So many legends and half-truths about the history of some martial arts get spread that sometimes it’s nearly impossible to sift through them. That’s particularly true of arts that have left behind few written documents, such as those of the Philippines.
Practitioners just accept what their teachers tell them or go by rumors from those who seem knowledgeable. Few bother to do real research into the history of these styles. Those who do often find themselves pilloried as unbelievers.
Case in point: Mark Wiley.
Wiley spent a decade not just training in the Philippines but also interviewing anthropologists and museum curators there, sometimes traveling the length of the island chain to interview old masters in an effort to get to the truth about the history and nature of the Filipino arts. But his efforts have often met with scorn from the martial arts community, particularly in America.
“When I first went to the Philippines, I was really looking to just confirm the legends and history I’d already heard,” Wiley said, “but what I found was the opposite of what I expected.”
What Wiley found was that legends about blind warrior princesses and ancient mother styles for all Filipino arts were just that—legends. But the truths he uncovered were almost as fascinating.
BASED IN PHILADELPHIA, Wiley, 42, began studying taekwondo as a child, eventually taking a part-time job at Asian World of Martial Arts, a popular supply store in the city. There, he came across a book Dan Inosanto had written about the Filipino fighting arts and was inspired to make the switch.
Initially training with noted arnis instructor Remy Presas, Wiley saved his money so he could fly to California to work with escrima master Angel Cabales. Together, they set out to write a series of books on Cabales serrada escrima. Unfortunately, Cabales died just before the first book was completed. Unable to sell the manuscript, Wiley ended up going to college, where he wrote his senior thesis on Filipino martial culture.
Being a fan of the historical work of martial arts writers like Donn F. Draeger and Robert W. Smith, Wiley decided to turn his thesis into a book. By this time, his manuscript on Cabales serrada escrima had been purchased by Tuttle Publishing, which offered him an editorial job in Japan. From there, Wiley traveled to the Philippines several times, eventually marrying a Filipina and moving there to continue his training.
He was soon introduced to the man who would become his most influential teacher, Antonio Ilustrisimo.
“I had trained with a number of Filipino masters and thought I was hot stuff,” Wiley said. “But I sparred with grandmaster Ilustrisimo, who was in his late 70s, with padded sticks, and I couldn’t hit him very much. I did hit him a few times, but then I watched a videotape of the session and noticed that the whole time we were sparring, Ilustrisimo was watching a television playing in the next room. If Cabales and some of the other masters I met were like Jedi, then Ilustrisimo was like Yoda.”
WILEY BEGAN RESEARCHING the history of the Filipino arts, meeting with numerous masters and talking to local scholars and historians. What he found was quite different from the impressions many Westerners have of the nation’s fighting systems.
“I asked all these older masters about certain arts you hear about in the United States, like dumog (Filipino wrestling) and panantukan (Filipino boxing), and they had never heard of these things,” Wiley said. “The boxing they have in the Philippines is basically Western boxing. They do have some native wrestling styles, but they’re mostly confined to isolated local tribal groups.”
Wiley said there’s also a difference between native Filipino battlefield arts, which had been practiced by tribal groups and are now all but extinct, and modern Filipino arts in the form of arnis and escrima. Arnis and escrima came into being when local Filipinos moved into the towns built by the Spanish, who occupied the islands for centuries. There, he said, they developed systems based on dueling or self-defense.
WILEY RECORDED SOME OF HIS FINDINGS in Filipino Martial Culture, which was hailed by many as an outstanding piece of research. And although the book was rather tame, with Wiley passing on the oral histories presented by many masters without offering commentary on their veracity, it still made him enemies in the Filipino martial arts community. Oddly, the main cause of this hostility was the seemingly innocuous assertion that there’s no historical basis for the term “kali.”
Although it’s a popular name used by many Filipino martial artists in America to refer to a mother style from which all Filipino weapon arts sprang, Wiley said there’s no evidence for it ever having been used before the 1950s.
As for there being one parent art that’s the forerunner of all modern Filipino styles, Wiley said he broached the subject with many scholars in the Philippines, who pointed out the variety of languages and ethnic groups in the archipelago. “One of them told me they don’t even have one cooking style there,” he said. “How would they have one martial art that all the others came from?”
Wiley said he has a lot more information that explodes cherished myths about the Filipino arts, but after being attacked online for so long, he’s leery about publishing it. His recent books have stayed away from such controversies.
And that’s a pity. Sometimes what martial artists need the most is for someone to toss a hand grenade into their dojo bunkers and explode a few of the old myths.
