Assignment 16 - TD

Tserenpuntsag Davaadorj

Speech to Persuade

    2,000 years ago, as the Shaolin monks sought to understand the natural order, they studied all the creatures that surrounded their monastery. Analyzing the tendencies of the mantis to the tiger, even trying to understand the dragons of legend. Through their studies they realized that each animal’s actions were used the least energy to accomplish the most amount of work. Upon this realization, they integrated each animal’s movements into their own, thus creating the animal forms of Shaolin kung fu: the tiger, leopard, crane, snake, and dragon. Every martial art has its own origins, but all share the common goal of mastering the mind, not the body.  As the time passed with now us living in a period of relative peace, we come to look down upon violence, and rightly so. But we have come to associate martial arts with this violence, with aggressiveness and hostility. I am here to tell you that martial arts is a path to peace and ultimate part of a path to enlightenment and understanding.

    What the West knows of martial arts is mainly through the UFC and old kung fu movies. Nobody even watches those old movies anymore though, not like I do. Movies like the 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Enter the Dragon were my favorite (on top of the Pokemon movies). What stuck to me the most though were the lessons they taught. For example, that soft beats the hard. If you and your  younger brother get into an argument and you smack him upside the head and tell him “man shut up”, as is the normal, and he hits you back which in turn causes you to punch him. You two are at a crossroads now, you and your younger brother can continue to fight or you can hug him and tell him “I’m sorry brother, forgive me,” instantly diffusing the situation. I personally have always made the choice to continue fighting and it doesn’t work out well. You can certainly criticize me for being violent and aggressive as some people here may know. But that is not the fault of martial arts. Martial arts helps me find peace and has made me more peaceful than before. Through studies we can see that martial arts practice leads to reduced aggression and better self control. You gain better emotional wellness in general and increased cognitive abilities. Though that's probably because exercise as a whole makes you smarter. The lessons from martial arts are what I apply to my life and are the principles that I live by. I hope one day to be beat up in front of a crowd by some thugs so I can stand up all battered, and hopefully bloody, to proclaim “Mahatma Gandhi taught me ‘Non-violent protest’.”

    Now, when we watch the UFC what we see is the most efficient way to beat down a human being. A combination of the most efficient maneuvers and techniques from a variety of fighting disciplines, mainly Muay Thai, boxing, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. This is the culmination of the globalization of our world and the advancement of a craft. Martial arts evolved alongside warfare to be the most efficient way of killing someone, there is no doubt about that. That for most of its history you trained yourself for a king, shogun, or emperor in order to assert his dominance. That is why learning martial arts has been seen as simply wrong. Why would you want your child to learn something that is historically meant to kill people? Because of the natural progress of humanity. We learn from the past. We treasure life because of the existence of death. As such the craft that kills is now the craft that protects. We hear it everywhere, martial arts for self-defense. If you don’t know, in India, a woman is raped, molested, sexually abused once every thirteen minutes. The Indian government has pushed the teaching of martial arts such as the traditional Indian Kali, not only for self-defense, but for the self-empowerment of women in a highly patriarchal society. The atomic bombs dropped on Japan resulted in the fatalities of 300,000. 90% of whom were civilians. If we can learn from that, sign a nuclear proliferation act and save 2 million lives that would have died if fossil fuels were used instead of nuclear energy then we can certainly find the message of peace that martial arts contains and not only see it as senseless violence.

    The reason why we cannot accept teaching people how to fight though, is not because of that singular issue alone. It is because of a refusal to understand others and stubborn stick to an insular point of view. You know what I’m talking about, the guy that brings a snowball onto the House floor and states matter-of-factly, “If global warming is real explain this!” After 9/11 the man known as Mark Stroman went out to kill as many Middle-Eastern people as he could and killed two people who weren’t even Middle-Eastern, they were from Pakistan and India. He then shot another man in the face, leaving him partially blind. 10 years later, as Mark Stroman was about to be executed, the man who was shot told him that he forgives him. That he never hated him to which Mark replied with “I love you”.

    These are lessons which we can all learn. Even if you go hard, you can still be soft. You can find mercy and forgiveness in your heart. That is what it truly means to be strong, and ultimately that’s why I pursue martial arts, to be strong. But not to be strong in the traditional sense, a different kind of strength. Gandhi had many a meaningful quote, but my favorite of his is “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” So let’s all be strong and progress together, have compassion and understanding and the open mindedness to learn the lessons that life teaches us.