So, apparently I’m a snob when it comes to martial arts! I must be because on two separate occasions now women have accused me of being one (interesting that it’s women both times!)
A recent exchange went something like this…
Me: Are you going to the seminar with master x this week? Her: Yes, you? Me: Yes, but if he teaches a basic hip throw I’m walking out. 🙂 Her: You’re such a marital arts snob! 🙂
As you can see, there were smilies involved, so I don’t think it was meant seriously, but there’s always a grain of truth at the bottom of most jokes.
Photo by Anete Lusina
This got me thinking. I think I am a bit of a snob when it comes to technique in jiujitsu. The popular wisdom goes that after black belt you start to really appreciate the basic techniques and find hidden value in them. Sure, I can see that. It’s true, you do revisit seemingly basic techniques and find things you’ve missed or deeper levels to the technique. But sometimes basic techniques are just… basic. And a bit boring. Show me something new and cutting edge, especially if I’m paying for a seminar!
When it comes to Chinese martial arts (CMA), I’m a snob in a different sort of way. Watching other people do CMA I don’t always express an opinion, but internally I’m very judgy. I find it hard to praise people for a mediocre performance, or even ignore all the bad bits like some people seem to be able to. But equally, when I do see something I like, I’m pretty free with my praise about it.
When watching forms done on video I always try to factor in that “everything looks 20% worse on video compared to real life”, and judge accordingly. But even so, what some people in marital arts deem worthy of sharing with the pubic makes me question their sanity. A lot of it is just embarrassing, but there is something else to look out for…
As I discuss with Jess O’Brien in an upcoming podcast, it can be hard to know what is correct in Chinese marital arts. Quite often, even within the same style, two teachers will have radically different interpretation of the same principles, and they can often both be right at the same time – i.e. they can both make it work. It’s not until you get hands on with a person that you can tell if what they’re doing works, or not. So, it’s usually a good idea to gets hands on with somebody before you criticise them too much.
With that said, I think you do need to be pretty discerning with what you’re accepting as “good” in Chinese martial arts. CMA has always been infiltrated by people who were, shall we say, not very good, but pretended to be so, especially to naive Westerners who can’t tell the difference. Then there are the teachers who hold things back and don’t teach all their skills. There are plenty of ways to waste years in CMA not really learning anything of value.
But what is being a snob? Isn’t it just having high standards? The Cambridge dictionary defines a snob as: “a person who respects and likes only people who are of a high social class, and/or a person who has extremely high standards who is not satisfied by the things that ordinary people like”
OK, ignore the first bit about social class, since that’s got nothing to do with it, but look at the second part. “Not satisfied by the things that ordinary people like”. Hell yeah! I can identify with that.
When it comes to martial arts I think that a snob is a pretty good thing to be. When there are 7 year old kids going around with black belts in Karate or Taekwondo, I’m quite happy to hold myself to higher standards. Most ‘self defence’ videos you find on YouTube are laughably bad. And a lot of Tai Chi videos appear to be cult-like and weird.
If this is what ordinary people think martial arts are, then yes, I’m a snob.
I have a new podcast out! Bruce Lee will be no stranger to anybody listening to The Tai Chi Notebook Podcast – even 50 years after his death he remains the most famous martial artist in the world.
But could he actually fight?
World Champions in karate competition have gone on record to point out that he never once competed in tournaments. So, were his martial abilities simply a trick of the camera?
My guest for this episode is Bruce Lee authority and bestselling author John Little.
To get these first hand accounts John has tracked down over 30 witnesses to the real fights of Bruce Lee as well as those who were present at his many sparring sessions. There are over 30 years of research in this book that took him thousands of miles around the globe.
I’ve recorded a follow-up to my recent podcast with Rikard and Miika about Baji, this time with my Heretics podcast co-host Damon Smith, who is also a Baji practitioner. Listen to the new episode here. There’s a lot of talk about technique here, and how it compares to Xing Yi.
Here’s the blurb:
“This episode follows on from Episode 26 of Graham’s Tai Chi Notebook Podcast in which he interviews Woven Energy patrons Rikard Elofsson and Miika Wikberg about the little-known martial art of Baji. We discuss the possibility that the Baji Xiaojia is the most perfectly balanced form from any martial art – “Xiaojia is more Tai Chi than Tai Chi”, and look in a bit more detail at the history, technique, strategy and background to this subtle and robust martial arts style.
Graham, Miika and Rikard’s original episode can be found here: “
Bājíquán (八極拳) or shorter just Baji, is commonly known as “the martial art of bodyguards”. It emphasises the use of attacks that close down the distance as well as explosive close combat techniques such as combinations of elbow, knee and takedown techniques.
Both Rikard Elofsson and Miika Wikberg are senior Baji students of Lü Baochun, based in Finland who has over 40 years’ experience in the training and practice of baji. He has trained under many of the famous martial artists who used the style, such as Han Longquan and Zhang Xuchun.
Timestsamps:
0.40: – Rikard – Introduce yourself/how did you meet your teacher Master Lü Baochun?
3.15: – Miika – Introduce yourself/how did you meet your teacher Master Lü Baochun?
7.15: What makes Baji different to other martial arts?
8.30: Old Baji and new Baji
9.20: Trademark techniques of Baji
10.15: How is Baji power different? Training methods and the 3 stepping methods –
I’ve been meaning to read the story of Matthew Polly’s time spent training at the famous Shaolin monastery for years, but I finally got around to it recently thanks to my Audible.co.uk subscription*. And what a great read it is! I’m sure we can all identify with the teenage Polly, unsure of himself and his place in the world, who falls under the spell of Kung Fu and decides to dedicate his life to the pursuit of it as some kind of escapism from the pressures and fakeness of the modern world. To Polly, Kung Fu represented something sublime, pure and otherworldly that actually meant something. But unlike most of us, he did more than just dream about it, he actually went to Shaolin and lived there for almost a year, at a time when there was no Internet, no easy way to get there and China had only recently opened up to foreigners, so most Chinese people had never even seen a Laowai in the flesh before.
Polly’s story could best be summed up as a sequence of misadventures punctuated by moments of sublime martial arts inspiration. He manages to get into all sorts of scrapes involving accidentally offending senior party officials, being entered into a tournament against a San Da champion and hilarious misadventures with the opposite sex. Part Bill Bryson-style travelogue, and part kung fu geek-out, this is a rewarding, even emotional, look into what the Shaolin monks were really like in the 1990s, just as their international fame as stage performers was starting to spread and take over from the mystical image everybody had of them from the Kung Fu TV show. (Interestingly, at one point Polly watches the Kung Fu TV show with the monks who laughed their heads off at the idea of burning a dragon and tiger into your arms by lifting a hot anvil and dropping it into the snow – “why would you do that???”)
What you really get from this book is a sense of what the Shaolin monks are really like back then, and how much more human, relatable and down to earth they are compared to the lofty ideas we all have of them. It answers all the big questions like, how good are they at actually fighting, how seriously they take the “monk” side of their lives and how they train iron first, arm, head and even iron crotch.
The little snatches of Chinese you pick up by reading the book are also a hidden bonus and bring the characters to life marvellously. By the end of the book you feel like they are your friends and you know them just as well as Polly did. Anybody who likes this blog would love this book. Recommended.
N.B. The cover with a monk holding a Burger King bag is representative of the idea of American values seeping into China, but a little misleading as there were no Burger Kings in China then, and certainly nothing like that in the rural backwater of the Shaolin village.
*Like a number of other books, American Shaolin is included in the cost of an Audible subscription, so if you are a subscriber you get it free.
“When you can take the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.” – Master Kan
Here’s the blurb:
“Did Western movies and TV lead to the creation of the Shaolin Warrior monks? Did the modern Shaolin fake something that had already been reinvented anyway? Did the Qing Dynasty really destroy the Shaolin temple, or did they instead create it? What influence did three subsequent phases of communism have on Shaolin? Was there a Southern Shaolin Temple, and what about the modern stuff at Wudang Mountain? These questions and more answered in our new episode on the infamous temple and its monks.”
Seeing these old masters from Taiwan looking so good while practicing their external arts has made me wonder about switching my priorities.
I’ve been enjoying the recent series of videos from Will on his Monkey Steals Peach YouTube Channel of his tour of Taiwan Kung Fu schools. The latest one features Long Fist. It’s been great to see so much good technique demonstrated and also a few of the younger students, proving the arts have a future.
But of course, a lot of the practitioners Will has featured are older, but that doesn’t stop them being proficient in dealing out the ass whoppings. This has made me reflect on my own training priorities. A lot of these fit-looking older men are training in arts that would be classified as ‘external’ like Long Fist and Mantis, rather than the so-called ‘internal’ arts like Tai Chi or Xing Yi, which are more normally associated with older people.
Perhaps shifting focus to these external arts, which have longer postures with more twisting and stretching, and are practiced more vigorously is a good idea as you get older?
I’ve got to admit, that while I do feel good after a few run throughs of the Tai Chi form, I probably feel more energised and exercised after a few runs through of a Choy Li Fut form. My cardiovascular system is placed under more stressed for one thing, and my joints get moved through a larger range of motion.
“When you practice the form, the slower the better!” – Yang Cheng-Fu
Of course, Yang Cheng-Fu in his 10 Important Points, famously used this distinction between internal and external to explain that external arts were “harmful” for you, and the fact that you don’t get out of breath doing Tai Chi proved its superiority! He wrote (recorded by Chen Weiming, and translated by Jerry Karrin):
“External martial artists prize leaping and stomping, and they do this until breath (chi) and strength are exhausted, so that after practicing they are all out of breath. In Tai Chi Chuan we use quiescence to overcome movement, and even in movement, still have quiescence. So when you practice the form, the slower the better! When you do it slowly your breath becomes deep and long, the chi sinks to the dantian, and naturally there is no harmful constriction or enlargement of the blood vessels. If the student tries carefully they may be able to comprehend the meaning behind these words.”
Yang Cheng Fu
Now, it doesn’t take a genius to make an observation that Yang Cheng-Fu could have done with losing a few pounds himself, and that since he died relatively young his thoughts on longevity should be taken with a pinch of salt. Frankly, I think he could have done with getting a bit out of breath now and again!
It’s also fairly obvious to anybody who has seen Chen style Taijiquan that ‘leaping and stomping’ can be a part of Taijiquan too.
However, I do think there’s something to what he’s saying. When moving slowly and achieving a mediative state of mind you can experience profound levels of relaxation that do feel different to other types of exercise. When you “slow your breath” and it becomes “deep and long” it can feel wonderful. However, is that enough? I think it’s a mistake to use this type of exercise to replace more traditional cardiovascular exercise, and your body will not thank you in the long run.
Why not do both? Tai Chi has its place, but so do external arts of the Shaolin variety. Perhaps the best approach is to not skew too heavily in favour of either, but to adopt a balanced approach where you train both equally? Let me know what you think.
I was just catching up with a recent episode of Will Wain’s trip to Taiwan to visit various martial arts schools. The episode I was watching was about a style called Six Harmony Mantis. Six Harmony Mantis looks like (and is!) a combination of Xing Yi/Xin Yi and Preying Mantis Kung Fu.
What I like about it is that the way the two arts have been combined is exactly the same way I would have done – take the best bits of both. So, it’s the Xing Yi footwork and body method with a few cool Mantis techniques on top. It’s a great idea!
But what really caught my attention about this episode was the second half, which is a fascinating look into the living tradition of Chinese Folk Religion and how its practiced in Taiwan. I mentioned in a previous post that there are a lot of influences on Chinese Martial Art that don’t come from a military background, and this is a strong one – Chinese Folk Religion. It’s a blend of all sorts of things, and a good contender for being the most widely practiced religion in the world.
In this episode you can learn about family temples, the gods that are honoured on them, spirit possession and more. I think spirit possession and martial arts have a big connection. Often when a person is possessed by a war-like god they perform war-like movements. A bit like marital arts forms…
When I started in Tai Chi I was taught that “Sifu” was a rank you were awarded only after years of dedicated practice when a certain level of mastery had been obtained in your martial art. Then one of my students took a trip to Hong Kong and it turned out that everybody was called Sifu! Your taxi driver, your chef in a restaurant, a car mechanic, etc. it just meant somebody who was skilled at something.
Sifu is Cantonese, Shifu (simplified Chinese: 师傅 or 师父; traditional Chinese: 師傅 or 師父; pinyin: shīfù) is Mandarin.
The character 師/师 means “skilled person” or “teacher,” while 傅 means “tutor” and 父 means “father.”
In Brazilian JiuJItsu (BJJ) we don’t have Sifus or Shifus, but we do have Professors. That sounds even grander than Shifu, yet how many people know that Professor is just the Portuguese word for teacher? It’s like saying “coach”, but in a culture like ours that has real Professors (i.e. people working in academia) it gets a sort of elevated status. (Actually, professor is a slippery term in the West as well, because in North America it can mean anybody who is a researcher or teacher in a university, whereas in Europe it is generally used to indicate distinction in a field.)
Professor is, unlike Sifu a rank that can be awarded mainly because BJJ has a belt culture. (I’m sure that if Chinese marital art had a belt/rank culture then Sifu /Shifu would inevitably become the black belt rank.)
But BJJ has its own weird cultural oddities. Certain BJJ teams and academies have rules that every black belt must be addressed formally as Professor by lower ranked students at all times. How seriously these rules are taken tends to be up to the academy owner though.
I’m a professor myself, but I never insist somebody call me professor. That would be nuts. I just let them call me whatever they’re comfortable with, but I don’t object to it if they do call me professor. There are some black belts who make a big fuss if you call them professor, going as far as making fun of the person who said it or going on a mad rant. I think that’s just rude. It’s just as bad as being one of the people who insist on being called professor!
I prefer a middle way. Some people like the whole rank and respect thing, I get that, and they’re just trying to be respectful by calling me Professor, so I appreciate their effort. I just don’t make a thing out of it.
I’ve always believed that trying to control what other people do or say too much never turns out well in the long run. The same can be applied to martial technique. Whenever I try and force something to happen in a sparring situation, it rarely turns out well, even if I’m really good at it! And this is where my personal philosophy in BJJ aligns perfectly with Tai Chi. I find it much better to ‘go with what the guy is giving you’ rather than to try and impose your will on them. If he’s giving you his leg then stop trying to go for his arm and take his goddamn leg and do something with that instead!
It’s amazing how simple this strategy sounds, but how hard it is to apply against somebody really trying to get you, with real resistance. It’s so tempting to try and ‘just do your thing’ and impose your will on the opponent. Yes, sure, this can work, and you see it work all the time in competition. The problem is it requires serious amounts of athleticism and effort to achieve. It’s a high risk, yet high reward strategy. And one of the risks is that you might get injured because you’re usually going to have to use some force against force. I’m too old for that type of game, and I’d also like to say, too wise, but that sounds a bit pompous, especially when I’m the same guy who just this morning tried to feed that cat my (human) breakfast cereal by mistake.
When you catch yourself doing that, it’s hard to think of yourself as a Sifu, Shifu or a Professor. You’re just a guy who wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing, and who now owns a cat with a newfound taste for Chocolate Chip Mini Weetabix.
I think this post is perhaps a little half formed, but I want to get on to writing up my last lesson with Bear, so I’m going to put it out as is. Let the pieces fall where they may…
An interesting new video has been released by Will (a recent guest on my Tai Chi Notebook podcast) about his recent visit to Taiwan where he got to talk to various Taiwanese martial arts masters. It’s the start of a series and it looks like it’s going to be great – Will gets to walk down the smokey back alleys of Taiwan to find the martial artists and martial arts schools in Taiwan you wish you could. What’s not to like? Watch it here:
The blurb reads: “In the first episode, I meet up with my friend John Eusebio @longfistmantis to visit the bookstore of Liu Kang Yi. Mr Liu’s bookstore, Wuxue Shuguan has a huge collection of martial arts books, in both Chinese and English, and he has also spent decades collecting old and rare manuscripts. In this video he shares his insights on the development of martial arts from a military combat art, to an integrated system of both combat and health practice, as we see it today. He also shows us a copy of the Bubishi, the foundational manual of Okinawan Karate.”
Mr Liu talks about internal training, and how it relates to strengthening the tendons and fascia of the body, so that it can toughen and that can lead to more strength “qi” in the body. This all seems fairly accurate to me. (There’s discussion to be had about whether these methods were always a part of Chinese marital arts, or added in later from a different tradition, but that’s by the by). Then he talks about the 3 phases of development of Chinese martial arts, which is the part I wanted to pick up on.
To paraphrase, he says, the first is only martial training and not cultivating: it’s pure combat. No focus on health. This is the military period. The second is once it entered the civilian population. They train both combat and cultivate health, but separately, developing things like Yijinjing and Baduanjing. The third evolution was to combine combat and health, to bring both aspects together. Taijiquan is a good example of this.
Now, this is not a bad way of looking at the evolution of Chinese martial arts, but I think it’s a bit reductive, and crucially, it misses out a lot of other influences.
It’s a view that is not dissimilar to Peter Lorge’s in the book Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century which is that marital arts were all originally military arts and over time were simply dispersed from the army into civilian life.
Lorge’s position is laid out clearly in the introduction to his book starts with this:

I actually really enjoyed Peter’s lecture about the history of Chinese martial arts at the Martial Arts Studies conference 2017, but it seems that both Mr Lorge and Mr Liu both view Chinese martial arts as a kind of offshoot of military training, and nothing more, and in both cases the subject doesn’t even seem to be up for debate, it’s just presented as self obvious. The parallel between both of them is that they are relying only on written sources as their research into the matter. In fact, a lot of the cultural traditions of ‘common folk’ were not recorded, since writing belonged to the upper classes.
Now, I’ll admit, there can be no doubt that the intermingling of civilian and military life had a massive influence on martial arts practiced by people in villages, particularly after the Ming Dynasty army was disbanded and returned to civilian life after its defeat by the invading Manchu’s, who seized control of Beijing in 1644. Xing Yi in particular is one of the martial arts that traces its origins to that event, to military methods kept alive by ex soldiers who were now civilians who had had their weapons taken away. A review of Xing Yi’s existing methods and techniques today reveals a clear bias towards methods that work with a spear, which would have been the dominant weapon in the military for soldiers, and also a concern for facing an attacker who is in front of you, not to the side, which is another feature of military arts. However, most other Chinese marital arts are more biased towards barehand actions than weapons, contain sometimes elaborate sequences that would appear to be more at home on a stage than in a street fight, or involve making specific hand gestures or actions that hint at a ritual quality, that it’s clear, to me at least, that something more is going on here. Rather than just military methods being translated into personal self-protection methods, we are seeing other influences.
In China, there is a long history of martial arts being used in religious ritual, festival culture, spirit possession, street entertainment, Xiqu (Chinese theatre) and Wuxia (which literally means “martial heroes”, a genre of Chinese fiction concerning the adventures of martial artists in ancient China). I think those traditions have as much influence on the martial arts passed down to us today as the military does, and in a lot of cases, more. But, if you mention this to proponents of the “pure pugilism” brand of martial artist, they usually try and explain to you that all these things came out of marital arts. i.e. martial arts came first, and the dance/performance/theatre/ritual, etc came second. In fact, Lorge argues exactly this at 43.00 minutes in his lecture (which I still enjoyed!), despite cataloging wrestling going back centuries as pure entertainment for the Royal Court. This attempt to explain away the obvious flaw reminds me of when people present funky martial applications to form movements that clearly don’t look like marital movements. There are some frankly ridiculous martial application out there from well know teachers who, rather than just admitting that there’s no real martial application of this move that makes any sense, come up with something that just looks silly.
I’ve talked to a lot of martial artists on my podcast (20 episodes so far!) and I quite often broach this subject to see what kind of reaction I get, and I’ve found that the martial artists who live in Asia, or have lived there for some time, tend to have no problem with the idea that Chinese martial arts is a broad church of methods derived from various traditions. It tends to be the people outside of that culture who have a problem with what they’re learning not being a super-deadly killing art created for one purpose only – to be the best fighter! I suppose it’s because so many of these cultural traditions are still alive and well in Asia today that it’s hard to deny their existence. Just look around you. Martial arts training halls tend to have shrines in them where incense is burned as part of a religious ritual. Or the martial arts school participates in local religious festivals by enacting Lion and Dragon Dance routines, or giving a demonstration of martial arts. Or there is a semi-religious ceremony involved in becoming an indoor disciple, etc.
I think two things are going on here. First there’s a reaction against the modern Chinese trend of turning marital arts into a gymnastic demonstrations instead of fighting arts, and secondly there’s a reaction against the modern trend for making Chinese martial arts appear as spiritual and mystical in the same way Yoga is.
As Charles Holcomb wrote in 1990 , “Everywhere in China the martial arts either present themselves in the guise of simple exercises or are shrouded in arcane religious mysteries. Western enthusiasts often feel impelled to strip away these religious trappings and construct a version of the martial arts that is neither simple gymnastics nor religion, but emphasizes true hand-to-hand combat skills. The question remains, is this an authentic understanding of the martial arts?” [1]
I think that process of trying to present the martial arts as true hand-to-hand combat skills is very much alive and well today, I mean, its probably what most people are looking for when they start Kung Fu. I certainly was. But I think it’s also something of a reaction to the introduction of Chinese martial arts to the West, which came off the back of the Kung Fu TV series (which presented martial arts as mystical from Shaolin monks) and followed off the back of mystics like Alan Watts who presented a very counter culture sort of take on Eastern religion.
While there’s nothing wrong with that, my feeling is that it misses out on the wider, and weirder, historical context of the arts we practice today. They’re a rich blend of various traditions, and we should treat them as such.
[1] Theater of combat: A critical look at the Chinese martial arts by Charles Holcombe, Historian. Vol. 52 No. 3 May.1990. Pp. 411-431 Copyright by Michigan State University Press
The Tai Chi Notebook 