Muay Thai fights with the art of eight limbs
Muay Thai, often called Thai boxing, is a full-contact martial art of stand-up strikes, sweeps and clinch work. Its nickname, the Art of Eight Limbs, counts the fists, elbows, knees and shins a fighter can hit with, twice the weapons a boxer is allowed to use in the ring.
Someone who practises it is a nak muay, and Westerners training in Thailand are sometimes called nak muay farang, foreign boxers. The first half of the name comes from the Sanskrit mavya, meaning to pull together or unite, and in Thai muay means to tie as well as sport boxing. Thai derives from Tai, meaning free and naming the Tai-Kadai speakers. The modern phrase took over from the older Ram Mut Ram Muay during the reign of King Rama II, from 1809 to 1824.
The art belongs to a family of styles across the Indian cultural sphere, including Musti-yuddha, Muay Boran, Muay Lao, Burmese Lethwei, Cambodian Kun Khmer and Tomoi. Thailand's official history, compiled by the Institute of the Art of Muay Thai, traces it to a hermit named Sukatanata, said to have founded a school of liberal and martial arts around 657 AD, and to Fon jerng, a fighting dance from the Nanzhao period that survives as a classical dance in northern Thailand.
The oldest written use of muay appears in the Mungrai law code of 1296, a palm-leaf text from the reign of King Mangrai, founder of Chiang Mai, which lists it among 18 kinds of quarrel. From 1455, under King Borommatrailokkanat, a royal guard unit of fighters called Tha Nai Lueak was written into military law, and it was abolished under King Mongkut in the mid-1800s. Northern chronicles also describe an Ayodhya king importing boxers from what is now Chonburi province.
The sport spread worldwide in the late twentieth century as Thai fighters entered kickboxing and mixed-rules bouts abroad. At home the professional league answers to the Professional Boxing Association of Thailand, under the Sports Authority of Thailand.
Source: Muay Thai
