some jow ga history

[thekuntawman]

hello jow ga brothers. if you go to yahoo.com and search for "kek lok si temple" you can see the temple in malaysia where jow lung study northern shaolin kung fu.

jow ga is very popular in malaysia and singapore. and there style is very close to the jow ga dean chin brought to the u.s., except there form is different. i mean they do the same forms there, just a different way and order of moves.

but kekloksi was rebuilt and it is a very beautiful big place.

and you guys who dont know, this is the place where we get our gune lic kune and jeet kune from.

[ZhouJiaQuan]

Thanks for the info, it is very interesting to hear( and see) history like this. I found some nice pics of the temple. I wonder how clsoe the rebuilt temple is to the original. Do you happen to know the name of the monk that taught our founder the shaolin style?

Train Hard,
Wally :)

[thekuntawman]

sorry i dont know. i even forgot the name of the uncle who taught him hung gar, and the local teacher who teach him choy gar.

i do remember the name of sifu chin's eagle claw teacher, who was lau man fat. chan man cheung was a student of jow biu, but he learned most of the art from jow lung bo, his son. jow lung bo is still teaching in china.

if you know rahim muhammad, ask him for a tape of his visit to jow lung bo and his school. its very intereting he sent me one a couople weeks ago.

[mysteri]

kuntawman-
as always u offer great knowledge and its appreciated. keep it coming!

zhoujiaquan-
if you check out jowtigers.com, it has a lot of interesting history including the names of sijo's teachers as sumbitted by derek johnson.

[ShaolinTiger00]

excellent. thank you.

[iron_silk]

When I said past I meant a decade or two ago in America. Now I don't know much about jow gar, nor do I practice it, BUT I did get a hold of many old kung fu magazines with many articles on jow gar.

Within those articles there was apparently some sort of dispute between jow gar practitioners in regards to who brought jow gar over first or something like that I am not sure. Something about a Dr. Richard Chin taking all the credit from Dean Chin?

I am sorry I don't recall the names very well anymore, and I was just wondering...and would appreciate if someone could tell me little about what happen? Thanks!

[thekuntawman]

richard chin claim to be a fully certified jow ga teacher. but when chan man cheung came to the us in 1990, he told us all, with richard chins students there, that he did not know richard chin, but he knows his brother, who was si gungs student in the 70s. his brother was a intermediate student at the highest.

the dispute in the dc area jow ga people is that hoy lee opened the first kung fu school in dc, but it was kung fu-karate. hoy taught the karate, sifu taught the kung fu. everyone admits that hoy is sifus student, even hoy, until about 6-7 years after sifu chin died. then hoy began to say HE brought jow ga to the us. i was not around then i was in the philippines but i remember articles in the magazines that hoy wrote that he was originally a jow ga student before he came to the us. but that was not the story in 1981.

the confusion is when si gung told all the young generation that it was sad that sifu chin died when we are so young. so he told us to call him "sifu". of course, that made some of the jow ga traders to say they are under chan man cheung, which made sifu there own si hing. very disrespectful. so now you have 5 or 6 guys going around saying they are 3rd generation under the founder jow biu. i watched a class where a si hing of mine traced his line from jow biu to chan man cheung to hoy. very wrong, because it skipped over jow lung bo, and dean chin, the one who taught him.

[thekuntawman]

oh anyway back to mr chin, he wrote articles (also some fat guy i forgot his name) that he is the jow ga master of the US. he never mention washington dc jow ga people. when there was kung fu events in dc his representative would come but never him.

he was giving black belts in jow ga, which is not traditional. the technque they show to us looks like karate. and then when we saw all there kung fu, it was kung fool ;-) very weak. after si gung insulted them, they never came back.

[mysteri]

as with anything where someone is assigned a rank of some sort, the question is never if controversy will occur; but when. as with a lot of kung fu families, controversy clouds a lot of the relationships with people within the families. then, of course the pollution of this cloud permeates throughout the future generations. with this of course, comes degradation of the quality of the students, the school, and ultimately the kung fu when the future generations are cursed with the controversy. the hope for all families is that u learn, fall, heal and continue to learn, because to do otherwise would be to row up stream, moving backwards. when you have such potential and a strong flow already going, a choice has to be made whether or not you will move backwards or fowards because you can't remain idle, unless u wish to continue to struggle againt the strong current. kung fu teaches us to not resist and to go with the flow and that we must continue to advance. this flow keeps things from becoming still and stagnant, once again polluted. hopefully we can all learn to move foward together, especially when the controversy is within one kung fu family. ultimately, whether within kung fu, the home, the country or under the stars.. the truth is we all remain as my si gung so pleasantly states, "ONE FAMILY!"

[ZhouJiaQuan]

Well said...

:taking a bow to mysteri: