Book Review - Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals: A Historical Survey (Kennedy & Guo, 2008)

 

I would love to give this book five stars out of five, but cannot.

I found this book promising but deeply frustrating; it is essentially two books, and each of these books is itself a collection of essays rather than a cohesive whole.  The first book is a historiography of Chinese martial arts manuals, discussing the problems of age, the tendency of martial artists to exaggerate the accomplishments of the past, and the Republican Chinese renaissance of martial arts from a generally military field to a more broadly based cultural phenomenon.  This is the half written primarily by Brian Kennedy.  It is not perfect; Kennedy and Guo are very obviously xingyi practitioners and write what they know, and they are both far more familiar with developments in Taiwan than in China as a whole, including Hong Kong, the mainland, and Macau - again, writing what they know, and in the process illustrating the areas that they don't know and didn't research as heavily.

Before I continue, a note on terminology - historiography is, broadly speaking, how we study history itself, such as evaluating how trustworthy a source is, examining the biases of a source, and the limits of the available sources.  A professional historian might quibble with me on this, but I'm not writing for a professional audience, so this definition will work for the lay reader.

This first half is by far the stronger half.  Kennedy takes a common-sense approach to the subject, and discusses some common myths and their likely origin, and why he does not believe them, whether that is the supposed discovery of the xingyi scrolls in the base of an ancient statue or the supposed role of Bodhidharma at Shaolin.  He discusses the danger of blindly accepting accounts of ancient lineages that descend into mythology, the roots of Chinese martial historiography, and the problems of trying even to find historical manuals.  Unfortunately, Kennedy's individual essays do not tie comfortably into a coherent whole, and the result is a series of dissociated chapters held together loosely by a theme of Chinese martial arts historiography.  Sometimes it is fascinating and useful, like Tang Huo and mythbusting the origins of Chinese manuals, or the section about how the origins of martial arts, even those like tai chi, are generally martial - as in tied to the military practitioner.  Sometimes, it feels very much like a favor done for a friend, like the rather over-kind chapter on the owner of Lion Books, a publisher of martial arts books in Taiwan that still publishes today.  I have looked over the Lion catalogue, and the best word I can find to describe their approach is "uncritical."  Sometimes it feels simply frustratingly incomplete.

That last sentence feels like the perfect transition to discuss the second half of the book, primarily written by Elizabeth Guo.  There are two deficiencies that I see in Guo's half of the book.  First is that, of the manuals listed, precisely two reach even as far back as the Ming Dynasty, in the early 1600s.  This is to some degree understandable - in his half, Kennedy makes quite clear that there are problems with even finding books truly verifiable to the 1800s, never mind the 1500s.  However, because the majority of the manuals that Guo is discussing are from the Republican period, in historical terms, they are almost too modern to consider historical.  At some point it goes from being "a survey of historical manuals" to "a survey of the Republican martial arts renaissance."  It would be similar to me writing a catalog of modern longsword manuals.  I certainly can write a catalog of Tobler, Windsor, and company, but I'm not writing about historical manuals at that point but doing a literature survey of what we know right now.

The second problem I see in Guo's section is that, especially given that the two authors make the point that most of these manuals aren't available in English, none of the manuals are ever quoted.  Want to know what any of these people actually say? Too damn bad! You get a two-paragraph blurb followed by a bunch of blurry B&W photos scanned in from the manual.  This is especially frustrating given that Kennedy has a number of quotes from his sources.  This is especially egregious in cases like the mid-1500s manuals, where the average martial artist will not look at a sword or spear manual and build a plausible reconstruction of the action being depicted.  Cases like the modern boxing manual, the average person can understand that the action shown is delivering a punch, but why is a man with a shield in a high guard and weight far back on his back leg? Is he parrying or coiling to launch? Good luck figuring that out from Guo's survey.

All of this in combination makes it very difficult to evaluate how significant Guo's sources truly are.  Is the western boxing manual from the 1930s actually important, or is it simply an interesting factoid she felt like including? There is a frustratingly low amount of analysis for each source, no quotations, and an over-reliance on images pulled from the manuals, which fill pages, but don't fill brain cells.

I give Kennedy's section four, and Guo's section a low three.  This book started promising and ended frustrating.  I recommend it to the collector of manuals, but not to someone looking for practical martial arts advice.