How important is lineage to you?

We all have a martial arts lineage of sorts, some remain faithful to one, others perhaps through no fault of their own, have several. There are those that believe who you follow is of the utmost importance, and there are others who couldn’t care less.
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Anyone who has an interest in the history of the traditional martial arts will be very familiar with the idea of “lineage snobbery.”
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One purpose of a “lineage” is to create the image of unwavering historical continuity over time. It denotes who inherits the style or family legacy as well as the responsibility for preserving the memory of certain ancestors.
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Stories of these ancestors often take on legendary qualities, and may even be subject to a “creative process”.
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However, lineage (or following a legacy) itself does not indicate the quality of an instructor’s teaching. Just because you can verify your teachers lineage, doesn’t guarantee that they themselves are good teachers.
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Are they any more skilled because of their lineage?….. Perhaps not. Just because someone can claim a lineage, it doesn’t mean that they have been taught everything in the art (you know who you are). Verifiable teaching skills are arguably way more important than lineage.
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The very fact that legitimacy can be inherited inevitably creates strong incentives within the martial arts for some individuals to subvert this process. There are many who buy their way into legitimacy, claiming that their lineage is somehow older, purer, or just more authentic than the one you belong to.
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Today of course, martial arts is also a business, and, like any franchise, as the number of schools rise, the quality of any given school can vary. Many individuals will claim lineage above all else. For many instructors it provides an alternate route to increasing their legitimacy in an already crowded marketplace.
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Lineage is not something I would consider to be the sole determining factor for evaluating the quality of a teacher or school, including my own. For me it’s the people, the practitioners, the current teachers. It’s important to me for the values I hold, and I believe that it’s valuable to have that.
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There was a phrase mentioned to me once that people say is an indicator of how good you are at your skill.… “You have a good teacher.”….. That’s good enough for me. 👊🥋
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📷 Photo Credit: courtesy of Leonardo Jahn & Osvalter Urbinati

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