Our second pairing will be that of Gung Fu and Technique. First and foremost, these two are NOT the same. Let me repeat that by saying that they are NOT THE SAME. They are not synonymous save by the most extreme and tenuous stretch of the imagination. The character “Gung” literally translates to “merits and achievements” with the implied undertone of [through hard work]. The character “Fu” literally refers to a male person/figure. So literally the phrase would translate to “A man who has achieved merits through hard work”. More colloquially, Gung Fu would simply be “a hard working man”. The phrase is appropriately used for all skills which require a level of diligence and ability to become adept i.e. cooking, cleaning, building/fixing things, gardening, writing, fighting etc. Thus a person who does Gung Fu does not train in techniques, but simply the skills required to make their techniques viable.
Let me now introduce three phrases that used to be separate in meaning for Chinese Martial Arts curriculum. The first is ‘“Lien Gung”’, the second is ‘Lien Kuen’, the third is ‘Saan Sik’.
For the first phrase, the word ‘lien’ means ‘to train or practice’. The ‘gung’ character still refers to the merits and achievements mentioned. Thus to ‘“Lien Gung”’ means ‘to practice and train the meritous skills’. In the context of TCMA, it refers to fortifying the body, training in the tools and skills to make techniques efficacious when used.
The second phrase, ‘Lien Kuen’, is what most people think gung fu is all about. ‘Lien’ is still the same as the previous statement and ‘Kuen’ refers to fists; in TCMA though, Kuen is sometimes used, as in this scenario, as an umbrella term for a form/kata. So, as popularly understood, the phrase ‘Lien Kuen’ refers to forms training.
The final phrase, ‘Saan Sik’, refers to techniques. The character ‘Saan’ translates roughly as ‘scattered’ or ‘dispersed‘. The character ‘Sik’, translates to ‘formulae’ or ‘style’. So if we translate literally, ‘Saan Sik’ means ‘scattered formulae’. However, colloquially, it refers to the training of the individual techniques found within a gung fu form.
For better or for worse, these three quite distinct categories of training are now lumped under the umbrella term of Gung Fu. Some blame Bruce Lee for using the term Gung Fu quite candidly and, due to his popularity, people took to it and refused to give it up. Some blame the times, seeing the necessity to have some sort of cohesive label for things to appeal to a more disparate audience. I blame both, but I waffle on which gets the most blame. That is why when strangers or interested individuals ask me what I do, what would normally be a 10-15 second interchange with a native Cantonese-Chinese speaker becomes a several minutes long explanation to a non-native/total stranger to the subject.
For our purposes, ‘Lien Kuen’ has already been discussed in the previous section which detailed, in a nutshell, the “Gung Fu Form”. We will be discussing “Lien Gung” and “Saan Sik”.
There is no mysticism about the power behind real Gung Fu people. There is no magic technique, no ultimate punch or kick, no extraordinary strength or speed. It all comes from ordinary, rigorous, time consuming training. You see a martial artist punch through boards, bricks, concrete and, if you are a lay person, you might be inclined toward slight mysticism. You may be properly convinced of esoteric meditations and arcane movements and dietary regiments that might produce such epic powers. But in all honesty, to attribute such brilliant displays of martial prowess to such nonsense is doing TCMA a severe injustice. Granted there is a certain level of mystique about the Asian Martial Arts but, to be quite honest, the mystique stems more from the ambience of where training used to commence (temples, mountain tops, secluded forests etc), than the actual training itself. There is nothing mystical about slowly pounding away at stones and wooden training dummies to gradually make your bones denser. There is nothing very mystical or mind boggling about rubbing liniment oils onto your bruises to decrease the swelling and to promote blood circulation after all that physical abuse. There is nothing properly magical about rising early in the day, taking in the fresh air, doing gentle, but effective, and time consuming stretches and breathing exercises to limber up, freshen up, and encourage circulation and muscular toning day in and day out.
“Lien Gung” is fortifying the body.
“Lien Gung” is the heart of TCMA.
It is the process of strengthening all of your body so that the punches and kicks and grabs and throws you learn from forms and drills can actually be used. Allow me, if you will, an example to illustrate the reality of “Lien Gung”. Boxers are notorious for superior punching skills, and rightly so. If a discipline centered on primarily one type of hitting, that being a punch, it better be bloody magnificent in that category. And boxing genuinely is. Time and time again, when taking the average practitioner (average, not individual, as there are some shit boxers and some marvelous gung fu/muay thai/judo/karate etc punchers) the boxer reigns supreme in the punching category. However, the mainstream boxer wears gloves; All that power… through a gloved hand. I promise you that if you take off the gloves of the average boxer, and told them to punch as hard as they would normally with the gloves on, most of them would find themselves unable to perform close to their gloved-potential; they have powerful punches, but relatively soft hands. Their hands cannot handle the strength of their own punches. No doubt a punch from a professional boxer, without gloves, should knock out the average individual. At the same time though, chances are that the boxer will also split their hand or break a knuckle on impact. The Gung Fu person, though, seems to punch through wood, bricks, concrete etc barehanded with none of the injuries that would be sustained by a bare handed boxer. Are they stronger? Perhaps… but, on average, not likely in the punching category. What makes the fist of the Gung Fu person not split open and spill blood? The “Lien Gung” aspect prevents this. Over years of gradual, constant, static and dynamic pressures applied to the striking surfaces (palms, forearms, knuckles etc), the bones harden and skin toughens up. Though their peak power upon impact might be less than the boxer, their toughened bones and skin can withstand the impact with little to no injury. This allows the Gung Fu person to consistently throw out powerful punches, time and time again, with little time for recovery. If that picture wasn’t vivid enough for you, try this. Boxers are equal to the world’s most magnificent and powerful Glass Cannon. Glass is easy to manufacture; it’s just melted sand. It’s a bit time consuming to melt and mold so much glass, but once it’s done you have one quickly made cannon. One shot and BOOM, chances are that the bridge will collapse. A shame about the cannon though, because that also goes BOOM and can’t be used anymore until proper repairs are made. The Gung Fu person might simply be a regular cannon. It needs the wooden frame and the iron casting and the ceramic bits and steel whatsits. It’s more expensive to make and has a longer production time. But it fires more regularly and can be used quite consistently… and it’s still a cannon.
“Lien Gung”, by itself, is quite non-spectacular in appearance. It consists of standing in stances, walking in stances, slapping materials of varying densities and hardness, running laps, jumping, stretching, exaggerated breathing, segmented muscular tensions and, to a certain degree, weight/resistance training. Inherently, there are no techniques in these exercises. But it doesn’t matter how many techniques you know. A weak hand cannot punch. Flimsy legs cannot stand. Fragile fingers cannot grab. Stiff muscles cannot move well. You may know every single tiger claw technique known to man, but if the fingers are weak and the stance is shaky, there will be an absence of the power to grip and the foundation to sink and pull. No longer can it be called a tiger claw but more aptly titled a pussy cat claw. Even pussy cat claws are probably better than the “lack-of-lien-gung” claws, because at least cats have sharp nails. It used to be that learning Chinese Martial Arts was nearly ALL ABOUT “LIEN GUNG”. However, certain changes in the times required for a refocusing of the curriculum. The major one is that it was no longer financially viable for CMA Masters to teach as they used to and, in order to make money, they had to make the training less harsh to generate a more reasonable cash flow. Thus they flooded the curriculum with drilling techniques with a severe de-emphasis on training Gung. Ask yourself honestly this question: “If you went to a martial arts teacher, paying for instruction in the initial stages, and all you learned for the first two to three years was standing in various stances, slapping various objects of increasing density and hardness, and bludgeoning tree trunks and bamboo poles with your forearms etc… would you seriously consider staying at the school?” Most likely no… no one in the modern era would acquiesce to this type of training due to lack of time and general unwillingness for such physical abuse. However, if you saw a school that taught lots of quick punches and kicks and pine board breaking within the first year… that would draw your attention immediately. Even as spectators, the latter is far more appealing to watch then sweating, shaky limbed individuals trying to hold horse stance for an indeterminate period of time. Thus “Lien Gung”, what should be 85% of Chinese Martial Arts training, is something more along the lines of 30% in most schools. Insurance is another big issue… can’t have children smacking hard surfaces without taking into account sue happy parents.
“Saan Sik” refers to the individual techniques. This phrase includes the ‘Wood Punch’, the ‘Double Tiger Claws’, the ‘Reincarnated/Revived Crane’ and the like. “Saan Siks” are the separated units of a formal Gung Fu Form. Just because they are codified and practiced in a particular sequence DOES NOT MEAN that in an actual physical confrontation that they are to be used IN THAT ORDER. It may seem like common sense to many of you that the form itself does not signify an actual battle strategy, but it is surprising how many people watch a form and go “that would never work in a fight” with the idea that the form is teaching you how to fight. That notion is, by nearly every stretch of the imagination, INCORRECT. Think of the Gung Fu Form as the ABCs of your respective system. In the forms are the collected movements which are relevant to a particular combat philosophy. It is your job, as a diligent practitioner, to recognize the individual techniques that are strung together, detach them from the set, and reassemble them as you see fit (and by that I mean ‘as you find them to be actually efficacious in combat), and drill those combinations. This is the portion of Gung Fu where “dead movements” are given life and the art is allowed to continue changing and evolving to fit the body structure and needs of the individual practitioner. Everyone learns the form one way. Everyone does the same conditioning and body fortifying exercises in one way. But when it comes to the expression of individual techniques, different people will choose to use different techniques. Different people may also find a way to utilize the same technique in different ways. Let me give you an example. There is a sequence in the Hung Gar system, found most noticeably in one of the Pillar Forms known as “Gung Ji Fook Fu” which translates roughly as “Taming the Tiger Along the Gung Character (the Gung character in this case is shaped like the letter I [aye] so it is often translated as –Taming the Tiger Along the I Pattern—). In this sequence, we have what is called a Gwa Choi followed by a Pao Choi (a hanging back fist followed by an upward rising strike with the opposite arm). I understand it is hard to imagine, but bear with the poor illustration. Some interpret this sequence as the Gwa Choi blocking an attack and, followed by a side step, the Pao Choi attacking upwards to the face. That is one possible interpretation, though somewhat awkward. Another interpretation is that this sequence trains the force of downward strike and upward strike to ward off blows coming from respective directions… another possible interpretation. Yet still there are some who maintain that this sequence should not be taken literally together but are, in fact, simply two techniques strung conveniently together which should be taken apart and treated as unique entities… yet an additional acceptable interpretation. And there are those, and I am among them, who believe this sequence can both be taken apart to be two separate techniques (a hanging back fist as well as a rising forearm/fist strike)… AS WELL AS training a type of scissor technique. It doesn’t matter if you can’t imagine it… just realize what I have just done. I took a pair of movements in a popular form, and everyone essentially trains the form in a similar manner, and introduced to you four possible ways/interpretations of what that one pair is meant to do. There is a saying which roughly translates to “One Thousand Transformations, Ten Thousand Expressions”. This refers to, among other things, the notion that one idea can be expressed in so many different ways and, from these different expressions, so many more differences and flavours arise.
“Saan Sik” speaks directly to the heart of Gung Fu evolution. If people simply practiced the forms and did the lien gung, the art form would be preserved quite nicely in whatever present state it was transferred. It is by the exploration of the many permutations of these individual techniques, combining and reinterpreting and experimenting with what works for the individual, that the art is allowed to breathe and survive. However, it must be made abundantly clear that knowledge of “Saan Sik” alone does not a good Gung Fu practitioner make. All the techniques in the world don’t amount to a whit if the body is too weak to use. For those that like fantasy video games, “I don’t care how powerful your spells are, if you don’t have the magic points to cast then it’s as good as not having the spell.” If we had to pick from the three categories of “Lien Gung”, “Lien Kuen” and “Saan Sik”, Lien Gung would prove to be the most important of the three. Lien Gung, all by itself, makes a powerful individual who, by default, would be a formidable adversary, or a splendidly healthy individual. Forms collectors may look impressive, but they are weak and empty, what we call “fah kuen sau teui” or “flowery fists and embroidered kicks”. That means it is all for show and nothing is substantive in the way of application or practicality. Saan Sik aficionados are equally weak, but stand a slightly better chance in that if you know a plethora of techniques and fight very smart and conservatively, there may be a chance of victory. But the most sure fire way of success in TCMA, in any form of martial arts for that matter, is the Lien Gung aspect, the fortifying of the body. Absent techniques and form, a strong clumsy swing is still a strong swing… despite being clumsy.
Train Hard. Talk Less.
~Thunder Palms
No comments:
Post a Comment