Obsession with Rank and Title

by Ken Warner
December, 2003

Today it seems there are more Masters, Grandmasters, Professors, Sokes, Sijos, etc. than ever before in the history of the martial arts. Now this may not be totally unexpected - as more and more people practice martial arts, it follows that more and more of them would do so long enough to earn such ranks and titles. However, it also seems that the percentage of people claiming such ranks and titles has increased disproportionately to the increase in the total number of people practicing martial arts. But I guess even this may not be such a bad thing, in and of itself. One could argue that as more people practice martial arts for a longer period of time, people in general would become better teachers, thus enabling more people to achieve such high ranks and titles.

But I fear, instead, something else is going on here.

In days long past, the term "master" just meant instructor. One was a student, then when one started teaching, one was a teacher, or "master." There was not this depth of hierarchy that we see in the martial arts today.

Unfortunately, I am familiar with many martial arts instructors who seem much more occupied with their ranks and titles than they are with practicing or teaching quality martial arts. The situation has become so bad that I could literally send an application to several different organizations who would promote me to "Grandmaster," "Founder," "Soke," or any rank or title I might want - for a fee.

Again, up until only a hundred years ago, or so, there were no ranks or titles. There were students and there were teachers. People introduced ranks and titles to the martial arts as their arts spread beyond their own personal control. For example, once there were enough people teaching Kano's Judo, the Kodokan introduced the concept of degrees of Black Belt in order to delineate the hierarchy of ability among its instructors. 5th Degree Black Belt was considered "mastery level." And in the beginning, there were only 5 degrees of Black Belt. Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan Karate, for example, went to his grave as a 5th Degree Black Belt. And no one held any rank higher than that in Shotokan until after his passing.

Judo was also the first art to add levels beyond 5th Degree. But those levels were purely administrative - they enabled the Japanese to keep control of Judo in Japan as the art spread to other continents.

In any event, in those days one could be fairly confident that if a person earned a degree of Black Belt that such a rank said something concrete about that person's abilities. Today this is no longer the case. There are even people out there wearing very high degrees of Black Belt, and being promoted to even higher degrees, who do not even practice their art any more!

I know of martial arts "masters" who have achieved very high ranks in arts in which they have never even trained. And I know of martial artists who have earned 1st Degree Black Belts who have turned around and found someone to promote them to "Master" without any training beyond what they had up to 1st Degree.

I personally feel that the situation has become so bad that one would do better to ignore ranks and titles all together. This may not work so well for someone who has no training - such a person would not be able to make a judgement for him- or herself.

However any martial artist with any time in training should come to a point where he or she evaluates other martial artists by their skill in their art, and their skill in teaching others their art, not by the belts they wear or the diplomas that hang on their walls.

My Kung Fu teacher, for example, does not claim "Mastery." His students simply call him "Sifu," which just means "teacher" in Chinese. He has been training in martial arts for over 30 years. He is extremely skilled in more than one style of Kung Fu, as well as Tai Chi and other internal Chinese arts. He would unquestionably meet anyone's standard for what defines a "Master." Yet he claims no such title. He is all about good, solid martial arts. He is not about ranks and titles.

I would urge anyone looking to train in different styles to forget about ranks and titles. Learn to look beyond the belt around an instructor's waist, or the diploma hanging on his or her wall and look instead at the quality of the martial arts that person is teaching, and the quality of that instructor's students. An instructor's rank or affiliation does not matter. At the end of the day, ALL that matters is the quality of the martial arts an instructor practices and teaches.