Searching for the Way

by Nigel Sutton

Over the past two decades, author Nigel Sutton has traveled throughout Asia in search of the martial arts, special skills, senior masters, and sacred knowledge. He spent decades in the company of masters, listening to their stories, learning their arts, and documenting their lives. He came away with much more than skills and knowledge; he discovered the Way. In this engaging work one can discover the inner lives of the world's leading martial arts masters and the secrets of their fighting arts.

172 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1999

Reviews

[Ellis Amdur · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Malay penninsula Chinese community is a very intriguing world when one considers traditional Chinese martial arts. On the one hand, expat communities go back many generations, primarily from some sub-ethnic groups from southern China. From a combative perspective, this means that for many generations, at least, it developed in a circumscribed fashion, with little influence from Northern Chinese martial arts in general, and with specific southern Chinese arts developing and flourishing. Furthermore, friction between the Malay and Chinese communities has developed into outright violence, sometimes even pogroms, so that even today, many Chinese martial arts practitioners train for genuine self-protection rather than a mere hobby. In the last decades, new martial arts influences, first from Taiwan and more recently from mainland China have altered the local scene. Mr. Sutton's study, in particular, emphasized the Yang-derivative t'ai chi of Cheng Man-ching, although he's also trained in a number of other arts as well.
This book is a picaresque tale of his studies with various teachers. Mr. Sutton must be a man of considerable charm and character, because he had the good fortune to study with a number of teachers--and unless you are rich, such study only can happen if you are deemed to be worth teaching.
Through his book, one gets an idea of the martial arts culture of the area, including the role of challenges and public demonstrations, and how a non-Chinese person fits into this--as both a kind of a prize that the teacher can show off, and an intriguing challenge to teach.
Mr. Sutton does a great job in combining the human stories (warts and all) of a number of teachers, leavened with enough detail of the kind of training he has done so that the reader gets an idea of what it would be like to study in such a milieu and what one would learn.
The book could have used more rigorous editing--it meanders both in time and locale, and at times I got lost who he was studying with and when. Then again, this seems to be the course of his study as well--this is not a book like a novel which builds to a climax with some dramatic ending. Rather, it highlights one aspect, at least, of what surely is a very interesting life.