Unlike academic degrees, martial arts vary widely on the requirements and types of honors and ranks that students receive. While the most common method for determining rank is the colored belt system, some martial arts, such as forms of tai chi and qigong, eschew rank altogether. Determining which rank of which martial art is most prestigious requires a careful look into the amount of time, effort and mastery required to reach that rank.
The Black Belt
The black belt is the traditional rank used to denote mastery of a martial arts system. Contrary to popular belief, reaching a black belt rank often has less to do with a practitioner's ability to fight than his familiarity with forms, styles and techniques. While one school might award a black belt after only a year of class attendance, others, such as the Shaolin Gung Fu Institute, can require a minimum of three years before achieving a black belt.
Degrees of Black Belt
As impressive as it is to receive a black belt in any system, some martial arts have multiple degrees of black belt. For instance, the traditional Japanese arts of iaido and judo have 10 dans, or black belt degrees, each of which might require the same amount of time it took to progress from white belt to first-degree black belt. This makes it difficult to compare mastery levels if one person has trained for 30 years to receive a tenth-degree black belt while another has trained 10 years and received black belts in multiple traditions.
Teaching Licensure
Most martial arts offer teaching licensure to students who receive a certain level of black belt. Because these students can potentially start their own schools and teach their own version of the art, many martial art traditions require a significant mastery before awarding teaching licensure. Therefore, a martial artist with a black belt in a tradition, who also is eligible to teach, can be considered to have a high degree in that martial art.
Lineage and Awards
Some martial arts, such as bujinkan budo taijutsu, operate under a single grandmaster whose responsibility is to preserve and pass on the martial art to successors. In these cases, the individual who has the highest ranking and holds the most information about her particular tradition's techniques, forms and history can be said to have the highest degree for that art. Other types of martial arts, such as the sport-oriented mixed martial arts tradition, often gauge a practitioner's prestige on the competitions she has won.
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