Commentary: Closed Door v Open Door Schools

I've noticed that Chinese martial schools are sometimes tagged as being "closed door" or "open door" schools. "Closed door" means that they're secret, with their teachings only being given to students within the privacy of the school, with no entry or observation being allowed to the general public. In addition, it sometimes means that the school is selective about its students, and will act to ensure that only specific individuals learn its lessons. "Open door" means the school is accessible to the general public, that people are allowed to observe or learn the school's teachings, and that anyone is eligible to become a student.

These labels seem to represent extremes on a continuum, since there are apparently shades of variations between them. Some schools are very open in who they accept as students and in how they allow public access, but they still retain a core set of "secrets" that are only taught to an elite cadre of cadets. Other schools discriminate based on types of students, setting certain minimum requirements for entry (in the modern era, this is normally such things as GPA, good behavior, etc.) and advancement (minimum age, minimum grammar school grades, etc.).

As far as I can tell, there is no real qualitative difference between "closed door" versus "open door" schools. The martial arts--or the martial artists--produced by a "closed door" school are not necessarily better than an "open door" school simply because one is "closed door" and the other is not. If there is a difference in students, it's in the amount of knowledge known. "Closed door" schools will always claim that there is "secret" knowledge not known to the public and only held by a select few, and "open door" schools will claim that they endeavor to maximize as much knowledge within each student as is possible.

From a certain perspective, the distinction is an artifact of Chinese history. But from a different perspective, it's a division reflective of issues that permeate modern society. I find it interesting that the thread has continued from the past to now.

"Closed door" Schools

The idea of a "closed door" environment makes sense from an intellectual property perspective.

If a school's teachings are seen as an assembly of techniques, concepts, training methods, and processes, and its concepts and theories the product of the accumulated research and thought of experts and scholars, then that school's teachings are effectively intellectual property. In essence, the school's teachings constitute a distinct and recognizable body of knowledge resulting from the work of identifiable creators and protected and maintained by specific leaders.

In modern legal theory (at least for the U.S. and much of the Western world), intellectual property is something seen as ripe for protection, not only to ensure that credit is appropriately assigned to a given body of knowledge, but also to ensure that the people deserving of such credit then have the ability to make profits from such knowledge. In addition, intellectual property rights extend to allow control over a body of knowledge which can be transferred to people other than the original creators--and so enable intellectual property rights to last beyond a single lifetime.

In which case, there is some justification for a school to protect its knowledge, or otherwise it risks having its knowledge disseminated to the larger world, thereby incurring the surrender of control by its instructors and in turn risking dilution of its distinctiveness or corruption of its teachings. Such scenarios would render moot arguments for intellectual property rights and remove the ability to demand revenues from public use of such knowledge, and would also deny leadership the power to control the future development of the school as a recognizable entity.

While such conceptions may not have existed in ancient China, some form of them must have operated. A martial arts style's creator almost certainly would have wanted to be able to control who would learn his (or her) martial art--for any number of reasons, ranging from political (denying information to political enemies) to personal (denying information to personal enemies) to honor (ensuring that only school was represented by people of highest character) to arbitrary (race, age, gender, religion, etc.) to anything else. Furthermore, a creater would almost certainly have wanted to control who would have the designated power to carry on control of the martial art--a creator would have wanted to designate grandmasters from close trusted friends, confidants, relatives, etc. to ensure a preservation of the school's "styles" and reputation from malicious agents who might seek to discredit the school or from unqualified instructors who might exploit its identity for their own livelihood. Moreover, there was assuredly a monetary incentive, in the sense that a school's master needed to have something to offer to entice students to pay for lessons--and that something could only be worth money if it was knowledge not known to the common public.

Such arguments ring true today. Questions of control and profit are issues that exist as much in the modern era as they did in ancient China. As a result, the existence of "closed door" schools are not entirely arbitrary decisions driven by the personal peculiarities or biases of their masters. Instead, these arguments maintain validity in justifying the continued practice of "closed door" schools.

"Open door" Schools

For all the justification, however, given to the continued existence of the "closed door" school, there is a contrary, perhaps stronger, perspective to the "closed door" perspective and its mindset--particularly in terms of a larger-scale, time-sensitive scholarly perspective: the "open door" school.

Extending beyond boundaries of society, culture, language, race, nation, province, town, or school, a martial arts school's knowledge can be viewed as a contribution to human knowledge, with the entirety of human knowledge itself being a collective work reflecting the accumulated wisdom of the human species. In this sense, a school can be seen as an active participant in the intellectual awareness of all the human experience, with the observations and theories and lessons of its creators and grandmasters being individual volumes in a larger library of knowledge.

Such an interpretation highlights a number of issues:

Knowledge can be lost or destroyed

Knowledge can be lost. Secrets can be forgotten. Books, libraries, repositories can be destroyed. Any time such incidents happen, the loss marks the permanent erasure of wisdom from existence. Throughout human history, there have been notable episodes where indescribably significant knowledge has been lost, either as the result of misuse, disuse, death, or destruction of books, libraries, people, or even entire civilizations and cultures.

A common example is the burning of the great library of Alexandria, which marked one of the greatest disasters to human intellect, since it involved the destruction of the Hellenic world's entire body of knowledge. Scientists estimate it set back the development of human civilization by a 1,000 years, and that even now--after the re-discovery of much of the library's wisdom--there are still secrets that will never be found.

Another example is Archimedes, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the development of mathematics. Legend has it he was murdered by Roman legionnaires just as he was about to finish a mathematical theorem. His murder has been taken as one of the greatest losses of intellect and knowledge to have ever been suffered. Coincidentally, much of his writings were lost in the burning of the great library of Alexandria, never to be recovered. It was only relatively recently discovered that Archimedes had apparently begun to develop calculus--almost 2,000 years before its "invention" in the 1600 and 1700s.

Beyond tragic events such as murder, there is even simple expiration due to natural causes. Languages and cultures have been lost because the only representatives died before passing on their knowledge to a younger generation. While perhaps an inevitability in human history, such events have incurred a cost in lost wisdom--wisdom that has as much relevance and importance to the modern world as it did to an older one. Amazon tribes hold knowledge of tropical medicines unknown to the West. Surviving Navajo tribesmen were able to use their language as a code for the United States during World War II.

Sometimes the erasure of a culture occurs not from natural causes but also mass human intervention in the form of genocide, from the Roman purging of Carthage to the Holocaust to the Khmer Rouge to the Cultural Revolution, each of which marked the wholesale termination of human intellect and skills. Such losses meant setbacks, not just in terms of the tragic loss of life or the horrific infliction of carnage and suffering, nor just in terms of cultural eradication, but also in terms of the collateral damage to innovation, creativity, technology, understanding, insight.

Regardless of how it happens, knowledge, once lost, may be lost forever. As a result, the continued preservation of "secrets" and "closed door" lessons increase the risk of loss by dramatically curtailing the multiplicity of sources. In effect, it reduces redundancy in the preservation system, and makes it more likely that an individual's death, a library's burning, a culture's destruction will truly achieve the erasure of wisdom--wisdom that could have served to help the world.

Knowledge becomes stale if it is not shared

Knowledge is sometimes taken as representing truth. As truth, this means that it is often accepted as something that must be immutable, unchanging, or permanent.

But this is a questionable proposition to me. Truth may be eternal, but knowledge is not. Because knowledge may represent what we accept as truth at one point in time, but then it may be later found to be incomplete, distorted, or plain wrong. Human knowledge once took the fact that the ground was flat to mean a universal truth of the world being flat. The truth, however, was clearly that the world was round, and that is was our limited knowledge that prevented us from seeing this. It took further knowledge of scale, perspective, and physics to realize that what we saw as flat was actually a very large object so immense that its curvature was beyond our visual comprehension.

Knowledge is something that evolves. It changes. And sometimes what we thought we was right--and therefore truth--turns out to be right only to a certain degree and only from a certain perspective, and so becomes really just parts of a larger truth.

But for this to occur, knowledge must be tested. For knowledge to be tested, it must be exposed. That is, it has to be made available for the collective body of interested researchers and explorers to investigate and apply and test and observe. This can't happen if the knowledge is kept hidden from the rest of human society.

It also can't happen if the keepers of knowledge presume an exclusive right to explore and research their own secrets. The Catholic Church held as truth that God had made the universe with the Earth as its center. They persecuted anyone who said otherwise. They nearly executed Galileo Galilei for proposing that the Earth was a body revolving around the Sun. Often, the keepers of knowledge are vested in their own secrets to an extent that they are more interested in keeping it in stasis than they are in letting it develop; too often, they are more interested in the power of possessing secrets than they are in discovering greater truths.

Knowledge needs knowledge to grow

A corollary to the above is that knowledge must grow, and that in order to grow it requires a pre-existing base of knowledge . Truth adds to truth. Discovery builds upon discovery.

Scholars apply pre-existing knowledge to determine promising new avenues of exploration. Surveying the accumulated state of awareness in a given field sometimes reveals curiousities and issues whose investigation may uncover new phenomenon. Astronomers, for example, learned of the existence of supermassive black holes and their roles in galactic structure only by utilizing prior research built upon the papers on gravity written by Albert Einstein. The confirmation of the scale and power of such entities was only determined by pre-existing theoretical work that had surmised their possibility.

Likewise, pre-existing knowledge sometimes offers insights to new mysteries. Physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his auto-biographies that he developed his ground-breaking theories on sub-atomic interactions using the physics involved with circus performers rotating dinner plates on top of poles. The well-understood physics of the gyroscopic properties of the spinning plates, he claimed, helped him better understand the enigmas of the nuclear forces acting between sub-atomic particles.

In addition, it is important to be familiar with pre-existing knowledge to avoid replication of already understood phenomenon. Researchers always stress that it is important to know what you don't know, but in order to do so you have to know what it is you do know. The anecdote is frequently told of an inventor who set out to find an improved version of the light bulb, but then never reviewed the work of Thomas Edison, and subsequently invested significant resources to find that the best filament for an incandescent light bulb was tungsten--which was the exact same discovery Thomas Edison had made years earlier.

Whether it's to find new directions in study, to gather insight into new phenomenon, or to simply avoid wasteful replication of prior work, researchers need have to have access to the knowledge that exists. Otherwise, there's no point of reference for them to base their work upon, and nothing upon which they can expand the picture of human consciousness. As a result, it greatly impedes the continued development of human awareness, and stifles the growth of humanity in wisdom and capability.

Knowledge deserves to serve the world

Even in modern legal theory, intellectual property protection is not meant to be perpetual. Intellectual property rights are allowed for a finite period of time to ensure an honorable and worthy return to a creator and his or her designated heirs. But such rights are meant to end, with the recognition that once a creator has been given a chance to earn a benefit from ahis or her creation, that creation should ultimately be disseminated and made available to the world, and thereby serve to contribute to the collective consciousness of human wisdom.

This is a relatively simple point, but it's worthwhile to make: one of the purposes of knowledge (apart from things such as learning for its own sake) is trying to improve the human condition. There is plenty of suffering in the world. There is plenty of ignorance. There is plenty of bad things. Knowledge should be trying to make things better.

But it can't make things better if it's not being used or grown, and it can't reach its full potential to make things better if it isn't reaching its full capacity to be used or grown. Keeping knowledge hidden or constrained serves to deny the use and growth of knowledge. As a result, keeping knowledge secret has the consequence of continuing the darkness in the world, and preserving the worst of the human condition.

To me, this seems contrary to the ideals and aspirations of the martial arts, which while ostensibly is about developing the inner and outer components of the individual, is also supposedly about making the world a better place by ensuring that martial artists serve to improve it. Enlightenment shouldn't just enlightenment of a few, it should be enlightenment of all.

Of course, there are some reasons to retain control over instruction. As a matter of preserving its unique identity, a school should have some power of identifying its own techniques. In addition, as a matter of maintaining quality control and reputation, a school should exercise discretion in recognizing qualified instructors and practitioners.

But these objectives are attainable without resorting to the use of "secret" teachings or exclusive enrollments. Knowledge can still be accessible without surrendering control. A school's teachings can still be recorded and made public without loss of ability to label its own property or certify qualifications of its own teachers and students.

If the ultimate purposes of knowledge are to be realized, then effort shouldn't be put into keeping knowledge secret or hidden away, but instead should be put into spreading knowledge as far and as wide as possible to the peoples of the earth. This way, knowledge isn't being hoarded to benefit just a few, but rather shared to benefit all humanity. More than this, it becomes part of the greater effort to improve the human condition. In which case, there is little (other than mundane) purpose for a "closed door" environment and a far greater and far nobler purpose for an "open door" one.