The Best Martial Art

No question in the martial arts world is more likely to bring about a controversy than that of "Which martial art is the best?"

There are dozens of sites and forums floating around out on the internet, perhaps most popularly Bullshido.net (which isn't designed exactly around the question but seems to center on it), begging the question and fighting about the responses, often presenting this argument or that for or against whatever martial art they feel like talking about, defending, or decrying. Often these arguments get quite heated, becoming flame wars and escalating to the point of trying to call out practitioners for a head-to-head battle to determine which art is really supreme.

Of course, this same question has spurred several popular television shows coming out of every "learning" type cable channel in the world, for examples Fight Science, which used pseudo-scientific means to investigate the question, Human Weapon, which kind of approaches the question directly but in a high-glam-low-realism way, along with several others of the sort, all of which I'd grade as being "interesting" but only semi-educational and starkly unscientific about their approach to quantify or legitimize the question at hand.

It's possible as well that one of the most popular fighting movement in the world today (and probably the fastest growing movement in terms of popularity, passing boxing and kickboxing some time ago), the mixed martial arts (MMA) movement, got its start in the no-holds-barred arenas first widely popularized in the West by the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). This, of course, is not a single martial art, but it seems to be the case that its original conception was to take fighters at the top of their games from different backgrounds and pit them against each other to see which fighters and styles reigned supreme. As is well-known, there are certain standouts: notably Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), but almost always in some kind of combination.

From what I've seen, this is how I think it works: essentially every style thinks that it is the best style, if not universally at least for some specific purpose. That makes sense, if it wasn't true, these styles would have died out long ago because people would have just pitched the study of them for better things. Furthermore, the question seems not to be one that can be answered because while all arts have the same overall goal, each hopes to achieve it in certain different ways that work better in some specific circumstances than others. Wing Chun (Wing Tsun), for instance, is pretty good for fighting in the tight, closed-in spaces that it was designed for, but in other circumstances, calling it "The Ultimate Art" seems a little inappropriate. BJJ is similar in that in some situations, it's pretty hard to argue with its effectiveness, but in others (on asphalt in a situation where your opponent might have a buddy or two lurking), it seems not to fit so well.

Incidentally, this "Ultimate Art" thing comes from a rather popular t-shirt that I see floating around a lot of BJJ programs that reads: "BJJ, the ultimate art," often with a picture of someone getting choked out or something alongside it. That claim seems a little too substantial, in my opinion, for anything. Still, I've heard similar statements (even from the top) about baguazhang and Yin Style Bagua in particular. Are they true? I think context has a lot to do with it.

Instead of delving into why I think one art or another is great or not so great, I would rather raise some questions for anyone interested in the pursuit of knowledge of this kind. Maybe these will spur discussion, and perhaps they'll just sit in people's minds.

First, what would qualify an art as the best?
Since there are many factors and goals to be considered within any art, this is difficult to address directly. Obviously, the ability to win fights against trained and untrained opponents should definitely be considered. Should the level of physical (or other) development of the body, mind, mind/body, qi, etc., be taken into account? Suppose, for instance, that there's an art that develops the body tremendously well but produces relatively poor fighters. How does that compare with an art that produces fantastic fighters whose bodies are fit only for wear, tear, and eventually destruction over time? There are too many goals and directions to be considered here to answer this clearly unless there is some art out there that is superior in most if not all of these regards: building the body (strength, flexibility, balance, movement, etc.), improving health, fostering longevity, developing the mind and internal systems, as well as obviously creating adept fighters. It seems scoring highly in all of these would be a requirement of any art contending that it is "the best."

Second, how do you measure?
The UFC and its likenesses present one method of measurement: take rather seasoned fighthers from a variety of backgrounds and let them beat on one another until we see who comes out on top. Of course, the modern UFC breaks this up by weight classes and includes a number of reasonable rules to make it more and more sporting (and so they can make more and more money off it). Is this a good measure of an art, though? At least in terms of ideals, we'd like to think of martial arts as giving the little, weak guy an edge over the big, strong guy... so weight classes aren't so good. Also, it seems that this approach measures the ability of the art to develop good sport-fighters, not the actual depth and effectiveness of the art itself. I know that BJJ guys can poke people in the eyes and add that kind of thing to their game, but this aspect of measurement does not take that into account in any realistic way.

Fight Science tried a different approach: quantifying various aspects of the art to see who can hit harder or faster, move more nimbly, or what have you. It didn't really do anything from the perspective of actually fighting one another, however, and it certainly didn't do what it did scienfically. For instance, the boxer, kickboxer, Tae Kwon Do, and karate guys on that show were all pretty big guys. The "kung fu" guy (practicing Shaolin) was comparatively tiny. I was kind of put off by the obvious discrepency when they tested punching strength (the boxer won, of course, and probably should/would have in a more scientific approach). The kicking strength evaluation was even more ridiculous since the folks threw different kicks, including the TKD guy running halfway across the room to throw his kick. This makes for cool tv, folks, but shitty science. More uniform conditions, larger samples, averages, and statistics would have said a lot more about things than that relatively influential show could hope to.

Third, when/who do you measure?
When should the effectiveness of an art be measured in terms of judging its practitioners? I often hear about a guy doing this art for six months beating up a guy that did that art for a year. So? This is no good for a few reasons: What if the one guy just sucked? What if the one guy trained less in that year than that other guy did in six months? What if [insert any of the dozen or so reasonable arguments the loser would contend makes it unfair]? On the other hand, should it be measured by comparing people at the very top of their arts? That seems equally not good: what if this guy is better than that guy regardless of which art they studied, i.e. if they had studied the same art with the same intensity, the one that won still would have won because he's just better. Again, this would require averages over large samples to have any real meaning, and the samples would all have to be standardized for effort, size, strength, training duration, and a host of other factors that can't really be standardized very well.

Honestly, most people that do something aren't really that good at what they do, and therefore those people probably aren't very representative of the art. On the other hand, it seems unreasonable to judge the matter only in terms of the outliers because they are, by definition, atypical and would likely excel in any art they worked at. Basically... I don't think this can be measured.

Fourth, who the hell cares?
This question of superiority in arts reminds me of the question of superiority in religion. It's maybe slightly more likely that you'll convert someone than from one faith to another, but in either case, it probably requires you to use force. If you like your art, I say train it. If you don't like your art, find a new one. If you feel like your art bottomed out on you, look for a deeper one or one that fits you better. If your art is too complicated or difficult for you, find something you can handle. We're all supposed to be doing martial arts because we like it, right? It's not like martial arts have a huge military meaning any longer (cf. the Boxer Rebellion), so do what you like to do.

Essentially, my opinion is that this question is kind of crap to begin with. Certainly there are some arts that do not offer practitioners as much as other arts would. Those arts might be considered worse than others, but even the content offering is difficult to quantify objectively making even this difficult to measure meaningfully. Certainly also, there are just exceptional people who can do exceptional things even with a crap art, so almost any martial art, save perhaps totally made-up ones (what I like to call Redneck Ryus), could potentially create good or even great fighters.

From what I've experienced, for those interested, Yin Style Baguazhang seems incredibly thorough and complete. It seems to contain a startlingly deep amount of potential development in every arena I can think of that a martial artist would possibly be interested in: physical development, skills development, health building, fighting ability, self-defense quality, training diversity, internal growth, mental challenge, physical demand, etc., combined with a high degree of realistic practicality to its methods and theory. It is deep and complete with nothing seeming to be lacking. That much is true. Would I expect most of its practitioners to be able to go win a fight against people that train other stuff? Not really... but I wouldn't expect that out of any art.

Will I say it's the best? I'm unqualified to and therefore loathe to say anything is objectively the best, but He Jinbao will happily say it is. Of course, he's the boss of the style, so he really should be saying that: it's his, for the time being, and he is it, in some sense, as he is its true representative in the world right now. I agree in that it offers, in some respects, far more than many other arts do. From what I've gathered, its reputation in China supports his claim as well, but reputations are hardly an objective basis.

For me, what's most important is that I like it and feel that I get a tremendous amount out of training it. If that doesn't earn it some points where they matter: for me, then nothing really does.