Martial Arts
From MartialTalk Online Martial Arts Encyclopedia Project
A martial art, often referred to as a fighting system, is a system of codified practices and traditions of training for combat, usually (but not always) without the use of guns and other modern weapons. Today, people study martial arts for various reasons including sport, fitness, self-defense, self-cultivation (meditation), mental discipline, character development, and self-confidence.
"Martial arts" derives from the ancient Sanskrit term "sanyakala" (sanya means related to the army and kala means arts),Japanese terms bugei (武芸) and the synonymous bujutsu (武術) or their Chinese equivalents wǔ yì (武藝) and wǔ shù (武術). The Chinese-English Diction of Herbert A. Giles, 1882, tranlates wǔ yì as "military arts." It does not use the later term wǔ shù, nor does the 1931 Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary. The term was also translated in 1920 in Takenobu's Japanese-English Dictionary from Japanese bu-gei (武芸) or bu-jutsu (武術) as "the craft/accomplishment of military affairs". Other common pronunciations of the character pair 武術 include: Cantonese: mou seut and Vietnamese: Võ-Thuật).
This term is slightly anomalous in its English usage. Its strict meaning should be "arts for military use" (fighter aircraft, sniper training, and so forth) but in normal usage it is used to refer to formalized systems of training to fight without modern technology. It is nevertheless valuable to distinguish between fighting systems intended for soldiers in battle (even without modern technology) and fighting systems intended for sport or for civilian self-defense.
The practice of martial arts goes back to Zhou dynasty times, i.e. to a time more than 2,500 years ago, in which students were required to master the liù yì (藝) Six Arts, rites, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics. So the word yì has long been associated with fighting arts that can be used in battle.
