A training area is a system-specific context in which training in a martial art takes place. The locations considered appropriate for training vary widely across the world’s martial traditions. The choices made may arise from traditional medical beliefs. For example, the masters of some Chinese systems recommend morning practice outdoors in order to promote health.
In other instances, historical and political contexts dictated hiding the practice of martial skills from the politically dominant behind closed doors or in secluded areas; it was for that reason that, according to oral tradition, Brazilian capoeira was practiced in slave quarters or in the bush and was disguised as dance. In India, the ethical concerns of the Northern Kalarip-payattu gurus who do not want the dangerous art misused confine teaching to an indoor area at night.
Buildings designated as appropriate locations for martial art instruction are common in both European (e.g., the salles de fence [French; fencing halls] of the Renaissance sword master) and Asian (e.g., the guan of some Chinese boxing teachers) arts. In some traditions, such as the Japanese or Korean, a building (referred to in Japanese as a dojo and in Korean as a dojang) whose use is restricted specifically to activities associated with martial arts teaching, practice, testing, or exhibition serves as the location for training. On the other hand, although the location for the instruction in and practice of the Indian martial art of Northern Kalarippayattu is also a building, the kalari (Tamil; battleground), this building also may be utilized by the martial arts master as the clinic in which traditional medicine is practiced.
Outdoor areas such as pits or even the shaded area behind the house of a guru are employed as training quarters in the Southern Kalarippayattu system of India, as in some other arts. In yet other arts, the notion of a training area is even more informal. For example, particular parks may provide the training grounds for some of the Chinese arts (e.g., taijiquan [tai chi ch'uan]) in order to allow practitioners to obtain the benefits of fresh air while going through forms, but this is a matter of customary practice rather than the consecration of the site, as is the case with the Japanese or Okinawan dojo, for instance. In the traditional street capoeira of Brazil, certain public areas (most notably the plaza of the Roman Catholic Church of Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil) became traditional areas for practice, although these locations were used for a range of other social interactions, as well.
Although this is not universally the case, it is common cross-culturally to make of the training location something in the nature of sacred space, if only temporarily. The space commonly is marked by special behaviors on entering the area. Students bow or perform similar ritual acts when entering. Behavior in the Japanese dojo (place for studying the way [do]) represents the height of formality in this regard. Not only is the building itself entered with such special behaviors, but also an area of even higher intensity is created within the building itself. In a traditional dojo, a kamidana (altar to the spirits) will be found in the front of the room. Photographs of founders of the system, master instructors, or legendary figures are clustered on the front wall—along with national flags in many contemporary training halls. Hierarchy is signaled by positioning within the dojo. The higher ranks line up facing the front of the training hall, with lower-ranking students lined up behind them; teachers stand at the front of the room facing students. The dojo and the behaviors appropriate to it set the model for many other contemporary Asian martial arts and those non-Asian systems influenced by them.
Practitioners of kendo, the Japanese Way of the Sword, practice their moves with bamboo swords in a dojo in Japan, ca. 1920.
In south India, a dynamic relationship is believed to exist between the students of kalarippayattu and their training hall, in that the building is analogous to a human body, while the students are the body’s animating spirit. One cannot exist without the other. Even abandoned training halls do not lose their sanctity. In ancient times, Howard Reid and Michael Croucher report that landowners commonly owned private kalaris. If the training buildings fell into disuse, rather than destroying them, owners had them converted into temples. Rituals such as lighting a sacred lamp every day marked the abandoned kalari as sacred space.
Again, even in those systems lacking formal buildings for the practice of their disciplines, the symbolic use of space is obvious. Even in Southern Kalarippayattu, where outdoor areas rather than buildings are utilized, students of this art, like their northern counterparts, ritually honor deities as sociated with the kalari, and particularly Kali (the Hindu martial goddess), before they begin training. In capoeira, the roda, the circle of play formed by capoeiristas awaiting their opportunities to enter, is essentially created by the berimbau (the musical instrument used to accompany the jogo—the martial contest of the art). The position in the roda occupied by the berim-bau and by the mestre (teacher) constitutes a high-intensity area analogous to those noted in the Japanese dojo. The pe do berimbau (foot of the berimbau) denotes the opening (the “door,” as conceived in this tradition) through which one must enter to play. This door should be approached in a crouch from the outside of the ring. To enter, players kneel, perform ritual gestures (perhaps making the sign of the cross familiar in Roman Catholicism), and enter the roda with an acrobatic flourish (e.g., a cartwheel) before beginning the jogo. The phenomenon of creating a sacred space without resorting to physical structures suggests that the training areas of traditional martial arts are more properly regarded as conceptual rather than physical.
The martial tradition of framing training and contesting areas as sacred space, while not universal, is widely spread and tenacious. There is a reminder of this custom even in specifically nontraditional combat systems in the formalities that precede bouts.
