When people become devoted to a martial art, they are doing so not at a single point in time but in a process that extends through time — the present moment, the memory they have of their training, and their expectations of the future.
Often very devoted practitioners cherish the first view they had of an art, when their inspiration and excitement was at its peak. Of course, when they began training they were also rote beginners at the practice, so not well qualified to judge the art, or even their experience learning it. As they learn arts that have layers to them, they may experience some distress, especially after thinking they have understood or become proficient with a portion of its teachings. This can happen when a teacher introduces another level to training, or provides information that seems to go against the grain of what they were first taught. Much of modern culture prizes linear processes, quick or slow, but advancement nonetheless. Instead, in traditional martial arts, we often experience plateaus of understanding that can persist for a long time (sometimes, indefinitely) that would need to be processed in some way to move through and beyond to greater levels of skill.
A teacher has to judge when to show the student directly, when to prompt them indirectly, and when to simply watch and wait as the student struggles. Sometimes the student does not figure out how to swim — in the case of traditional swordsmanship one does not literally drown under such circumstances, but nevertheless the expereince can be stressful. Is the teacher simply not teaching? Do they not care about the student succeeding? Do they know something they will not share? Why are they indifferent to their student's suffering?
One perspective is that a practitioner should study under a teacher that shares their knowledge without reservation, but from the teacher's perspective they may indeed be doing so, only to have the student miss key details either by training with not enough attention (they think they 'know' the solo or partner form or other principle) or intensity (they think they don't need to practice as much now they have reached a certain 'level' of training). Or their training is distracted by continued obligations they feel they have to other activities, but are irrelevant to their teacher (e.g., continuing to practice another martial arts). Or they are distracted within the group. They might think they should rework material for beginners they are mentoring, making it 'easier' for them to learn, or rework the curriculum of what they are learning to make it more 'common sense', thus destroying parts of its character they are in fact unaware of. The examples go on.
Of course, there are also teachers who cover up their limitations by pretending to know more than they do, and point to a myriad of reasons a student is not ready for more. Or they suffer other problems of character or behavior a student might only discover after many years. This narrative can cut both ways.
A student who is a gifted athlete or naturally strong and agile might discount the refined body mechanics introduced in advanced martial practices if they have to that point excelled using their natural skill. They may be resistent to changes a teacher appears to be making, which are not changes to an art but instead revealing a more subtle manner in which the art can be practiced, once a person has some passing familiarity with it. The teacher is the same person the gifted student was excited to train with initially, but when the teacher introduces more sophisticated practices that challenge the very notion of natural strength and agility, the gifted student might be quite frustrated that their innate abilities (or cultivated, through western physical culture) are not good enough or being discounted. Especially if they view their teacher as not as strong or fast as agile as they are, due to age or some other factor.
These kind of internal narratives on the parts of students often assume the teacher's skill is fixed and not changing over time. In reality, teachers themselves continue to train and their understanding of arts mature and evolve. So, they are not the same people the student began training under. We train, we age, we teach, we take on new practices, sometimes let old practices go. It is not always the case that early students of a teacher are more fortunate, if the teacher's understanding has deepened over time. Each case will be unique. But as a teacher's understanding evolves, they very well can practice the same martial art with a new perspective, if they are aware of and preserve its guiding principles.
I mentioned the notion of nostalgia for early training. Maybe some practitioners feel the first way they trained was more authentic than later on, if a teacher has made some small modifications to how they practice an art. But if the teacher has a deeper understanding, those changes may be quite important to pay attention to, and not sometime to be quickly discounted. Once people get into a specific habit of thinking and movement, they feel good about a certain way of doing things. They want to build on that knowledge, and in a linear fashion it is appealing then to learn more content, acquire more ranks, feel like they approaching the end of an art. But arts do not end with being awarded their final license.
The understanding of an art can have multiple layers of meaning. They way I do introductory practices twenty years after beginning training should not be the same as I did when I first trained and was being watched by my teacher. If it was, the intervening time and effort served no purpose. But, ideally, the current practice would still be the arts I study, despite that changed understanding.
Arts that have a cohort of senior teachers that can interact and provide feedback to each other, collegially, tend to be stronger than ones that fracture and fracture as each generation passes. This is not a question of lineage. One can have a well-defined and accepted lineage and still not be very good, for example if an art was never very good to begin with, lost too much of its curriculum or higher-level knowledge or was taught to too many people, who thus did not learn the art at a deep enough level to convey it forward properly.
Given the difficulty associated to transmitting these art forms, maybe having a large size pool to sample from allows for there to be one or two people good enough to master the whole thing in a generation, but teaching a smaller group in a more dedicated fashion is generally a better path. I feel this to be important as students need to be held accountable, and teaching in a distributed seminar model to distance learners is exceedingly difficult when attempting to convey sophisticated approaches to body development, movement, mindset, and tactics. I've written before about doing so. One can have a well-defined and accepted lineage and still not be very good, for example if an art was never very good to begin with, lost too much of its curriculum or higher-level knowledge or was taught to too many people, who thus did not learn the art at a deep enough level to convey it forward properly.
I believe it is generally the case that high-level practitioners of martial arts, who developed and then were able to demonstrate martial skill also developed a public reputation of their skill, and thus attracted many students, or several generations of students, so were both well known and influenced later traditions. Arts that are small and rare might not actually be very good on average – if they were excellent, they would have generally become well known. So, it is not always the rare or small predecessor art (e.g., the first people practicing a specific art) that would necessarily be the best exponents of the art, or the best exemplar of the art today. Instead, it may be more likely the most famous or well-known practitioners of the art, who had a chance to interact (both peacefully in exchanges of information, and combatively in matches, challenges, duels, or warfare) with other martial artists, that would potentially have the highest quality practice. The question is whether that practice survived to the same level of virtuosity. Some arts may have flourished once and then wound up small, barely surviving, but it is very rare to find a lost art practiced by only one or two people that has any relevance in terms of skill or impact in the broader community.
Counter intuitively, arts generally start with a small curriculum based on key insights that distinguish them from the founder's previous training – they are not birthed fully grown addressing all modalities of combat. In China, there is a concept of ascribing the invention of an art to an interaction with a wandering monk or hermit, or mysterious teacher, stemming from the influence of Confucian concepts, where old knowledge is prized, and innovation held often in some level of suspicion. So, traditionally, Dong Haiquan does not invent bagua, he instead interacts with a mysterious Taoist who teaches him and then can no longer be found.
Over time, a core set of teachings explaining or introducing or preparing practitioners for those key insights is typically put in place, either by the founder of an art or his senior disciples when they pass what they have learned on to others. Teachers tend to add material over time: their own embellishments, their own deeper insights, material from other traditions they have studied, material to address the tactics of other groups they have encountered, material to explain the core insights of the founder or make them more easy to later apprehend. In times of peace, arts may grow considerably given the creative impulse teachers might have to develop new routines beyond any specific reason listed above.
