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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darth Shoju" data-source="post: 3466945" data-attributes="member: 11397">Well let me clarify that I am not a "katana-fanboy" and I'm not promoting eastern martial-arts as superior. I certainly don't expect real-world martial-arts to work like they do in the movies and from my understanding, Shaolin demonstrations are more for entertainment value than displaying real fighting techniques. Further, I hope I'm not coming across as portraying myself as an expert on martial-arts, I'm speaking mainly from observation. That being said, it has long been my own opinion that a lot of the truly traditional martial-arts work far better when used on someone who doesn't really know what they are doing in a fight, or has only rudimentary knowledge (a typical street-brawler perhaps). In addition, kung-fu's origins were likely quite humble and I suspect the concept of teaching techniques based off military combat training to peasants and monks was meant to simply be a "it's better than no training" concept. I would certainly agree that its reputation has been elevated to an unrealistic level.Ultimately, what I'm trying to say is that I find it illogical to *completely* discount the practicality of traditional eastern martial arts. While Shaolin kung-fu may have been built up to an unrealistic level due to its mythical place in Chinese culture, I still believe there is merit to be found in its teachings on some level. From my understanding, Shaolin-trained bodyguards are highly sought in China so there must be some level of merit there (though I suppose you could say that this is as much due to a desire to simply *say* one has a Shaolin bodyguard). As far as Bruce Lee is concerned, while his personal style incorporated elements of western martial-arts, it was still firmly rooted in a lot of the basic concepts of Wing-chun kung-fu. Other styles of kung-fu such as Hung-gar are considered to be fairly practical, as are types of karate (particularly more modern styles like Kyokushin). Again, while I'm not defending the mindset that kung-fu or ninjitsu or karate are the "ultimate martial-arts", nor the idea that a katana can cut clean through a car or somesuch nonsense, I *am* saying that traditional eastern martial-arts are far from utterly ineffective and have their place among the combat systems of the world. I do support the notion of the evolution of combat arts towards being inclusive and practical by incorporating the functional aspects of any and all martial-arts, regardless of what part of the world they come from.</blockquote>

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