Shaolin-Do answers challenge.

[themeecer]

Originally posted by Brad

And to themeecer,
If your sick of the name calling, stop calling people names. And stop insulting martial arts systems that have nothing to do with the people you're personaly attacking.


You've insulted lots of peoples masters with you childish rants(not to mention using hate language in the process), so don't try to make it out like you're taking the "high ground".

Excuse me? Childish rants? Name calling?

You must mean things like this:

he loses sleep over the fact that everyone in the kung fu world thinks his Master is teaching junk?

or

It's the original Mc kwoon, dojo.

or

idiots

or

your dog praising cult

or

Thanks Sow Lame Do! You steered me into a REAL kung fu school!

or

the WC guy will just get mad and kill the SD guy most likely

or

I think a punch from a SD guy would feel a tickle

or

as you go down the masters page, people look worse and worse.

I used no hate language, this is hate language:

McDojos are fun but the 'students' from it can be a bit ignorant and naive. This thread made me come to the decision to find a mcdojo this summer, enter it and kick naive *****s like these to a coma

I am not personally attacking anyone .. I am defending people I love. When they name names of people that are important to me, it becomes personal. I didn't insult any of these attacker's schools, I just mentioned a fact that what is officially recognized in China as "kung fu" is a national sport. I know of many schools that still teach traditional arts and was not referring to them. And if calling Wu Shu a sport is an insult then you need to take it up with someone else, like the organizers of it. I personally like watching Wu Shu so I didn't view that as an insult.

As to childish rants, I fear you have the wrong person. Read the posts of these detractors.

[Evad]

Ok, here's some explanation about a few things.

Masterkiller - it officially did not have a name before the development of the SDA. It was just called whatever an instructor wanted to call it, Master Sin always just referred to it as Shaolin. Most of the other various teachers and students that got involved with promoting the school would default to calling it Shaolin karate do.

The three senior students had a vote in decided to promote some of these jokers to their current rank. Which is a big stink within our organization anyway. One of those three has unofficially boycotted all activities related to the SDA for this reason. Which happens to be my teacher. He's sort of out on the sidelines remaining loyal to Master Sin, but not taking part in the maniacal ego stroking that takes place at the Lexington headquarters.
Fin.

The whole Gi, 'karate' thing...First of all if you look at traditional shaolin monk uniforms do they not resemble a japanese Gi? Secondly, Master Sin began teaching at UK part time in the sixties around the time after Bruce Lee came on the scene. At this time there was no such thing as Kung Fu magazine or Tiger Claw, you could'nt just order a nice chinese uniform to supply your students with at a reasonable price. But Gi's and Judo uniforms were easily available and affordable. Master Sin wore a Gi when he started teaching and wore one when he was a student under his teacher(s). But his teacher(s) wore the traditional chinese attire expected of an old dude teaching kung fu.

Which brings me to the some of the history, here is a little known and seldom acknowledged FACT. Master Sin and Master Hsiang both learned from multiple teachers in Indonesia not one. And the main teacher whom our lineage on the SD site refers to as Great Grandmaster Ie Chang Ming is actually Sin and Hsiang's Grandfather on their mother's side.

Here's an irony as well; there is so much ego in SD that it would actually be nice to be able to 'hire people from other styles to accompany our material' hell if we did that then maybe there wouldn't be all the controversy. The truth of the matter is that some of our people won't even allow their students to branch out and try new stuff. For example, recently there was an incident at our annual tournament. A very prominent and successful school showed up wearing kung fu uniforms, and the man in charge got upset and parleyed Master Sin into scolding the offending school. This of course ****ed off the attending people and they left and haven't been back, so that instructor and all his student base is now 'out' of the system. Master Sin had originally ok'd the use of those uniforms at the respective school.

The result of things like is this, Master Sin does not attend and teach regularly at any of the schools anywhere in the country. He teaches an annual seminar and that's about it. The SDA is run and managed by Bill Leonard.

The whole 'karate' thing was not decided in a '90's meeting, the decision to designate Master Sin's line of martial art the Do was decided. Which is a good thing otherwise one of us SD people might inadvertantly open a school and teach our stuff to an unprepared public:0)

More to follow....

[Evad]

The Yip Man story was great!!! which is another thing I'd like to address.

Does Master Sin actually remember 900 kata?

NO. No more than a doctor can recall the 1000's of pieces of material required for his profession. Or a lawyer can recall every word of the constitution. Question, does Metallica recall every note of every song, along with every lyric of every song they ever did? There's got to be 1000's of notes comprising there material. Do these various people practice everything they know every single day?

Here's another little know and seldom if ever acknowledged FACT, both Master Sin and Master Hsiang have troves and troves of old books, scolls, parchments, and various other materials that contains the kata and other material they teach. When one of them decides to open up a new piece of material, they study these 'notes' and work it up to teach again. I have seen these notebooks, and they're really cool, very old delicate some of them. These are notes that they themselves took while learning the stuff and also notes and journals of their Grandfather and his contemporaries. Master Hsiang has some notebooks detailing material and he has no idea what it is, because at the time it was available to him, he says he wasn't interested in learning it, he can read and make some sense of it but he can't put it all together.

As for hiring people into an association to absorb material, who in their right mind would hire themselves out that way and be legit? Not to mention that it's really not even affordable to do that in any practical sense, if you had the money to accomplish that why then create a master minded scam and call it Shaolin Do?

Stacey - your absolutely right, you really hit the nail on the head, "there is no quality control" and your correct in not wanting to go near a SD school, most of them are riff raff. And yes Master Sin looks exactly like Liu Kang.

MOre to follow....

[themeecer]

Originally posted by TjD

say i spend 20 some-odd years mastering the six forms of wing chun, then someone else comes along claiming they know all the forms of my style style plus 900 others, and learned them in the scope of a few months, saying they are a master. how would you feel? how does this make you and your effort look?

Let me start out by posting this I found writen by one of the masters in our SDA manual:

Two identical twins begin training on the same day.
Twin A practices one hour a day six days a week and comes to class three times a week. Twin B practices one hour a week and comes to class twice a week. After two years of training Twin A has over 600 hours of personal practice and has been in about 300 classes. Twin B has only 104 personal practice hours and has been in about 200 classes. Now, when someone asks "How long have you been in martial arts?" they both say "Two years!" I guess they both think they are telling the truth, but a more accurate answer would be for Twin A to say "I've been doing martial arts for about 900 hours" and for Twin B to say "I've been doing martial arts for about 300 hours."
When someone asks me how long I've been studying martial arts, I reply, "Long enough to learn and be able to perform all the material you can see on my workout schedule - and I have about 16,000 hours of training." When they say "What's that in years?" I reply "If you practice an hour a year, it's 16,000 years."

So when you say 20 years mastering 6 forms I have no idea what time commitment you are talking about. Did you spend 8 hours a day in class 365 days a year? Also you said "mastering" not learning. There are many forms I know that I have not mastered. I have heard it said that it takes 1,000 times to master a form.

How does one man learn 900 forms? Well, not all forms are the same length. We have some short forms that are only 5 or 6 movements. This is sometimes listed as the 108 Tan leg forms I have read on some SDA sites. Is this counted as one complete form or 108? I don't know. But this does get the number down to 798.

Oops .. I just refreshed the page and saw that Evad took my next words out of my mouth. So read his post.

We don't claim to have wing chun in our system, but would assume there would be similarities. If I remember correctly wing chun was started by a shaolin nun. Correct me if I am wrong. The way I see it you are my cousin in martial arts, since we share the same school as originators. You will differ from us because I am sure there was more art developed in your system once your system spread.

I haven't seen much wing chun, do you know of any online videos I could watch? I love watching other stylists and can learn something from everyone. I am not totally in favor of cross training because I have more material to keep me busy than I need... no need to incorporate more. (Not saying I wouldn't attend a seminar taught by another master if given the chance, just don't have the time to become a regular student)

[Evad]

MOJO - I'm sure about the western suit and tie question, could you elaborate?

As for the record at the shaolin temple. That's an excellent question, I'm not sure if there would be a record, don't know. But I can say that it's possible that such records could have been destroyed, lost, revised, omitted, etc. So if there is an official record somewhere I would'nt know what could be done with it. What I do know though is that in the late seventies if I recall correctly, a peer student of Grandmaster Ie entered a traditional tai chi competition being held in Indonesia. This student performed one of our tai chi fan routines, and was disqualified. The attending judges laughed off the student saying that the form of fan kata he was doing no longer existed, that it had been lost to history several decades before becoming extinct and that only pieces of it remained. The student challenged the decision, and was afforded an opportunity to provide proof of authenticity of the form. There was a committee assembled and the student presented a 'book' detailing the form along with lineage stamped with the appropriate family 'Chops' as a seal of approval. These chops were researched and in the end the tai chi fan kata that we teach was officially recognized by that tai chi association in Indonesia and was allowed for competition.

During the boxer rebellion, the cultural revolution, the fall of the last emperor. There was a great loss of traditional material and training methods. Many old teachers and students were systematically hunted down and imprisoned or killed per various reasons. Some of these old teachers fled the country taking their methods and history with them. It's possible that some of this material could be out there somewhere locked away in a dusty attic somewhere. So these records could be somewhere or they could be destroyed or they may have never existed. Hard thing to verify.

more to follow....

[Evad]

TjD - I totally agree with you. What I said early about the butt kissing and $$$ put out to be promoted just really gets under my skin in the same way your talking about SD laying claim to 900 kata. These guys did nothing to deserve the rank and prestige that they've been elevated to in our organization, there's no humility. In fact all they have succeeded in doing is generating some really bad rap for SD, and that takes all my hard work that I've put into my training and flushes it down the toilet too. Because of this facade of ego, my credibility is damaged in this forum. If I wanted to get into a serious discussion with someone here about MA, no one would partake if they know I'm in SD, even if I have some good priniciples and knowledge to share no one with take heed of it just because of the stigma attached to the I know more kata than anyone in the world ego stroking. I read a quote once from a book, and I don't remember who wrote it but it was attributed to a Shaolin monk, "I do not fear the 10,000 techniques that you practice. I fear the the 1 technique you have practiced 10,000 times." There's always someone better than you at anything. Someone somewhere can kick the crap out of anybody and not even flinch regardless of your 'style.'

more to follow...

[RedSkaNite]

Hey, themeecer, here is a list of a bunch of Wing Chun video clips for you to check out.


http://pages.zdnet.com/wingtsun/wing....com/id18.html

[African Tiger]

This sums up Shaolin Do in one friggin photograph. What is this guys, krouching kitty kat style???

[themeecer]

Hehe .. heck if I know.

I don't know much about James but I am thankful for the articles he has written for us. It appears to me that he is a better writer than he is a martial artist.

Thanks RedSkaNite ... tons of videos. That will keep me busy for sometime.

[joedoe]

Any SD schools in Indianapolis? I am going to be there for about 5 days in August and if there is one I might pop in and watch a class.

[Shaolin-Do]

nope, Most are in kentucky, tenesee area.
the rest, scattered througout the south.

[African Tiger]

Themeecer - about this whole name calling thing, I was clearly dissing your art, not you personally. Read the post again.

And you never addressed the issue that one of your West Coast masters is about as warm as a bucket of ice cubes poured down your crotch during a Minnesota snow-storm. This is so NOT Shaolin. You don't run a REAL kung fu school like a business, with fancy uniforms and patches, and some jackwad toying with his computer instead of welcoming a potential student.

And whoever wrote that old crap about Gi's looking more like Shaolin Monk robes was really reaching for that one. Take a look at the robes on martialartsmart.com and compare them to gi's...and don't be smoking a bowl like I am, do it sober!

Actually if you smoked a bowl and went into a Shaolin Do school, would you lose even more brain cells?

[themeecer]

Originally posted by African Tiger
Themeecer - about this whole name calling thing, I was clearly dissing your art, not you personally. Read the post again.

In dissing my art you are dissing me. I live and breathe SD. Also by dissing my grandmaster you have insulted a personal friend of mine. (I used the word diss more in those sentences than I have my entire life)

Originally posted by African Tiger
And you never addressed the issue that one of your West Coast masters is about as warm as a bucket of ice cubes poured down your crotch during a Minnesota snow-storm. This is so NOT Shaolin. You don't run a REAL kung fu school like a business, with fancy uniforms and patches, and some jackwad toying with his computer instead of welcoming a potential student.

I tried to .. I asked who was the master in question. I have no dealings with the west coasters. Not heard good things about the Sword organizations but that may just be isolated incidents.

And you do run REAL kung fu as a business if you want to feed your family. The flip side of the coin is the way my teacher teaches. He treats us more like family and has us out to his cabin for instruction a lot. He has no concrete payment plan. He lets his students pay when they can and therefore many a time the bills at our school are more than his income. Do I like that he treats us like family? Yes. Do I like that students can take advantage of him because he doesn't run it more like a business? Heck no.

Originally posted by African Tiger
if you smoked a bowl and went into a Shaolin Do school, would you lose even more brain cells?

Ahh .. more name calling.

[Serpent]

meecer - go back to the Detractors topic you started and answer my question please.

[Evad]

Let's see African Tiger, these look like Gi's.



so do these and look it's from the old mural in the temple itself...like they've come undone in the sparring match. there's alot of different uniforms the monks wear...

here's some monks just hanging around enjoying the weather.. in what look like Gi's, and these are modern photographs



this one's cool, he even has a black belt on...



Look at this clay sculpture, he has something similiar to a Gi...

This is real cool, here's the $2000 "credibility" monument of Grandmaster Sin at the temple, I'm getting all these pics from the same site called Shaolin International. Why the heck would they choose to show a store bought revenue generating 'plaque' that funds all the bok choy item in their gallery? Oh, it's probably there to help generate some sales... check it...it's the one in the front


here's another clay dude with a Gi on...


Here's yet another example of a young monk wearing what is similiar to a Gi...