Bokh: Ubiquity of Mongolian Wrestling

Unlike the Shoulin Monks, the Mongols once ruled from Europe through China, spreading their martial arts farther and more deeply than the Shoulin Temple ever could:

("Mongol Empire map" by User:Astrokey44 - Based on the freely licenced Image:Genghis khan empire at his death.png using information from maps of the Mongol Empire in atlases and on the web such as [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. Made in Photoshop and Painter.. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.)

It's fairly safe to say "Mongolian Wrestling" (also known as "Bokh,") influenced Shoulin Kung Fu far more than the other way around. For example, it seems likely that the ubiquitous "horse stance" found in almost all East Asian martial arts originated with the Mongols, since the average Mongolian warrior rode a horse all the time, unlike the average Shoulin monk.

In Bokh the goal is to get opponents to touch the ground with any part of the body besides the hands or feet. Coming from a herding and hunting culture, they aren't concerned about territory control or fighting indoors and thus have an unlimited ring size (unlike the Chinese Lei Tai elevated fighting platform/stage) :

In "Choosing a Martial Art" I use a story of a hypothetical village where Mongolian Wrestling starts an evolution of martial arts that explains the various categories of martial arts we encounter. However another way of using Bokh to look at martial arts, is as all other martial arts being a reaction to Bokh. Considering how wide spread exposure to Bokh must have been in the past, this is historically true to varying degrees. Chinese Wrestling is clearly Mongolian Wrestling for those not tough enough to be real Mongolians:

In the internal martial arts push hands sparring (not to be confused with stationary push hands drills,) is very similar to Bokh in it's rules. In some regions Mongolian Wrestling does not allow an opponents hand to touch the ground. Add to that the Lei Tai concept and we have push hands sparring (one obvious connection was the founder of the largest sect of Taoism today was a friend of Genghis Khan):

In the west, the ancient art of Glima bears a strong resemblance to Mongolian Wrestling as well:

The Mongolian Wrestling approach to self-defense works well for warriors because putting an attacker down on the battle field gives you time to draw your own weapon and finish your enemy off before he returns to his feet. Also compared to the injury risk of trading blows and wrestling for submission holds, there is a very high return on skill and physical conditioning for warriors using Mongolian Wrestling as a way to stay combat ready. As the Vikings played a similar role in Europe as the Mongolians did in Asia, it makes sense that the Vikings had a similar martial art very much like Mongolian Wrestling.

Besides imitating Mongolian Wrestling, other martial arts go for more expansive or simply completely different techniques, in hopes they can out strategize what essentially amounts to a Mongolian Wrestler. So many self defense techniques are focused on what to do if someone grabs you like a competent stand up grappler... and in the context of these martial arts origins, it seems like someone was worried about self defense against a Mongolian Wrestler. Weapon martial arts are again trying to give the advantage against the historical bully and dominant fighter on the battlefield:

And as you can see from that video, even when techniques vary, the objective of martial arts is often the same: to put the opponent on the ground. The ultimate goal of any type of boxing or kick boxing is to put the opponent on the ground, and in traditional full contact "knock down" Karate, it is the only way to score. Even as far off as the UK, "shin kicking" players have identical goals to Bokh players:

Now even Japanese Judo (and to some degree Sumo) with all their starchy traditions, self-righteous espoused values and convenient culturally biased changes to their rules, can't avoid the inevitable influence of Bokh (as if Bokh's influence on these sports wasn't already obvious enough):

Like the universal influence of the ancient Mongolian Hordes, the influence of Bokh on martial arts is felt today all over the world.

(October 2015 update: check out my newer post on the importance of wrestling to martial arts in terms of history, religion and technique.)

Sparring vs. Fencing

I am making a distinction between "fighting," "sparring" and "fencing." Most people understand what figthing is, but they don't understand that sparring is the best thing that ever happened to martial arts:

• A fight is for keeps. Two people go at it to see who's best. There's a permanent record of who won, and who lost. Fights help to keep martial arts schools in check, to make sure their teaching methods are effective compared to other schools. For example in a submission grappling tournament, how well the participants do against each other gives us some feedback on how effective their schools are at teaching submission grappling.
• In sparring, you set a time limit for the round, and practice against each other for the duration of that round. You do not stop and talk about every little move that works in the round, you keep going continuously. Sparring isn't super competitive, you might work on advanced techniques you are not good at yet, even if it means your opponent does better against you. Sparring is the most important activity when it comes to learning moves you can use in a fight. For example in a submission grappling school students will typically spend half the class time wrestling against each other trying to land submission wrestling moves. A beginning student might land some moves on a more experienced student who is practicing moves they aren't good at yet. 
• Fencing is a perversion of fighting and sparring, where every time someone lands a successful technique, judges or the fencers themselves pause to discuss what happened and credit whoever "successfully" executed the technique. In martial arts there are many kinds of forms and two person drills, and fencing is a type of two person drill. Fencing is very problematic because people so often and easily mistake it for sparring. Sparring is the the single most important martial art exercise. For example if a submission grappling class only worked on position escapes and never had full sparring rounds, their students would never become competent grapplers.

This great evil of fencing instead of sparring or fighting in the martial arts takes many forms, be it light-contact karate point fighting, "calling kill shots" or judges separating fighters after each successful blow in Renaissance weapons tournaments, or honestly even in Olympic-style fencing. In fact I think Olympic style fencing is where this whole problem begins:

I think that the evils of fencing spills out into all other forms of "fencing" as well, be it Kendo or people trying to learn to fight with real swords:

The worst part is that many of the people who should know better, the folks proclaiming to teach the "martial arts" side of weapons, are some of the worst offenders. The justification for stopping as soon as the successful technique lands is that supposedly it would kill the opponent so quickly and instantaneously that it is unrealistic to assume the opponent might keep fighting back. This is a very naive view:

Consider how much of this ARMA tournament is actually spent trying to land blows, and how much of it is instead spent walking around and getting commentary from spectators... very problematic considering how much pretense there is in their stylized technique:

Where in the ancient training manuals does it say to stop every time you think you might have landed a good blow? When fencing replaces fighting or sparring it promotes the following bad habits:

• Posturing and Ego.
• Wasting sparring time by walking back to corners and getting to breath and have bad cardio generally.
• Stopping when you think you got a good hit in.
• Stopping when you think they got a good hit in.

Look at how pathetic this becomes when it is applied to unarmed martial arts:

In today's world with full contact tournaments of many different kinds, there simply is no excuse for adults acting like that in the name of martial arts.

Contrast that to people who are actually taking sparring and fighting in weapon martial arts seriously:

Very legitimate competition going on there, very unlike those "fencing" videos above. Consider how superior the technique is at Dog Brothers Gathering compared to any of the fencing above:

Now Dog Brothers is pretty much a fight. People who spar (not fight) in the same martial arts outside of competition use safety weapons or armor instead of wood vs. flesh: 

On the ARMA website they have a rant about how padded weapons are obsolete, yet as you see in their video above, their fighting and sparring is terribly inadequate, not sparring at all, just fencing.

At Tres Espadas we use a wide variety of safety weapons to do a wide variety of real sparring with, so we can test out martial arts techniques from numerous cultural origins, and to develop new techniques:

Fencing is expressly forbidden at Tres Espadas. That is because fencing is the worst thing that ever happened to martial arts.