well said, lindley
What starts out as Wing Chun should be the foundation that evolves into your own Kung Fu (“Jeet Kune do”) with Wing Chun concepts. The system starts you out, but the system should not become your ball and chain. Many styles teach the system without allowing the student to build on the system.
It sounds a lot like my Sifu, Dana Wong, who although he was with GM Cheung for a long long time, had WC background from the WSL lineage and others while growing up in Boston. He often said to us that WC was about understanding principles and that what you learned from them was more important than the “techniques”. He would say that the “techniques” would come out by themselves, depending on one’s personality, body style, athleticism and natural abilities, and other things that an individual would bring to their training. He would encourage us to find our own ways to resolve a situation once we were in a position to do so. He would say that WC was a vehicle to get you an advantage, whether by positioning, or from the energy received at a contact point, or whatever. But once you got that opening, whether you applied pressure with straight punches or a well-placed hook or uppercut or a joint manipulation was up to you. WC helped you to find an opening, to get an advantage, to put you in a good position, but then it was up to you as to how you finished it. Sifu would put forth “situations” and then give us some “what ifs” that could occur from the base situation he gave us, to encourage us to see the options and possibilities that could come from any “technique” so to speak. But then he would encourage us to explore even further, saying that there could probably be another four or five “what ifs” that could happen if we only took some time to play with them. By doing so, he would give us a logical explanation of the whys and hows of what he gave us, but then would give us an opportunity to play with those whys and hows so that we could understand them, and more importantly, assimilate them into OUR own understanding and training, so that we would have that knowledge to do with, what we would.
Becoming a Sifu is using your experiences to share with your students, not to take your interpretation and mold them into it. Like being a parent, you can only hope to instill values and the true concepts of the system. How they use it is up to them, but they will see in the results. The beauty of Wing Chun is that it does not really care about method, as the Kung fu is the result.
This is exactly, I believe, is what made my Sifu such a popular person here in Australia, because he is so willing to share his experiences and understanding with us, his students. He really DOES want his students to become better than him. He often would say that he started his “serious” training too late in life to become the best , but he could still be the best that he could be, from THAT day on in his life. And that’s what he also tries to instill in us, to become the best that we can be, from wherever we are at any stage in our lives. He wants us to become better than him, because he said, then people would remember him as a good teacher and one who cared about his students. Sifu Wong has had his share of “real” experiences in his life, but he doesn’t use them, I guess, to get people to come and train with him. He has always just tried to put forth logical reasons for what he’s teaching, and if one can see the logic, then one can make decisions for oneself. If the logic is flawed, or if someone can present him with a better way to deal with something, he is also humble enough to say “I can see that” and will be the first to want to explore that concept to add to his own knowledge.
Teaching is not for everyone. However, what is the value of learning something and not sharing it?
Again, you hit the nail right on the head. Sifu would say that his WC knowledge was like money; you can’t take it with you when you go. Plus he would say that one always got MORE from things, when one gave. Too often, he would say, a lot of WC instructors and contemporaries of his would hold their knowledge, even from each other and not share, for fear of one getting one up on another, much to the detriment of their students and to the WC system as a whole. He believed that to be one of the major reasons for so many factions in the WC family today. It is good to see things like this discussion on a forum like this, where hopefully practitioners and instructors can add CONSTRUCTIVELY to each other’s experiences and training.
Thanks again for an encouraging and insightful contribution to this discussion.
This is why it’s good that there’s much to choose from.
