Two lousy cats and a snoring, pregnant wife kept me up this morning.
So, I was thinking. For those who still believe that Sin The' is capable of telling the truth (and I do think this, since everyone can admit that they're wrong):
Imagine he were to come out tomorrow and tell you that he learned his mantis from Je Shou Fu, or that he learned his bird systems from Liu Su Peng, nevermind what his deposition states. He tells you about CHung Yen, multiple teachers, and thus slightly contradicts his prior stories, but not entirely----just enough to make them shape-up in your mind.
Would you have any reason to believe him? Or, would you assume that he was lying (or that he had read this thread)? And do you suspect he would stop at the believable claims, or continue on to extraordinary ones?
If he can't recall what he taught between '65 and '90, and if he misrepresented everything that he did between '65 and '90 in the 90's, why in the hell should anyone trust that he can recall what he did between '55 and '65? And why would you have any reason to believe him now?
Now, I always suspected that 1) the lineage was false, if not fake (i.e., difference between stories received from Ie vs. reality---hence my avatar and name here), 2) that nobody could take GM The's claims in his books without a grain of salt, and 3) that GM The' was a fabricator, but I also thought that there was enough correspondence between what he taught (Lian Wu Zhang, Jie Quan) and variations of those forms elswhere to suggest that he had learned something from someone, at some time.
In this situation, though, given the deposition's "revelations," I wouldn't trust him even if he confirmed what I suspect was true about his training in Indonesia (and his command of 5 languages, LOL, when he hasn't mastered this one).
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Sidenote: As a thought experiment, consider the following scenario. I'm on a blackbelt test that GM The' is officiating. He asks me to perform the adaptive drunken immortal form. Instead, I break out into the Longfist routines that I learned five or six years ago from a different teacher outside the art. GM The' gets a little confused at what I'm doing and stops the test.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
I say, "the Adaptive Drunken Immortal."
He says, "That's not the Adaptive Drunken Immortal."
I say, "Okay, it's actually Longfist. I learned it from a book."
He says, "That's actually good, if you learned it from a book."
I say, "I didn't learn it from a book, I learned it from my Longfist teacher. His name was Chop Suey."
He says, "That's a strange name."
I say, "His name isn't really Chop Suey."