What exactly qualifies as a Traditional Martial Art?

[Omega Supreme]

I'm starting to think the entire term is useless. The more you try to stick a specific definition on it, the more the definition fails to apply to anything, or, alternately, encompasses everything. Alive/non-alive is a clear distinction, whereas traditional and... well, what? Contemporary? Practical? Competitive? There is no effective antonym.

Antonym?

[W. Rabbit]

Many of the once thousands of bujutsu-ryu ha are now extinct, most of them because the headmasters and retainers of those systems were eventually killed by better headmasters and retainers of other (and often better) schools. That's the way it worked then through roughly 300 years of continuous internal warfare.

This pretty well sums up the history of CMA too. Ancient China was a meatgrinder of fighting styles.

Shitty styles didn't get humiliated: you were brutally beaten to death or chopped to pieces. Your students decided they needed to find a new master.

And once peacetime approached, the focus became less life or death skills and more personal development, spiritual growth, etc.

[Andrew Lawrence]

Really it seems that the term has little use in actual categorizing or grouping a bunch of arts together by any useful set of criteria. It could be considered taxonomically redundant as a term and perhaps a new term or new terms will spring up to replace it in time.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the 'Traditional' label has managed to survive, its memetic quality so to speak, is that it in conjures up an image of martial arts style that are of a similar mindset in the mind of the person using the term.

For example when people say traditional do they really mean that in their experience practitioners of the arts make appeals to authority style arguments when trying to justify the validity of their style, using the age of a technique or style (quite often falsely) or the fact that it has been done like that for generations, quoting masters and grand-masters, and placing time served as more important that technical ability, or making assumptions that time served equals technical ability. Instead of making they arguments based on sparring and competition.

It's about the only reason i can think of for the term still being in use, that it goes someway towards describing the typical practitioner, rather than actually describing the arts being practiced.

[Andrew Lawrence]

Really it seems that the term has little use in actual categorizing or grouping a bunch of arts together by any useful set of criteria. It could be considered taxonomically redundant as a term and perhaps a new term or new terms will spring up to replace it in time.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the 'Traditional' label has managed to survive, its memetic quality so to speak, is that it in conjures up an image of martial arts style that are of a similar mindset in the mind of the person using the term.

For example when people say traditional do they really mean that in their experience practitioners of the arts make appeals to authority style arguments when trying to justify the validity of their style, using the age of a technique or style (quite often falsely) or the fact that it has been done like that for generations, quoting masters and grand-masters, and placing time served as more important that technical ability, or making assumptions that time served equals technical ability. Instead of making they arguments based on sparring and competition.

It's about the only reason i can think of for the term still being in use, that it goes someway towards describing the typical practitioner, rather than actual describe the arts practiced.

[goodlun]

Does it have a sport that goes with it? Yes not traditional No then it is traditional even invented yesterday as long as it has an oriental name.

[Holy Moment]

Here, I'll spell it out for everybody and tell you which arts are traditional and which arts are MMA (Full-contact or Alive would be a better name, but I'll go with MMA because that's what self-proclaimed traditional martial artists would call them). I think this is the only way we can really go about things, and when we reach a point of contention the discussion can progress from there.

-Traditional
Aikido
Ninjutsu
Most styles of karate
Most styles of kung-fu
Taekwondo
Hapkido (And related Korean styles)
Silat
Japanese Jiu-Jitsu

-MMA
Boxing
Judo (Used to be traditional until MMA took off. Now it's been disavowed by traditionalists because it's a grappling art)
Muay Thai
BJJ
Kickboxing
Wrestling
SAMBO
Kyokushin and off-shoots (Except those who consider themselves traditional)
Savate
Sanda

Along with TMA and MMA, the other classifications for martial arts are Str33t and Weapons. Str33t martial arts are defined by the disapproval of sport and traditional methods, although there's some crossover between traditional and Str33t mentalities (Mainly, the disapproval of sport methods).

-Str33t
Krav Maga
Systema
San Soo
SCARS

-Weapons
Fencing
Kendo
Eskrima/Kali
Renaissance fencing

[Holy Moment]

I have to say, I really think the term was either born out of ignorance or made up to contrast with sport martial arts. Back in my Tang Soo Do days, my instructor always emphasized how TSD was the "traditional" form of the more sport oriented Taekwondo (I had my doubts about the validity of these "traditional" methods early on, being that the kids from the Taekwondo school we sparred with always seemed to be better than us).

In other contexts, like when a TMA guy is disparaging MMA for example, I think the term is being used under the belife that the style he practices really is older than the styles a mixed martial artist studies (Which is often not true).

[Rivington]

What about SMA? As in Static Martial Arts.

So then taiji, for example, isn't a static martial art, as there is a "new frame" of the Chen style (an early twentieth century innovation) and a "practical" version of that new frame (a late twentieth century innovation), as well as a "hunyuan" version.

[FinalLegion]

Actually, that's not technically true.

Yes there's a strong association to the "traditional" or old school jujutsu from which Judo was developed however, any martial tradition created in Japan post Meiji Restoration is very much "gendai" - modern and not classical or "traditional" in nature because they have evolved or developed from their origins.

Aikido, Seitie Iaido, some forms of Karate-do etc are all gendai budo but are all strongly based of older classical systems.

"Classical" is a better descriptive however from a Japanese perspective there's already two specific terms which more than adequately define the difference :

Koryu - Old school

Gendai - Modern

The reason why BJJ isn't generally considered traditional is because it is current and relevant to our present era. That's the same as how martial systems in Japan were considered when they were current and relevant to that era

Given that explanation, I have a question:

If one wanted to try and adapt a koryu art into modern culture, would it still be a koryu art or would it now be considered a gendai art?

[CrackFox]

Again, that's a misconception and not true or accurate description of many old-school systems.

You seem to be talking about koryu styles, which is something different again. I was trying to give a working definition of that people mean when they say TMA - something that includes genuinely old styles, and the hundreds of kung-fu/karate/jujutsu/whatever styles that were developed last Tuesday, and which claim to be traditional and deadly.

Also I would argue that even with the koryu styles, my definition still applies, as while they may have once been based on doing what works, they are *now* focused on doing things the way they used to be done. It doesn't matter if the way they do things is the best way - developed by trial and error in the battlefield - or something that is completely made up. You get shown the thing, you do it as instructed and if you do it another way, you're wrong.