Good morning everyone. How are all my SD friends doing? All is good here. Whats new Baqualin? Did I here you went to a tournament? How was it?
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Keep IS-Dfr locked down. All IS-Dfr posters deserved to be punished.
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Junior Member
Good morning everyone. How are all my SD friends doing? All is good here. Whats new Baqualin? Did I here you went to a tournament? How was it?
Junior Member
This might come as a shock to some of you but I did some reflecting last night on some things that I have said and I would just like to appolagize for any negative comments I might have said.
From the spine
Good morning to you too mkrii....all is good and hope no one has insulted you!!!!....the tourney was just our fall gathering here in Lex. and I was speaking about the demo I did on Baqua Spear.Originally Posted by mkriii
BQ
Last edited by Baqualin; 10-05-2007 at 08:08 AM.
Junior Member
So where do you guys hold your fall tournament? Iwish I had known about it so I could have come and watched it.
Registered User
Looks like it's time to update the KFM Glossary.
Chiballsofmilk - 'cross hands' is something you offer to do with someone in order to learn, exchange ideas, etc.
Doofus.
Taiwan rules but Cleveland ROCKS!
Meanwhile, I'll be looking for God in this box of Cheerios - Crushing Fist
Junior Member
My question is this...Is Shaolin Do Karate the same as Shaolin Kung Fu? If it is, then your saying that what you teach has no other arts (japanese, korean, etc...) mixed in with it. What you teach is all Chinese?
Daper Dan Man
So far just the first 8 rounds. I'll learn "cannon rocks the leg" from my teachers.
Daper Dan Man
To my understanding its all chinese as filtered through indonesia and the kentucky. I don't know if it was "mixed" with somthing else. It has taken on its own unique "flavor" for various reasons.
Registered User
HMM very good question. probably because they get tired of getting trashed on by MMA guys. This helps them feel better about themselves and what they do.
Eternal Student
Ummmm.... wouldn't you fall into that too? Kettle? Black? Much??HMM very good question. probably because they get tired of getting trashed on by MMA guys. This helps them feel better about themselves and what they do.
Message: Due to the ongoing Recession, God has decided the light at the end of the tunnel will be shut off due to power costs. That is all.
Master of Chu Bagua
#1-Same thing.
#2-It's my personal opinion that it contains influences from Indonesian and Malaysian MA's like Kuntao, Silat, and yes, perhaps even a little karate. But I would say that those influences would be small. Being such as the lineage travels through Chinese Buddhists, I'd see it unlikely that MA's like Silat, which have strong native ties to Islam, would comingle without much ado. In terms of kuntao, I'd assume, that as GGM Ie was teaching Chinese students in Indonesia, his students probably picked up some kuntao trimmings here and there from each other and from friends outside the Chinese community, and some of these developed in the system. It's ultimately ignorant to assume it could remain unchanged. Shaolin in China couldn't even claim to remain unchanged. When we look at how traditional Shaolin schools developed in Vietnam, Korea, and other outlying Asian countries after various migrations of Chinese MA's, we see similar (what we might be tempted to call) "watering-downs" or "differences", but are simply geographical, artistic differences, or differences in interpretation. In terms of karate, the structure of the teachings is presented in the fashion of karate. Take the ippon kumite, for instance. I saw these done in Okinawan karate in the Peachtree-Dunwoody area in a class run by a guy that taught traditional karate in a local gym (very affordable, very good teaching....and as a side note, he and his entire class was learning Hung Gar at the time from a local Chinese sifu.) Our ippon-kumite were very different from theirs. The method of movement and blocking was different. The method of retaliation was different (ultimately the same, since you wind up hitting someone, LOL). But I would say that ours were based more on Chinese principles of fighting (in my varied CMA experiences), which are rather different than JMA principles (which are often more direct and linear). Still, the structure of presentation--A punches, B blocks/moves, is the same structure of retaliation. So ippon-kumite, whether this is one of those "Japanese trimmings" the SD canon purports was used to throw off the govt. LOL, or whether it is just some approximation to name the one-step techniques, who knows? Who cares?
#3-Karate is a generic term, even in karate. Shorin-ryu karate is Shaolin Karate, but even then, it's only Shaolin Fujien crane karate. So even that label is inaccurate. Shaolin Do Karate/Kung-fu (depending on who's advertising it) is identifiably kung-fu. Sure, some of our craptastic vids on the net don't necessarily display this, but those on M. Grooms' private channel do. But it would be hard to label the other, craptastic ones, as karate either. I give props to anyone who puts themselves out there on the net, so I'm not gonna diss any of 'em, not even the "Dancing Queen" tiger practitioners.
Various reasons=(in my observations) precisely this:
Everyone who trained with the brothers The' back in the day say this: they were kind of on the "hardcore" side......LOL, which is not that surprising, seeing how MA's are/were practiced in Indonesia until the 1970's/1980's. Find some kuntao-silat training vids, and you'll see what I mean. Guys having boiling oil poured on their heads and hands in order to test themselves, diving through panes of glass (not safety glass), jumping off of the tops of three story builidings, sometimes rolling out of it, sometimes just impacting, somtimes breaking legs--but all the time friggin' nuts!
Nevertheless, I'm going to assume one facet of the training was always the same: in that, it is/was more about gaining the essence and application of a movement rather than the "pose". What I mean by this is can be easily corroborated by any SD student. When you throw a high block, you throw one a little above the temple, a couple of inches out. For the most part, in CMA, you throw one several inches directly above your head (although most CMA's don't have the correct angular deflection, and thus have poor high-blocks, from an SD mindset of applicability). The The' brothers probably never emphasized the angle or hand position; no school I've encountered does either (not like my old Longfist teacher, who would stop you mid-form, take you back to a "pose", and manually reposition your hand). The important thing in SD was/is you had to be in position to actually deflect something. But if you don't throw a really high high block (like in my Longfist), the form tends to look crappy.
I always tend to stress high blocks, and practice the motions big. I figure the way CMA developed, and taught larger (which seem ineffective) movements, was for the reason that in combat, you're going to be tense, and your motions will become smaller. If you practice exaggerated movements, they'll probably be just right when you get cramped in combat situations. This is the way I train, and it helps infinitely in my sparring.
Last edited by Shaolin Wookie; 10-07-2007 at 01:24 AM.
Registered User
The forms as taught are a blue print. We are taught to perform a technique say a leg sweep by keeping the leg straight 'almost' and driving through , and bringing the foot as high as possible. Just as we are taught to perform other tech with exaggerated movement so as to develop the proper body mechanics and muscle coordination and cond. It is my opinion that some get stuck at this point and consider it the end. Instead I feel they should start to add fluidity and shorten the techniques to generate more power and flow "flavor" . Some dont these are the ones who appear to be doing Kara-te, Japanese style. This makes the form easier to teach and more sharp focus wise. KC
A Fool is Born every Day !
Master of Chu Bagua
Exactly, KC. I agree with this 100%. But the problem is, sometimes in the transmission (and I know this from experience) certain teachers who do not realize this do not pass on those exaggerations to beginners, and assume that because they, as senior practitioners, can feel the application, power, and flow, and can therefore preserve the essence with their own flavor, that the new guy can do the same thing. And this simply is not the case. It takes that exaggeration, sometimes, to really understand what you're doing. I had several teachers of sifu level pass on those "smaller" motions, which made no sense to me. And then the master of the school would see that, tell me to exaggerate it a little (b/c I assume he can see the struggle/frustration in the movement/attitude), and it seemed like it made all the difference in the world, and lights went off in my head. And later, I would whittle those motions down to more precise and exact ones, and still continue to do this daily.The forms as taught are a blue print. We are taught to perform a technique say a leg sweep by keeping the leg straight 'almost' and driving through , and bringing the foot as high as possible. Just as we are taught to perform other tech with exaggerated movement so as to develop the proper body mechanics and muscle coordination and cond. It is my opinion that some get stuck at this point and consider it the end. Instead I feel they should start to add fluidity and shorten the techniques to generate more power and flow "flavor" . Some dont these are the ones who appear to be doing Kara-te, Japanese style. This makes the form easier to teach and more sharp focus wise. KC
It's really a question of teaching philosophy/method, more than anything.
#10 sparring technique is a microcosm of this in action. I always see wretched versions of this. Generally, I just try to get people to know the points of action, where the hands go/chamber, etc. But then I pull someone aside who's been doing it longer, yet still doesn't understand it, and again describe the points of action, and then ask them to apply it, and there's this look of sudden enlightenment as they figure out the basics of the motion. And then you explain the reason the feet shift and the knee raises, why the hand doesn't make a huge sweeping rise and huge sweeping chop, and why you want to pull your hands up (to throw the elbow)....and the technique gets remarkably complicated. And when you perform it in the air, after knowing this, and hte motions are much smaller, more precise, more directed, and can be applied without much trouble (honestly, most people are just asking to catch sparring tech #10, and I oblige them).
Sometimes it's a case of not passing on an exaggeration to just get their body in place; and sometimes it's a case of negligence in not teaching them how and why to trim down those movements, once their body becomes accustomed to it without too much thought.
But some people don't take that advice, or don't get it, and they just perform a dead technique, rote, of movement, and nothing else. And I see that attitude a lot, not just in SD. Sometimes I think the approach to teaching is just not there anymore in some MA's. And with the proliferation of schools, more teachers, some with the wrong attitudes, proliferate, and the expansion--although good for you and I--tends to ruin the art. (kind of like TKD, where a good tournament performer thinks he's good enough to teach and sets up a chain school, but doesn't pass on the ART---the art suffers and becomes a bit of a joke). But if you can find a great teacher (like the master of the school I attend, and several of its higher ranking teachers (all throughout ATL, really), you can profit by it. I lucked out by having great, dedicated teachers. Some are great at fighting. Some at certain styles. Some at weapons. There's a wealth of expertises to draw on.
I've cross-trained for a while, and I'm constantly astounded (and curse my stubborn blindness) to see that I've already learned what I'm seeing in another art, only I didn't realize it.
Last edited by Shaolin Wookie; 10-07-2007 at 01:24 AM.
Daper Dan Man
Interestingly, I was cleaning out my garage yesterday and I came across a copy of the manual that accompanied the old KET "Karate Series" back in the 80s that GMS hosted. In that manual, GMS refers to everything as karate including what was being done by "karateka" in China. Now, no one, not even GMS will say today that karate or karateka is the proper term to describe the martial arts in China, but it shows that early on, the term was, to GMS, interchangable. GMS said his style was shaolin karate and that its origns were 100% from China as taught to him by GM Ie.
When I started in 1989, my first teacher was calling the style karate, but on my first "intorductory" lesson he said that the style is really Chinese kung fu, but is called karate because of the way GMS trained in Indonesia. The terms and the gis were part of that tradition that was uniqe to SD. If GM Ie ingrained calling it and acting as if it was "karate" then that's understandable. (This is one of the reasons I'd like to get White Earp's teacher's take on this).
Master of Chu Bagua
Does this mean I'm a karateka, too? Sweet. I'm ranked in two arts, for the price of one.
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