Early martial arts disciplines like karate grew in tandem with Eastern philosophies such as Buddhist thought, and served as excellent practical outgrowths of those ideas and practices, much like the meditation practices and rituals themselves. To karate practitioners, qualities like mindfulness, humility, and conscientiousness were essential to mastery of the discipline.
These qualities helped the practitioner to stay in tune with the body, and exist in the present moment with grace and fluidity. Beyond that, these religious ideas undergirded a way of life. One approached one's teachers with respect, and one treated combat as a grave matter to be reflected on with weight, and then turned to as a last resort.
Now if we turn to a common Western karate center and examine its advertising rhetoric, we see something very interesting. We see these qualities reproduced, but within a different ethos, a different way of life. The split becomes especially apparent when these karate centers appeal to parents that are looking to enroll their children.
The qualities of mindfulness, humility, and conscientiousness are still there, but they are touted as a way to "condition" the child to better follow directions and integrate into a regimented life. What was once an intrinsically rewarding set of values which extended to all spheres of life has become a truncated and instrumentalized mechanism, which is driven through external reward, or at least the withdrawal of external punishment.
Now, let's be clear: this split is a gross simplification for the sake of illustration. Surely the values of Eastern martial arts have been taken up as binding material for authoritarian structures in the East, just as they have contributed to holistic reawakenings in the West. Such is the nature of values when they are generated and then undergo decay and rebirth over time, in accordance with the landscapes that communicate them.
But then this simplification serves a purpose as well: to point a finger. The extractive, authoritarian human motivation and experience is one that has been common to the species across time and space, and the same is true for the generative and anti-authoritarian. The contrasts exist in where these tendencies are springing up, what kind of critical mass they enjoy, and where they are going. One only has to look upon geopolitical affairs and the flows of materials and cultures to see that capital is the premier driving force on the world stage, a force which inspires the extractive and authoritarian instinct most copiously, for various interrelated reasons, and which currently emanates from Western origins, at least as far as we can immediately identify, for all practical purposes.
The Western Babylon - however marbled with radical movement and ideology - is the extractor par excellence of our time, an extractor that inspires sympathetic and self-protective measures in all of those societies that surround it.
Anyway, to get back on track, the basic pattern of distorted value and its cycles of birth and death can be apprehended wherever the genesis of religious experience produces communicable artifacts, which besides having the ability to reproduce their own nature as they spread, also have the capacity to be separated from their cradle and instrumentalized to achieve a limited effect.
The old saw about religion being the opiate of the masses is incomplete. Religion begins as the poppy with a life of its own, taking root in a soil and growing with the soil. The narcotic nature of that poppy makes up the poppy itself, and is only fully essentiallized when it is finally extracted by an external power for the sake of a separated and specialized purpose: that of pacifying through violence.
