The Hung system, in which the student must endure years of grueling stance and grip training along with high-impact conditioning of the forearms, is generally considered one of the most “external” systems of southern kung fu, and as such it gives the acolyte effective fighting tools earlier on than some of the more “internal systems” (such as ba gua, which by the way is pretty nifty stuff, as you can see here). But as the student advances, and understanding deepens, the system’s internal aspects come to the fore — one’s movements become smaller and more economical, and there is less and less reliance on athletic prowess, imperviousness to pain, and brute strength. In particular, three things happen: 1) the body learns to relax and deliver power only at the moment it is needed; 2) the practitioner learns to bring that power smoothly from the foundation — the legs, hips and waist — to the striking hand, in a rising, gathering wave; and 3) one learns to release all of that focused, concentrated power into the target through the striking hand, rather than letting any of it get “stuck” along the way.

This transition from external to internal as the years go by is a good thing, because, having worked at this stuff since I was 19, I am now a weather-beaten 55-year-old with creaking knees, and am simply no longer capable of the lower-body extravagances the style demands of a younger man: octopus-like leg sweeps, leaping to one’s feet from a floor-level crouch while spinning a seven-foot halberd, and so on.

But the ging! As any lifer like me will tell you, that just grows and grows. And a little goes a long way.

The article is here. It’s rather technical, and certainly won’t win any awards for prose style, but I thought if any of you out there are involved in the martial arts you might enjoy it.

It’s sad to see these cultural relics dying out. Good to see, at least, that Llap-Goch is still alive and well.

Master Chung was one of the most important influences in my life. In late 1975 I was a wild and fractious 19-year-old, and a friend who had just joined a class being taught by one of Master Chung’s disciples at the youth center in Princeton, where I then lived, suggested I give it a try. I was deeply impressed by the grace and power of the Hung Gar system being taught there, and signed up at once. After a couple of weeks I was invited to attend one of the classes being taught by Master Chung himself, and was so bowled over by his formidable presence and obvious command of his art that I resolved at once to do whatever it would take to learn whatever he could teach me.

“Whatever it would take” turned out to be an awful lot. For two years I pretty much dropped everything and attended classes with Master Chung five or six days a week — in Princeton, at his home in Spotswood, at the firehouse in Jamesburg, and at the old Aaron Banks karate academy on Broadway in Manhattan. The Hung Gar system involves, perhaps more than any other style, ruthless conditioning of the body — in particular the training of the legs for its deep, low stances, and of the forearms with endless blocking drills — and Master Chung, who had been a drill instructor in the Army, was a pitiless taskmaster. But after a year or two under his lash I was transformed: my body and will were hardened, and my childish habits of sloth and indiscipline burned and beaten out of me.

It was not easy being one of his inner circle of students. He had grown up in New York’s Chinatown in the strict southern-Chinese kung-fu tradition — he was a disciple of the great Gin Foon Mark, as well as having trained in the Lam Sai Wing Hung Gar lineage — and expected total dedication from his own disciples. We were often called upon to run some errand or perform some menial task, and there were endless demands in the form of meetings, impromptu training sessions, performances, and ceremonial occasions, including the annual Chinese New Year trek through the frozen streets and alleys of Chinatown — which in those days before New York City’s ban on explosives, was more like a tour of duty in Vietnam than a parade. But for what we got in return it was a bargain.

Master Chung was a man of frightening phsyical mien. He was not especially tall, but was as stocky as a pit bull, and inhumanly strong. He had hands like meathooks, scarred and discolored from decades of Iron Palm training, and a round, grim face with jutting jaw and glittering dark eyes. His unslender middle belied an extraordinary agility, and his hands moved like lightning, with deadly accuracy. He had a quick temper, and every single one of us was utterly, abjectly terrified of him.

For all that, though, he was very fond of, and fiercely loyal to, his students, and he had a marvelous sense of humor. He also loved the opera, and sometimes, having invited some of us over for an afternoon of training, he would spend the time instead serving us tea and playing music for us. He was very fond of horses, and often took us on riding outings in the park near his house.

Much of what I am as a man today I owe to Master Chung. By the time I earned my black belt from him in 1982 or so I had learned, of course, an awful lot about Hung Gar and Praying Mantis kung fu — including some things that I think most students of such matters these days will never learn from anyone — but he had also taught me some far more important lessons: that there are some things in life that are worth working and suffering patiently for; that everything of value in this world, without exception, must be paid for; that the greatest blessings often require an act of submission; and that no matter how tough you think you are, there is always somebody tougher.

We parted ways in the late 1980s — I will not go into the details here — and I never saw him again after that. A few months ago, having heard he was ill, I sent him an email, and had been hoping to pay him a visit. The last I had heard was that he was cancer-free, and recovering; the news of his relapse and death was a terrible shock. My thoughts go out to his many friends, students, and disciples, and of course to his son Phil, an extraordinary martial artist in his own right.

Thank you, Sifu. May you rest in peace.

Back then few people in the West had even heard of kung fu; this was before Bruce Lee introduced us all to it in his role as The Green Hornet’s astonishing sidekick Kato. Most people, if asked about the Asian fighting arts, would have named the Japanese systems of judo, karate, and jiu-jitsu.

Now Black Belt Magazine has put some of its old back issues online, and in the January 1965 edition is an interview with Master Wong himself. Have look on page 11, here. And check out those sneakers!

What are we to make of all this? I hardly know what to make of it myself. I have practiced southern Chinese kung fu for 33 years now, under the tutelage of several formidable masters, and can tell you that there is something, apparently real, to which the term ‘chi’ refers. It has always been hard, though, for a skeptic like me — even while experiencing some of these phenomena firsthand in my own training — to say with certainty what is an objectively existing ‘substance’ of some sort, and what is a subjective experience of more commonplace phenomena.

Kung-fu training includes a great deal of attention to the flow of ‘chi’, and the meditative and physical exercises that we do (such as the practice set called the “Iron Wire“) certainly create some potent effects. At the more ordinary end of the scale one often feels various parts warming, strengthening, or tingling, as the attention, posture, and controlled breath direct the ‘chi’ into them — and any serious practitioner will know that when the flow of ‘chi’, directed by the breath and the correct body mechanics, is properly synchronized with the striking hand, the blow has an effect that seems entirely out of proportion with the effort made. Indeed, we often have new students who are curious, but doubtful, about the ability of seasoned practitioners to strike with disabling power from just an inch away, and it is always startling for them when I or one of our other seniors do it to them. When delivering a blow like that, there is a definite feeling of something internal being directed from one’s nether regions (specifically, points just below the navel, and in the perineal region of the groin) up through one’s middle and out through the striking hand, all timed and guided by the breath. But I have always wondered whether this is all just good mechanics, or whether there really is some actual substance, still off the Western scientific radar, at work here. Is the subjective experience just the mind’s way of guiding the body? The warming of the parts is real enough, but is it due to increased blood flow, or something more exotic? Certainly, when being struck by a kung-fu adept in this way (something I have been on the receiving end of on far too many occasions), the blow has a curious, penetrating sharpness, and an effect that lingers unpleasantly.

Harder to account for is the experience of expanding one’s ‘chi’ outside of the body. In practicing many of our chi-gung exercises, the hands are brought together, nearly but not quite touching. In my early years my sifu used to asked what I felt as I practiced the breathing exercises in these positions; I could usually feel some warmth, but little else, and could see that this was not what he was hoping for. One day, though, a couple of years into my training, I took up one of these postures after a particularly energetic class, with quite different results.

The posture was what we in Hung Gar call ‘crane’ stance: not the one-legged position familiar from The Karate Kid, but rather one in which both feet are on the floor, about shoulder-width apart, with the toes turned in slightly and the knees drawn together. The pelvis is rotated up and forward; beginners are often told to imagine a guy wire attached to a point just bleow the navel, and anchored to the floor a couple of feet in front of them, against which they are pulling, thereby rooting themselves to the ground. For the cultivation of ‘chi’ the hands are positioned in front of the lower abdomen, with the palms facing the body. The thumbs are extended, with the hands nearly touching, so that the space between the thumbs and forefingers forms an open triangle. The tips of the thumbs and forefingers are just a half-inch or so apart.

Standing in this posture, the practitioner breathes slowly and attentively, imagining the air flowing in a circular path: in through the nose, up along the top of the skull, down the back and into the lower abdomen, then out through the mouth. (The tip of the tongue touches the palate just behind the upper teeth to complete a circuit between two major meridians.)

I had done this many times already — though I had only been at it a couple of years at the time (this would have been 1978 or so), I had been training with my sifu six days a week all along — but this time was different. I felt, every time that I exhaled, that there was an expanding bubble pushing outward from my abdomen, and that it was only with a marked effort that I could contain it with my hands. It felt exactly like the repulsive force between two magnetic poles of like polarity. I was flabbergasted: this startling phenomenon just did not fit into my taxonomy of the physical world, but there it clearly was.

I was not able to reproduce the experience the next day, or for many weeks afterward, but little by little it became easier and easier. I told Master Chung about it; he gave a grunt and said it was “about time”. When I asked him what, exactly, it was, he said — plainly irritated at having to explain anything so obvious — that I was simply feeling my chi.

I have to confess that even thirty-odd years later I still don’t know how to account for it. I can summon up the “bubble” any time I like (though its intensity varies greatly with my general well-being), and it certainly feels to me as though I am directing ‘chi’ into my targets when I strike them, and that it is doing most of the work. I know I am able to generate a lot of power with very little motion. But I feel no closer to understanding what sort of phenomenon it really is (good mechanics plus a helpful illusion, or something more exotic?) — and furthermore, despite having associated closely with more than a few “old-school” grandmasters over the years, I have never experienced at first hand anything like what is shown in these videos. The first clip, of Lama Dondrup Dorje (a.k.a. Sifu Yueng), is so unbelievable that it is tempting (and quite possibly correct) to assume mere charlatanry. But then again, I do have compelling first-hand experiences of my own ‘chi’, so for all I know it might be possible to cultivate it to this seemingly absurd level. I really just don’t know what to think.

I will say this: whatever it is, if it is real I see no reason to imagine it is anything supernatural, and so I don’t see why we can’t train our instruments on it and begin to figure out just what the hell is going on.

It is the Year of the Ox; may the markets be bullish.

Yee’s Hung Ga will be taking to the streets in Chinatown, performing our usual lion dance and kung-fu demonstrations, on the last day of the celebration, February the 8th. Do come down if you are in town.

Master Yee is the “real deal”; I think you’ll see what I mean.

I shall have to make a similar apology for today as well: I was up at the crack of dawn to spend the entire day traipsing around Chinatown as part of the annual Yee’s Hung Ga Kung Fu Association lion dance and parade. These Lunar New Year extravaganzas are always exhausting — I’ve been doing it for 32 years now, and it doesn’t get any easier as the knees and back get older — so once again I’m too pooped to post. I have more to say about Lycan’s paper, but it will have to wait.

So, having mentioned “chi sao” in one of yesterday’s posts, I’ll just share with you another good example, and hope for more free time tomorrow.

I’ve written in the past about the emphasis some kung fu systems place upon “sticking” to your opponent; this refers to the practice of maintaining a light contact with the hand or forearm in order to obtain a flood of tactile information about your opponent’s intent. Once you’ve really got the hang of it, it’s almost as if you tap directly into the other party’s proprioception; sometimes it seems as if you know what he’s going to do before he does.

Sticky-hands training, known in Chinese as “chi sao”, is an essential part of a Southern Praying Mantis education, which is where I learned it, but it is also a central element of the Wing Chun system. This video shows Sifu Augustine Fong giving an entertaining public demonstration of what Wing Chun chi sao looks like. Enjoy.

PS: I’d like to congratulate my student and younger training brother, 17-year-old Frankie Aline, who, having studied with our system since he was 8, today successfully demonstrated his command of two of our most advanced long-weapon forms (the Chun Choy Dai Dao, or “Kwan Dao“, and the Yu Ga Dai Pa, or “tiger fork“), and was awarded his black belt.

According to Reuters, it’s “on”. The charges are serious:

The Internet user, calling themselves [sic] “Five Minutes Every Day”, said on an online forum last week that a Japanese ninja came to Shaolin, asked for a fight and many monks failed to beat him, the newspaper said.

“The facts that the monks could not defeat a Japanese ninja showed that they were named as kung fu masters in vain,” the Internet user was quoted as saying in the post.

As if this weren’t bad enough, my confidential sources inform me that “Five Minutes Every Day” then compounded the offense by inserting his thumbs in his ears, waggling his fingers in the air, and saying “Nurny Nurny Nur Nur” in a high-pitched, nasal tone.

This is surely unwise: in addition to being able to bounce like Pogo sticks on a single rigid forefinger (wondrous to behold, of course, and a useful fighting skill if ever there was one), the Shaolin Monks have now, apparently, schooled themselves in some fearsome Western combat techniques as well. In particular, they appear to have mastered the use of lawyers to harass people they don’t like (a practice referred to in the Orient as “I Soo”).

I find all of this more than a little worrisome, and not just for the impact it’s likely to have on international relations, world financial markets, and so forth — I have personal interests at stake as well. I’ve been practicing “Shaolin” kung fu myself for over thirty years; I had no idea, however, that I was complicit in a trademark violation all along.

Please don’t tell anyone. Those flappy swords can give you one heck of a wind-burn.

Although I have devoted myself pretty much exclusively to Hung Gar for the past twenty-five years or so, the sifu I studied with when I began my kung-fu education back at the end of 1975, Master William Chung, had been trained in both Lam Sai Wing Hung Gar and Kwong Sai Jook Loom Praying Mantis. His Praying Mantis sifu was the famous Gin Foon Mark, and in addition to making sure that we had a solid foundation in the Hung system, Master Chung saw to it that we learned some Praying Mantis as well.

Like most Southern Chinese systems (including, of course, Hung Gar), Southern Praying Mantis (SPM) relies mostly on strong hand techniques, rooted stances, low kicks, and what is known in the business as “short” power. What that term refers to is the ability to deliver full power when the hand is already close to, or even in contact with, the opponent’s body. This in turn means that once a block is made, or the practitioner gains control of an opponent’s arm with his forearm “bridge”, it is not necessary then to draw his own hand back to in order to make a powerful strike. In this way striking can flow smoothly from blocking, with no time lost; once you have forced open a path to the opponent’s body you can seize it at once.

The key to this short power in SPM lies in having your feet rooted to the ground, and in generating torque through the midsection that can flow in turn through the arms to the target. Control of the breath is essential, as is “opening” and “closing” the upper body. When closing, the elbows and shoulders tend to draw together, the waist pulls back slightly, the breath sinks earthward, and the palms rotate so as to face upward. In opening, the shoulders pull back, the hips and waist drive forward, and the palms turn downward.

The other fundamental skill in SPM is “sticking”. What this means is that once the forearm bridge makes contact with the opponent’s arm, preserving the contact enables the practitioner not only to read the opponent’s intention with great speed and accuracy, but also, by interpreting subtle shifts of the opponent’s weight and direction, to move in such a way as to control and redirect the attacker’s arms, creating small openings that one can then drive through with short-range power. The hands work together fluidly so that when one takes control of an opponent’s arm, it will often pass control to the other hand so that the original blocking hand can get “on top”, or can get through to the body.

SPM is purely a fighting art; it does not, unlike many other systems, including Hung Gar, contain any elements (at least as far as I know) that are there for purely aesthetic reasons. It is an outstanding close-quarters fighting system, and although I’ve chosen to focus on the Hung style, I still practice the SPM I know, not least because it comes in handy when I need to sneak one in on my most advanced students and training brothers, some of whom are getting awfully good these days.

If you’d like to see some of this stuff, there are quite a few videos online. Here is a good look at some of the kinds of hand techniques I’ve mentioned (just ignore the silly music, and the swaggering tone generally), and here is some very old footage of Master Mark himself, making mincemeat of a Choy Li Fut expert.

Dim Mak, in case you haven’t heard of it, refers to the practice of striking or seizing sensitive points with the intention of causing various ill effects, not excluding death, in one’s opponent. It is closely related to acupuncture; in many cases the very spots that are stimulated by the acupuncturist to heal particular internal organs will, when attacked with malevolent intent by the Dim Mak practitioner, cause debilitating or lethal injury to the same parts of the body.

I shouldn’t say much more about it, since the details are, for obvious reasons, among those things that kung-fu systems generally keep to themselves. But as you can imagine, it’s a tricky thing to practice; when I was first trained in this aspect of the system, almost thirty years ago, I actually made myself quite ill for several days by using myself as a guinea pig. It was embarrassing, and I felt quite foolish — which indeed I was, as I had been amply warned: further proof of the sad fact that the only path to good judgment is through bad judgment.

Gin Foon Mark is a name I’ve known for many years. I began my instruction in Chinese martial arts in late 1975, when I was 19, under the tutelage of Sifu William Chung, a native New Yorker who had by then moved to Spotswood, New Jersey. For the first couple of years, having no other urgent business, I attended my sifu’s classes six days a week — one day in Princeton, my home town, two days at a karate school run by the noted sensei and tournament impresario Aaron Banks (that was in Manhattan, on Broadway somewhere in the 50′s), one day at the Jamesburg, N.J. firehouse, and two days at Master Chung’s house. Master Chung, in turn, had got most of his own instruction from his sifu, the great Master Mark, though he had learned much of his Lam Sai Wing Hung Ga from other teachers — in the lineage, if memory serves, of the renowned Lum Jo.

Master Mark has been at this a long time — he is now an old man, and has been teaching since 1947 — and had an “old school” kung fu education. From his website’s biographical notes:

At the age of nine he was admitted to the Chun San Shaolin Temple and studied with the famous monk Ki Fut Sai. He received instruction in Si Lum, White Crane, Eagle Claw, Leopard and Tiger. He also studied Tiger Claw in the Hoi Jung Temple, and Kwong Sai Jook Lum Praying Mantis in the Macow Jook Lum Temple.

In these monasteries Master Mark was schooled in Moo Gai, a martial form of Qigong similar to Tai Chi, Ming Kung, self-defense and healing arts; Shin Kung, spirit Kung Fu; Chi Kung, the use of internal power for martial arts and health. This included Iron Shirt, Iron Palm, Cotton Palm and Dim Mak. He continued his studies of Praying Mantis in the United States under Lum Wing Fay for ten more years.

My education under Master Chung, while focusing primarily on the ferocious Hung system, also included an admixture of Southern Praying Mantis, which I have always found fascinating, and which still provides me with some useful surprises to spring upon my more advanced Hung Ga students and training brothers. I wish Master Chung had a site of his own that I could link to; he is a formidable master in his own right. Sadly, though, he does not. If, however, you’d like to see some video clips of his teacher, one of the foremost living practitioners of one of the world’s most highly refined fighting systems, then go and look at Master Mark’s website.

Martial arts being a rather prickly environment, I must offer a disclaimer here: none of the hagiography above is intended to downplay in any way my tremendous respect for my own teacher of these past fourteen years, Peter Berman Yee, and the gratitude I feel for his expert guidance, and that of his sifu: my sigung, the famous Tang Fung Hung Ga grandmaster Yee Chi Wai. I’ve made a lifetime commitment to Hung Ga, and it is indeed a fearsome fighting system. But Southern Praying Mantis has an elegance, beauty, and hidden power that I also admire deeply; I have always had a special fondness for it, and I thought readers might like a glimpse.

The Iron Wire is practiced under controlled tension; it derives its name from the feeling one has during many sections of the form that one is stretching an imaginary cord between the hands. Each movement is carefully synchronized with the breath, and at many points in the form there are particular sounds that the practitioner must utter. These sounds are intended to direct the breath (or “chi”) to various organs and muscles. If performed incorrectly or without understanding, this combination of moving tension and controlled breathing can, in fact, cause serious harm, and as a result the form is taught only to advanced students.

Unlike most of the other forms in the system, which are essentially dictionaries of fighting skills and techniques, the Iron Wire doesn’t move around the floor very much. Instead, the set emphasizes opening and closing, rising and sinking, and transitions between “hard” and “soft”. Above all, one learns to cultivate, even during the most demanding moments of the form, an open “core”, a clear and relaxed center for the free motion of the breath, which is absolutely essential for the development and control of internal power. Perhaps even more beneficial is the way the form forces the practitioner to turn the attention inward, to become aware of the state of one’s own body, and the interplay of its parts. The student simply cannot practice this form effectively without being fully “in the moment”, and is lifted, however briefly, from the waking sleep in which most of us pass our days.

The Iron Wire, though exceptionally demanding, is also peculiarly energizing. After practicing it, as I have made a habit lately of doing first thing in the morning, one feels sharply invigorated, as though each of one’s cells had been briskly massaged.

The great Hung Ga grandmaster Lam Sai Wing published a book describing this form; if you are interested you can find it online here. I’ll say it again, though – you have to work your way up to this one, and it’s not the sort of thing you can learn from a book. You can really hurt yourself doing this the wrong way.

Over the past thirty years of kung fu (and other inner work), I’ve devoted a good deal of attention to this. When I watch inexpert students sparring, the signs are always there, and always the same. The students are nervous: they are putting their skills to the test, and they might receive a painful blow at any moment. Their egos are on the line, and they are being watched. I can see the tension in their shoulders, the stiffness and jerkiness of their movements, the quick and shallow breaths, the lack of connected power in their techniques.

When we are under pressure in daily life, we unconsciously react in the same way. Over time the effects are insidious. In particular, I believe that this inattention to our internal posture is responsible for a fair percentage of the idiopathic hypertension that afflicts so many people.

So try this: take stock of your inner state. See if the breath is sitting high in your chest; if so, relax your abdomen and try to let the breath drop down behind your navel. Loosen the muscles in your face (especially the jaw), in your neck, and in your shoulders. Stay with this sensation of the body as long as you can. Do it as often as you can.

I’ve had mild hypertension myself for a while (I’ll be 50 in a month), and I have found that I am able to lower my systolic reading by at least ten points within a few minutes by doing this.

Our posture is an indication of how we are inside, but it goes both ways. By consciously adjusting our outer manifestations, we can make an inward change as well.