Isn't this bit here useless?
     
The question has been often posed, ”Why study a martial art that has no practical application in the modern era.” Well, there is a simple answer: the preservation of that art due to a love of that art.

When we aim to learn an art, in part, we surrender ourselves to that art.

In that vein, we become practitioners because of our “fan-ship“ of martial arts (and sword arts in specific) but when we truly start to love that art and become absorbed in that art, we then surrender to that art in hopes that we can successfully transmit that art – and it’s attendant traditions, history, philosophies, spirituality, etc – to the next generation. It is a matter of preservation, revival, and servitude.

One who enters into learning an art and subsequently decides to “disregard that which is not useful” has a few strikes against him right off the bat.

First, he has not abandon and surrendered himself to the art and to its instructors and trusted masters, but retains his ego: his cup was not empty when he entered the teahouse, and he can not truly taste the fine teas of the establishment without the taint of his own, lesser tea. He can not learn the art as it should be because he has pre-judged the art. Having no experience or expertise with which to make such a judgment, it must – by necessity – be flawed and so the taint to his learning experience must also be tainted: he can never truly learn the “inner secrets” of the art because he can not even learn the basic foundation of the art. What he learns instead, is the art as it is colored (and fouled) by his own incomplete, uninformed, uneducated opinions.

Second, he has created an adversarial relationship: master teaches the unnecessary, and so I must decide what is good and bad. This does nothing but degrade the relationship, and the learning process. Master is Master for a reason, and he instructs because you do not know. To defy this tutorial is to create a situation where you and he are working towards different goals. This will degrade not only your ability to learn the art, but will – by necessity – taint your opinion of most arts in general. It will strip you of your ability to learn at all because when you finally decide that this art has taught you all it can, you’ll move on to the next art with the same opinion. This will be tainted even further by his opinion that his experience in the first art, and he will assume he has learned more than the present teacher can teach him. The more arts he cycles through, the less he is able to learn from the new arts. In this way he will never be complete nor can he ever learn a new art: his cup gets fuller and fuller, but he never really empties it, cleans it, and prepares it for the next art.

   Third, he tends to be the sort that treats the art as a business and himself as the patron. He asks himself “what am I getting for my time and my money” and this is so completely contrary to the art that it is the sole reason so many arts fall into deficiency and disorder. The so called “Mc Dojo’s” are the end result – arts watered down and sold through belt mills with no substance whatever. Anyone can be a martial artist for $30 a month, and anyone who puts in his one to three years can be a black belt – an “expert” and perhaps even a “Doctor of Martial Philosophy”.

He can open his own Dojo and make a good living continuing to peddle his own brand of Martial McNuggets (“Yes, I’d like a black belt in Tae Kwon Do … oh, and a side order of Kumdo as well. And super size that, please.”). However, he never learns the art as it was intended, nor does he learn the art at its fullest. He has become a boxer with some vaguely martial moves, but that is like saying that because one can do a “color-by-numbers” painting and have it come out half way decent, that he is somehow an artist, then deciding that because he’s taken a few Bob Ross courses, that he’s been trained in classical art mediums and should count himself amongst the most celebrated of modern artists.

I could go on, but I won’t. This – and the rest I have not written here – should go into an article on the decline of the arts. I think I’ll write one.