Just watching Greg do Chia Sao is a lesson in itself. Crisp, clean, automatic. Controlling the center. Making an angle. Actions from the elbow. Facing.
Loi Lau Hoi Sung, Lat Sau Jik Chung. Receive what comes, follow what goes, upon loss of contact, attack without hesitation. As David Peterson says, this is Wing Chun in a nutshell.
I have to admit, I find this whole story to be immensely interesting, although multi-faceted. The more I think about it, the more complicated it seems to be.
On the one hand, you have the cut-and-dried stance of Xu Xiaodong. Like those at Bullshido, he asserts its a simple matter of put-up or shut up. He thinks all Traditional martial arts are nonsense and so far, he has beaten up a Tai Chi “master” and a Wing Chun “master,” both in seconds. So, in these “contests,: he seems to have made his point. This conflict has defintely stirred up a hornet’s nest in China. There are reports of various types of state suppression of Xu and his ability to use social media to promote himself. There has been speculation that the Chinese state makes a lot of money from Kung Fu tourism and Xu’s activities might be bad for business.
In a new wrinkle, a Chinese tycoon is offering a total of 10 million yuan ($US1.45 million) to anyone who can defeat Xu! This should ensure more and higher profile events going forward. Hopefully those challengers who come forward will be wise enough to test out their fighting prowess against some other MMA style fighters in less public arenas before going for it on camera.
What I was thinking, however, especially in the case of high-level energy practitioners of Tai Chi, etc, is I don’t really expect the baiting approach of Xu to induce them to fight. Developing Chi is associated with Zen and other forms of training designed to raise awareness and awareness diminishes the power of the ego to control emotional centers and other behavior. That is, a true master of Tai Chi is not likely to be too ruffled by Xu’s challenges or induced to fight by them! So almost by definition, those who choose to step up to these challenges are having an ego-response, right? However, with millions on the line, which could in the right hands do so much good, one wonders if this will change the minds of those who might actually be able to fight with Tai Chi or some other high-level kung fu, who has the highest qualities of their art (such as being able to absorb energy or “issue it” (fa jing).
I remember the first time I saw someone “playing” the Muk Yan Jong (aka Wooden Dummy). This guy was visiting Oakland from Germany and had come by my old school (before Greg) to do a little training. He didn’t want to train with any of us – he just wanted to use our equipment, which he was allowed to do. None of us (not even the Sifu) had learned the complete dummy set, so it was a kind of mysterious tool which we’d only seen used fully in the movies. We had only learned to use it to train the Gan Sao and Kwan Sao “hands” (“in the ballpark,” as Greg would say, of what we see in the video below).
The dummy is most often associated with Wing Chun but variations on this tool have been used in many Chinese styles of Kung Fu.
The German visitor was learning some style of Wing Chun but the way he trained was quite different from what I later learned from Greg. He pretty much beat the crap out of that dummy and his goal seemed to be to make a show of force and the insensitivity of his arms.
There is an old story I heard from Gary Lam about his teacher Wong Shun Leung. A zealous student was hitting the dummy so hard he broke one of the arms off. He took the broken arm to Sifu Wong and said proudly, “Look Sifu, I broke it!” Sify Wong took the broken bit of arm, knocked the student on the head with it, and said, “Now I have buy a new one!”
I was trained as Greg demonstrates here, that working the dummy should be done with precision and controlled power. That the dummy is a training tool which teaches position, structure, and an approach to footwork. The footwork aspect is the least of it, as the dummy doesn’t move and requires the practitioner to step broadly around the arms and enter and exit and reenter, unlike real fighting, where the entrance is much more direct with a much tighter angle, and probably never that wide 45 degree entrance you are taught as a “training mistake” (i.e., a mistake you make in training that allows you to train but isn’t how you will fight, like training with both arms simultaneously in Chi Sau or developing footwork with a jump rope in boxing). The main thing the dummy teaches, if memory serves, is angle and structure and “chasing center.”