I'll apologize in advance if I'm misinterpreting your intentions, but I have to say it: this has the smell of bomb throwing purely for entertainment value, in which case I'm going to take a pass.

Forms are not magical 'truths' created by a supreme deity and passed down from a mountain on stone tablets; they're simply sequences of movements that, hopefully, simulate combinations of techniques that might reasonably be useful in fighting situations. They also can be used to improve balance, increase strength, grow hair and pick up chicks. That's it.

Every time a post like this shows up on these forums, the same group of people leap in with gleeful abandon to try and find some way to tie the integrity of a system (and by extension, its practitioners) to the age and/or creator of a hand form.

If you study a system because you like its forms, the fact that the local school has new carpeting, or you think the cut of their uniform makes your butt look nice, stop reading now. If you're still reading and you believe that a form is nothing more than what I described above, then things like age and 'author' really don't matter even a little. You either appreciate the applications and training benefits, in which case you practice it with great enthusiasm, or you don't, in which case you don't practice it. I've seen people in these forums bash a form simply because they believed Master Chan created it. As the acknowledged grand master of the Wah Lum system, if he isn't entitled to expand the system, who is?

Pardon my rant.

- CS