Grinding

難得糊塗

Ignorance is bliss.

字字要咬出汁漿來

Every character must be chewed until its juice is out.

With still no time to do the necessary research and write long posts came the opportunity to experience a method used by old practices described in the second quote.

Nowadays with the internet, access to knowledge and information shouldn’t be an issue any more. But, unfortunately, actual knowledge has been replaced by an overflow of information, most of it closer to gossip than anything else. In martial arts, anyone can make a website and write anything, whether relevant or not (the present blog being the perfect example) and, with a few copy/paste, whatever information, whether right or not, can become the norm. Therefore, any information coming from only one site cannot be taken as a serious reference and even if it comes from numerous sites, it may still be totally bogus. Of course, martial artists can overcome this problem since what they should care about is more whether any information is useful or not in their present training, not if it is right or wrong.

Still, it is obvious that from times when information was scarce and martial artists not very literate, the situation was quite the opposite. Oral teachings with their limited sayings pushed students to take as much as they could from just one saying instead of reading hundreds and hundreds of pages and dozens of books. In a time when we try to absorb so much information and lose focus on more being able to do than just knowing, it may be interesting to do so. This might actually shine a light on a method rooted in other times.

And Black lives do matter