Kung Fu Whispers: the Memoirs of O'Sensei, Part 2

So, seekers after wisdom, it’s Sifu Seamus O’Sensei here with the second chapter of my memoirs. Today I want to talk about the acquisition and transmission of knowledge within the martial arts.

A little knowledge, they say, is a dangerous thing. But how much is a little knowledge? How dangerous is it? For all I know, the knowledge that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is a dangerous little bit of knowledge to have. I must look that up on Wikipedia.

One thing I do know is this: beware Chinese whispers. The expression comes from the days when students in a Kung Fu school in Shanghai would watch their Sifu – a notoriously strict and unforgiving teacher - demonstrating a technique, then whisper to each other as he stalked around the room, ‘I think he did it like this…’

Many years ago, in the town of Letterkenny it was, a man began courting a young lady. When the day came for him to go to her house for the first time, she cooked a joint of lamb. The first thing she did was to cut one end off of the joint, before putting it in the oven. The lamb was delicious, the best he’d ever tasted. He asked her what difference cutting the end off made and she said ‘I don’t know, but Mammy always did it and it seems to make a difference.’

Some time later she took him for Sunday lunch with her parents. Her mother, sure enough, cut the end off of a joint of lamb before cooking it, and again it was a superlative meal. The man asked her, ‘Mammy, you and your daughter both cook a fantastic joint, and you both cut the end off before putting it in the oven – what difference does that make?’ Again, Mammy wasn’t sure – ‘Me own Mammy always did that, and it seems to work.’

The day came when our young Romeo came to visit his love’s grandparents. Sure enough it was another Sunday, and sure enough the roast was a joint of lamb - almost as if things had been worked out purely for narrative convenience. The young man was drooling with anticipation. But his girlfriend’s Nan simply grabbed the joint, stuck it in a tin and shoved the tin in the oven. Our lad was shocked, but sure enough, the joint was utterly delicious. If anything, though he wasn’t fool enough to say it, Nan’s cooking was the best of the lot.

‘Nanny,’ he asked her, ‘You, your daughter and your granddaughter are all fantastic cooks. But your daughter cuts the end off of the joint before cooking it; so does your granddaughter. They both say they got it from you, and yet you just stuck the whole joint in a tin and stuck that in the oven. Why don’t you cut the end off of the joint?’

‘Oh,’ said Nanny, ‘I bought a bigger tin.’

There is a moral here for martial artists, and I cut the arms off of many students before I realised what it actually was: you don’t have to shove someone in a tin to teach him martial arts, but if you do, it’s a pretty good conditioning exercise.

And you can always buy a bigger tin.