LEGENDS OF KUNG-FU #27 Evolution It's a common occurrence for instructors of the same style to have slight variations in their forms or their applied techniques. That leads to a great deal of bickering, useless quarrelling back and forth about who's right and who's wrong. After that argument begins, the parties involved start questioning each other's credentials, claiming that the other person didn't spend enough time with their teacher, wasn't the favorite student, or altogether misunderstood what the teacher was saying. Traditionally, this kind of insult-fest had a simple solution: fight. The winner would be vindicated, and the loser would shut his mouth and most likely close his school. However, the litigious environment of modern life precludes this type of solution as an acceptable option. So the only acceptable venue for such testing has become the tournament scene. Yet even that is not foolproof, as most competitors, coaches, and even the judges themselves can tell you that politics still can play a role in any fight or forms competition, unless the victor stands so far away from the rest of the pack that even the completely uneducated and impartial observer is convinced of who won. In the Chinese martial arts world, Wing Chun kung-fu instructors are probably the most vehement about their squabbles about who learned what from whom. For a system with only three empty hand forms and two weapons forms, there seems to be an inordinate amount of heated bickering about the right and wrong way of doing them. In my own experience, I've seen several different versions of those three hand forms. Yet, most of the instructors I've seen demonstrate those forms have legitimate reasons for doing their forms in the way that they do them. It also seems that because of Yip Man's long career as a teacher, he taught the forms in slightly different manners to different students at different points in his life. Wong Shun Leung, Hawkins Cheung, William Cheung, Leung Ting, and Ho Kam Ming were all direct students of Yip Man, but their forms all have minor differences in sequence, in execution, and in flavor. If you don't believe me, go buy the instructional or archival videotapes that feature them or their students. Better yet, go to some Wing Chun seminars and feel the differences for yourself. My master, David C.K. Lin, studied directly under the late Chang Tung-sheng for many years. During Chang's lifetime, he was regarded as the undisputed king of his chosen system, Shuai-Chiao. Both Lin's proponents and his detractors seem to agree that he was one of the finest students to ever learn from Chang and one of the finest instructors to teach and practice the art. Yet on a recent trip to Italy, Lin was criticized for incorrect technique by a student of one of his junior classmates over whether or not a certain hand was supposed to be open or closed during the execution of a form! My master's response was classic. "Standard techniques are a method of teaching beginners. As long as the combative logic behind each movement is sound and the application is effective, the minor differences are irrelevant for people who really understand the concept behind a certain technique," explained Lin. I recently had to explain this to one of my own students in a little more detail. As we were practicing a particular throw in preparation for his Combat Shuai-Chiao black belt test, I demonstrated one particular footwork pattern that went with the throw. My student then asked me why my master's elder son did the same throw with different footwork and hand positioning. I told him that he'd just asked a question that cut right to the core of martial arts evolution and proceeded to answer him as follows. "For the purpose of teaching and testing you as a beginner, you learn to do your techniques in a standardized manner. That basic manner teaches you certain body mechanics and develops certain strengths. Eventually, you have to learn how to think outside the box and see how to execute your techniques from a variety of different entries. The ability to understand how to derive those variations and make them work under a variety of different situations is what separates those who know an art versus those who are merely parroting what their teachers tell them. For an art to be alive, it has to be functional for a variety of different people, each with their own attributes and weaknesses. I do my throws differently from my master's son because I have certain structural weaknesses in my own body that I'm compensating for. I'm also not as fast as him, so I have to adjust my techniques to work while using a slower, weaker body. So while I can show you a variety of ways to perform a certain throw, only one or two ways might work for my particular body type, for my particular injuries, for my particular mindset." In a teacher's lifetime, he may teach one technique a number of different ways, depending on his level of comprehension or the state of his body at that time. Internal style authority Daniel Yu Wang once told me that he spoke to a very famous, elderly Tai-Chi teacher while he was still living in China. This elderly teacher had hundreds of students from around the world and was highly respected in the Tai-Chi world, revered as a living treasure. He told Wang that he disdained the fact that his younger students worked so hard to copy his form, yet were copying the form of an old man who was no longer in his prime and could no longer perform the Tai-Chi form in the way it was meant to be. Thus, it stands to reason that this old teacher probably taught his students from decades ago to move differently than the students he was teaching at the time of his meeting with Wang. The Chinese martial arts are still evolving. But we need to have our eyes and minds open enough to see that the different variations we see are not always errors or omissions as long as they retain the basic necessity of combative practicality within a system's conceptual boundaries.
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