From Shaolin and Okinawa to Bruce Lee and the Gracie family — the hand-to-hand fighting traditions that became sports, philosophies, and global cinema.
"Martial arts" is a 19th-century English translation of 武術 (bujutsu) — the technical fighting skills of Japan's warrior class — but the term has come to cover an enormous family of unarmed and weapon traditions across East Asia, with later branches in Brazil, Russia, France, and the United States.
Three things bind these traditions together. They are systems of physical violence codified into pedagogy. They are connected, in most cases, to a philosophical or religious framework — Buddhism, Taoism, Confucian propriety, Bushidō. And they have, in the modern era, mostly transformed from combat preparation into sport, art, and self-cultivation.
This deck covers the major Asian traditions (kung fu, karate, judo, jiu-jitsu, taekwondo, muay thai, aikido), the global figure of Bruce Lee, the modern synthesis we call MMA, the Brazilian transformation of jiu-jitsu by the Gracie family, and the Olympic combat sports.
What it does not cover: Western boxing, Greco-Roman wrestling, fencing — those have their own deck. The line is partly arbitrary, but the cultural lineages here are predominantly Asian and their modern sporting forms are mostly post-1880.
The mythology places the origin of Chinese martial arts at the Shaolin Monastery in Henan, founded c. 495 CE, when the Indian monk Bodhidharma reportedly taught fighting forms to weak monks. The historical record is thinner than the legend; what is documented is that Shaolin warrior monks fought for the Tang dynasty in the 7th century and were a recognised military force by the Ming.
What the West calls "kung fu" is in Chinese 武術 (wushu, "martial technique") or, more colloquially, 功夫 (gongfu, literally "skill achieved through time and effort"). It encompasses hundreds of styles, broadly grouped:
Northern styles — long-fist kicking systems (Changquan), Eagle Claw, Praying Mantis. Larger movements; legacy of mounted warfare.
Southern styles — Hung Gar, Wing Chun, Choy Li Fut. Closer-quarter, hand-prominent. Developed in densely populated Guangdong and Fujian.
Internal styles — Tai chi (Taijiquan), Bagua (Baguazhang), Xingyi (Xingyiquan). Slow, alignment-focused, drawing on Taoist body theory; weaponised through correct structure rather than muscular power.
The Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) was named for the Yihequan ("Righteous Harmony Fists") — a martial society that combined kung fu with spirit-possession rituals and rose against foreign concessions. The "boxers" were martial artists.
The 20th century professionalised wushu into a Chinese state-supported performance and competitive form, while many traditional family styles continued through individual lineage transmission, often in Hong Kong and Taiwan after 1949.
Karate (空手, "empty hand") emerged on Okinawa, the largest island of the Ryūkyū Kingdom, through the 17th-19th centuries. It synthesised indigenous Okinawan grappling (te) with Chinese kung fu carried by traders and teachers from Fujian.
Anko Itosu (1831-1915) is the central pedagogical figure. He systematised the kata curriculum, simplified what had been secret family transmissions, and in 1901 introduced karate into Okinawan public schools — the first institutional teaching of the art.
Gichin Funakoshi (1868-1957), Itosu's student, took karate to mainland Japan in 1922 at the invitation of the Ministry of Education. He renamed it from "Chinese hand" (唐手) to the homophonic "empty hand" (空手) to make it sound more Japanese, and founded what became the Shotokan school.
The major Japanese karate styles all date from the 1920s-30s mainland transmission:
Shotokan (Funakoshi). Long, low stances; linear power.
Goju-ryu (Chojun Miyagi). Hard-soft synthesis; strong Chinese influence retained.
Shito-ryu (Kenwa Mabuni). Combines elements of Itosu and Higaonna lineages.
Wado-ryu (Hironori Otsuka). Karate with jujutsu's body movement.
Post-1945 American occupation troops carried karate home; by 1960 it had become a global martial-arts category, with offshoots like Kyokushin (Mas Oyama, full-contact tournament karate) and the influence on the early American kickboxing scene.
Olympic karate debuted at Tokyo 2020 (held 2021) and was dropped after that single Games.
Judo (柔道, "the gentle way") is the work of one man: Jigoro Kano (1860-1938). Educated at Tokyo Imperial University, Kano studied multiple jujutsu schools (Tenjin Shinyo-ryu, Kito-ryu) and in 1882 founded the Kodokan in Tokyo, synthesising his predecessors into a single coherent system designed for safe practice and competition.
Kano's innovations were pedagogical and political:
— Eliminated dangerous strikes from regular training. Throws and groundwork could be practiced at full intensity with proper falls (ukemi).
— Created the dan/kyu rank system with coloured belts (a Kano invention; before judo, no martial art had belt ranks).
— Wrote the system in modern, scientific Japanese; gave techniques systematic names (seoi-nage, uchi-mata, osoto-gari).
— Promoted judo as physical education and as a vehicle for moral cultivation. The motto: "Seiryoku zen'yō, jita kyōei" — maximum efficient use of energy, mutual welfare and benefit.
Kano was Japan's first IOC member (1909) and the chief promoter of Japanese sport internationally. Judo became an Olympic sport at Tokyo 1964 (men's) and Barcelona 1992 (women's).
The modern competitive game has narrowed Kano's original technical vocabulary substantially — leg grabs were banned in 2010, ground time has been progressively reduced — but the institutional shape of the sport, with its dojos, gradings, and the Kodokan as nominal headquarters, remains as Kano left it.
Notable champions: Anton Geesink (Netherlands, broke Japan's monopoly at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic open-weight final), Yasuhiro Yamashita, Teddy Riner (France, 11 World Championship golds and three Olympic golds), Ryoko Tani.
Japanese jujutsu (柔術) — predecessor of judo — was the unarmed combat system of the samurai class, developed during Japan's Sengoku and Edo periods (roughly 1500-1850). Hundreds of ryū (schools) existed; key ones included Takenouchi-ryu (founded 1532, often cited as the oldest), Kito-ryu, Yoshin-ryu, Tenjin Shinyo-ryu, Daito-ryu Aiki-jujutsu.
The technical canon: throws, joint locks, chokes, pressure-point strikes, defenses against weapons (sword, staff, knife). The samurai assumption was that an unarmed encounter was a contingency — the warrior's primary weapons were his swords — so jujutsu was about closing distance, controlling, restraining or killing without weapons or with a small concealed weapon.
The Meiji Restoration (1868) abolished the samurai class. Jujutsu schools faced an existential crisis. Kano's judo was one response — a rationalising, educational reformulation. Other lineages survived in narrower channels:
Daito-ryu Aiki-jujutsu, transmitted by Sokaku Takeda (1860-1943), spawned aikido through Takeda's student Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969). Aikido (合気道, "the way of harmonising spirit") removed jujutsu's striking and competitive elements and reframed the system around joint locks and throws executed with circular blending against an attacker's energy.
Jujutsu reached Brazil through one specific transmission line — Mitsuyo Maeda, a Kano student who emigrated, taught Carlos Gracie in Belém in the 1920s — and produced what is now the world's most widely-practiced grappling art: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Taekwondo (跆拳道, "the way of foot and fist") is post-war: the systematisation of multiple Korean fighting traditions in the years after Japanese occupation ended in 1945.
The pre-1945 Korean martial heritage included taekkyon (an indigenous foot-fighting game) and subak. During Japanese occupation (1910-45), Korean instructors trained in Japanese karate; after liberation, several "kwans" (schools) opened in Seoul, each teaching a karate-derived but identifiably Korean curriculum.
Choi Hong Hi (1918-2002), a Korean general, led the unification effort. In 1955 the kwans agreed on the name "taekwondo." In 1966 Choi founded the International Taekwon-Do Federation (ITF). Political schisms followed; in 1973 the South Korean government created the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF, now World Taekwondo) as a competing global body. Choi spent his later years in North Korea; the ITF and WT remain separate.
Taekwondo's distinguishing technical feature is its emphasis on kicks — head-height roundhouses, spinning back kicks, jumping techniques. The competitive WT format awards extra points for kicks to the head and for spinning techniques, which has shaped the elite competitive style toward dynamic foot-fighting.
Taekwondo became an Olympic demonstration sport in 1988 (Seoul) and a full medal sport in Sydney 2000. It is now the most-practiced martial art globally by registered participants.
Korean instructors fanned out worldwide in the 1960s and 70s, building the dojang network that brought taekwondo to suburban America, where for several decades it was the default "martial arts class" for children.
Thailand's national sport, muay thai ("Thai boxing"), is the modern competitive descendant of muay boran ("ancient boxing"), the battlefield martial art of the Siamese kingdoms. Records of organised bouts go back at least to the 16th century; the legendary Nai Khanomtom, a Siamese prisoner of war who reportedly defeated nine Burmese champions consecutively in 1767, is the founding national hero.
Muay thai is the "art of eight limbs" — punches, kicks, elbows, and knees are all scoring weapons, with extensive clinch-fighting using knees and short-range strikes. Modern competitive muay thai uses gloves (introduced in the 1920s) and Western-style rounds, but retains the wai khru pre-fight ritual dance, traditional music (sarama) accompanying each bout, and amulets and arm bands worn by fighters.
Bangkok's Lumpinee and Rajadamnern stadiums are the sport's traditional centres. Nightly cards have run for decades.
Muay thai techniques are foundational to modern MMA striking — the round kick to the leg, the Thai clinch, the teep (push kick) — because the art has been continuously combat-tested at high volume for longer than any Asian striking equivalent.
Lethwei (Burmese), Pradal Serey (Cambodian), and Tomoi (Malay) are sister arts with overlapping vocabulary and shared regional roots. Lethwei in particular still permits headbutts; bouts are sometimes contested without gloves.
Major modern champions: Saenchai, Buakaw Banchamek (a major K-1 figure as well), Dieselnoi Chor Thanasukarn, Samart Payakaroon.
The single most consequential figure in martial arts' global cultural reach. Bruce Lee (Lee Jun-fan, 1940-1973) was born in San Francisco's Chinatown, raised in Hong Kong, returned to the United States in 1959, and in 13 years built — and embodied — the popular Western image of the martial artist.
Lee trained Wing Chun under Yip Man in Hong Kong as a teenager. In Seattle and Oakland in the 1960s he opened schools and taught a Wing Chun-rooted but increasingly cross-trained curriculum. By 1967 he had named his synthesis Jeet Kune Do ("the way of the intercepting fist") — explicitly anti-style, drawing from Wing Chun, fencing, Western boxing, and judo.
Lee's Hollywood career began with the role of Kato in The Green Hornet (1966-67) and accelerated after his return to Hong Kong: The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), Way of the Dragon (1972, which he directed), Enter the Dragon (1973, Warner Brothers, the first major Hollywood–Hong Kong co-production), and the unfinished Game of Death.
Lee died on 20 July 1973 of cerebral edema, age 32, weeks before Enter the Dragon's release. The film grossed over $200 million worldwide and triggered the global martial-arts cinema and training boom of the 1970s.
Lee's legacy is both technical and cultural. Technically, his cross-training advocacy and his rejection of style-based dogmatism prefigured MMA. Culturally, he was the first Asian male global movie star, the figure who broke a long Hollywood pattern of Asian men as comic relief or villains. Every subsequent Asian-American martial artist or actor has worked downstream of him.
The kung fu film is, alongside the Western and the samurai film, one of the great genres of physical cinema. It crystallised in 1970s Hong Kong studios — Shaw Brothers, Golden Harvest — and through the 1980s and 90s expanded into the action-comedy and wuxia traditions.
Shaw Brothers, founded 1958 by Run Run Shaw, produced the foundational kung fu film catalog: The One-Armed Swordsman (1967), Five Fingers of Death (1972, the first kung fu film to break in the U.S.), The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978).
Golden Harvest, founded 1970 by Raymond Chow, signed Bruce Lee in 1971 and Jackie Chan in the late 1970s, becoming the dominant studio of the period.
Jackie Chan (b. 1954) reinvented the kung fu film as physical comedy. Drunken Master (1978), Project A (1983), Police Story (1985). Chan does most of his own stunts; the practice of credit-rolls of injuries from filming became a Chan signature.
Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, the "Three Brothers" of the China Drama Academy with Chan, all became major action stars. Yuen Woo-ping became the genre's premier choreographer (Drunken Master; later The Matrix and Crouching Tiger).
The wuxia tradition — flying swordsmen, mystical martial arts, period drama — runs in parallel: King Hu's A Touch of Zen (1971); Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China series (1991-); Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000); Zhang Yimou's Hero (2002).
The Hong Kong cinema influence on Hollywood action — the Wachowskis' Matrix (1999) imported Yuen Woo-ping; Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003-04) imported the entire vocabulary — is now structural rather than novel.
The single most significant martial-arts development of the late 20th century. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) emerged from a Japanese transmission to one Brazilian family and revolutionised global combat sports.
Mitsuyo Maeda (1878-1941), a Kodokan judo expert and itinerant prizefighter, settled in Belém, Brazil, in 1914. He taught his judo (which still included the full jujutsu groundwork that competitive judo would later restrict) to Carlos Gracie (1902-1994). Carlos taught his brothers, of whom Hélio Gracie (1913-2009) became the technical innovator.
Hélio, smaller and physically weaker, refined the system to emphasise positional control, leverage, and submission from inferior positions — the closed guard, the triangle choke, the armbar. The Gracie family ran open-challenge matches in Rio (the vale tudo tradition) for decades, using them as marketing for their academy.
Rorion Gracie (b. 1952), Hélio's son, emigrated to the United States in the 1970s and in 1993 co-founded the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The premise was a Gracie family infomercial: put a slight, technical jiu-jitsu fighter against larger boxers, karatekas, sumo wrestlers, and let the world see what wins.
Royce Gracie, Hélio's third son, won UFC 1, 2, and 4 (1993-94), submitting larger opponents repeatedly. The result was a generational reorientation: any martial artist serious about fighting now had to study ground grappling.
The expanded Gracie family — Carlos and Hélio's sons, grandsons, in-laws (Rickson, Rolls, Renzo, Royler, Roger, Kron) — produced the largest professional grappling lineage in the world.
The Ultimate Fighting Championship debuted on pay-per-view 12 November 1993 in Denver, Colorado. The format: a single-elimination tournament, no weight classes, no time limits, almost no rules ("no biting, no eye-gouging"). Eight fighters, one octagonal cage, one night.
Royce Gracie won. He weighed 178 lbs and submitted three larger opponents, including a 200-pound boxer and a 260-pound shootfighter, in less than five minutes of combined fight time. The promotion's pay-per-view did 86,000 buys.
The early UFC was a marketing exercise dressed as a sport. By UFC 2 it had Gracie winning a four-round, 11-fighter tournament. By UFC 5 it had introduced rounds and time limits. By UFC 12 (1997) it had instituted weight classes.
The political backlash was severe. John McCain called it "human cockfighting" in 1996 and lobbied state athletic commissions to ban it. By 1997 the UFC was off PPV in most markets. The Fertitta brothers and Dana White bought it for $2 million in 2001 and reformed the sport into something regulators could sanction: unified rules (2001), structured weight classes, mandatory medicals, the eventual stripping-back of toward Olympic-style commission oversight.
The aesthetic shift mattered: by 2005 (the airing of The Ultimate Fighter reality show on Spike TV, with the legendary Forrest Griffin–Stephan Bonnar finale), the UFC had moved from underground curiosity to mainstream cable property. By 2016 it sold for $4 billion to WME-IMG.
By the late 1990s, the lesson of the early UFC was unmistakable: a fighter who knew only one martial art was at a disadvantage. The "style vs. style" framing of UFC 1 gave way to the cross-trained fighter — boxing, muay thai, wrestling, BJJ — as standard.
The Pride Fighting Championships (Japan, 1997-2007) ran in parallel with the UFC and was, for a stretch in the early 2000s, the higher-prestige promotion. The Pride era produced Fedor Emelianenko (the most-feared heavyweight of his era), Mauricio "Shogun" Rua, Wanderlei Silva, Dan Henderson.
The post-2005 UFC produced its own pantheon. Anderson Silva held the middleweight title from 2006 to 2013 with a 16-fight win streak — the longest in UFC history. Georges St-Pierre (welterweight) is the most technically complete MMA fighter many have seen. Jon Jones at light heavyweight became the youngest UFC champion (age 23) and remains, despite drug-test failures, statistically dominant.
Khabib Nurmagomedov retired 29-0, having dominated the lightweight division through wrestling-based control descended from Dagestani sambo. Conor McGregor made the sport mainstream culturally and held two division titles simultaneously (2016).
Women's MMA, originally dismissed by the UFC's Dana White, was added in 2012 with the signing of Ronda Rousey; her arm-bar dominance broke ratings records and forced the issue. Amanda Nunes, Valentina Shevchenko, and Zhang Weili (the first Chinese UFC champion) followed.
Modern MMA is now a fully cross-trained sport. The base disciplines remain identifiable — wrestling, BJJ, muay thai, boxing — but a top fighter trains in all of them, full-time, professionally.
Sambo (a Russian acronym for samozashchita bez oruzhiya, "self-defense without weapons") was developed in the 1920s and 30s by the Soviet state, drawing on Russian wrestling traditions, Japanese judo, and the indigenous grappling arts of the multinational Soviet republics.
Vasili Oshchepkov (1893-1937), a judo black belt who had trained at the Kodokan, and Viktor Spiridonov, who developed a self-defense system from indigenous wrestling, were the founders. Oshchepkov was executed in Stalin's purges; the form survived through his students.
Two main sport variants exist: Sport Sambo (similar to judo, but with leg-locks and a different jacket/short combination) and Combat Sambo (adds strikes, headbutts, groundwork, and is much closer to MMA than to judo).
The Caucasus region — particularly Dagestan — produced a dense wrestling and combat-sambo training culture that has, in the 21st century, become the world's most productive pipeline for MMA fighters. Khabib Nurmagomedov, Islam Makhachev, Khamzat Chimaev, and most of the current UFC lightweight elite are products of this single regional system.
The technical core — wrestling-based control, top pressure, leg-attacks from the bottom, conditioning at altitude — is identifiable across the Dagestani fighters. Modern combat sports have spent the last decade catching up.
Aikido (合気道, "the way of harmonising spirit") was developed by Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969) — known to practitioners as Ō-Sensei, "the great teacher" — through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, drawing on Daito-ryu Aiki-jujutsu (under Sokaku Takeda) and Ueshiba's mystical Omoto-kyo religious practice.
Aikido's technical premise is the redirection of an attacker's force through circular blending and joint locks. Practitioners do not strike; they receive an attack, harmonise with its momentum, and apply throws or pins. The art is competitive in the sense of training partners attacking and being thrown, but tournament-style aikido competition is rare and contested within the tradition.
Ueshiba's son Kisshomaru Ueshiba systematised the art for post-war international transmission. Major branches include the mainstream Aikikai, the more competitive Yoshinkan (Gozo Shioda), Iwama-ryu (Morihiro Saito, weapons-focused), and the soft-style Ki Society (Koichi Tohei).
Aikido's relationship to combat realism has been debated for decades. The art's training method — pre-arranged techniques against compliant partners — does not produce reliably effective fighters in resisting opponents, as MMA has demonstrated. But aikido was never designed as competitive combat; it is a moral and physical discipline whose claims are about practitioner cultivation, not fight outcomes.
Steven Seagal brought aikido into Hollywood action films of the late 1980s and 1990s. The actor's later career and politics have not aged well; the films are still, in their early period, the only real cinematic record of aikido.
Western boxing, governed by the Marquess of Queensberry rules (1867), is the oldest continuously sanctioned combat sport. It has its own deck. But its interaction with the Asian arts, particularly through 20th-century kickboxing, deserves a chapter here.
American kickboxing emerged in the early 1970s as a fusion of karate's striking with boxing's ring format and gloves. Bill Wallace, Joe Lewis, Benny "the Jet" Urquidez were the early stars. The sport peaked in popularity in the 1980s before being eclipsed by MMA.
K-1, founded in Japan in 1993 (the same year as the UFC), reorganised stand-up fighting under unified rules and created the global kickboxing star system. Champions like Ernesto Hoost (Netherlands), Peter Aerts, Ramon Dekkers, Andy Hug, and the Brazilian Anderson Silva (before his MMA career) drew enormous audiences in Japan through the late 1990s and 2000s.
Glory Kickboxing (founded 2012) and ONE Championship (Singapore, 2011) are the modern professional homes.
Dutch kickboxing — Mejiro Gym (Jan Plas), Chakuriki, Golden Glory — produced a distinctive technical synthesis of muay thai with European boxing, characterised by heavy hands, low kicks, and conditioning. The Dutch K-1 dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was a small-country sporting miracle.
Modern MMA strikers almost universally have substantial kickboxing or muay thai backgrounds. The pure-karate fighter is largely a memory.
Five combat sports currently feature in the Summer Olympics: boxing, wrestling (Greco-Roman and freestyle), fencing, judo, taekwondo. Karate appeared at Tokyo 2020 and was dropped. Sambo and BJJ have been recognised by the IOC but are not on the programme.
Wrestling was on the original 1896 Athens programme (Greco-Roman) and has been continuously contested since (freestyle added 1904). Wrestling is the most universally distributed combat sport — every traditional culture on earth has a wrestling form (Mongolian bökh, Senegalese laamb, Turkish oil wrestling, sumo, Indian kushti, Russian sambo wrestling). The Olympic forms are relatively recent international standardisations.
Fencing has been Olympic since 1896. Foil, épée, sabre. The sport's lineage runs from European duelling traditions through 19th-century French and Italian schools to the modern electrified competitive form. Aladár Gerevich (Hungary) won six consecutive Olympic gold medals in sabre (1932-60), the longest individual streak in any Olympic sport.
Olympic boxing is amateur boxing, scored on punches landed (not damage). The amateur format has produced Muhammad Ali (1960 Rome), Joe Frazier (1964 Tokyo), George Foreman (1968 Mexico City), Lennox Lewis (1988 Seoul, for Canada), Vasyl Lomachenko (2008, 2012). The transition to professional after Olympic gold has been the standard career path.
The Olympics have always struggled with the relationship between traditional combat sports and the IOC's preference for measurable, broadcastable disciplines. Karate's removal after a single Games is the latest expression of that tension.
Sumo (相撲) is Japan's national sport and one of the world's oldest organised competitive grappling traditions. Records go back to the 8th-century Nihon Shoki; the modern professional sport (Ozumo) has run continuously since the early Edo period (1600s).
The premise is austere: two wrestlers (rikishi) face each other on a 4.55-metre circular clay ring (dohyō), separated by a small white tape line. The bout begins with both wrestlers crouched, fists on the ground; on the simultaneous mutual rise (tachi-ai), they collide. A wrestler loses by stepping out of the ring or by touching the ground with anything other than the soles of his feet.
Average bout length is under 10 seconds. The ritual surrounding the bout — salt-throwing, leg-stomping (shiko), ceremonial water — takes 4-5 minutes. The proportion of theatre to sport is considered.
The professional ranking system: six divisions, with Makuuchi the top tier and Yokozuna the highest individual rank (a yokozuna cannot be demoted but is expected to retire if his performance declines). Fifteen-day tournaments (basho) are held six times a year.
Foreign-born yokozuna — Akebono (Hawaiian, 1993), Asashoryu (Mongolian, 2003), Hakuho (Mongolian, 2007, eventual record-holder for most career championships), Harumafuji, Kakuryu, Terunofuji — have dominated the sport's elite ranks since the 1990s, a fact that has caused recurring institutional and cultural tension.
Sumo's Shinto origins remain visible: the dohyō is purified before tournaments, the referee carries a sword, the entire institutional structure of the Japan Sumo Association is interwoven with religious symbolism.
Capoeira is Brazilian — developed by enslaved Africans in colonial Brazil from the 16th century onward, drawing on West African dance, musical, and combative traditions, disguised as dance to evade slaveholder suppression. It was illegal in Brazil until 1937.
The art combines kicks, sweeps, head-butts, and acrobatic movements within a circular game (roda) accompanied by music played on the berimbau (a single-stringed bow instrument), drum, tambourine, and call-and-response singing. Two practitioners "play" inside the roda, exchanging movements that are simultaneously dance, fight, and conversation.
Two main schools: Capoeira Angola (preserved by Mestre Pastinha in 1940s Salvador) emphasises low, slow, traditional play. Capoeira Regional (created by Mestre Bimba, also 1930s Salvador) is faster, more upright, more directly combative; Bimba sought legitimisation by adding rank ranks and a structured curriculum.
The art was decisively legitimised internationally through the Brazilian diaspora of the 1970s and 80s. There are now capoeira academies in over 70 countries.
Other syncretic and indigenous arts deserving brief mention:
Silat — the umbrella term for the indigenous martial arts of the Malay Archipelago. Highly variable; many regional styles. Used by Indonesian and Filipino diasporas.
Kalaripayattu — South Indian (Kerala) martial art, claimed in some accounts as the oldest still-practiced martial art on earth, with documented lineages back to the 11th century.
Krav Maga — modern Israeli self-defense system, developed by Imi Lichtenfeld for the IDF in the 1940s and 50s. Pragmatic, anti-aesthetic, focused on neutralising threats fast.
Most martial arts include weapons curricula; some are primarily weapons systems.
Kendo (剣道, "the way of the sword") is the modern competitive form of Japanese swordsmanship, derived from kenjutsu schools (Itto-ryu, Yagyu Shinkage-ryu, others). Practitioners wear armour (bogu) and use bamboo swords (shinai); strikes are scored on prescribed target areas with a coordinated voice-strike-footwork called ki-ken-tai-ichi. The All Japan Kendo Federation (1952) is the modern governing body.
Iaido is the art of drawing the sword — a meditative, mostly solo practice of cutting drills from various seated and standing positions.
Kyudo (弓道, "the way of the bow") is Japanese archery as a contemplative art. Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery (1948) made it briefly Western-fashionable.
Kobudo — Okinawan weapons. Bo (staff), sai, tonfa, nunchaku, kama. Originally peasant farming tools adapted to combat after Ryūkyū samurai disarmed the population. Karate's classical kobudo curriculum is increasingly preserved by specialist teachers rather than mainline karate dojos.
Eskrima / Arnis / Kali — Filipino martial arts. Stick, blade, and empty-hand systems with extensive flow-drilling. Bruce Lee's friend Dan Inosanto brought Filipino martial arts into the broader American martial-arts curriculum in the 1970s.
European Historical Martial Arts (HEMA) — the late 20th-century reconstruction of European medieval and Renaissance fighting traditions from surviving fight manuals (Liechtenauer, Fiore dei Liberi, George Silver). HEMA tournaments now exist for longsword, rapier, sword-and-buckler.
Most Asian martial arts have an explicit philosophical or spiritual dimension. Three texts deserve mention as pieces of world literature, not merely martial arts source material:
Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings (Go Rin no Sho, 1645). Written by Musashi (1584-1645), undefeated swordsman of 60+ duels, in the last year of his life. Five chapters — earth, water, fire, wind, void — on strategy, swordsmanship, and the unity of art and life. Read alongside Sun Tzu's Art of War as the East Asian strategic canon.
Yagyu Munenori, The Life-Giving Sword (Heihō Kadensho, 1632). The Yagyu family's strategic and ethical text. Sword as cultivation, not just killing. Written for the shogun.
Takuan Soho, The Unfettered Mind (Fudōchi Shinmyōroku, c. 1632). Zen monk's letter to Yagyu Munenori on the application of Zen mind to swordsmanship. The notion of mushin (no-mind) and fudōshin (immovable mind) as combat states is set down here.
The Western philosophical literature on martial arts is thinner but real. Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (1948). Trevor Leggett, Zen and the Ways. Donn F. Draeger's three-volume Martial Arts and Ways of Japan (1973-74) is the academic standard.
Whether these traditions' philosophical claims survive secular examination is contestable. What is harder to deny is that thousands of hours of disciplined physical practice, in any tradition, produces something that practitioners describe in terms recognisably similar — composure, focus, a less reactive relationship to fear and anger. The traditions disagree on the metaphysics; they agree on the result.
Tai chi (Taijiquan, 太極拳, "supreme ultimate fist") is the most widely practiced internal Chinese martial art. The traditional account credits Zhang Sanfeng, a semi-mythical Taoist monk of the Wudang Mountains; the historically documented lineage runs from Chen Wangting (1580-1660) of Chen Village, Henan.
Five major family styles: Chen (the original), Yang (Yang Luchan, 1799-1872; the most widely-spread modern form), Wu (two distinct lineages share the romanisation), Sun, Hao.
Tai chi's modern public face — slow, choreographed solo forms practiced in parks at dawn — descends from the simplified 24-form set created by the Chinese state in 1956 for mass health practice. The traditional family forms include fast sections, fa-jin (explosive power) drills, weapons, and partner work (tui shou, "pushing hands").
The combat-application question is genuinely contested within tai chi circles. Most modern practitioners do not test tai chi against resisting opponents, and the rare attempts (e.g., the much-publicised 2017 defeat of tai chi master Wei Lei by MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong in 10 seconds) have not been kind to traditional claims. A small number of teachers — Chen Yu, Chen Xiaowang, Adam Mizner — maintain serious combative training within tai chi lineages.
The other internal arts — Bagua Zhang (Dong Haichuan, 1797-1882), Xingyi Quan (semi-legendary origin in General Yue Fei) — share with tai chi an emphasis on alignment, structure, and using whole-body coordination rather than localised muscular force.
Tai chi's documented health benefits — balance, fall prevention in the elderly, modest cardiovascular gains — are now well-established in the Western medical literature. As an exercise modality, it has fewer risks than running and more measurable upside than most yoga.
Most Asian martial-arts traditions historically excluded women, with explicit or implicit barriers to dojo entry, ranking, and competition. The 20th century broke down most of those barriers, unevenly.
Keiko Fukuda (1913-2013) was the first woman to receive judo's 10th dan from the Kodokan. She studied under Jigoro Kano himself; the Kodokan capped women's ranks at 5th dan for most of her career, and she received her 10th dan only in 2011, age 98, after decades of advocacy.
Ryoko Tani (Japan, b. 1975) won 7 World Championships and 2 Olympic golds in judo's lightest weight class, becoming a national celebrity. Kayla Harrison (USA) and Clarisse Agbégnénou (France) are recent dominant figures.
Women's MMA's mainstream emergence dates to Ronda Rousey's UFC arrival in 2012 and her armbar dominance through 2015. Amanda Nunes succeeded her as the standard-bearer; Valentina Shevchenko, Zhang Weili, Rose Namajunas rounded out the elite.
BJJ's women's circuit, structurally smaller, includes Beatriz Mesquita, Bia Basilio, Mackenzie Dern, Ffion Davies. Women's no-gi grappling has grown rapidly through ADCC and EBI tournament expansion.
Olympic taekwondo and judo have full women's programmes; women's wrestling joined the Olympic programme in 2004 (Athens); women's boxing in 2012 (London).
The traditional Asian arts vary widely. Some — like aikido and tai chi — have sustained substantial female participation throughout. Others — like sumo, where women are formally barred from the dohyō — remain explicitly male.
Most martial-arts pedagogy combines four practice modes:
Solo forms (kata, taolu, hyung, poomsae). A choreographed sequence of movements practiced alone. The traditional vehicle for technical preservation. Karate kata, tai chi forms, taekwondo poomsae.
Partner drills. Pre-arranged sequences with a training partner, used to teach distance, timing, structure. Aikido and traditional jujutsu rely heavily on this mode.
Sparring. Live exchange against a resisting opponent, with rules constraining what is permitted. The mode that produces fight-tested ability. Boxing, BJJ, judo, muay thai, MMA — all rely on extensive sparring. Traditional karate styles vary in how seriously they spar.
Conditioning. The physical-training base — strength, endurance, flexibility, recovery. Increasingly indistinguishable, at the elite level, from generic athletic strength-and-conditioning.
The question of what mix produces effectiveness has been answered, repeatedly, by combat-sports outcomes since 1993: arts that emphasise live sparring against resisting opponents produce better fighters than arts that don't. Aliveness, in jiu-jitsu coach Matt Thornton's formulation — the practice of techniques against full resistance — is the single best predictor of an art's combat effectiveness.
What is also true: many martial arts are not primarily training people to fight. Aikido, tai chi, kyudo, traditional karate kata work — these are vehicles for body cultivation, philosophical practice, group discipline. Their value is real but it is not combative effectiveness, and judging them by that standard is a category error.
Most Asian martial arts share a recognisably common training-space culture, even across traditions that have little technical overlap.
The dojo (道場, "place of the way"; equivalent terms exist in each tradition — Korean dojang, Chinese guoshu guan, Brazilian academia) is treated as a special space. Bowing on entry and exit, removal of shoes, addressing the senior instructor by title (sensei, sifu, guro, kyoshi, professor), bowing to training partners.
The hierarchy is explicit. Belt or sash colour signals rank; senior students assist the instructor; the most senior student often has formal ceremonial responsibilities. The structure descends, in most cases, from Kano's Kodokan model (which itself drew on Confucian teacher-student conventions).
The dojo's relationship to the surrounding culture is variable. In modern Japan, dojos are workaday municipal facilities or commercial schools; the religious dimension is mostly residual. In some Brazilian BJJ academies, the lineage culture is intense — pictures of Hélio Gracie, Carlos Gracie, the academy's master — and approaches the structure of religious devotion. In suburban American taekwondo schools, the cultural framing is largely vestigial.
The shadow side is real. Cult-like teachers, abusive instructors, exploitative belt-payment structures, and (in some traditions) sexual abuse have all surfaced repeatedly in martial-arts institutions. The hierarchy that produces serious commitment also produces conditions where boundary violations go unchecked. The recent BJJ community reckonings around abusive coaches are characteristic.
The serious bookshelf for the martial arts.
The martial arts are a visual subject. The reading list is a starting point; the films are the working canon.
Bruce Lee — full-length documentary.
Then watch:
— Muay thai in Thailand — first-time training experience. The Thai national art at a working gym, with the cultural texture intact.
— Rener Gracie on Jocko Podcast — the philosophy of jiu-jitsu. Three-hour conversation on the Gracie family, BJJ technique, and what white belt to black belt actually means.
And the films you should see, even if not as a martial-arts fan: Enter the Dragon (1973), The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), Drunken Master (1978), Once Upon a Time in China (1991), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Ip Man (2008), The Raid: Redemption (2011, Indonesian silat).
As of 2026, the field's centre of gravity has shifted decisively from the traditional national arts toward the cross-trained MMA synthesis. The UFC's $4 billion sale (2016) and the subsequent valuation increases mean professional MMA is now a major commercial sport, with global broadcast presence, large rosters of professional athletes, and structured developmental leagues.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has grown from a Gracie-family export to a worldwide grappling sport with hundreds of thousands of practitioners. ADCC and IBJJF tournaments have consolidated; ONE Championship and EBI provide professional grappling stages.
The traditional arts remain healthy as practices but have largely accepted that they are practices — physical-cultural traditions, not optimised fighting systems. Karate, taekwondo, aikido, traditional kung fu schools train the same as they did in 1985, with similar populations of students.
The hybrid contemporary model — train BJJ for grappling, muay thai or boxing for striking, weight-train for strength, pull techniques from any tradition that works — is now standard for anyone who fights competitively. The "single style" loyalist is increasingly a hobbyist or a traditionalist.
What persists across all of this: the basic structure of the dojo, the relationship between teacher and student, the discipline of regular physical practice in a space marked off from the rest of life. That, more than any technical lineage, is what makes martial arts continuous with their thousand-year history.
Why do millions of adults — most of whom will never fight in earnest — train martial arts?
The honest answer in most cases is not self-defense. The probability of needing to use martial-arts skill against an actual attacker is small for most people; the time investment to develop reliable skill is large. As insurance, martial arts are inefficient.
What they reliably provide is something else. Physical competence: a sense of one's own body that translates into a different bearing in the world. Stress management: the practice of maintaining composure under pressure (a sparring partner, a tournament, a graded ranking). Community: the dojo or academy as a structured social space, often producing some of the closest non-family relationships in adult life. Discipline: the repetition that is the precondition for any expertise.
For some, additionally, there is the encounter with combat — actual or simulated — that the rest of modern life carefully avoids. Most of us never test ourselves in any serious physical confrontation. The dojo offers a safer version of that test, with rules and partners and recovery, and the experience of having endured it changes how you carry yourself.
None of this requires belief in the traditional metaphysics. You can be an atheist BJJ practitioner, a sceptical aikidoka, a culturally unmoored taekwondo student, and the practice still does its work. The body learns whether or not the philosophy is bought.
Martial Arts was set in Iowan Old Style and Palatino, with vermilion and gold drawn from Japanese lacquer and Chinese seal-cinnabar.
Sources: Donn F. Draeger, Martial Arts and Ways of Japan; Matthew Polly, Bruce Lee: A Life; Renzo & Royler Gracie, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Theory and Technique; Jonathan Snowden, Total MMA; Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings; Jigoro Kano, Kodokan Judo.
Pages prior: Cycling, Football (Soccer). Pages following: Swimming, Olympics.
Filed under: Sports. Volume IX. Read alongside the religion deck (Buddhism, Taoism) and the cinema dimension of the literature decks.