What exactly is LINEAGE when referring to martial arts?

[jay]

Ive heard the term used a lot when referring to kung fu. What exactly is lineage? Is there more than one lineage for a martial art? And is lineage who your teacher learned the martial art from, or who the martial art originated with???

Thanks.

 

[JimR1]

It is from whence the art has come, the history of what you are learning. Example, I can trace back through my shotokan instructors, and those who taught them, ending at Funakoshi Sensei. But Funakoshi Sensei has a history too, not shotokan, so I can trace influences in shotokan much farther back. This is the lineage of what I have learnt, and in part of what I am now learning. Legitimate martial arts all have such lineage that can be traced. I find it interesting to see where these 'lines of influence' converge and diverge. Quite a study could be made of that.

 

[Karateka]

When talking about lineage, it usually refers to your instructor and his instructor and so on back to the founder. It's a kind of seal of approval.

 

[WankS]

What that guy said ^
But also it's a red herring. They argue around and around about who has the r34l lineage so they never have to face up to whether they can actually fight or not.h

 

[LIONDANCER]

All traditional martial arts have a lineage. It is you, your teacher, your teacher's teacher, your teacher's teacher's teacher, and so on.
No one knows where martial arts originated from. Could be as early as when the first man made a fist to hit with and it evolved from that. So no, you can not trace a martial art back to it's origin. If you get far enough back it gets foggy. Stories are mixed in with reality and there is no way to tell which is what.
However a lot of times you can trace a martial art back to the beginning of a style. For example Karate styles can be traced back to Tode Sakugawa who passed it on to his student Bushi Matsumura. Tode Sakugawa lived from 1733-1815. There was martial art before that but who those people were is not clearly documented and the fighting style was supposedly crude.
Kung Fu too can be traced back to Shaolin in the sixth century AD and to the arrival of an Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhidarma, at the newly formed Shaolin Temple. Buddhism had been brought to China a few hundred years before that but Bodhidarma brought the new religion to the martial arts. Whether or not the monks at Shaolin were already versed in the martial arts and what exactly Bodhidarma taught them, is much disputed. However even before then there are records of martial arts dating back to Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor who was a general and propagated hand-to-hand martial arts' techniques in 2698 BC. Kung Fu is probably the one martial art that can actually be traced the furthest. We know about other martial arts the Greeks had for example but I don't think there is a continuous lineage. We know that Alexander the Great had a martial art which he got from Philip II of Macedonia, his father but there are holes in that lineage.