Any lunatic fringe requires an attractor to draw it and keep it floating around, and in the case of the martial arts, the attractor comprises the solid, knowledgeable, and truly remarkable people and amazing abilities at the core of the martial arts. Only people with that kind of gravitas can attracts such a cloud of debris. (I don’t mean to imply that gravitas is good or bad, but if the lunatic fringe of a generally positive attractor like the martial arts is unethical and otherwise corrupt, despair at the kind of madness and havoc that can be fomented by the lunatic fringe of a totally corrupt ideal.)

 

Thank goodness there are people like Ben Lo at the core of tai chi. Professor Cheng’s premier student, Lo began as sickly youth—so debilitated that he could not stand upright—but by the time Smith knew him, he’d become a respected master in his own right. Despite his statement that “I only got a little” from Professor Cheng, he was able, Smith says, to perform amazing martial feats without exhibiting the use of strength. Lo brought his tai chi to America, trained many students here, penned important additions to martial arts literature, and provided Smith with a bunch of humorous anecdotes to give character to the narrative. But those aren’t at the expense of lessons here and there on Lo’s methodology, particularly his insistence on training the root with rigorous leg exercises.

 

Next is an amusing set of encounters between Professor Cheng and Guo Lianyin, an internal martial arts teacher who’d been featured in the Sam Peckinpah movie, The Killer Elite. The story includes Smith’s hsing-i and bagua teacher, Paul Guo, but it and its denouement are Smith’s stories, so you’ll have to read the book to find out what happened. More of Professor Cheng’s encounters—and students—follow. One vignette, a visit with internal exponent Liu Xiheng, includes a very nice Q&A on tai chi principles. But immediately after, Smith goes into an issue that obviously vexed him, for that vexation comes through clearly in the section titled, “I Defend Laoshi.”

 

“Professor Zheng was envied and attacked by some in Asia, but few critics on the gossip-route ever stopped by to brace him,” Smith writes. “All who did were abruptly converted. A few who never visited sneered publicly.” Smith goes on to cite examples of people who denounced Cheng for a variety of reasons. Some said he was too small and gentle and his movements were too weak to produce any real fighting skill. Others said Cheng wasn’t truly a student of Yang Cheng-fu as he claimed.

 

Smith soundly refutes all such claims, avowing that, while Professor Cheng was small and gentle, he also was superlative and resolute in his skills. Smith was there, so he should know. And as he points out, many of Cheng’s critics “have never met or touched this man.” Unless they tried him on for size themselves, their words were empty and meaningless. “Only Cheng could beat you without hurting you,” Smith writes. “That, friends, is body management.” The same could be said of Yang Lu-chan, who also was reputedly undefeated yet never seriously injured an opponent.

 

As for the claim that Cheng’s bonafides regarding Yang are fraudulent, Smith presents the irrefutable evidence that Yang’s top student, Chen Wei-ming, acknowledged that Cheng was right up there at the top with him. Further, Cheng assisted Chen in ghostwriting Yang’s book, Yang’s Complete Principles and Applications of Taichi Ch’uan, and he wrote the preface. He would not have been allowed to participate so deeply in this project had he not been highly regarded by Yang himself. For further evidence, check out my look at a book by Chen Wei-ming, which might be the Chinese version of Chen’s T’ai Chi Ch’uan Ta Wen—I can’t tell for sure because the book is in Chinese, which I cannot read. This book contains several photos of Chen pushing hands with a young Cheng.

 

Then comes the chapter on Cheng’s death and its aftermath. With the master gone, the disciples fractured into camps based, too often, Smith writes, on ego and jealousy. But not always. A few carried on in a tradition that Smith lauds as being most in keeping with Cheng’s own teachings. And Smith is careful here not to use names when he feels it might be inappropriate. So don’t look for in-depth gossip, though the fracture lines of the issues become perfectly clear.

 

What isn’t so clear now is Cheng’s earlier statements on the “secret” to tai chi: “Do taiji as though it were a common everyday thing…. Don’t posture and don’t pose. Do it as though you were walking…. Relax and sink, stand erect, and keep your qi at your dantian.” Sounds easy, in principle, and though we know it’s not easy in practice, at least it is possible to follow this method. But here, Smith says:

 

Zheng was unique, a happy aberration. He was able through tedious practice (much of it so arcane that it is a safe bet that it resides now in no living person) to take an intelligent and creative mind and to soften, reduce, and even empty it in the service of a none-too-robust body.

 

Based on this statement, it looks like all that earlier business about mastery was actually incomplete, and without Cheng’s tedious, arcane, and now lost practices, well, good luck in attaining that level. But there are Ben Lo, William C. C. Chen, T. T. Liang, and other superlative tai chi practitioners whose martial careers sprouted from or cross-pollinated with Professor Cheng’s tradition and who gained much that they have passed on to new generations.

 

The next chapter, “The Weird and Wild,” takes another swim in waters teeming with toothless martial arts sharks, frauds, and kung foolishness. For the most part, Smith doesn’t identify the assorted miscreants he talks about, but no matter. Their name is legion, giving Smith the opportunity to lambaste their ignorance, fraudulence, and other misdeeds. He speaks from experience and from the heart, and much of his criticism is a valid as sunshine, but when he turns a jaundiced eye on martial arts terminology and attacks, in the following chapter, “The Bogus Hollywood,” martial arts cinema, I feel I have to parse his comments more fully. So I’ll digress on these two chapters later. For now, let’s finish our survey of the book

 

In 1989, Smith retired from the CIA and moved to the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina. He speaks of that in comfortable terms flavored with nostalgic memories of those from whom he learned and with whom he practiced but who were no longer in this world. Smith was not done with the martial arts, however, and in North Carolina, he met Tim Geoghegan, a transplanted Irishman who was an osteopath and first-rate martial artist, mostly in boxing, wrestling, and judo.

 

After profiling Geoghegan, Smith digresses a bit on music he loved. A lot of the musicians he mentions are long gone and forgotten, but he would be insulted and think you were a musical idiot if you didn’t know of them and their music. Now, I love music, too, but here, he’s kind of like that guy in the local bar who can cite every baseball statistic from the last century—a lot of “so what?” information. But if it makes Smith feel like all that was “real” music, unlike the stuff we listen to today, well, okay. It’s his book.

 

Smith then spends a short chapter extolling the virtues of poetry that contains elements of the martial arts, and he cites a few examples. The final few sections begin with this:

 

Winding down after this blizzard of words, I paraphrase philosopher Schopenhauer to the effect that we spend our lives in search of something and when, after a great struggle, we finally achieve it, we are not satisfied so much as relieved that the damned quest is over. Yes, relief there is and a body meant for rest, but there remains also the responsibility to leave something coherent for the reader to retain.

 

He closes, then, with a few reflections on teaching the martial arts, which he says was as much for himself as for his students. He also expresses hope for the future of the martial arts despite the dilution, chicanery, competitiveness, strains of violence, and growing commercialism he’s often railed against in these pages.

 

With all Smith’s railing in mind, let’s return to the chapters, “The Weird and Wild” and “The Bogus Hollywood.” There are several issues to deal with regarding these chapters, in which, for me, Smith too often falls into the same traps he sets for others. And for my taste, he swims a little too far into the gulf of cynicism regarding anyone and anything he does not consider to be legitimate in his eyes. So, though I reaffirm that I admire Smith greatly and have been an avid reader of his work, I also recognize that, in this reality, all men have feet of clay, and Smith was no exception. I’d say that everyone he does consider legitimate truly is so, but some of his negative criticism is off the mark or falls short. So I feel I have to take Smith to task for what I perceive as a strong surge of ill-directed spleen, though when it comes to his critiques of martial arts flakes, well, I tend to go along.

 

He states in the introduction, “Critics have called me outspoken and controversial. But someone has to be, otherwise who would tell the emperor that he is naked?” He does this, he says, because “I protest against things I think are wrong: evil, hatred, hunger, and war. I’m for goodness, love, full bellies, and peace.” Okay. I can get behind that sentiment, but now I find myself in the position of being the one to inform the emperor that, though he is not naked, his clothing is in some disarray. I hope Smith will forgive me from the grave, but it is my task in life to play the critic, and many of his attitudes expose whole realms of martial arts ossification and hypocrisy that, it seems, none of us can fully escape and that violate Smith’s own aforementioned precept of “nothing in excess.”

 

He begins “The Weird and Wild” by vociferously damning “teachers (invariably they crown themselves ‘masters’) of taiji who are wrongos of the worst stripe.” Even at my relatively low level, I’ve encountered a fair share and whole-heartedly agree with Smith on almost every point. I’ve written about some, in fact. But it seems that, in Smith’s opinion, any tai chi teacher other than those of the highest caliber could be anything less than a “wrongo of the worst stripe.” Does he mean that every grassroots tai chi teacher should be avoided like a plague?

 

So, while Smith is honest about his opinions, some of them can’t really be justified and often rub the wrong way. Put it like this: He’s honest about his own opinions, though sometimes those opinions are rather opinionated. And here I get into dangerous territory as I attempt to correct the master on several points. I’ll not take them in order but will begin with the simplest: martial arts terminology.

 

When Smith lambastes the use of the term “kung fu” instead of “wushu,” I begin to catch whiffs of mental ossification. Okay, in a limited technical sense, he’s right. Or was. “Kung fu” really means “excellence achieved through effort over time,” not “Chinese fighting arts.” Or does it?

 

Dictionaries fall into two basic types: prescriptive and descriptive. The former presents the formal definitions of words to which speakers and writers are expected to adhere, while the latter provides definitions according to how words are used by their speakers. Most of the time, the two are largely the same, but not always. And every year or two, compilers of both types of dictionaries have to add and subtract words to keep current. The Funk & Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language from 1974 does not define “kung fu” at all, but Merriam Webster’s College Dictionary (10th edition), from 1995, does—as “any of various Chinese arts of self-defense like karate.” Somewhere in that twenty-year span, English speakers became aware enough of “kung fu” that it was added to dictionaries. I prefer descriptive dictionaries because, in daily speech, words mean what people think they mean, not necessarily what they meant in the past or what people elsewhere dictate them to mean.

 

Smith cites the word “wushu” as being the more proper term, but even during the time he was writing this book, the term “wushu” had taken on two different meanings in China: one referring to the traditional martial arts (Smith’s definition) and the other referring to acrobatic displays of martial movements not necessarily tied to real self-defense—more like a gymnastic sport. While the word looks the same to English readers, the pronunciations are different: “wu-shu” for the acrobatic art and “wu-ssu” for the traditional arts. Even Smith acknowledges the differences, though not in specific terms and not here. But the truth is, even many Chinese people now use “kung fu” to denote the Chinese fighting arts and “wushu” for the acrobatic art. Smith may prefer “wushu” for all of it, but the sands of time have shifted the language beneath his feet. (Such things happen if you live long enough.) Nor does he admit that the English language is as much borrowed as it is indigenous and is constantly changing. Language is a living thing, and to insist on it remaining static is to insist on stagnation. The language Smith learned as a schoolboy prior to World War II, is not the language of the 21st century.

 

He then takes on the term “martial art.” The word “martial,” he says, is too harsh, and the word “art” is too nebulous.

 

Are these fighting systems arts? Or are they simply skills of varying levels, which on the higher levels sometimes become artistic? It is a helluva stretch to connect fighting or martial to art. We don’t add an “art” to music, history, philosophy, medicine, and other occupations. As bad as “martial art” is, “martial artist” is worse. Through the magic of euphemism, even the garbage collector or hauler can become a sanitary engineer, or more concisely a garbitian, but he would never call himself a garbage artist.

 

Well, no, actually we do call a lot of things “arts” and people “artists,” even some he says we don’t. There are the medical arts, the plastic arts, the cinematic arts, the art of map making, liberal arts, sword art, the occult arts (black arts), dramatic arts (theatre arts), literary arts, and oratory arts, to name a few. And some of their practitioners are called musical artists (recording artists), aerial artists, and con artists. We even have Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, an entire book on macro martial arts and strategy.

 

The brunt of all this is that the word “art” has come to mean any object or set of actions or skills that exhibit excellence in aesthetics as well as structure, and “artist” refers not just someone who creates what is generally thought of as art, but anyone who has become consummate in some skill or other. You could rightly say of a master welder that he is a true artist of his trade—and if you’ve ever seen examples of sculptures welded by “non-artist” welders, you’d agree. If Smith wants to complain about any term that includes “artist,” it should be “kung fu artist,” which is a tautology. Anyway, his alternative, “combatives,” isn’t any better than “martial arts” and has an odor of violence that would turn off most tai chi folks who might accept that the art has a martial basis but who have no desire to engage in combat.

 

Now let’s look at Smith’s criticisms of sport-style martial arts such as judo, wrestling, boxing, and mixed martial arts. Elsewhere in the book, he points out that most judoka are too busted up by age forty to take another fall. After all, Earth is the biggest fist we have available, and it slams judoka every time they tumble. And later in life, he felt that judo had become violence-oriented, wrestling was mostly a sham, and boxing was brutality personified in two men beating each others’ heads until no brains remained in them. “Although I grew up liking professional boxing—and Lord forgive me, I even promoted amateur boxing,” he writes, “I have long since believed that all boxing should be banned. Boxing is too brutal for civilized societies.”

 

I tend to agree, but when he writes, “Boxing is the only sport that has injury as its aim,” I have to take exception. Perhaps the statement is true if you label boxing a sport rather than a martial art. If you change the statement to read, “Boxing is the only martial art that has injury as its aim,” well, that’s clearly not true. Every martial art has injury (or at least the defeat of the opponent) as its aim. That why it’s a martial art. In any fight, the goals are to avoid injury and deal defeat. A rare martial artist superior enough to his or her opponent might be able to deliver defeat without injury, but such cases are the exception, not the norm. And besides, what does such a person do if the enemy keeps coming back, determined to inflict harm? Would even Cheng Man-ching simply divert him time and again, ad infinitum, or would he decide at some point that enough is enough and deliver a damaging move?

 

Throughout the book, Smith constantly decries most martial sport competition and challenges to prove superiority, saying it’s all too brutal—violence for the sake of violence. But also throughout, he relates—often almost gleefully—a large number of martial encounters of various sorts, from sparring in a gym or dojo to formal challenges to harsh words and harsher fists in some back alley. Often these occur to defend reputations or to teach miscreants a well-deserved lesson. Sometimes he’s forwarding some story or anecdote he’s heard, sometimes he’s describing something he personally witnessed, and occasionally he’s at the center of the melee. And he even disparages martial artists who refuse challenges, not because they’re superior, but precisely because they are inferior and know but won’t admit it.

 

It’s useful, then, to examine Smith’s take on mixed martial arts fighting, which Smith refers to as “Ultimate” and which is perhaps close to being the ultimate example of the purely fighting end of the martial arts spectrum. Smith takes it to task, referring to it as a “beastly activity reflecting nothing so much as a terribly neurotic insecurity in participants and fans.” He also states, “Ultimate fighting is ridiculous. It has minimal regulations, making for a brutal, dangerous hash that most competent fighters avoid, although their technical competence is much higher than the rag-tag participants Ultimate pulls, and they would have a fairly easy time of it if they entered.”

 

Unfortunately, this statement has not borne out. I’m no fan of mixed martial arts. Quite the opposite. I appreciate the small amount of martial skill I’ve gained through tai chi—and I think that developing at least some martial skill is important because it helps the practitioner learn more about the deeper aspects of the movements they practice. But I mostly practice tai chi for the self-development, not fighting. The men and women of MMA, however, train to take pain as well as deliver it in practical and intense circumstances. They don’t train for self-development, they train to fight and win. The few bouts I’ve seen between MMA fighters and martial arts “masters” of various stripes invariably ended with the master on the floor, out cold, within seconds. These masters might know their styles, but they haven’t trained incessantly as fighters. It’s probably true that profoundly competent martial masters might easily win the day if they entered, but that’s not likely to happen. At least not in MMA. And if they were to enter and win, victory would come only because they, too, have diligently practiced real fighting.

 

But as outlined above, Smith delights in relating many tales of street fights and honor challenges fought. None of these fights had any regulations, and by all reports, some of those contests would make MMA look like a schoolyard scuffle and often ended in serious injury, maiming, and death. Such an outcome was accepted by all, but if an MMA fighter regularly killed or maimed his opponents in the ring, he’d soon face multiple sorts of trouble, from the legal to being ousted from the sport.

 

So, aside from that, I fail to see much difference between street and honor fighting and MMA beyond the fact that MMA fighters appear to do it for money, while those fighting in the streets or for honor—even master-on-master—usually do it for ego. But for MMA fighters, it’s also about ego, and for masters and other teachers, it’s also about money, because money pays the bills. Another teacher in town is likely to take away students, so the teachers go at it, not just to prove who’s best, but to make sure their practice hall stays full of paying students. So fighting almost always is about ego and money. And despite the fact that Smith rails against mixed martial arts fighters, he does not acknowledge that they strive and train just as hard—and probably harder—than most martial artists to reach a high level in their discipline. But heck, he even denies legitimacy to Muhammad Ali.

 

Nowhere, however, is Smith as critical as he is of martial arts cinema, which he takes to task in “The Bogus Hollywood.” To put it simply, he despises and deplores every martial arts film and every man and woman martial artist in them. But the truth is, most blanket statements are structurally faulty and factually false, and Smith’s attack on cinematic martial arts is no different.

 

I’m not here to defend martial arts cinema and actors from Smith’s attacks. His criticisms are valid for a lot of martial arts cinema, much of which is vapidity laced with egregious and phony violence. And often its actors are not all that great martial artists. Or actors. But clearly a number of them were—or are—extremely expert. BS kung fu posturing on a movie set says nothing at all about an actor’s true knowledge and skill. But Smith takes them to task, each and every one, with a special animosity for Bruce Lee, who he berates for five pages. I’m not going to play the Bruce Lee apologist here. I’ve enjoyed his movies and the honor the visibility he brought to kung fu in America, but I’m not what you might call a devotee.

 

Smith derides Lee for his tension and barely concealed anger, and he states that Lee did not participate in tournaments and that none of his street fights could be verified. Thus, he concludes, Lee was a well-built actor who could mimic kung fu movements but could not really fight. These are very common criticisms of Lee, even today. But I have watched several of the biopics on Lee (which aren’t necessarily trustworthy) and watched many interviews with many topnotch martial artists who knew and practiced with or fought him, and to a person, they laud his skills as being of the highest order. Smith, however, wouldn’t take the words of any of these men and women as truth because, in his view, they’re all pathetic and incompetent, too.

 

Unfortunately, Smith too often has had harsh words for the concept of tournament fighting, which he felt had devolved into sport brutality engaged in by incompetent martial artists, to give his criticism of Lee’s lack of tournament participation any real bite. And as noted above, Smith relates stories of a great many street and honor fights engaged in by kung fu greats, and he often accepts them a credible despite the evidence for them being purely anecdotal, but then he is automatically dismissive of similar stories told about Lee.

 

He then says that Lee did not study kung fu conventionally and therefore could not know anything of value, ignoring the fact that there are in this world men and women of amazing and natural talent and skill—physical or otherwise—for whom systems are not sails but anchors. If she only mimicked her predecessors, incredible gymnast Simone Biles could never do the amazing acrobatic feats she seems to do with ease to earn more than thirty Olympic and World Championship medals. If David Belle had just accepted pushups and sit-ups as a workout, he would never have invented Parkour, which takes inspiration from martial arts film stars Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jean-Claude van Damme as well as from chi kung and other physical disciplines. Just two decades later, Parkour advocates prove that you don’t have to be Spiderman to be able to do amazing feats of climbing, leaping, jumping, swinging, and so forth. Smith has lavishly praised Professor Cheng as one such self-inventive man and does so for a handful of others, such as Morihei Ueshiba and Donn Draeger. These people—and I could name dozens more of the top of my head across many disciplines—prove that training doesn’t have to be formal traditional training to have meaning and utilitarian value.

 

And finally, Smith criticizes Lee’s skill from a distance—which is exactly what he slams Professor Cheng’s detractors for doing. Those detractors, he says, never touched hands with Cheng to feel his ability to yield and to deliver real power, but Smith never accorded Lee the same courtesy before damning him as a fake. If he had, maybe his observations might have borne out, maybe not. Again, I’m not being a Bruce Lee apologist here, simply pointing out that if criticisms of Professor Cheng’s martial skill by those who never met him are, de facto, worthless, then so are Smith’s of Lee.

 

But all Smith has done with Lee is briefly observe him in one of his early movies—and not even much of that before he walked out in disgust, determined that what was presented there was cinematic and phony. So what? Would anybody expect less. Or more? It’s a movie, after all, not real life. I prefer to listen more openly to the statements made by his contemporaries, who lauded Lee for his excellence and expertise and say they witnessed actual martial encounters he had. Are they all totally incompetent to judge? Are they all liars?

 

I have to wonder what caused Smith’s obvious vitriol toward Lee, and all I can come up with are the yin and yang of things. When Smith went to Taiwan, his main associations seemed to have been with internal stylists, of who he found a number of excellent examples. He had enough hard-style training with Western boxing and a little karate and Shaolin to recognize that flexible skills utilizing intrinsic energy were very likely to be superior to hard style martial arts with their emphasis on strength and speed—if for no other reason than, as we age, strength and speed naturally wane, but intrinsic energy can continue to increase.

 

We also have to take into account the often-antagonistic schism that exists between the internal and external martial arts, with exponents of each deriding and scorning the other. If Smith found himself associating almost exclusively with expert soft stylists, there would have been a fair amount of subtle—or not-so-subtle—discrimination against the hard styles that might have amounted to a sort of indoctrination against them and their practitioners.

 

Further, once Smith began studying the Chinese internal martial arts, he naturally sought and found a paragon of soft, intrinsic energy in Cheng Man-ching. Lee’s method was at polar opposites: extreme yang to Cheng’s extreme yin. In his book, Heal Yourself and the World with Tai-chi, Bob Klein writes, “To let the body absorb attention, you must let go of attention rather than holding it rigid. The rigidity of attention makes the body rigid. Rigidity separates attention from the body. That is why we practice to relax the body and to relax the attention—so that the two can merge.” (Bob Klein, 2021, p. 124). I tend to go along with Klein, but I also acknowledge that the world is filled with all sorts of people with all sorts of proclivities, many of which are as unfathomable as life itself.

 

Professor Cheng’s true artistry in artistry was at the flexible, yin end of the martial arts spectrum, while Lee’s true artistry in fighting was at the rigid, yang end. Reality has a way of balancing out between extremes, and it is not possible for one or the other of those extremes to be superior to the other—at least among martial artists in their prime. If such a thing were to happen, the balance of nature would be upset. If the one that becomes inferior is no longer the extreme it once was, another entity or idea will appears to become the new and very similar extreme. But perhaps Smith wasn’t thinking of balance, but saw Lee, even if only unconsciously, as the antithesis of all he’d come to believe and trust about the internal arts. If Lee, even in his “rigid” state, were a truly effective and superlative fighter, that would put lie to the internal arts’ claim of soft superiority in combat.

 

I’m not claiming superiority here of any method or style, though most of us tend to believe in the martial art we practice, otherwise we wouldn’t practice it. As far as I can tell, it’s not the martial art that counts, but the martial artist. Martial style has to do with taste and proclivities—and sometimes availability. Superiority lies, as with Cheng, within the individual. Cheng was a superlative of his method, as Lee presumably was of his. I’m not judging the skills of either, either of whom could wipe the floor with me. Who would win a fight between the two? Who cares? Only a small-minded person would want to see either beaten to a pulp, though it would be interesting and instructive to see how such polar opposites would deal with each other. But apparently for Smith, Lee’s biggest sin is that he died early precisely because he was one tense fellow unable to relax.

 

Again I say, so what? To expect a person like Lee to walk the path of a Professor Cheng is to desire to subvert the course of nature. One does not expect an apple to taste like or have the consistency of a kiwi, though both are fruit. Each of us are who we are, and not someone else. We either show movement or we stagnate. And our movements should journey into territory we desire—or perhaps were meant to explore—instead of into someone else’s reality.

 

And so what if Lee died young? Even Professor Cheng died at a non-advanced age, and so have a great many other tai chi and other martial arts masters. Smith himself mentions a number of them. As far as I can tell, the point of life isn’t to live long but to live thoroughly, and one person’s thorough is not the same as another’s. There’s simply not enough life in any of us to be everything we possibly can be. Perhaps Lee was so hard and packed-in and so bursting with force, intensity, and energy because his life was to be so short and he had much to do and offer. Perhaps the human frame, no matter how well trained, cannot stand the strain of such energies, be they martial or not. The French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who died at age thirty-six, left 737 canvas paintings, 275 watercolors, 363 prints and posters, 5,084 drawings, and some ceramic and stained-glass work and helped change the face of modern art. And guess what: He had very little formal training, but mostly just studied informally with his fellow artists—read: Sparred with his dojo mates instead of learning forms or katas. Jimi Hendrix, before his death at twenty-seven, changed the face of modern music though he did not go to music school but learned music by practicing and playing music—again, practiced with his dojo mates. As I said earlier, I could name dozens of such individuals off the top of my head in a great number of fields, including the martial arts.

 

As for Lee, well, I don’t know. I wasn’t there any more than Smith was. Nor am I one to judge anybody at that level of skill. But I do know this: Lee might not have been an internal stylist, but the light from his shooting star, though brief, illuminated the landscape, allowing many to find a way to the martial arts. And some of those people, once the landscape was illuminated, saw the realm of the internal, saw its beauty, and felt its call.

 

While Smith rightly lambastes some martial arts stars, he unfairly maligns others. One is Jackie Chan, who he says does not really do his own stunts—clearly not true, as anybody who’s bothered to watch his movies or the outtakes at the ends of them can readily observe with their own eyes. Making slanderous comments based on little evidence is, from the outset, a faulty approach, as he himself has said of Professor Cheng’s critics. But the irony is, Lee’s movies probably did more to spark Western interest in the Asian martial arts than all of Smith’s books combined. Maybe that’s what really irked Smith.

 

Unlike Smith, I admire anybody who can approach artistry in a physical sense, from jugglers, magicians, dancers, contortionists, acrobats, and athletes to martial artists, be they masters or not. And yes, martial arts movie actors, some of whom are truly incredible athletes and probably excellent martial artists in a real sense. The achievements of all these people, no matter what their pursuits, are no less important to human advancement than scientific breakthroughs, artistic achievements, improved living conditions, or new social and cultural opportunities. All help humanity move into a greater future. There is an evolutionary imperative toward greater complexity and improved abilities through time, and the proof positive of that is in the new generations now rising, whose members show advancement in many human skills and abilities significantly beyond those of my generation.

 

In order for a system to change, to exhibit motion, it must overcome inertia, which is defined scientifically as resistance to changes in velocity, which remains constant until some force changes its speed or direction. In other words, objects at rest tend to remain at rest, while objects in motion tend to remain in motion—though, of course, here on Earth, gravity and friction are forces that constantly affect momentum. So in essence, every time something is moved, it is torn free, at least in part, from its connection with the surrounding reality, which produces some degree of chaos and heat at the interface, which is manifest as friction.

 

Cultural change is no different. Change always brings heat and turmoil until things settle, for a time, at least, into a steady state. We see this phenomenon in politics all the time, and we’re seeing it now in the martial arts, which are undergoing a tremendous sea change from the traditional to the non-traditional. It could be said that the martial arts, after their introduction to America, began to become American, mixing styles and traditions just as America’s diversity creates admixtures of race and culture. It can’t be a coincidence that the mixed martial arts began as an American phenomenon. Smith, himself, was at the core of the initial impetus of Westernizing the Asian martial arts. He might have denigrated Lee for not being a traditionalist, but remember, Smith, himself, openly advocated for dropping traditional Japanese ritual from the martial arts in America, saying it eventually reverted to “mumbo-jumbo.” And he would further admit that a great many movements from traditional martial arts styles are worthless for combat.

 

Add to that the fact that martial arts practitioners engage in the martial arts for more reasons than you can shake a staff at, some of which have little to do with fighting anything but humankind’s two greatest enemies: aging and lack of spiritual connection with the Tao. (Say, “God,” if you like, or “Zeus” or “Ahura Mazda” or….) Beginning with the aforementioned schism between the internal and external families, this fracturing leads to all sorts of misunderstandings and antagonisms, particularly regarding the utility and ethics of fighting. Even those of us who do not actively engage in fighting usually understand that the martial arts are, first and foremost, martial, but many of us prefer the art rather than the fighting end of the spectrum.

 

I think what Smith misses—or perhaps ignores—is the fact that there are several classifications of people, and one is the warrior class. Warriors tend to value utility over art, the external over internal, and the actual over potential. For them, the purpose of practicing a martial art is not to improve themselves but to more efficiently defeat an enemy. That’s what they want to do. That’s what they like to do. Smith is in a category on the opposite side of the wheel: the shaman, who values art, the internal, and the potential—the one who seeks to defeat or at least sublimate his or her own ego. As with any polarity, antagonisms and criticisms are a natural result and often are directed in a scattershot fashion meant to take down an entire mindset rather than just a few of its precepts or practitioners. For folks with the warrior personality who value success in battle, Smith’s stance is just as faulty.

 

I know I’ve been somewhat harsh in my criticisms, but as I age, I can see how once-vital concepts often mentally ossify into staid opinions. It’s that old dichotomy of the flexible vs the rigid, and while Smith constantly decries the latter, that’s exactly what happened to his attitudes, at least in some instances. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still deeply admire him and value his writing as some of the most important in martial arts literature ever produced. Despite its flaws, Martial Musings is an important work, not just for its description of Smith’s life and the lives of other martial artists he knew, but for the great number of significant issues it raises about the state of the martial arts in the recent past and current with his writing.

 

Some of the good Smith hoped for has come to pass, but much of what he considered to be the ills have proliferated far beyond his lowest expectations. The literary genre of science-fiction clearly demonstrates the dangers of prognostication because all such tales are founded on understandings in the present. Spaceship pilots of pre-computer sci-fi have switches to throw and dials to twist instead of touchscreens and voice commands. It’s hard, in other words, to predict the future when the future adds so many unpredictable elements to the flow of time.

 

But the passengers of that space ship, despite their questionable technology, often have important things to say to us on a human level. Specific changes in technology might be largely unpredictable, but the human aspects are not as readily altered. People largely have the same concerns they’ve always had, though maybe with a few twists added due to the rapid technological changes and cultural complexity that are flooding humanity at present. In other words, the hardware changes more rapidly and readily than the software. The same is true of the martial arts, and while the hardware —read: martial arts systems—might eventually have gotten away from Smith, in his life and work, he contributed mightily to the software that is the foundation for the modern martial arts.

 

I’ll wind up with a couple of details on the book. Reading is as much a technical process as it is an absorptive one. The art of good writing is to make the reading process enjoyable, informative, and smooth, while the aim of good publishing is to make the vehicle of the book as transparent as possible for the reader. This book is written with Smith’s usual style and élan, but I have a couple of issues with the book’s production. I’ll start off with praise, though. Unlike most martial arts literature that sees the light of day between paperbound covers, Martial Musings is a hardbound book printed on durable paper—a format worthy of this author and this book. However, the publisher chose to use a coated paper stock that is less than ideal.

 

Coated paper is a paper with a light amount of clay impressed into its surface. Printers and publishers generally use a coated stock for printed pieces—particularly magazines and brochures—that have photographs and other detailed graphics. This is because the ink of graphic images will sit on top of the slick surface of coated paper and retain its crispness, where it would soak into an uncoated stock, sort of like a sponge, blurring the image even if ever so slightly. Since this book has a fair number of photographs, it’s perhaps sensible to use a coated stock, but that can lead to its own problems.

 

For one, this coated stock is light tan. I have any one piece of advice for publishers who want to use a colored stock: Don’t. I’ve been guilty of this myself. Once. A colored stock—even one that is light tan—lessens the contrast between the words and images on the paper, and the coating readily picks up glare from surrounding light sources. Both factors make reading more of a chore for the eyes. And it’s even worse on images, even if they’re printed in black-and-white, and in this book, they’re not. All the photos are rendered in sepia tones, seriously lessening the contrast of the images as much as any potential blurring on uncoated stock might have done. Book publishers should almost always use an acid-free, non-coated white paper stock, which will both facilitate the reading process, preserve the crispness of the type and images, and provide durability.

 

I have another quibble with this book—and some readers might think I’m being overly picky here, but I spent a lifetime in the writing, editing, and publishing industries, and I tend to be a stickler for, if not form, then format. In this book, the page numbering begins on a left-hand page, where it should begin on the right. Most readers might not know that, but to a publications professional, it looks sloppy. What isn’t sloppy is the inclusion at the end of the book of a selected bibliography of Smith’s work, glossaries of Japanese and Chinese terms, and a good but not absolutely inclusive index.

 

In closing, all I can really add is, if you’re a reader of martial arts literature, you should read everything by Robert W. Smith that you can lay your hands on, including Martial Musings. You won’t be sorry.

 

 

A mostly complete bibliography of Smith’s works can be found at https://ejmas.com/jcs/jcssmith_bibliog.htm.

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