Is Shaolin-Do for real?

[Golden Tiger]

Lot's of good posts and thoughts from all but my question is - why force your beliefs on others?

Mainly because they figured out a long time ago that there were some us on here and that we would agrue with them. No harm, No foul.

Not me, I'm just lurking waiting to be the first to post on the 100th page as GT beat everyone to the 1000th post

I am givin her all she's got captin... or are you saying that I post too much?

FWIW, I think it is strange that some in SD get all worked up because a few schools wear something other than a gi. If it doesn't matter to the head of the system, it shouldn't either to anyone else. IMHO, it is how a person performs in class that is more important than what they are wearing.

Where the heck did that come from? They told you that you might have flaskback's didn't they? But nooooo, it was just a lil dot on a piece of paper after all..



TWS...who woke you up?

[kwaichang]

Good thought OU Ji But there are those whose soul purpose in life is to have someone agree with them. Well I do what I do and if it makes me a better person and if I can show Compassion and respect to others I am a better person for it, that is what SD does for me. Whether you believe learning 17 forms as is in ShotoKan or 100 forms in SD is no matter . As bruce Lee said if it helps you in a fight then it is Good, I do what I do I have trained for 35 years I love martial arts and I read and contribute to this thread because in a glimmer of hope something good might come of something that is said either by me or someone else but I see people trying to rationalize what they think by trying to get others to agree with them. I trained hard last night every punch felt good my lungs were burning from fatigue and when I was done I felt pain and pleasure at the same time. You could prove to me with out a doubt that SD is something else but I dont care cause I have punched in Boxing, Shoto Kan , Wado , Hung Gar, White Crane Yoshukai and even Aikido and believe me the punches in SD are the same as those in other systems. So argue about history or about lineage or number of forms but I cont to punch and kick and throw and develope the force called Chi or Ki . Peace to you all for having such analytical and inquisitive minds I pity us all KC

[cbishop]

....cause I have punched in Boxing, Shoto Kan , Wado , Hung Gar, White Crane Yoshukai and even Aikido and believe me the punches in SD are the same as those in other systems...

wow!! you practiced all those systems?? that's amazing.. and to think that
they all punch the same way. maybe they should just give up on having
specialized techniques and training methods and form one great big
organization. they could call it 'TAI KWON LEAP'.

wait a minute.. i remember now. muhammed ali DOES punch EXACTLY like
a Lam family Hung Ga practicioner. they're gonna be p!ssed when they
find out he's learned the secret of the iron bridging technique.

[Lohanhero]

there was a quote on another site on the bottom of someones posts. i think it is very good in heart. goes somthing like...

"Those that fight, fight. those that watch criticize."

please though, dont get stuck on single words.

[The Willow Sword]

JP.
Yes i do agree that there are many schools that teach TMI(hehe my new term for the rest of the year) and yes i know that this is not the ONLY reason that SD is ridiculed here. why would i even NEED to go into that which has already been established and re-established for longer than most here have trained or started martial arts?

TWS who woke you up?

haha well i am currently in KY right now overseeing some family buisness and since i dont have access to a computer i am using a public library computer. so i am filling in time here and lookin at the forums.

My anger at certain SD peeps has faded in to memory and from my last bitter but humourous post in this long thread concluded all the "venting" that i am going to do on the subject. (the post where i wrote the script for "SD the Musical"

so i thought i would offer up some actual insights and more rational opinions.

forever and always,,,TWS

[kwaichang]

Tae Kwon Leap is also known as Free style Martial arts or American Karate. I meant to say the source of power is basically the same in most arenas of punching unless they are thrusting instead of striking techniques KC

[Ou Ji]

I'll probably get a lot of crap for this BUT ......

There are only so many ways to throw a solid straight punch. Each style has slight variations but for the most part a punch is a punch.

And since I've never been jacked up by a slight variation it really doesn't mean a whole lot to me.

3 more pages to go!!!

[kwaichang]

Please expound on the way / s to throw a straight punch and while you are at it please tell us about circular or hook punches as well. KC

[kwaichang]

What ever happened to Fred Sanford ??? KC

[gungfujosh]

I know this thread has been going on for a while, I just want to sy I have trained with Grand Master Sin The and the Elder Masters the Swords and I have been in martial arts for a while. I really love the school and the systems, I know the stories of the liniage and it can be viewed in the Chinese Shao-lin Center websites. I personally believe them, and Grandmaster The also has a book. Regarding the number of forms--there really are a lot.
I have studied at various schools, Karate, Aikido and I was a state ranked wrestler in NY, and the Chinese Shao-lin Center is the place I will be going for the rest of my days (and nights [lotta forms]).
Thanks

[Radhnoti]

I can point out one inconsistency in the book off the top of my head. It states clearly that GM Ie chose to name his system shaolin-do and that this was the name in Indonesia.
I've spoken with people who say they were there when the name shaolin-do was chosen...in Kentucky. I believe we have at least one person posting on THIS thread who was there (GT?).
I'm not saying, "Oh, oh he lied!" Just that the book was probably MOSTLY written by Master Halladay, the native English speaker. So, you can't really say the book is an irrefutable source for the history...

[BM2]

Although I rarely see him anymore, I know one of the first students of Shao-Lin Do. He quit in or about 1980. He is older than Master Sin and remembers when M. Leonard walked into class around '68(?). I state this because I asked him just this summer what Master Sin told them they were doing and he replied " It was always Shao-Lin Do."
I may be going out on a limb here, but GT may laugh at all "What I heard (fill in the blank) say...".
For myself, I don't like putting someone's name on the forum but since it was only used to date when this person was in Shao Lin Do and not about them, I hope that Masters Sin and Bill over look it.

EDIT: M. James R. Halladay wrote the November 1987 issue of Inside Kung Fu and it has a painting of M. Hiang standing behind M. Ie but the article says it is M. Sin. This may be the reason so many SD web sites has that wrong.

[Golden Tiger]

I can point out one inconsistency in the book off the top of my head. It states clearly that GM Ie chose to name his system shaolin-do and that this was the name in Indonesia.
I've spoken with people who say they were there when the name shaolin-do was chosen...in Kentucky. I believe we have at least one person posting on THIS thread who was there (GT?).

I think that the actual name of Ie's school was not Shaolin-Do but that was the name given to the system. I had Master Sin's certificate translated once upon a time and the school was more similar to what Hiang calls his now. (can't remember the exact name at the moment)

As for what I remembered concerning when the system started being called SD, I might be off there. What I seem to remember is that around the late 80's or early 90's, most if not all the schools were calling themselves something different. (Chinese Center for Martial Arts, Sin The Karate Club, xyz Karate, CSC, etc.) When the SDA was trying to get started and Master Sin thought the movie was going to be made, it was decided that all the schools would have Shaolin-Do some where in the name. The hand patch was made and there was even going to be an "offical" sign that everyone would use. I might even still have the letter and the mock up's for it. This was fine and dandy for about a day of course and it never came to be.

Now, I might be remembering all this completely wrong but it seems the way it was. But then again it was 15 or so years ago and at the time, I didn't tell myself to remember it exactly so that years from then I would have to give a deposition on it.

[wingsandsword]

As someone who lives in Central Kentucky and has been interested in Martial arts for a long time, I've had plenty of dealings with Shaolin-Do, and I haven't been impressed with them so far.

My first encounter with Shaolin-Do came when I was very young, about 6 or 7. I had problems with bullies at school, and even though I tried to run from them, there were times when being able to defend myself would be useful. My parents enrolled me in the only school in the small town we lived in at the time (circa 1984) and I started being taught "Shaolin-Do Karate", and fairly quickly earned my Yellow Belt. Even at the time I had my doubts about the quality of the testing, since several dozen kids were all being tested at once in a big gymnasium with him looking on, how could he really evaluate each of us from a short test viewing dozens of us at a time? Of course, the movie The Karate Kid came out not long thereafter, and loads of kids wanted to study martial arts. However, my own studies kinda bogged down, what I was being taught wasn't useful at all against an aggressor, it was almost all elaborate Kata that had to be memorized exactly, not very useful when you're trying to learn things you may need tomorrow to protect yourself. Between having great difficulty in remembering these intricate patterns at the age of 7 and very little of what I was learning was actually practical in self-defense, I stopped taking Shaolin-Do. Interestingly enough, it was always referred to as "Karate" and never as "Kung Fu" and always talked about as being Japanese in origin, not Chinese.

In fall of 1999, I was at the University of Kentucky getting my major in History. One of my friends and classmates was a student of Sin The and arranged with the professor for him to give a guest lecture in a class on the history of China. He came and gave a lecture on how Christianity is just an offshoot of Buddhism because the missing years of Christ's life in the Bible were where he travelled to China and learned Kung Fu and studied Buddhism and Taoism, and the proper way to be more Christlike is to study Kung Fu (followed by a brief autobiography and mentioning he runs a Kung Fu school in Lexington). At the end of the lecture when he left, Dr. Stapleton (Professor of History at UK, specializing in Chinese History) gave a big chagrined disclaimer that just about nothing he said had any academic weight or proof, and she looked a little embarrased that she'd given up a session of her class to somebody who came in and told what was essentially a thinly veiled recruiting speech with extremely dubious pseudohistory. The second time I'd dealt with Sin The and Shaolin-Do was not impressive. I noted that he had gone from teaching "Karate" to "Kung Fu".

The third time I encountered Shaolin-Do was a few years later. I was engaged to a girl (we later broke up), and after being with her for many months, she proudly tells me she just got her 1st Degree Black Belt in Shaolin-Do. I knew vaguel that she practiced martial arts (she rarely talked about it, but had mentioned it a few times). She was so excited, believing she was now invincible on the streets. I had my doubts, and I tried to politely let her know that, but she wanted to prove how good she was, so she challenged me to a sparring match. Now with only a 5th Kyu, she couldn't lay a hand on me: her moves were sloppy and uncoordinated, her strikes unfocused, and she seemed to have a library of preprogrammed responses to attacks, that once you learned them she couldn't do a thing to stop you. She never laid a hand on me, and after getting the better of her many times, she frustratedly quit. This was a brand new, just tested black belt in Shaolin-Do, and I, (at the time) a novice 5th Kyu with only 9 months of training could easily best her?

A fourth time was when students of Shaolin-Do joined the dojo where I now study learning another art. Virtually all the Shaolin-Do students we met had one of two problems, they were utterly unwilling to learn new ways to do things, or they were remarkably arrogant about their own skill. Some were prideful of their black belts in Shaolin-Do and even though they wanted to learn another art, they couldn't seem to understand that things were taught differently, so the exact same stances, forms, and moves just cannot be repeated rote and assume that another art will grant a belt (even if they try and explain to the instructor that it's the "original Shaolin art", as if the instructors will change the curriculm to reflect what they say, even if the art they are learning does not claim to be Kung Fu or Shaolin in heritage), and the others made horrible uke, and treated every practice like it was a sparring match and were very aggressive and confrontational. After 4 years of study in another art, and having seen a dozen Shaolin-Do practitioners come to our Dojo for further study, they all seem to have serious attitude problems about aggression and the inherent superiority of their art. I wondered why they were studying another art if Shaolin-Do is so superior, I asked one and apparently he wanted to have belts in multiple arts, so he could claim having black belts in multiple arts, and figured since he knew "true Shaolin" he could easily get a Black Belt in any other art. The highest I ever saw a Shaolin-Do practitioner get in another art was 4th Kyu, and that was only after he gave up Shaolin-Do to study our art (and he was doing well before he had to move away).

After all I've seen, living in and around Lexington for a quarter century around many practitioners of Shaolin-Do, I've been distinctly unimpressed by the quality of their instruction and their teaching.

[kwaichang]

So what we have here is someone who has not told us what he studies and a lecturer who may or may not know dates as well as history. What exactly does it take to impress you?? Give us your history so we can asess whether your opinion is viable. Also just because you are around an area does not make you an all knowing individual. KC