Spiritual Degradation of Martial Art: A Tragedy

[Druiyung]

     Whether many of you are aware of it or not, but the spiritual aspects of martial art has been deteriorating for awhile now. These days many contemporary masters are focused more on cash as opposed to the character of the students and disciples. Many masters will reason that the reason they are not as selective as the Ancients of past is because teaching martial art is their primary means of income.
     If that be the case, then in their youth they should've focused more on getting a degree, getting a job, specialize in a particular kind of trade. Saying that teaching martial art is their primary if not sole means of income is a literal insult to martial art simply put. They are literally auctioning and selling martial art: they are selling a part of a country's culture, a country's national treasure and tradition. If you want to eat, then find a primary profession to support yourself first; do not use martial art as your lunch ticket because that is simply despicable and indecent. You can sell many things in this world but all of you, as martial artists, should not under any circumstances, stoop so low as to comromising our martial spirit.
In any case, adding salts onto injury, many of these contemporary masters don't even have much to teach to begin with. Those in the martial dojos or contemporary Shaolin Temples (if you give the monks a big enough check, they'll give you a certificate saying that you're a representative of Shaolin and all of a sudden, within a matter a months, you are a highly skilled Shaolin practitioner or god forbid, a "master.") Students of such masters not only pay them a large amount of cash but what's worse is that they're not even getting close to a fraction of their money's worth of material. Should they encounter trouble in the future and their life is threatened, the students will, for a lack of a better word, die.
Thus, I beseech all of you, do not emulate the actions of these martial charlatans. Do not let the spirit of martial art further degrade than it already is now. If you wish to teach martial art, get at the very least 20-30 years of authentic experience under you belt (otherwise you're neither doing your potential students/disciples nor the martial world any service). If you must teach, teach either within your family or to a select group of people, about 5-15 people at most. Remember, the bond between a martial instructor and their students/disciples is a precious and sacred one. You would be better off having those 5-15 people who sincerely respect you and care about your well-being in life than those 20-30 something others who basically see you as nothing more than a seller of a particular good who's on their payroll.