Don Roley said:
Why Dale, are you taking another shot at Ralph, or was this just a coincidence? I was just looking over
this web page and thinking about how close it was to what I hear the Japanese say about the evils of teaching budo for a living. There is even an old poem by Momochi Sandayu that if you use ninpo for personal gain, you will never understand the true nature of it. (Or something to that effect.) Of course, I realized that you and Luke do not teach martial arts full time, but Ralph does. He is the one that all the warnings I have been hearing about how when you teach for a living, you become a budo businessman and not a person who can afford to keep high standards in the face of what the public wants applies to.
Did you mean to take this shot, or was it just a fluke?
That's a superb page, well worth bookmarking. A lot there would apply equally to this guy teaching Tenjindo Marital Arts.
No, I wasn't specifically digging at Ralph, just pointing out that since I don't teach for a living and have other commitments, I have to put a lot of thought into what is most important in my teaching, what's most effective and efficient in getting the result I want. (The result I want is good budoka who won't feel "lost" when they go and train in Japan.) It seems to work, as I have students who are now shihan themselves.
"Combative fitness", therefore, is not part of the dojo training itself. As an instructor it's not my responsibility to make others fit: It's to enable them to protect themselves and others. Fitness is not especially important in the execution of most techniques -- though it certainly
does help in surviving an extended class session or a seminar.
But general fitness is something students need to take care of on their own time.
Digressing to a somewhat related point, in the Bujinkan approach something that "
looks combative" isn't necessarily better -- often it's quite the opposite. You need to be able to turn that sort of feeling either on or off, using it selectively, and for the past several years Soke seems to have been emphasizing the ability to do things with no obvious power and projecting no "intention" an opponent can read, not looking like you're "fighting" at all.
Now back to teaching for a living. . .I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with that as a thing in itself, depending on "where you are in your life" when you do it. I think if you're a mature individual who has already "made a life for yourself" in some other way it can be great, because your life experiences become a part of your approach to teaching and can make it richer and deeper.
Someone like our Tenjindo marital expert who's young, has a shodan in one thing, a nidan in something else, a brown belt in something further, not only has no martial depth but no depth to his experience of life. This is especially dangerous, both for you and your students, if all you've ever really done is train in and teach martial arts: It leads to a very narrow, shallow perspective. Such a person is likely to be unable to see, for instance, that a ryu is not merely a body of knowledge but a living community.
I have no intention of teaching for a living myself, but I'd consider myself as someone who
could do that without creating problems: I'm broadly educated (Master's degree in political science -- undergrad major was originally cultural anthropology); have had a 20-year military career (Marine NCO and commissioned Army officer); have a broad base over many years of civilian experience in security management and consulting; have considerable international experience and exposure to various cultures via both military and civilian travel; and have been training in the Bujinkan for twenty years. All of these things influence the way I teach. Quoting MacYoung on the breadth of stuff that's really necessary to enable people to defend themselves effectively (from the page you linked), "That is why my best advice to you about learning self-defense is to go study, different martial arts, legal issues, psychology, interpersonal skills, cultural anthropology, communication/negotiation etc., etc., because these issues have just as much to do with self-defense as any martial art."
The drawback with the idea is that I probably couldn't actually make a living at it, because real budo doesn't have mass appeal.
So I'd have to jazz up the training with a lot of fitness conditioning so I could parcel out knowledge more gradually and slowly; start having "contests" such as sparring, and making things look really "combative", to keep students motivated and able to have an immediate sense that they're really "doing something". . .because otherwise they might take their money, which I've grown accustomed to considering
my money, to a competitor.
Fortunately, for me it's never been about money, which makes it laughable that earlier Ralph said, "How do you help others in the community other than helping yourself to money at seminars?". That's pretty ironic, as I spend far more time going to other people's seminars than giving my own. Locally, I give a low-cost "back from Japan training" seminar a couple of times a year, generally for about 50 bucks a head, and that's it.
Outside the Bay Area I don't do much, for the simple reason that I've never been an especially high-profile guy so I don't get asked very often. The ones I do elsewhere are generally for people who used to train with me who have moved out of the area and relocated elsewhere, so there's already a relationship of trust and mutual regard. I don't set specific fees that hosts are required to meet: My usual arrangement is airfare, space on floor/couch/whatever to roll up in my plaidie, and a bottle of decent Scotch single-malt whisky; if there's some pocket money to bring home it's a nice treat, that's all. The last seminar I did was at the end of February for the Bujinkan campus organization at the University of Southern California, which is headed by a nidan from my dojo who's now down there going to school. For people coming in from off-campus, the cost was $50 for the weekend, two days of training; for the university students themselves there was no charge.
