BE the Shoulin!

Soooo much lineage in martial arts. In most cases it is an imitation of Chinese Martial Arts lineage ("my teacher's teacher's teacher trained under Bruce Lee") or tracing the arts roots back to its Chinese Martial Arts lineage ("Karate originally meant Chinese hand and is probably based on Crane Kung Fu.") And in Chinese Martial Arts, 90% of the time the goal is to do one thing and one thing only: to demonstrate how that style of Martial Arts was derived at the Shoulin Temple.

(This can lead to extremely severe errors in deciding how to train. For example many people decide to train in Wing Chun to try to be like Bruce Lee, tracing Lee's lineage back to Wing Chun master Yip Man. The problem is Bruce Lee hated Wing Chun, the vast majority of his criticisms of Traditional Martial Arts (TMA) were based on his own experiences in Wing Chun. He had much nicer things to say about other TMA like Choy Li Fut. If you want to be like Bruce Lee, the one thing you would never want to do is Wing Chun.)

BUT what was so great about the Shoulin Temple? It was that so many different people went there from around China to seek asylum, and so many of those were mercenaries and soldiers, and because they had time on their hands to refine their arts, evolve their arts, and to spar it out. In other words who did the Shoulin trace their lineages to? They traced their lineage to themselves for being an awesome fight club.

It really is not your lineage that matters. It is the community of people you train with. All around the world right now the martial arts masters of tomorrow are being created in MMA clubs and other serious martial communities full of people willing to spar and improve their hands on ability. Your sparring partners and you coaching each other, that is being your generation's version of The Shoulin Temple.

But didn't the Shoulin have extraordinary powers? Lots of fight club type schools experiment with Yoga and TMA type training. Many of them cross train in weapon martial arts, and some of them even spar with weapons. Compared to TMA schools that don't do this, they have extraordinary powers.

The Summit BJJ club was originally founded as a sort of co-op, and still has the most affordable BJJ training in the area. When they started, the most advanced student they had was a purple belt. When I started the most advanced student was a single brown belt and a few purple belts. I was there when the first student was awarded his black belt and a few of the other members of the club got their brown belts. Now the club has multiple black belts. WHY did their skill improve so much? Because they got together and trained four times a week for several years, and because they had the type of community they needed to pull that off.

At Tres Espadas our contempt for lineage is a core part of our club's ethos. Tres Espadas was founded by rogue students who broke away from Doc Fai Wong's kung fu system because we decided that we didn't share the same vision. They wanted fitness, they wanted to make people better. The first thing they taught was a solid front kick. We wanted to "feed Christians to lions" in the ancient Roman gladiatorial arenas. The first thing our club members would know is how to knife fight. Over the years we have accumulated a lot more hands on actionable Weapon Martial Arts knowledge through sparring than we would have ever learned studying the endless number of weapon forms in Doc Fai Wong's system.

Don't wait for a master to come along and grant you martial arts abilities. Find or found a like minded community willing to train and spar in order to pursue the abilities you seek!