Merpati Putih Silat
Javanese silat from 1963 built on breath work, breaking, and getaran - vibration perception also taught to the blind.
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IndonesiaCharacter & Origin
Training
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What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
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About Merpati Putih Silat
Merpati Putih means white dove in Javanese and stands as a symbol of peace and justice. According to its own tradition, the art arose around 1550 at the court of the Javanese kingdom of Mataram and was passed down for generations exclusively within one family. The turning point came only in the tenth generation: Rd. Saring Purnomo Hadi instructed his sons to begin teaching it publicly. The two of them - Poerwoto Hadi Purnomo, known as Mas Pung, and Budi Santoso Hadi Purnomo, known as Mas Budi - founded the Merpati Putih organization on April 12, 1963, in Yogyakarta in central Java. Instruction rests on three pillars. The first is tata gerak, movement and technique; the second is pernafasan, breath work, on which the practitioners' famed ability to break hard objects is built; the third is getaran, training in the perception of vibration. It is this third pillar that gives the school its distinctive standing. On September 15, 1990, Merpati Putih drew up a special curriculum for the blind, in which the perception of vibration is used for orientation in space; thanks to it, practitioners can make their way through a maze and, in demonstrations, even move about blindfolded. Few martial arts can demonstrate their inner work so verifiably, and few have a program of their own for the blind. The school's name thus points not to combativeness but to peace and justice, and instruction follows the same order of values: movement, breath, and only then the ability the public associates most with Merpati Putih.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.