Inventing Traditional Martial Arts, with Prof. Peter Lorge

Inventing Traditional Martial Arts, with Prof. Peter Lorge. Also available as an audio podcast on the Martial Arts Studies Podcast. Theme music, 'Eejeb', by Ronin E-Ville (ronineville.com) used with permission.

[@BobJohnson992]

The problem with most of the people who are writing "histories" of Chinese martial arts is that they know so very little about Chinese martial arts. I would suggest that people go back historically and start with the time of the Daoyin exercises (all the CMAs still use some of those exercises) and also ask themselves why all the CMAs use the ☯symbol. If you don't understand the different system of body movement in CMAs, you don't understand CMAs well enough to opine about them.

[@Veepee92]

The comment about Shaolin martial arts being invented in the 1980s is a prevalent, but unfortunately mistaken impression. The idea of "Shaolin martial arts" really ought to be categorized together with the martial arts of the surrounding Dengfeng County, where people have been both entering the temple for either monasticism or martial arts as well as leaving for their homes to toil land when times were hard, only to come back at a later time or not etc.
So the martial arts of Shaolin had always been trained side by side by both the locals of Dengfeng and the wuseng of the Temple, therefore the act of "returning" the martial arts back to the Temple in the 1980s was more akin to introducing a species back to an ecological location where it had previously become extinct rather than creating something anew a new "style" altogether.
Otherwise the keynote speech was very good and accurate!