The titles used for teacher, uncle, training brother, in a martial arts organization. I recently was thumbing through my Chinese English dictionary and noticed that they weren’t under the English translations that I assumed. Does any one know the history behind them?
For Shifu, I was told that it roughly translated to “Father teacher” The idea being that your paternal father bore you, but you martial art Shifu taught you skills to stay alive. Hence your martial father (Shifu) was almost, if not more important than your paternal parent. In addition your Shifu had a particularly important task to teach you as if you were his son/daughter. Bearing in mind you also had to respect your teacher with the same thoughts you would a real parent. I thought this explained the devotion many martial art stories depicted from student to teacher and vise versa.
there should be a thread about tradition discussing this in the other related arts forum… started by vash, check it out and see if anything there applies.
Originally posted by Life long Student does any one know the history, and why not use the standard language of the area I.e. father/teacher or uncle instead of a separate term.
Not sure what you mean. What area are you referring to? In Chinese the terms mean uncle, etc. It’s used because the kung fu “family” was considered to be just as cohesive as a regular blood family with a similar structure.
When I looked up Father in The Oxford Chinese/English Dictionary. Nothing even came close to sifu. I had been under the assumption that these were martial art school terms not common expressions.
Sisuk = elder training brother under a different sifu but still higher up the tree than you = shishu —>does not equal ‘uncle’ except as an analogy. The regular word for uncle is shushu. The word is similar but not the same.
sidai = I don’t know. Where I train we all just use ‘shixiong’ which means, “gong-fu brother”. If he is a jr. brother we call him ‘xiao shixiong’. If he is a senior student we call him ‘da shixiong’.
Sifu = Shifu = master. It is a formal term of address used occasionally outside of gong-fu circles. Someone who is a master at anything may be addressed as ‘Shifu’. The word has a root very similar to, but not the same as, ‘father’. This reflects something about the relationship but you don’t have to get carried aways with it. In olden times we westerners used to do more apprenticeships than these days and the apprentice calls the master, “master”. It could be a blacksmith, an shoemaker, whatever. So, I think ‘master’ is the best translation.
Other terms in use these days with their closest english terms:
jiao lian : coach
jiaoxue : teacher
laoshi : teacher - this term is a bit more formal than jiaoxue
‘Shifu’ is used these days in the mainland to reflect a bit more intimate connection than simply teacher. At best it should be like a family relationship as is implied but not neccesarily.
My master does not allow anyone to call him sifu. He says unless you are living with your teacher (under his roof), eating his food and basically living like his kid, you are missusing the word sifu. Though his one disciple/daughter pretty much does that.
He prefers to be called coach or teacher. I call him master because he’s light years ahead of people I have called sensei and sifu in the past. He’s not on the same level as them. He really is the only person I’ve met martially that I’d call a master.
I’d call Kelly Slater a master of surfing and Salvador Dali a master of painting and Michael Jordan a master of basketball.
