What is lineage in Silat and how is it passed on and does it vary with school? Is it from mouth to ear i.e. the lineage holder selects a successor and passes it on before their physical death? Is it in the blood, is lineage hereditary. Something passed from ancestors like in the case of royalty? i.e. a blood line. Is it something that is spiritual like with the selection of a Dalai Lama, more to do with destiny etc?
Any, all or none of the above. It depends entirely on the particular aliran. Some of them have elaborate ceremonies complete with funny hats. Others have backstabbing and politics :bang: My own teacher says "Who gives a <word I can't use on MAP> about lineage. What's important is that you have the Art." That's one of the reasons I'm still with him after all these years...
I wouldn't agree with that 100%. While it is important that we focus on the here and now, and not live in a time-warp, where all we do is focus on the past, it is equally important to acknowledge your teachers, and their teachers, etc.. as without them, you wouldn't have the art to begin with! It is important to strike a good balance, but we must not lose the 'adat' and forget those that have sacrificed much so that we can learn silat today.
I wish I could say “wow what a wise statement” but I’m not! Without lineage your art would be dead or dying.Bit by bit things would be lost and diluted. When people look back at history all they would be able to say is that Silat WAS once something special. Well actually they might be saying that quite soon.
I would not presume to speak for Mr. Tellner's teacher, however his statement has more to do with the stupidity that gets bandied about when there are lineage arguments - versus focusing on the training. Back in my youth I had a saying for those that overly argued lineage, or used it as a tool to fool people: "The proof of my lineage is on the floor." In no way was disrespect to teachers implied. But the unwillingness to be burdened by nonsense is a welcome trait.
I think lineage is evident in movement. Also in explanation of guiding principles of a system/lineage. Unfortunately, this is not something that a prospective student or neophyte will necessarily grasp when seeking out instruction in a system they are unfamiliar with. Unfortunately, wallpaper doesn't tell the whole story. Lots of due diligence is advised when seeking a teacher in a discipline that you are unfamiliar with. I personally think that one should find a teacher that is inspiring, and that one can relate to. If they are generally well regarded, then go for it. Lineage standing can be manipulated as easily as black belt certificates.
Guys, I think we're talking past each other here. By "transmission of lineage" I mean the ceremony by which someone is annointed as the carrier and supreme authority of a system or style. That's what my teacher (and I agree with him on this) considers a waste of time. More often than not it's nothing more than ego-stroking and probably detracts from the quality of one's practice and teaching. If you mean giving credit to those who came before you and respecting their wisdom and knowledge by passing it on to the best of your ability, I would say that's so fundamentally important as to need no defense.
Ok if you’re talking about large ceremonies then I agree. To be honest I think lineage is decided at birth anyway so little point in having a ceremony several years later.
People love a connection to an era, or a traceable route in a timeline. It gives them a feeling of self-worth and belonging. Americans like to trace their roots to their ancestors in Scotland, England, Africa, etc. It gives them a sense of connection to a culture and civilization older than what they might have, and can also instill a sense of pride in hyour own history. What it can NOT do is give you any physical relation to the history, culture or art that you don't already posess genetically. The linkage is purely psychological. Being a black American doesn't make you a lost member of the Zulu tribe. Being (myself) from Scottish grandparents doesn't make me a descendant of Robert the Bruce with legal claims to his kingdom. The same is true in martial arts of ANY kind, in fact much more so than I would say anywhere else. I cannot go to a website, visit a school or speak to an instructor without getting somebody's kung fu resume dating back to the 12th century. I hear it over and over: "My teacher trained with Wang, who trained with Chong, who was the student of Fong, who slept with Chang's mother, whose neighbor cleaned the toilets of Soong. My lineage is from this heirarchy." This is, in my opinion, a false lineage. You didn't know these people. You didn't touch hands with them. You never heard what they had to say. All you are getting, no matter how truthful your teacher is trying to be, is secondhand information. The only "lineage" you can claim are those who you have trained directly under. Anything else is fantasizing. My students can claim to have trained with me, and the ones that go to Indonesia with me can claim Pak Bambang as well. However, they cannot claim all my teachers as a lineage, because they didn't train with them, only me. And what they get from me is my understanding of the knowledge I was given, complete with my own failures in training as well as skills and achievements. I can't duplicate Bambang word for word, move for move, skill for skill...No student can of ANY teacher! You take th eessence of the lessons and apply them to the best of your abilities, knowledge and understanding AT THAT TIME. On the subject of the art being lost, dying, or things getting diluted...Do you suppose that isn't the case now? When one physical technique is transferred to another person, that person has to change it to adapt it to his/her body size & strength. A person who has learned a martial art will alter it as time goes by so that he/she can continue to practice it in later years. There are just as many changes, if not more, than there are causes to remain the same year after year. Also, who said change equals dilution? That's a metaphor, and not an accurate one at that. It's misleading because it implies that the addition of new knowledge and the deletion of obsolete knowledge is somehow to be frowned upon. There is nowhere else in life that we as human beings would accept such. In the computer world whomever presented such a concepyt would be ridiculed into the street. In this age we have access to more information about martial arts than ever before, and our knowledge about the world around us allows us to see the fallicies in our own training by observing the strengths in others. What took decades to correct due to isolation can now take seconds to a person with an open mind. This is in now way disrespectful to the art, or the HUMAN BEING who created it...If he had access to the knowledge you do today, do you really think he wouldn't see the need for correction? Do you suppose this oh-so-wise creator couldn't bring himself to change his style if he learned how to build a better mouse trap? Things cannot be lost...The body only moves so many ways, and if it was found once, it will come around again. Anybody can discover this. Anybody can achieve this. Behind every TECHNIQUE there is a CONCEPT. Behind every FORM there is a CONTENT. Behind every ART there is an ESSENCE. That's the base of ALL martial arts, the motion conceptualized is experimented with until a technique for application is formed. A group of principles & techniques became a form. The presentation of this form from the creator's point of view became an art. The dilution really occurs after the second generation of students produce students of their own, and the guidlines of the founder become dogma. Then the art falls into stagnation, and any hope of contemporary evolution is LOST. Focusing on who did what in the art when the world was flat is to place importance on the irrelevant. Someone who lived & trained this way 500 years ago doesn't have any bearing on you today, outside of perhaps a shared principle or concept he discovered back then. You must learn to recognize what is important, and what is trivial. Trying to carry an ART or STYLE is nothing more than trying to carry a burden in your life. Understanding the essence of what the art is trying to say to you is what's important. Recognizing what the concept of your technique is will advance your skill in the art, not listing out the instructors of it up to it's creator. "Lineage" does nothing for you, outside of providing a kind of record of those who trained before. My students can all tell you this. They move well, train hard, and are skilled with the tools they have developed in the time they have spent with me. Most of them do not know who I have trained with, almost none of them even know my rank, outside of "Teacher in this school", and it doesn't interfere with their learning capacity in the least. The skill will prove true, that wall chart is just decoration. Habit and tradition should not be above criticism, nor should the dead rule the living.
You're being a little disingenuous here, Bobbe. Maybe it's a fit of modesty. I've met some of your students. They're proud as hell to be your students. One of the reasons they train hard is out of respect for their teacher and the knowledge that you work at passing on to them.
As usual with you Todd, you keep posting to me as if I have a modicum of education. Think "Neanderthal" and start from there. I always have to Google a few words to figure out what you mean. I found "disingenuous " to mean "Not straightforward or candid; insincere". But I am, at least, I'm not being consciously insincere. If it comes across that way, then I apologize. I would agree that my students may take a certian pride in the knowledge that they are training an art that has a colorful background, and the Pendekars are famous names in the Martial Arts world (Suwandas). Also, I admit to having a unique relationship with the family, and they do know that they are getting alot of eyewitness information, as opposed to "the teacher of my teacher was told by his teacher that this might work" kind of thing, which is certianly more security in the transmission of knowledge. However, I stick to my original point: By shifting focus away from whatever lineage I may posess & onto the personal development of the individual student, they spend less time worrying about the trivial (in my opinion) issues of "Place in history". Also, I promote friendship & equality in my school more than the traditional teacher-student relationship, and they aren't as influenced by my beliefs as they would be in more traditional schools. But I prefer this, because they can make their own descisions about things. The ones that still cling to a idolistic attitude with me (I discourage it, but it happens sometimes) will see that lineage isn't as important to me as knowledge and skill, then they will usually be influenced by my example. I try to instill a sense of self-worth and pride in their own abilities, not in the pictures of my teachers on the wall.
Walk the Line I would agree that my students may take a certian pride in the knowledge that they are training an art that has a colorful background, and the Pendekars are famous names in the Martial Arts world (Suwandas). Also, I admit to having a unique relationship with the family, and they do know that they are getting alot of eyewitness information, as opposed to "the teacher of my teacher was told by his teacher that this might work" kind of thing, which is certianly more security in the transmission of knowledge. However, I stick to my original point: By shifting focus away from whatever lineage I may posess & onto the personal development of the individual student, they spend less time worrying about the trivial (in my opinion) issues of "Place in history". Also, I promote friendship & equality in my school more than the traditional teacher-student relationship, and they aren't as influenced by my beliefs as they would be in more traditional schools. But I prefer this, because they can make their own descisions about things. The ones that still cling to a idolistic attitude with me (I discourage it, but it happens sometimes) will see that lineage isn't as important to me as knowledge and skill, then they will usually be influenced by my example. But this is what lineage is, isn't it? Knowing from whence you came? You pass long knowledge you gained to your students, and while where you learned it isn't as important to them as that you *did* learn it, a sense of history can and does add to things. If it's true, it doesn't matter who said it, of course. I try to instill a sense of self-worth and pride in their own abilities, not in the pictures of my teachers on the wall. And I wouldn't argue with that. But if a teacher is claiming that his art comes from God's mouth to his ear, or that someone else art is not valid because his lineage is invalid, that is sometimes enough to rate a response, if not a debate, if for no other reason than to help folks separate the wheat from the chaff. Not everyone recognizes a tall tale when they hear it, and helping folks avoid being gulled is certainly -- in my mind -- being more a part of the solution than the problem. There are teachers of the arts who make claims that are simply not true, and by so doing, they are selling something they don't have. Now and again, you just have to call 'em on it ...
You have a point Steve. But I am looking at the use of the term "lineage" here as "The next link in the chain" not "descended from this line". They my students) are merely the next upgrade in the system, the next team up to bat. And I stand by my belief that they don't know from whence they came, because they didn't come from there. I did though, and they can claim me along with anybody else they actually train with, but as well as being the vehicle for knowledge transmission, I'm also the knowledge filter. There are some lessons that don't penetrate for me, there are things I won't understand or be able to master due to whatever reason, and therefore won't be able to pass them on. Every teacher has this. There are some things I do better & can improve upon more than my teachers, every instructor has this as well. By the time it reaches my students, it's different than what the person who taught me did. Not terribly so, I don't believe change is dilution, but still: It's not the same as what I was taught. If I instill the idea that their (student's) evolution of skill and knowledge is more important than clinging for dear life to a stance, block or method of training that is severly outmoded just because "that's how they did it 500 years ago", then I think I have accomplished teaching the founder's art with the student's best interest at heart. Going back to the idea of "Essence" over "Art". Lastly, I have an inherent dislike of mysticism in the martial arts. I hate it when instructors try to hypnootize their students, for whatever reason. you can attest to having seen something like this I'm sure, viewing your recent post in our private Silat forum about Plagarism. Well, from what I have seen & experienced, that sort of control starts with subtle tricks that slowly convert the student into a zombie, such as "Sensei is always right" "Call me Master" "Your obi has a sacred spirit in it, never wash it" and of course, "Our lineage goes back to the days of yore". Getting the student to buy into one of these will open the door for the others. Maybe it isn't always for the bad, I'll grant you that. But the examples of it being used for hypnotizing a student are by FAR more in abundance than not. This disgusts me. My high school math teacher never took me aside & said; "You are learning the Euclidian lineage of mathematics. As long as you can add & subtract, REMEMBER TO HONOR EUCLID!!". See what mean? I didin't even know who Euclid WAS until I was an adult. It didn't enhance or detract from my learning math. And there's lots of other examples I could give. Martial Arts teachers are in a limbo-like state in society. Not really "educators" per se, and not "guardians" either. Yet they are revered and respected as both, often by nothing more than the belt they wear. This puts them in a position of power that is difficult to overcome, because it's like a kind of inherited respect, and not often an earned one. So I tell my students to just call me Bobbe, and don't make a big deal of the honorific because it doesn't get me a better deal on my mortgage. It only matters in the school, and since everybody already knows it's my school...Why bother? I tell my students that what they are doing now is much more important than what I did 20 years ago, or what my teachers did 45 years ago. I tell them to create, not imitate. Anyway, that's it, that's all I wanted to say. Hope this made some sense!
^ The above post was written with a few Bailey's Irish Cream milkshakes under the wing, so I may have been a bit over the top...Sorry if it rambles, you wouldn't believe how much sense it made at the time!!!!
Select a number of very different martial arts and of each one of these select the best school you can possibly find. Go to each of those schools in turn, not as a participant but as an observer. Try to feel the atmosphere, character, spirit generated within that school, do not go there to criticise their art but just to feel and observe the atmosphere in the class. First thing you will notice is that every martial art has its own character, spirit, personality and this generates an atmosphere unique to that particular art. Visitors to those various schools will either like that atmosphere and become members of that school or they will dislike it and move on to find an art which more closely conforms to their ideals. Those who stay will over time be influenced and moulded by that atmosphere. Although students may vary in ability/ style within that school they will all be tainted with that arts character over time. I have heard martial artists say such things as “ I tried very hard, I was so frustrated I never got it, but then one day it happened, I got it and after that everything was easy”. What was it that they eventually got? How is linage passed on in a class? Tradition is what keeps this atmosphere alive and once your art lose its traditions it starts to deteriorate or transmute into something else. This is why tradition and history are important and should be preserved.
