The Dark path

I have said a few times that my family was planing to begin making available to public material related to our system. Shanxi is a very traditional place and there are many people involved in this process, so that it will happen slowly. Outside China we will make the material available trough my website and through EF. We are beginning with some articles that will discuss many points related to our system. At the moment they are all written in Chinese by my master and I will be translating them. The articles follow a specific order and this is the first one. In case you are interested please let me know and other articles will follow.

“The weak is no match for the strong”, it’s been said that this is true since antiquity. “The small can’t beat the big, women and children now it. Nevertheless, I that liked so much the Chinese martial arts, didn’t necessarily had to follow this way of thinking. I thought that the thousands of years old Chinese martial culture was very rich, so deep that it couldn’t be measured and so wonderful that one wasn’t able to express it with words. Therefore I have always maintained conviction that in the midst of the Chinese martial arts there was the fighting skill and the methods that would allow the weak to defeat the strong and the small to defeat the big. But the kind of stories told in the Martial arts novels were always in front of my eyes, at times hidden, at times visible. My senses and my inspiration kept telling me I would find it. The kind of martial arts where the weak could defeat the strong and the small could defeat the big.

In order to find it, to study the martial arts where the weak defeats the strong and the small defeats the big, in the past I have made contact with more than a hundred families and all kinds of practitioners of martial arts (in here I will not say their names). Among them there were many masters (??) that are now very famous inside and outside of China, also there were some that created their own families, became famous, created clans – famous masters, experts, coaches. All this practitioners from different families were experts in my opinion. At that time, if you wanted to find out about the martial ability and the methods of martial experts and to be sure of their knowledge of martial art, according to the traditions you would need to have some social skills to become close to them. But in my case I didn’t need this. They saw that I was young and small; my thinking was simple and pure and looked like a child, so that they would not feel worried about me. I made use of this advantageous situation and began to look for what I was trying to find and to ask some questions related to martial arts. There was no need to run in circles and to conceal my meaning, and every time I went straight to the point. Because I was clear about my objectives in learning martial arts and my conditions weren’t unfair, I really didn’t need to be over polite. My objective in learning martial arts could be expressed by the word “use” (?) – that is to say it needed to be something I could use in a real fight. At the same time, no matter what kind of martial arts it was, provided it would give me the means to defeat big people then I would be pleased. I really didn’t expect that this all simple and small objective would give these experts so much trouble. Among them inevitably there were some that were recognized and experts and were very famous and while answering questions and at the same time performing, showed that they were unworthy of the fame they had, training and using it in ways that weren’t according to the original ways.

These martial arts experts, even though they practiced different martial arts, when it came to their teaching methods and methods for fighting, their all had the same characteristics. For example: The method and type of teaching was all the same. When they were showing a technique to defend a punch or a kick, they would stipulate the action and the place you would hit. At the moment you threw a punch or kicked them, they would use an action to defeat your attack and defend themselves. After a while I would also try them a few times, not moving according to their stipulations and the places they told me to hit, and as a result was very surprised. There was a time when a master that already had a big reputation was teaching me, told me to use my left hand to hit his nose. As I was preparing to use my left hand, I suddenly changed to the right hand and hit the master’s face so loud that there was even a sound, and accidentally my finger went into his eyes, so that there were tears in both of the master’s eyes and his face was all red. Because at the moment there were many people there, the master looked too ashamed, but at the same time I was just a kid and he couldn’t do anything. These kind of identical situation have happened many other times when I tried other experts. This finally made me understand: masters, martial arts, they are all separated by good and bad, real and fake, high and low levels.

Besides, the martial fighting methods possessed by these masters, when used in real fight situations were all about matching power and pure force. For a young student that wasn’t yet an adult, none of these methods were of value. To overcome these problem, in the past a master told me to persistently train iron palm. The medicine used in the training and its recipe, the master wouldn’t teach to outsiders. The master would prepare the medicine, but the iron sand and other elements I would have to get them by myself. The sand would heat pretty fast and it was so hot that putting your hand inside was really hard. Even though there was the usage of the medicine for the hands and wrists, because there was a lot of friction the skin of your hand would become hard and the joints of the fingers would change shape, nevertheless the effects of the training could be seen very fast. After a while, even if I couldn’t say I could break a stone at every attempt, at least breaking stones wasn’t a big problem. However the most regrettable thing was that this kind of method for breaking stones and bricks never had the same effect while free fighting people that it had when performing on stones and bricks. The practice and the reality have proved that the fighting methods possessed by these masters from all these lines and martial arts, weren’t the “small beats big” and “weak beats strong” that I was looking for.

Afterwards, a person that have tried and tried many different martial arts and that knew my story told me: In Pingyao (Shanxi) there is a guy called “Tuan Yuezi” (???), not taller than 1.60 meters, not heavier than 40 Kg., that in the past had defeated the famous Pingyao Long Fist master “An Liuer” ?????, that was 2 meters tall. I have heard about An Liuer long ago. In the martial circles of Pingyao he was very arrogant. To make sure about the veracity of this story I once again set foot on the road, and began to visit other masters.

I am always amazed with the criteria used by some organizations to distribute (!) their Duans. A “Duan” is a unit that serves to measure one’s ability in a certain marital art, much like the Japanese “Dan”- it goes from 1 to 10. As I see it the system doesn’t certify that a person is martially skilled (able to fight) and many that have received it are not, as I understand, examples of accomplished fighters. Bottom line is that when it comes to Xingyiquan, it was created to be a fighting system, a self defense tool, and unless one has fighting skill, having whatever Duan one might have won’t mean a thing. In my understanding having a high Duan in a martial art and not being able to fight is most undesirable, both for the organization issuing the Duan and for the one receiving it.

I am happy with my zero Duan.