in marma adi, no clue if it is true.

He was also said to be able to push venom out was striking certain points above the bite, but who the fuck knows he was pretty frail when I saw him.

Not all of Kerala was under British rule. Kerala was formed by the unification of Malabar, Travancore and Kochi kingdoms.
At the end of the Anglo-Mysore wars, that fought between the Kingdom of Malabar versus the British, Malabar came under the rule of British in 1792. During the war, Tipu Sultan fought with the British from west, south and east while Maratha Confederacy and the Nizam of Hyderabad attacked from the north. British got control over the South Kanara (which included the present day Kasargod) in 1799. Thus Malabar region came under the British Raj.
So what about the other two?
Kochi and Travancore was not under the British rule. They were princely states. British signed treaties of subsidiary alliance with King of Cochin in 1791 and King of Travancore in 1795.
What is a Subsidiary alliance?
An Indian ruler entering into a subsidiary alliance with the British had to accept British forces within his territory and also agreed to pay for their maintenance.
The ruler would accept a British Resident in his state.
An Indian ruler who entered into a subsidiary alliance would not enter into any further alliance with any other power, nor would he declare war against any power without the permission of the British.
The ruler would not employ any Europeans other than the British, and if he were already doing so, he would dismiss them.
In case of a conflict with any other state, he would agree the resolution decided upon by the British.
The ruler would acknowledge the East India Company as the paramount power in India.
In return for the ruler accepting its conditions, the Company undertook to protect the state from external dangers and internal disorders.
If the Indian rulers failed to make the payments required by the alliance, then part of their territory was to be taken away as a penalty.
Even though Tipu Sultan refused to sign such a treaty, the Nizam of Hyderabad made Hyderbad a princely state even though they had fought the Anglo Mysore wars together.

contd.
"Like other stories of Shaolin, this story[17][18] has, after all, some basis in reality. Bodhidharma was the founder of Dhyana (Chinese: 禅; pinyin: chán; Japanese: zen) Buddhism."

>The idea of Bodhidharma influencing Shaolin boxing is based on a qigong manual written during the 17th century.
>The 17th Century
Frankly I'd take the explanation that Monks did martial arts for defense.

There were people here there who still maintained it, especially the house of Travancore who were allowed to practice a more limited and physical maintenance version of it. That is why a lot of the moves about stretching and leaping its to loosen the body and prepare it for the actual style which people have forgotten.

It is supposedly more like Silat or Kickboxing in its true form, but once again this is mostly conjecture from old masters.

Thus, Kochi and Travancore (Central and Southern Kerala) remained as a Sovereign Monarchy which was not directly under the Brirish rule while Malabar (Northern Kerala) was under the British rule.

I think it was extrapolated from presumably similar martial arts, like using modern sport fencing techniques to try to recreate medieval longsword techniques. It's probably safe to say that it's unlikely that the modern Kalari martial art shares much at all in common with the historic art.

I was born in Kochi, I am pretty sure I know my states history.

Contd. Meanwhile, this is what the Shaolin had to say for themselves in their own records
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_Kung_Fu#Southern_and_Northern_dynasties_.28420.E2.80.93589_AD.29
"In 495 AD, Shaolin temple was built in the Song mountain, Henan province. The first monk who preached Buddhism there was the Indian monk named Buddhabhadra (佛陀跋陀罗; Fótuóbátuóluó), simply called Batuo (跋陀) by the Chinese. There are historical records that Batuo's first Chinese disciples, Huiguang (慧光) and Sengchou (僧稠), both had exceptional martial skills. For example, Sengchou's skill with the tin staff is even documented in the Chinese Buddhist canon. After Buddhabadra, another Indian[10] or Tamil[11] monk, Bodhidharma (菩提达摩; Pútídámó), simply called Damo (达摩) by the Chinese, came to Shaolin in 527 AD. His Chinese disciple, Huike (慧可), was also a highly trained martial arts expert. There are implications that these first three Chinese Shaolin monks, Huiguang, Sengchou, and Huike, may have been military men before entering the monastic life.[12]"
>There are implications that these first three Chinese Shaolin monks, Huiguang, Sengchou, and Huike, may have been military men before entering the monastic life.[12]"
Which is highly likely, considering that we do know that PTSD'd soldiers, deserters from armies, and ex-Bandits frequently turned to monasteries for a new life since nobody else would accept them in Chinese society.

Again, the same shit in Japan where Ronin and bandits, and losers of civil wars ran for the sanctuary of the Buddhist Monasteries for help.

In reality monestaries were often major landowners, had their own militas made of laymonks or just hired thugs, and often got involved in politics at both the local and national level.

At least that's how it was in Japan.

" The waters of Kamogawa, the dice of Sugoroku and the monks of Hieizan are things quite beyond my control"

-Emperor Go-Shirakawa

Why would Huike desperately want to be Bodhidharma's disciple by cutting off his arm? Surely Bodhidharma may have been a better fighter than he was.

youtube.com/watch?v=9uaFnYhWke8

Even if you take this story literally, cutting off your own arm is not a good move for a martial artist or something a martial artist would look for in a student.

The story is about Buddhism, not fighting.

The story is about the deluded mind. The mind and body are one, as it is used in martial arts.

"The mind and body are one"

A phrase used mostly by people who dont understand the concept. losing an arm limits you as a martial artist, period. you cant use a staff with one arm, you cant use pole arms or many swords, for both grappling and striking you are limited.

The purpose of it was to show that he can be taught martial arts without an arm, and Bodhidharma saw it as a challenge as a master to teach someone martial arts without an arm.

A lotta conjecture. No one really knows mate, its all just bits and Pieces that can be misrepresented to fit an agenda.

Nowhere in the story you presented does it say that, it doesn't even reference martial arts.

you're just seeing what you want to see.

If that is your idea of conjecture, then all of history is just conjecture.

If your going to take folk legends and tall tales over extent historical records than good luck, but please leave the history board

>historical records
>HRE
You can see why they are both questionable because neither are historical or records in one case or the Holy Roman Empire in the other. Also notice how they both have H R and E all prominent vowels!, its quite evident that most of history is just conjecture backed up by pieces of evidence that is used to further an overall agenda. That is what everything in this world is.

Why else would he give up a physical body part to become a disciple?

Because he sought enlightenment via Buddhism? Its kinda what the story is about

Which is why I don't believe both the Shaolin and 17th Century Myths and put their martial arts origins down to the fact that monasteries had to defend themselves just like any rural community in China. Except they had more time between meditations for training as compared to the common peasant laborer.

Case in point: the Taoist Monks were also known for martial arts skills. Again for the same reasons: self-defense. No Indian mystic bullshit in their part. What the Shaolin Monastery was to Buddhist martial arts, so was Wudang for Taoist martial arts.

They're probably even better than the Buddhists in fighting considering the Taoists launched two rebellions versus the government, the first of which was the devastating Yellow Turban Rebellion which is one of the 4 worst rebellions in Chinese history.

I don't buy that, Chinese martial arts was an institution, it was a part of Chinese society and it had to have originated from a single source. There are dozens of different martial arts in China but only as many in the rest of the world.

That's incorrect, fighting and martial arts, that is systematized systems of fighting, are ubiquitous part of human societies and were found where even there was civilization.

While very few of those systems survive they were quite common, as written sources attest to.

Furthermore even the Chinese claim there are at least two sources, Buddhist and taoist arts, though that too is probably a ahistorical
distinction.

That said there are elements found in Chinese martial arts that indicate there was probably interchange between arts and a homogenization over time. There was a lot of interchange between methods over time, and most surviving arts do not date back past the MIng dynasty, or even later.

"Piss on the waters, load the dice, and I want a thousand flaming torches up that mountain NOW!"

-Oda "Let's Dance" Nobunaga

>Furthermore even the Chinese claim there are at least two sources, Buddhist and taoist arts, though that too is probably a ahistorical
Not really, there's fucking a lot.

>The Military
>Buddhist Monks.
>Taoist Monks.
>Criminals lel.
>The so-called "Regional Styles." (good example: Wing Chun, which is specific to Guangdong, China)

空手