Everybody knows why cultivators in fiction cultivate: to become more powerful, so they can defeat more powerful cultivators.
That’s lame.
There’s only so much of such cultivation you can read before you get sick of the repetition. You already know how every conflict will end. The only question is how the characters get there—and the answer is usually by cultivation to gain more power. And even that grows paper-thin, because authors insist on writing to tropes instead of writing to truth. Read enough cultivation stories, and every story and every character quickly becomes like every other story.
With Saga of the Swordbreaker, I want to write to truth.
When you examine the history, culture and traditions of a civilization, organization, or brotherhood, you will discover that life does not neatly fit into tropes and themes. Tropes are merely genre conventions. Everybody knows what they are, and so everybody writes them because they are expected to write tropes, or to attempt to forge a quick, easy and inevitably shallow connection.
In cultivation fiction, everybody knows why the main character practices cultivation: to become stronger. The entire plot revolves around this singular theme. Real life is more complicated than that.
And therefore far more interesting.
In the real world, why would someone study the way of the fist? Let’s run through some of the reasons, both historical and present.
SUrvival
This is the most prosaic reason. A person studies martial arts so he can become a soldier, a police officer, a guard, a martial arts instructor—or a bandit.
This was the grim reality of late Qing Dynasty China. The empire was on the verge of collapse, law and order was virtually nonexistent outside the loyalist cities, and bandits prowled the long, lonely roads. Martial arts manuals, newspaper articles and journals from the time period speak of the predations of brutal robbers and gangsters.
For most of Chinese history, martial arts were seen as evil and repugnant. The scholar-bureaucrats held themselves to be above military matters. Daoism teaches that weapons are ominous tools, abhorred by all creatures; while Buddhism preaches non-violence and the sanctity of all living things. Soldiers were heroes only in times of war; in peacetime they were treated as uncouth brutes. Lacking social mobility, capital and influence, in lean times, men skilled in martial arts would turn to banditry.
In such a milieu, martial arts was intrinsically tied to survival. Martial artists put their lives on their line to earn money and ensure the survival of their family and community. Things like morality and religion become distant thoughts when the larder is empty, the crops have failed for the third time in a row, and the mandarins in Beijing have abandoned you to fend for yourself.
The rise of vicious criminals led to the rise of biaoju: escort agencies that protected merchants and government officials as they travelled the dangerous roads of China. To protect their clients, biaoju needed fighters and teachers skilled in martial arts. The military and police, noting the successes of the most famous guards, would often hire them as instructors or to capture notorious criminals. Martial arts masters discovered they could make a comfortable living by teaching their art, as opposed to fighting people. As martial arts entered popular awareness, street entertainers and opera troupes featured flashy martial choreography to dazzle their audiences. And thus an entire ecosystem around martial arts was born.
The Annals of Jingwu, published in December 1919, recorded a speech by Lu Weichang, one of the key officials of the Jingwu association. He said, “Ten years ago, our nation’s martial arts practitioners were looked upon as little more than bandits, but it is now understood that these arts are an excellent means of physical education.”
As recently as the turn of the 20th century, martial arts in China were associated with banditry and bloodshed. The idea that martial arts can be a beneficial practice was a relatively recent concept.
We don’t live in those times today, but extant Chinese martial arts emerged from that time period. Martial artists from that era would think in terms of struggle and survival—as would martial artists who live in a similar setting.
And intricately tied into survival was reputation and honour.
Reputation
In the world of the rivers and lakes, reputation is everything. Those who fail to defend their reputation will fall from grace, and will never again be allowed to return to the rivers and lakes until they redeem themselves.
When a biaoju enters a new territory, the local gangsters will challenge the biaoju to a match. This match isn’t necessarily lethal, in that the gangsters and the guards may not be fighting to the death. But it is life-or-death to the biaoju. The biaoju must defeat the gangsters. Should they fail, they will experience a severe reputational loss. They have shown that they cannot fight, and therefore cannot protect their clients. Therefore no one will hire them.
When a martial arts instructor sets up a school, he is telling the world that he knows how to fight. His school’s very existence will draw the attention of those who seek to learn master arts, and to expose frauds. When challenged, an instructor must be able to defeat the challenger. If not, he is expected to close up shop and leave town. His own students will abandon him in favour of teachers who can fight.
This custom is still practiced today in China. When a martial arts teacher arrives in a new city to hold classes, local strongmen may challenge him under the pretext of ‘requesting for a lesson’. Should the teacher fail the challenge, he will be blacklisted by the local jianghu and forbidden from teaching martial arts in the city.
When bandits run rampant, communities turn to their local martial artists for protection and support. Skilled martial artists would seek out notorious bandits to defeat them—usually by killing or crippling them. This was called ‘taking back the art’, a recognition that the bandits had sullied the reputations of their schools and lineages.
The Chinese term for ‘martial’, 武, is written with the characters ‘stop’ and ‘ge’. The ge is an ancient polearm. The implication is that the martial arts is a means of stopping the ge, and the reason one would do that is to protect someone. This speaks to an inherently noble and defensive purpose. Those who walk the way of the warrior will be expected to stop the ge—with their own bodies, if need be.
Idealists drawn to the notion of protecting the innocent would find much comfort in this interpretation of the term. And in an environment where bandits are known to be skilled martial artists, it would motivate these idealists to train that much harder, so that they could take back the art from those who abuse it.
In the First World today, violence as a means of upholding honour and reputation is an alien concept. We live in a kindler, gentler age, where violence is almost always frowned upon. Perhaps an exception is combat sports—boxing, mixed martial arts, and competitive events—where athletes fight each other for glory, rich purses, and to pursue martial excellence.
Yet the world of today is not the world of late Qing China—and isn’t necessarily the world of fiction either.
Cultivation
Cultivation stories are filled with action-packed adventures set in violent times. It is ironic, therefore, that the idea of martial arts as cultivation came from a peaceful era.
Grandmaster Sun Lutang popularized the notion of martial arts as a means of self-cultivation. While martial arts had been practiced as a means of self-cultivation since the late Ming Dynasty, if not earlier, this approach was largely confined to monks and educated elites. For everyone else, martial arts was primarily a means of combat, until the late Qing Dynasty.
Born in a town near Baoding, Sun Lutang immersed himself in studies of martial arts, Daoism and Confucianism. He fought in challenge matches and worked as a bodyguard. He founded the Sun styles of xingyiquan, baguazhang and taijiquan.
Then came the Boxer Rebellion of 1899.
Sun Lutang relocated his family to safety. Some of his students and teachers fought in the Rebellion. One of them, Cheng Ting Hua, the man who taught him baguazhang, was killed by German troops. The war ravaged through the capital and tore Baoding apart.
After the Rebellion, public sentiment turned against martial arts. Schools in Beijing were shut down and martial artists forced underground. Sun Lutang was far enough away from the capital that he could continue teaching unimpeded.
It is unclear how deeply the war affected Sun’s martial philosophy. What is known is that after the Rebellion, at a time when Chinese martial arts were on the brink of extinction, he advocated the practice of martial arts for health and self-cultivation. He sought to appeal to an educated middle-class audience, in a bid to ensure the continued propagation of the arts. When he penned his martial arts manuals, he took pains to emphasize the health and spiritual benefits of cultivation. In his books, he makes many references to Chinese classics, hinting at his intended audience, and how he intended them to use his teachings.
To be sure, the cultivation practices in the internal martial arts predated Sun Lutang. They were always there, hidden in the movements, transmitted only to indoor students. His great accomplishment was to emphasise cultivation and transmit it to a new demographic, one that would be receptive to such ideas.
And, no, Sun Lutang did not say anything about martial arts of cultivation as a means to grow one’s power. Indeed, in his baguazhang manual, he took pains to call out a certain form as being highly dangerous, warning the reader not to use these techniques recklessly, or to deliberately inflict evil on others. Cultivation through martial arts was primarily a means to achieve health, longevity, and harmony with the Way.
At the same time, martial arts training as a means of preparation for war was on the decline. Firearms had mostly replaced cold weapons everywhere in the world, even in the woefully inadequate Qing Dynasty military. As biaoju shuttered, demand for martial arts training dried up. Village militias only had enough time to learn the most basic of techniques. Policemen still needed martial training, but usually only to the extent needed to carry out their duties. In the age of the gun, there was little reason to learn martial arts for combat.
When Sun Lutang changed the emphasis from combat to cultivation, he renewed interest in martial arts in a new audience, and helped to transmit the ancient teachings into future generations. Rather than a means of defeating others, cultivation through martial arts was conceived as a means of defeating one’s personal weaknesses, and to attain a higher state of being.
This is the true meaning of martial cultivation, one that has been lost in the modern era… until now.
The whole gamut of reasons for learning martial arts will be explored in Saga of the Swordbreaker. Previously, Li Ming trained in martial arts so he could make a living as a biaohang and protect the innocent. As he grows in skill and stature, he encounters other people with their own reasons to practice the arts. These reasons, too, become part of his journey.
Saga of the Swordbreaker goes beyond your garden-variety cultivation fiction. It takes you on a journey through Chinese martial culture. It is a journey of adventure, discovery, and self-cultivation. Find out more here!
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