Embodied Epistemologies in Asian Martial Traditions: Kalaripayattu and the Transmission of Indigenous Knowledge

Abstract

Studies on Asian martial arts have often centered on their techniques, performances, or traditions, with less emphasis on how these practices embody knowledge systems in their own right. This article presents a different perspective by investigating how knowledge is produced through bodily training and transmitted from generation to generation of practitioners. Using examples from Chinese internal martial arts, Japanese budō, South Indian Kalaripayattu, and Southeast Asian Pencak Silat, this article investigates how combat knowledge has remained entwined with healing knowledge, ritual direction, and ethical training. Special attention is paid to the apprenticeship systems by which skills and perceptual abilities are transmitted from teacher to student through practice rather than text. In this perspective, martial arts knowledge seems less like a set of isolated fighting skills than cultural process whereby the body becomes a site of memory, interpretation, and transmission, maintaining a unique way of sensing and acting in the world.