The Vigor of South East Asian Martial Arts

Silat Practitioner

During the 80s to up until the dawn of the 21^st Century, the popularity of Filipino Martial Arts spread at a broader extent abroad. Together with the spread of FMA, other South East Asian Martial Arts blossomed abroad also and was accepted by a wide variety of people. Such arts as like Silat and Muay Thai slowly grew in practitioner population. Famous personages that were first oriented with East Asian Martial Arts like Karate and Kung fu also studied and explored these Martial Arts like Dan Inosanto and many others. This made South East Asian Martial Arts widely popular not just in the US but also throughout the world, with the US being a great pusher of cultural products. But what is in South East Asian Martial Arts that it appeals to a wide range of practitioners even attracting practitioners from ‘Monkish’ traditional East Asian Martial Arts?

Filipino Tribesmen

A lot of practitioners will readily describe South East Asian Martial Arts as deadly arts mainly because of the orientation in practice. In FMA, the traditional training would start first with the weapon training and will proceed to hand-to-hand. In Silat, a lot of very unusual weapons and techniques firmly rooted from where they come from exist. Muay Thai, though practiced or regarded as sport, treats the body as weapon and have derived its movements from weapon based fighting. This is not a special trait of South East Asian Martial Arts, rather, it’s the history behind these arts which pushed the practitioners of these arts to mold their techniques into killing techniques. 

Guro Dan Inosanto

As opposed to East Asian Martial Arts which experienced many years of civil war, South East Asian Martial Arts were exposed to wars which these nations could not easily thwart because aside from civil wars, or tribal wars, the history of colonization seeps through the hearts of these arts. South East Asia, with the exception of Thailand, has become a favorite spot for colonizers. With the more advanced systems of war that the colonizers brought to South East Asia, they outmaneuvered a lot of the resistances from rebels and nationalists. This pushed a lot of modifications in tactics with the colonized people. Silat practitioners and Eskrimadors learned to use (but they were already using this long before colonizers) their skills at a greater disadvantage. Past tribal wars have also honed the fighting techniques of these people. But with colonization, greater modifications were created in the Tactics used by the tribes people. Thus, modifying the term guerilla into something more than just a Spanish owned term. These developments where better showcased by the Vietnamese, a South East Asian Nation, during the Vietnam War.

Filipino Warriors Weilding Barong & Ginunting Sword

The violence that the old masters of these arts experienced therefore became ingrained so much in the practice of these arts that practicing these arts with no weapons is virtually impossible. As opposed to the “Monkish” practices of East Asian Martial Artist where, because of State suppression, banned the use of certain weapons, and thereby creating a more hand-to-hand combat oriented type of fighting, South East Asian Martial Artists virtually never abandoned the practice of weapons even in their practices today.

This historically ingrained mind-set in the South East Asian Martial Arts, that there could be war in any time or any place, probably what makes these arts deadly and appealing both in their practice and their application.

© K.A.L.Cinco, Tacloban City