Win a fight, get laid, lose a fight, get laid, it was a win-win situation.
This preamble to this post may appear out of place, even self-serving, but it is important if you wish to put your thoughts into the right context and understand what I am trying to say.
In a ‘Concept” driven Martial Art like Wing Chun, context is everything.
Context is usually the difference between understanding and confusion.
This post is a lead-in to a much larger body of work, that hopefully I will put into an E-book somewhere down the line.
I was 39 years of age in 1992 when I took up training in Wing Chun Kung Fu, and I came to the style with more than 35 years of experience in and around the Martial Arts scene.
This is quite relevant to my understanding and interpretation of the Sil Lim Tao.
Tune in to any newsroom in the Mainstream Media and they are full of dire economic predictions for the future, partly due to the fact that my generation, the ‘Baby Boomers’ are all entering or already at, retirement age.
Worldwide many millions of people are about to stop buying unneeded crap and stop paying taxes.
But if we step back 60 years we have that same many millions of children entering adolescence.
Unlike today, there was no internet, practically no Television, or at least none suitable for the growing youth of the growing countries, no video games, in short, no suitable and affordable way to fill the empty hours of growing up.
Even in a smallish city like Liverpool in England, there would be dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bored teenagers in the same place at the same time.
All trying to impress a potential sexual partner.
The cheapest and most easily accessed method was to show off.
And the cheapest way to show off was to fight.
No generation before or since has been involved in so much random, unprovoked, unjustified, street violence.
In Europe and America, Friday night was “Fight Night”.
School playgrounds became nothing short of a Gladiatorial training grounds.
This is what fuelled the Boxing Boom in the U.K. And then the advent of the Kung Fu craze worldwide.
To my generation, Martial Arts existed as a way to become a more capable fighter.
But the real madness was that we were not training to become fighters.
We were training to be lovers.
Win more fights, get more chicks.
Insanely you did not even need to win, just standing up for yourself, especially against bullies, would earn some serious ‘STREET CRED.’
The chicks of the day just loved guys who could handle themselves or were at least willing to try.
So the majority of teenage boys got into it.
Win a fight, get laid, lose a fight, get laid, it was a win-win situation.
Mindfulness did not rear its ugly head until sometime in the mid-1980s when most Martial Arts were hijacked by the health and fitness boom and the charlatans that populate it.
So, like all of my generation, my approach is always about capability, fighting capability.
If you do not align with this thinking that’s fine, it just means you grew up in better times, but it does not make me wrong.
Sil Lim Tao.
From the outset, it is essential to separate Sil Lim Tao from the Sil Lim Tao Form.
Sil Lim Tao, the “Little Idea”, is the central pillar of everything we do in Wing Chun, but the Sil Lim Tao FORM is just one of six movement sets that aid in understanding the “Little Idea”.
A convenient, but in no way essential, way to frame this is that the Sil Lim Tao is a set of books in which the Sil Lim Tao Form is just the first volume.
When we consider that I have been reading this set of books, over and over, for 30 years what do I think?
The “Little Idea”, as we all know, is a CONCEPT.
And CONCEPTS change every time they encounter new information, this is why CONTEXT is paramount.
I cannot ignore that what I think today is not even close to what I thought 20 years ago, but I do know, beyond any doubt, that the “Little Idea” has not changed.
I have changed, or rather my thinking has changed.
Saliently, what I think now is not what I thought 10 years ago, and I would be naive to expect my present mental position to be my Final Position.
I do however think that I am very close to the Final Position.
The “Little Idea”, the single overriding concept is SIMPLICITY.
The actual shape and content of the training we do, while important, is almost irrelevant.
We could use any style of Martial Art, after all, when Dr Leung Jan began this process of refinement and simplification the physical shape and content were based on his own skill set, more than likely Shaolin Kung Fu.
Many of you will disagree with this, and that’s fine, it was not and is not about the content.
It is about SIMPLIFYING the content.
What a vague and nebulous word SIMPLICITY is.
Especially when we consider that once we have simplified what we know and do and have this new approach, this new IDEA of what Wing Chun is, it means that what we knew previously, what we struggled with, what we argued over, was not, in fact, Wing Chun after all.
But even before our head stops spinning we realise that unless we now know all there is to know, we must SIMPLIFY our IDEA of Wing Chun even further.
Stick or twist?
Even more confusing, if we do choose to keep training this new IDEA of Wing Chun is also not Wing Chun.
If it was why would we work at changing it?
Back in the day at my Sifu’s school, one of my regular training partners was an ex-Turkish Paratrooper who had achieved a 5th Dan in Tae Kwon Dao, he had even represented Australia, and he was seriously talented.
A groin injury forced him out of the hyper-athletic T.K.D. And into Wing Chun.
He would get super frustrated when after working hard for months on removing unneeded strength and tension from his training, and succeeding admirably I must say, he would be told to remove more.
How do we SIMPLIFY something that we have already simplified?
With this in mind let’s look at the Forms.
When we first encounter the S.L.T. Form it has 108 moving parts.
Pretty much as soon as the smoke clears we are down to 54 moving parts that are played on both the left and right side of our body.
Once we realise that what we are doing is often the same moving part travelling on a different path, the Form gets even smaller.
Even less content.
Even less important?
Where I am today, there is only one moving part.
Do you know which one it is?
A SMALL MOVEMENT IS BETTER THAN A LARGE MOVEMENT.
BUT NO MOVEMENT IS THE BEST OF ALL.
unknown.
Wing Chun Sydney, Australia 