Interesting that you mention this. I was just reflecting: Years ago I had a shaolin-trained martial arts instructor, and some years after that, several shorin-ryu-trained instructors; shorin and shaolin are related in interesting ways in terms of styles but very closely related in the sense that they are martial arts "disciplines" with similar paths. When I watch e.g. documentaries of the shaolin way, it cracks me up to see the same attitude again and again--here are the serious students, and there are the fat teachers with amused looks on their faces, who just don't seem to care in that way anymore. I wonder if it's made worse by watching all the hardcore newbies line up at the door every year.

One guy who impressed me, and everybody else, was an instructor from Japan who lit into the fat American instructors, telling them they couldn't represent his way of doing things and also live as such a poor physical specimen. Still, I felt for them. There's some balance to be found, once the initial excitement and seriousness is over, once it has become one's day to day, and must now accommodate natural turns of flaxen emotionality in addition to the iron discipline. So these instructors talked the iron-discipline talk, but hadn't been trained, apparently, to navigate a long-term, realistic approach to life as an expert martial artist. As a result they looked like these guys I always see in the documentaries: Casting amused glances at the students, pot-bellied, always looking out for a laugh or a chance to lighten up. Something about that state of being contains an important martial arts truth.