Chung-Hua Institute

Southern style Kung-Fu history is filled with the kind of lore that makes for amazing sagas. Fukien & Canton both lay claim to different parts of the Southern Shaolin Temple's legacy. Interestingly, both provinces have systems known as "Five Ancestors" fist. The Fukienese Five Ancestors system (ngor cho kun - Fukienese) is a mix of the Ming Dynasty's Great Ancestor fist (tai zu quan), with Lohan boxing, monkey style, white crane techniques, and another fist system.

Canton supposedly has more than one system that uses the name "Five Ancestors". The one we'll examine here is also known as "Sil Lum Fut Ga" or the Shaolin Buddha style. Legend has it that the five great masters of the Southern Shaolin Temple - Choy, Hung, Lau, Li, and Mok - founded the Fut Ga system. They pooled their collective knowledge and created a new system that would become the standard curriculum for later generations of monks. Each of the five systems was known for a particular specialty, and the new hybrid that resulted kept the strongest points of each of the original systems, while culling out techniques that were less immediately practical. Fut Ga was the result.

Today, the Sil Lum Fut Ga system is overseen in Honolulu, Hawaii, by Arthur Yau Sung Lee. A student of Fut Ga master Lum Tai-Yong, Lee undertook his study at a young age and became the heir to his teacher's system. His system is known for fearsome hand strikes that move with lightning speed, impacting with devastating results. There are four basic fist strikes and seven open hand blocks that can double as strikes and slaps.

The obvious predisposition towards open-handed techniques is explained by Lee's son, Harlan, who oversees instruction at the Gee Yung Martial Arts & Lion Dance Institute. "When you hit with the palm, you stand less of a chance of hurting your knuckles," explains Harlan Lee. "Unless you spend a lot of time conditioning your knuckles, you run the risk of injuring yourself when you punch a hard object, like someone's head. A palm strike will lessen the chance of self-injury, while increasing the surface area with which to hit your opponent."

Arthur Lee illustrates the point in other ways as well: "Go get a focus mitt. Hit it with your palm, and you'll see that palm strike doesn't send vibration back into the arm the way a punch does. Striking with a closed fist has greater outgoing force, but diminishing return since it sends force back into the striker's arm." There are other benefits to using an open hand, as well. Versatility is perhaps the main advantage.

"With an open hand, you can attack with finger pokes, palm thrusts, and powerful slaps, as well as defending with parries and limb punishments," explains the senior Lee. Once, at a seminar event, Lee was teaching the open hand slaps that his Fut Ga system treasures, when a challenger voiced his disbelief that an open hand could inflict more pain than a closed fist. Lee invited the stocky man to try him out, and he immediately found a fist flying towards his face. With a powerful slap and a slide of his stance, the offending limb was swatted down with such force that the challenger stumbled forward, struggling not to show pain. Rolling up the sleeve of his heavyweight black gi, he found that Lee's slap left a bright red palm print with blood oozing out under the skin.

Open hands will also give a fighter 2-3 more inches in reach, as compared to a punch. Compare the effective range for a backfist to the range of a diagonal slap. Harlan Lee gives a concrete example: "To see this more clearly, hold your arm out at full extension and make a fist. Then open your hand and notice how much more reach you just created." This extra reach makes blocking and striking with an open hand faster than the same techniques with a fist. Lee continues, "Ideally, you should block with an open hand. If you want to punch after the block puts you into position, go right ahead!"

Open palms allow for easier blocking too. The wang chung chai (diagonal hammer strike) with either fist or open hand is a natural for blocking too, allowing one to strike the arm of his attacker. All of Fut Ga's seven blocks are open handed. The forearm tension required in making a fist is another factor that makes the open hand more appealing. When a palm strike or open handed block goes into action, it requires far less effort to accelerate it. The arm must be loose like a whip. No stiff power impedes it.

However, palm hits are not without caution. Arthur Lee warns, "It's best not to use the back of the hand to hit, since there are lots of nerve endings there that, when hit, will disable the hand. The palm has a lot more padding and is used on a daily basis for chores. There's not as much need to condition it."

Lum Tai-Yong would freely interchange fist and palm when he was forced to use his art. There were certain times, such as when he delivered a back-hand strike, that he preferred to employ the fist, as the knuckles generated more power. The palm still remained his preference for an angular strike. One time, Lum Dai Yong, when walking home at night with his wife and adopted baby, was attacked by two thugs. Arthur Lee spent a great deal of time with his teacher, recalling, "He used a combination fai ying jeong (upward lifting palm block) & wang chung chai to drop one of them immediately. The other ran from fear, when he saw that Lum's strikes to his partner's limbs were enough to debilitate him."

According to Fut Ga logic, the palm is best for striking the face, unless using a backfist. The power in a palm thrust comes more from the ma bu horse stance and slight shuffling footwork. When the hand comes out in a palm strike, the blade of the palm or the palm heel does most of the damage. On the other hand, slapping techniques use the whole surface of the palm to inflict damage.

Lee finishes by saying, "Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here when I talk about the power of the Fut Ga palm. Fut Ga uses a great deal of palm striking, but there are also a lot of closed fist techniques as well. The straight punch & backfist are used quite liberally. The open hand and closed hand have to work together for the best situation in combat. It's like yum-yeung, which people call yin-yang in Mandarin. You just have to understand when to use what. One of the beauties of the Sil Lum Fut Ga system is that we aren't reliant on techniques that require a great deal of physical strength to deliver. Punches to soft targets make sense, but open hands give you a sense of freedom and speed in your techniques. They're also symbolic of peace, which is what the Buddha taught."