Kung Fu Conversations Podcast

I'm a huge advocate for teaching fighting traditions in plain English first. If I'm teaching in an English-speaking community, I want students to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how it fits into the larger framework of the art. Foreign terminology, poetic phrases, and culturally specific references all have value, but they have far more value once a student has enough experience to appreciate what they are pointing toward.

Recently, Marcus Davila Sensei reminded me of a famous line often attributed to the Daoist tradition: "The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao."

Strip away any mysticism and there is a practical lesson hidden inside that statement.

Words are necessary. They allow us to communicate. They create shared meaning. They help us organize knowledge and pass it from one generation to the next. Without language, there is no curriculum, no teaching, and no tradition.

Yet words also create boundaries. The moment we define something, we begin to limit it. The moment we describe a movement, students often stop exploring and start memorizing. The moment we give a principle a name, people begin treating the name as the thing itself.

This is especially true in the fighting traditions. A punch is not the word "punch." A principle is not its definition. A kata is not the paragraph we write to explain it. These things only become real through experience. They must be felt, tested, refined, and revisited over years of practice.

The challenge is that both the body and the practitioner change over time. What a movement means to a beginner is often different from what it means to an advanced student. What a principle reveals after five years may be different from what it reveals after thirty.

The words haven't changed. The practitioner has. So we should use language freely, but also hold it lightly. The explanation is not the lesson. The definition is not the understanding. The map is not the territory.

At some point, every serious student discovers that the most important parts of the art exist just beyond the reach of language. The words can point the way, but eventually you have to walk the path yourself.