Binh Dinh: Traditional Martial Arts and the Art of Reading the Empty Chair

Hook

One late-year morning, I stood in the backyard of an old house in An Nhon, Binh Dinh. A rattan whip hung on the mossy wall, and below it, a straw mat lay rolled out but no one was sitting on it. The owner was a martial master in his seventies, a man who had spent nearly six decades preserving a family fighting style. He poured tea, glanced at the empty yard and said: “Years ago, at this hour, four or five children would be lining up to practice. Now people go to the gym, train MMA, or learn martial arts online. I am not blaming the children; I only blame myself for being too slow to read what is changing.”

“The empty chair never lies — it only exposes what we do not want to hear.” I have written that sentence many times while sitting in commentary booths, but that morning it truly touched me. The empty mat in An Nhon was not merely a story about a crowded or empty class. It was a structural signal. It was like the empty seats I saw in a Southeast Asian football federation meeting years ago, or the way I heard a name being mispronounced three times on live television during the World Cup. When a martial culture loses the students who sit on its mat, the sports system often answers with more medals, more tourism posters, or more glittering festivals. But the empty chair does not lie.

Context

Binh Dinh is known as the “land of martial arts” in Vietnam. This region produced many family martial traditions famous for their forms, kicking techniques, and ways of teaching linked to rural life. For decades, images of Binh Dinh masters appeared at festivals, traditional competitions, and cultural exchange programmes. Yet in modern sports arenas, the big question is not whether the heritage is beautiful. It is whether the heritage can continue to breathe inside a system that measures through scores, rankings, and results.

Based on my experience following fights in Thailand, South Korea, and Vietnam for more than thirty years, I see a troubling similarity. When a traditional martial art enters modern sports, people usually try to “modernise” it by standardising techniques into scoring movements. Thailand did that with Muay Thai, South Korea did that with Taekwondo, and Vietnam is doing it with Binh Dinh traditional martial arts. But each process leaves cuts: techniques born from real fighting become reduced to postures; moves requiring distance and flexible instinct become rigid when locked into a competition template.

I still remember the first time I watched traditional martial arts performed at a large sports event. Spectators applauded as martial artists spun, jumped, and shouted. On screen, scoring charts blinked: technique, speed, range of motion. Backstage, one old master shook his head. He told me: “I teach fighting so people can survive, but they want to watch me jump beautifully.” That statement stayed with me. Not because performance is bad, but because when a sports system replaces the aim of striking correctly with the aim of looking beautiful, it pushes heritage towards choreography.

Core analysis

Binh Dinh traditional martial arts have a rich technical foundation: footwork, hand techniques, kicking techniques, locks, and practical combat applications. The problem is that these techniques cannot be fully expressed through a fixed routine. A traditional practioner must read timing, distance, and the opponent’s intention. That is like a midfielder who reads the rhythm of a game before receiving the ball, or a Thai boxer who senses the opponent’s reach before launching a strike. When I watch a form performed on a red carpet or festival stage, I often look at how the performer finishes the movement: do they stop for the camera, or do they stop because they need to hold a position for the next strike? The difference is small, but it marks the line between martial arts and dance.

A common mistake in analysis is to measure only separate movements. I have spent many years watching martial arts tournaments and realised we need to read three layers: controlled distance, attacking rhythm, and the ability to keep structure under pressure. In Binh Dinh martial arts, controlled distance is not simply about standing near or far from an opponent. It is a sense of the “rattan whip zone”, knowing when the opponent can reach your leg and when you can step in without being struck first. A student with good choreography can look beautiful, but a student with good training must know how to shift body weight before the opponent changes step.

Attacking rhythm in traditional martial arts is not the same as the rhythm of an exercise. It is a combination of advancing, retreating, and unexpected stops. From the outside, one sees fast and slow movements alternating, but inside is a tactical decision. When I watch young martial artists from Binh Dinh perform at achievement tournaments, I see they are good at keeping a steady rhythm. They are also good at directing their eyes toward the punching hand. But I do not see many moments when their bodies are ready to change direction because of an imaginary counter-attack. In a real fight, that changing ability is what determines survival.

Structure under pressure is the third layer. Martial arts teach students to stay solid when pushed into a corner, when rhythm is broken, or when the opponent does not attack as expected. Binh Dinh traditional martial arts have rich ancient paired practice. But in many modern competitions, the form section often has no combat, and if combat is included, it is often governed by modern martial arts rules that prevent specific traditional techniques from being used. As a result, young people who want high achievements will bypass their ancestors’ special skills and switch to easier winning methods. The reward system is creating a generation of students who are good at following competition rules rather than good at understanding heritage. This is not an individual failure; it is a failure of the measurement framework.

When I spoke to some coaches at a martial centre in Binh Dinh, I heard them talk about “exporting martial arts”. They wanted to build a national brand, bring traditional martial arts into the international competition system, and make it a sport with clear scoring. I understand that desire. But between the global stage and the village mat, there is a great distance. What a martial school needs is not that every form can pass through a scoring machine or one aesthetic standard. What it needs is a system courageous enough to admit that some things cannot be placed on a stage. The moment a master senses an opponent pressing him with breath, the moment a student retreats half a step at exactly the right time to absorb a dangerous kick, those are data that do not appear in score sheets. But they are the core of Binh Dinh martial arts.

Contrarian angle

Many sports managers believe that in order to preserve traditional martial arts, they must turn it into an achievement sport and hold more international competitions. But when I look at traditional martial arts that have been “sportified” in Asia, I see consequences different from expectations. Taekwondo gained a global presence when it became an Olympic sport, but it has also been narrowed into a standardised technique system, and many essential values of Korean martial culture yielded to point-scoring tactics. Muay Thai also saw young fighters choosing safer styles to protect records. That does not mean the Thais or the Koreans were wrong, but it shows the empty chair remains, hidden behind the shine of medals.

The Binh Dinh story has its own nuance. Compared with modern martial arts, traditional fighting styles do not yet have one unified combat rule system. So when they are included in youth tournaments or festivals, organisers often borrow criteria from performing arts. The result is that martial schools good at teaching survival instincts struggle to showcase their skills, while schools good at stage presentation become the public face of the brand. From a media perspective, this is understandable. From a heritage perspective, it is distortion.

“Every mispronunciation is a system trying to say something.” When I was young, I mispronounced the name of a famous football player on television. That experience taught me that the mistake was not accidental. It was rooted in the way the media system operated without enough knowledge of the culture it was speaking about. Now, when I see Binh Dinh traditional martial arts squeezed into the fast, dynamic, and beautiful criteria of the stage, I see the same kind of misreading. The system is reading heritage in the language of the entertainment industry. The worlds of museums, heritage preservation, and sport have not truly sat down to ask the old masters what is most important about an ancient form. They only ask whether it can become a good promotional product.

I left An Nhon late in the afternoon. Before leaving, the old master stood up and made a very slow hand movement. He did not jump, shout, or finish with thunderous applause. He only stepped forward, lowered his centre of gravity, and extended his hand as if pushing an invisible door, then withdrew very quickly. “This move was used to block a spear coming from behind the bamboo grove,” he said. “People today do not see the bamboo grove, so they think it is too slow and useless.” I stood silent, staring at the empty space at the end of his hand. The empty student mat was still empty, but I began to see an invisible spear that only he and the old space could read.

Takeaway

The greatest lesson I learned from empty-stadium seasons, suspended matches, and martial schools with only one person left is not about blaming time. It lies in the fact that the sports system refuses to listen to the data of absence. If we only look at the medal table, record list, or number of registered tournaments, we think traditional martial arts are progressing. But if we look at how many practice halls actually open their doors, how many students truly learn through oral transmission, and how many masters can explain the atmosphere inside each form, we see another picture. The empty chair never lies. It only exposes what the system does not want to hear.

Modern sport may be a common language that helps traditional martial arts reach the world, but if that language forces heritage keepers to say things that are not theirs, that is when empty chairs will multiply. One can build beautiful performance centres, invite many international fighters, and project dazzling documentaries onto LED screens. But some data cannot be put into any statistical form: the feeling of a person standing on a straw mat, knowing that behind the bamboo grove there is a spear waiting. If the system misreads that, it will lose the key that makes Binh Dinh martial arts unique.

For me, the most moving moment in Binh Dinh was when the old master walked into the yard and looked toward the village gate as if someone was about to arrive. No one came. He smiled and said: “Long ago, my teacher stood here waiting for a stranger to come and learn. That stranger was me.” I held my notebook and wrote three words on the cover: “Read it correctly.” Traditional martial arts do not need to become a sport identical to all others. They need to be read through the silence they still preserve. Then, even if the mat is empty for a while, the heritage will still have a door to return to.