Queequeg wrote: ↑Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:39 pm
...in NM...
Johnny Tapia. That guy was fun to watch.
Ha yeah, that guy is such a local celebrity of course. Him and Breaking Bad lol, they get used as marketing a lot.
Queequeg wrote: ↑Thu Mar 18, 2021 2:52 pm
What if you are protecting people? What if the training is to incapacitate someone who is behaving in a violently aggressive manner? I would guess the training would need to be heavily balanced with metta and karuna. A person who is acting violently aggressive is by definition from a Buddhist perspective, out of their minds. They've given over to passions. To stop them from acting out would be a kind gesture.
This is a big part of it, what your training is oriented towards.
In general if one is training for self-defense, you are actually training to -not- be violent and to avoid it, but to have skills to protect oneself or others if needed, which does require some "simulated" violence at different levels of contact. So the training for it can be graphic, injurious if you're not careful etc. It however should
not make a person more aggressive.
In fact, I will tell you that some of the most violence-obsessed people I meet are those whose training is deficient in self-defense concepts, that have strange ideas about it, or a kind of fantasy idea about being a hero in a violent encounter. So in many cases the most unhealthy mindsets that develop are those which are deficient
in proper training about how violence works. The stereotype of the middle aged white guy holed up with his guns in his relatively safe suburban area with fantasies about taking down criminals is a good example. Another example on the opposite end would be an Aikido guy who thinks he can "avoid" hurting someone trying to smash his face in with fancy footwork maneuvers learned in the dojo with a compliant partner. This person is a mild danger because they have such a distorted idea about how violence works that they are overconfident in what their training can do.
Conversely, the guys I've known who do combat sport don't really view what they are doing as violence, they view it as sport. Some are good sportsmen, some are not, like any sport. Almost none of the combat sports people I've known are aggressive though. The Boxing gym is one of the most polite and earnest places I've ever trained. No bullshit, no ego, hard work and nothing else.
Of course, and let's recognize this:
most people will never use their skills in a violent encounter, plenty of people have never been in even a fistfight, much less a genuinely violent encounter...so what we are talking about is how certain things do or do not condition a person.
Along those lines, even for Combat sport there are significant parts of training that are not about fighting at all, but are about body mechanics, fitness, mental and physical endurance, social relationships, etc. A lot of these aspects are very positive, and tend to be the things that keep people training in the long term. For traditional martial arts this is even more so, most of why people train is for the personal-betterment aspect, even if they originally walk through the door for something more concrete.
Personally, I feel like a lot of the arguments in this thread circle around the idea that violence is merely physical acts, and that by studying physical acts you must become violent. It's more accurate to say that an already violent person has more tools to be violent if they have training. It takes more than learning violent acts to make people violent and aggressive - to shift someone's personality like that. First and foremost, you have to have a lack of respect for other people's autonomy..this is known and taught in things like DV classes. If some of the logic in this thread were true, then we would treat violent people's minds by approaching how they physically do violence...which is not at all how that is handled. The first thing that is looked at is how the violent person views others - this is what drives violence and domination of others, not knowledge of physical acts, which can be used either to perpetuate violence -or- to repel it.
There is some risk of conditioning oneself negatively for sure in martial arts or combat sport training, but it is not so black and white. The idea that learning about violence makes one violent is a Buddhist renunciate attitude it's best forms, and in it's worst forms is just people who can be insulated from violence exercising their privilege to do so. I cannot view the latter as a valid way of seeing things, though the former is reasonable for people who follow the renuniciate way of dealing with kleshas. We could still get into whether or not someone is angry or similarly caught in the afflictions during martial arts training..usually they are not, but that would get pretty abstract.
haha wrote: ↑Thu Mar 18, 2021 5:16 pm
I am not sure from where I have got this idea. But there might be some prohibition to watching bull-fight/animals fight or some kind of fight. Someone could tell what buddha said about it. This would also valid for person to person fight. We can generally conclude that it is not conducive for liberation.
IIRC there are direct prohibitions in the Pali Canon against hanging with Boxers and Wrestlers, I'm not denying that. Like I said, if someone's practice is renunciation, I get why they should not do martial arts, watch combat sports, etc. In Vajrayana, and to degree in places in the Mahayana, figuring out what is and is not of benefit involves a different reasoning than simple prohibition...that is a Sravakayana thing.