Sifu Freddie Lee Safe Sparring Kung Fu Demo
http://www.FreddiesModernKungFu.com
Email: [email protected]
Blog: http://freddiesmodernkungfu.blogspot.com

This is one of my earlier videos sparring with someone that contacted me online. He was not my student. He contacted me with a special request. He said he wanted to strictly spar. He said he went to a Karate school and that he needed to get better at sparring but then his Master didn’t have time to help him, so he wanted me to spar with him to help him improve.

After talking to him on the phone and meeting him, I felt he was a really nice guy and meant no harm, so I decided to work with him. Normally I only spar with friends or students, but in this case I could tell he wasn’t out to prove anything, he just sincerely wanted help to improve.

So I ended up working with him in some beginners level safe sparring. Which he really enjoyed. He enjoyed it so much that he ended up telling his Karate Master about the arrangement and showed him the videos, then his Karate Master got upset. His Master wanted him to stop meeting with me and then his Master wanted to meet me and spar with me or at least just monitor and coach him while he was sparring me. I told him that I was not up for that.

Already I felt a bad vibe with that, obviously that was not going to be a safe arrangement. As the Karate Teacher saw the whole thing as me trying to steal away one of his students, or to take away a part of his income. When it comes to business, when it comes to money, it could get pretty messy when it comes to Martial Arts. Learning from two teachers ends up becoming a conflict of interest.

When it comes to marriage, having two wives is disallowed, you are only allowed one wife, having two is not only frowned upon but illegal. When it comes to learning the Martial Arts the traditional way, you are only supposed to have one Master, not two or more. Like the saying of Jesus goes, “you can only serve one master.”

Well do I agree with this? In a way I do, even Osho has said in one of his books that when you have one Master, he takes away all complexity because you only have to listen to one, if you don’t surrender yourself to one Master then you can be pulled thousands of ways by your inner desires and now you will never be in peace. That is like having one Master pull you one way and the other pulling you the opposite way, you will be torn apart.

That is why they say that parents need to be on the same page when disciplining children. But imagine two parents who are divorced and they purposefully tell the child the opposite of what the other parent saids. One parent is telling the child to eat healthy, while the other is telling him to eat junk. It gets very messy

Having one Master is the way to go. You can’t live in two homes at the same time. You can’t live in China and America at the same time. You can only be in one country at a time. You have one place of residence.

I guess in this situation, the Master becomes like the students Parent. The Parent did not want the child to learn from me but then the child is interested in learning from me. But without the approval of the parent, the child is prevented from learning from me, it is the way it is. In most traditional Martial Art schools there is a certain level of loyalty that is expected. But fight gyms are not like this at all, you are not bound by any Master, you can just do whatever you want, you can jump from gym to gym and just fight whoever, the coach will even probably encourage you to do so.

With almost anything in life, when money gets involved, things get complicated. When you have two Martial Art teachers who are teaching for pay and there is only one paying student, the two Martial Art teachers can end up in conflict with one another, it can get pretty messy. And that’s basically what leads to this whole cage fight thing. You have two teachers who end up fighting in the cage to win over the students. And that is something I strongly disagree with.

What I say is, just leave it up to the student, if the student wants to leave one teacher to move to the next so be it. If any student wanted me to fight another teacher to prove that I am worthy to be his teacher, that already shows me that he is not a student worthy of having.

I will never fight any teacher to prove anything, that goes against the teachings of the Martial Arts. I’m just here to be honest and self-expressive as an Artist. Those that wish to learn from me can learn from me but if they do not believe I am qualified to teach them, then they are free to go elsewhere to find a teacher of whom they do give that respect.