PART 5
Jon: One phenomenon which we see in the MA world is that of people making a ‘combined’ art based on the arts they have studied. What are your thoughts of this issue of ‘purity’ in martial arts?
Jarek: Your comment reminds me of when I first started studying with my Xinyi Liuhe teacher, Li Zunsi (李尊思). Soon after I started studying with him, I noticed that there were several movements he was teaching which came from other arts like Cha Quan (查拳) or Guan Dong Quan (关东拳). When I asked him about why we were practicing these moves, he replied “Because they work in fighting!”. That’s why martial arts evolve and change – because people find that certain things work or don’t work.
A young Jarek (right) with his Xinyi Liuhe teacher Li Zunsi (middle)
When I was studying with him Li Zunsi emphasised that the extremities (shao jie) need to be fast (手要快). He would encourage us to develop fast handwork – one of the practice methods was to whirl the hands in front of the body in circles, with a rhythm almost like hitting a Bolang Gu (rattle drum on a stick, a common Chinese children’s toy), so that the opponent just sees a blur in front of his face and can’t tell where the real punch is coming from.
Li Zhongxuan (author of famous book on Xingyiquan) said there are two kinds of skills: (i) One kind consists of the attributes you achieve through individual training, such as strength, structure, speed, etc; (ii) The other kind is the ability to actually use these attributes / moves in a fight.
This also ties in to an old kungfu saying “yi ceng gongfu, yi ceng li” (different principles for different stages of gongfu). For example, normally when people begin practicing Xingyiquan the first thing they concentrate on is becoming very solid, rooted and integrated (zheng), and in this stage the body moves first and the hands follow the body. However, when it comes to sparring training, the hands must be launched very fast, and it ends up being the body following the hands.
Similarly, in Yiquan there is the idea of ‘breaking the bottle’. In the initial stages of practice you break your body into big segments – arms, legs, torso – and through practice merge them together into a very rooted, solid whole – you glue all the parts into a whole bottle, but the connections are elastic, live, agile. Next step is to break the big parts into smaller ones – the arm into palm, forearm, shoulder, etc and again stick them together.The stitched places are stitched with your intent, awareness. One continues the process until awareness penetrates even the tiny parts, cells of the body. Each step means new knowledge of the body, of how it works, how it moves. The rebuilt structure is very agile, swiftly responds to changes, directly on the reflex level.
Chinese Martial Arts – and MA systems in general – are designed as feedback loops, by which I mean the art has several parts (individual practice, footwork, reactions, neigong, sparring, etc). The beginner begins by practicing the stances and individual movements – this is part 1. Then, later on, the student gets the opportunity to spar, and finds out that the deficiencies in their individual training, e.g. not training with the correct intent, footwork is not agile, etc. Then you have to go back to the material in stage 1 and change the way that you train it. It is a continuous feedback loop which happens dozens of times in the course of learning any particular style or system. One of the problems that I have seen in CMA is that many students and teachers think that practicing forms or individual movements is enough, and never test their material out through sparring. Without the sparring feedback, they don’t even have any idea of which areas they are lacking in!
Jon: When I first started studying CMA, I thought that I would just choose a teacher, study a whole system from him, and that would be it. However, what I have found in practice is that actually it is more like a process of assembling the material that I need for a ‘complete’ system, based not only on material from my sifu, but also on drills / exercises from other branches of the same system, or even other systems such as Zhang family short boxing. Do you have the same experience?
Jarek: In Poland we have a saying “jumping from one flower to another”. It originally refers to dating girls, but I think equally applies to MA. I think especially in China a lot of martial artists, especially if they have not been exposed to other martial arts, think that their art is ‘complete’ and is all they need to learn. In my experience this is not true, there is no such thing as a ‘complete’ system and eventually everyone finds out that they need to study one or more other arts to complement their shortcomings / weaknesses. I am sure you know the Chinese saying “xue quan rongyi, gai quan nan” (martial arts is easy to learn, but very difficult to correct). Once you have a learnt one skill or movement to a certain extent it becomes engraved in your body, in your mind. In my case, even though I have done Xinyi Liuhe for such a long time, my body cannot ‘forget’ the karate I learnt when I was 17-18, and it still comes out in sparring. You cannot just erase what you have learnt before. The reflexes will always be there. I remember a Japanese guy who was studying wushu at around the same time as me. He was always on the hunt for the purest version of the art he was studying (Dai style xinyi), and would criticise his teacher for being too ‘hard’ (gang).
This whole idea of the ‘purest’ art being the best is absolutely not true – all you have to do is look at MMA to see that this is a false idea. Look also at Tim Cartmell – he originally studied Chinese arts such as xingyi, taiji and bagua, but then also later on studied BJJ and now is an expert at that too.
Famous CMA and BJJ teacher Tim Cartmell [source: Ground Dragon MA]
Every martial art is a product of its historical environment, which imposes rules and customs on it and means that certain moves or certain eventualities are not considered. A good example of this is the lack of groundwork in most Chinese kungfu styles.