Yes, I do know kung fu.  Several styles of kung fu actually.  Not that I’m that awesome at them – some are better than others but they all still need a lot of work.

But I do know of kung fu.  Started when I was 11, watching the 6 O’clock Sunday Night Movie and the Big Apple theater – all those Shaw Brothers movies.  And when I got older and started training for real, I started reading, and asking questions, and listening to stories.  Some stories that reinforced each other, other stories that totally contradicted themselves.  Out of almost 20 years of studying what I’d call martial arts history and martial arts lore, I think I can offer my take on a topic I feel I know well.  Mind you, it’ll be a distilled form, heavily spiced with my opinion and bias, but here it is anyway.

Kung Fu.  This label is attached to almost any martial art that comes from China. It is the generic name for literally hundreds of individual Chinese fighting arts.  Kung Fu is an umbrella term, and it’s actually not even the right word.  Kung Fu literally means “skilled gained through hard work and lots of effort/time” so you can have kung fu in cooking, in swimming, in painting, etc.  It’s a term that got popularized a couple of hundred years ago by Western travelers to China.  When European and American travelers went to see China in the 18th and 19th centuries and saw people running around kicking each other’s asses, they probably asked some local yokel what was going on and the yokel probably answered “oh, they have good fighting skills, have good kung fu, lots of kung fu!”  Anyway, the actual term for martial art in China is “wu-shu” which means “war skill” or “fighting skill”.  Nowadays the term “wushu” refers to the contemporary style created by the CCP and popularized by Jet Li and his contemporaries – a style that was systematized and standardized during the 50’s and 60’s by the Communist Party for lots of historical and sociological reasons.  We’ll come back to this later.

Anyway, back to the story.  Kung Fu, because it is an umbrella term, has no real easy way to describe it.  It’s as varied as China itself, and its stylistic differences are as varied as there are provinces and villages in China.  Suffice it to say that historically, China has had martial arts since they learned to organize themselves into armies and wage war, most likely since 2000BC or more.  But in those days the “martial” would have supplanted the “art”, and most likely have been very utilitarian – that is, it was geared towards combat on the battlefield, with weapons, in formations, etc.  There was some cross pollination with certain cultural endeavors like native folk wrestling or artistic performances like sword dancing that may have served as entertainment for kings and lords, but for the most part, Chinese Martial Arts (CMA for short) was abut war and killing.  Somewhere along the line in its long history Chinese warriors who got sick of the fighting and waxed philosophical about life may have injected philosophy and ethics into the martial systems they practiced and taught.  This occurred during China’s frequent religious infusions and evolutions and when it happened at a place called Shaolin about 1500 years ago, the concept of marrying fighting discipline with a philosophical /ethical/religious base really took off.  But still, first and foremost, Kung Fu was concerned with fighting, and remained so until about the middle of the 19th century when firearms were introduced to China.  This began a slow change in Kung Fu’s emphasis, one from simply combat and warfighting, to self defense, self discipline and physical culture, cultural heritage, entertainment, etc.  Nowadays, this trend still continues.

Stylistically, different kung fu systems can train you in different ways.  You can have it slow and deliberate like Taijiquan to close and tight like Wing Chun to hard and robust like Hung Gar.  It corporate  styles like Shuai Jiao that look more like wrestling or Judo, to systems like Northern Mantis and Hung Gar with emphasis on Animal movements, to systems like Taijiquan and Baguazhang that look deceptively unaggressive but feature very powerful grappling and throwing techniques.  So technically speaking, any style of movement you want, you can find in some kind of kung fu style, the trick is finding one that suits you.  The main things that all of the kung fu systems will have in common – and actually all martial arts systems if you really get down to it, is the following:

  1. The emphasis on the training of the use of the body as a unit.  Instead of using and training individual body parts, like you would when you lift weights, for example, the emphasis is on training to use the whole body as a single unit.  For example, power for a punch can be generate not from not just the arm, but from the toes that grip the ground, the ankles and knees and legs that prime the body and move it across space and fire the largest muscles in your body, from the waist and hips that provide rotational torque for the whole body, from the spine that flexes and coils, from the shoulders and scapula and ribcage that flex and turn, from the arms and elbows and wrist, from the connective tissues that store elastic energy, from the muscles, from your body mass moving across space as you step – all of these, all at once, all in a split second.
  2. The training will emphasize the precept of “one move equal a thousand techniques”, such that you are not learning a specific technique A as response B for attack C for situation D.  Instead, you learn general motions (and all the details therein) that you inculcate into your body so that you simply move, and depending on the situation that movement can translate into multiple different techniques.  The exact application will depend on your depth of understanding.
  3. Almost all kung fu styles will have some kind of Qigong associated with it.  There are various different types of Qigong (from health to therapeutic to martial) and the different styles will emphasis their own versions of martial Qigong.  Qigong is a combination of power training and body conditioning combined with visualization and breathing exercises.  An imperfect  modern analogy would be something elite athletes do when they get hooked up to machines to monitor how they run and breath oxygen, and then get coached on the exact and proper posture for optimal performance.  Plus throw in visualization techniques for “seeing “ the shot or the move in your mind’s eye, and all of this being fed back to the athlete by coaches, scientists, and doctors.  With Qigong, you are doing it all yourself (under the supervision of a qualified instructor – but eventually it’s all you), giving yourself self-feedback, maintaining proper body positioning, movements, stances, breathing and visualization techniques to maximize you’re your balance and the power your body can generate – all based on wisdom that was gained through literally centuries of experience and trial and error.  It’s the “secret” that can give you that extra edge in a fight.
  4. What about Qi or Chi, you say?  Well, this is a can of worms that I will address in another post, but suffice it to say for now that it’s an important part of Qigong.

You will hear a lot of talk about “internal” and “external” and “soft” and “hard” styles of kung fu.  These are semi-artificial classifications that are used to distinguish one category of kung fu style from another, but in truth, every kung fu style has some element of all of the above.  Internal styles are stereotypically famous for slow and deliberate training and are supposedly softer in technique and temperament than their counterparts, the external hard styles.  You can also have mixtures of internal hard and external soft, but typically, all these terms refer to a training methodology.  Internal and softer styles will emphasize more on power generation using proper body alignment, using your connective tissue and its elasticity more than direct muscular contraction, whole body movement, and the like.  Actually, so will external hard styles as well, but the difference is in the training sequence.  In internal soft styles, they will make you pay attention to these details (and these details can get into some pretty tiny minutiae of biomechanics) from the beginning, whereas external hard styles will focus on body conditioning and muscular robustness initially and come back to these minutiae’s later.  But then again, the exact sequence also really depends on the predilections of the instructor, so it all depends.

You will also hear “Northern” and “Southern” styles.  These are geographic, cultural, and demographic distinctions.  China is so huge that many provinces are practically different countries, with different dialects, ethnic majorities/minorities, religions, etc.  The main commonality is the written language and a common history under a single imperial dynasty.  Northern usually refers to systems and styles that originated in areas north of the Yangtze River.  Southern refers to styles that originated south of that river.  Geographically the Northern regions are wider and vaster, with large plains, deserts, etc.  So many of the large set piece battles between armies took place up there, and therefore it’s not unusual that many military-derived arts originated from there.  The south is more riverine, and more urban and denser in population, so more civilian self defense oriented arts evolved here.  Nowadays all the arts are found everywhere, but these terms serve as historical reminders of where the stuff come from.

A few words about Shaolin. It’s a very popular term and one that’s bandied about all over the place.  It’s like saying “Harvard” when you talk about law or medicine, or “MIT” when you talk about engineering.  Once you add the name, it sells.  But a lot of good ideas originated in those places and the same goes for Shaolin.  Shaolin is not the mother source of all kung fu or all martial arts as some claim.  The temple is only ~1500 years old and MA in general and even CMA in particular has been around a lot longer than that.  It became popular and famous because it became a haven for many warriors, soldiers, brigands, etc who sought to leave the fighting life behind, but not their physical disciples, and sought a refuge in which to live a quiet life.  With the introduction of Boddhidarma’s teachings and Ch’an Buddhism, philosophy married combat system at the temple and the Shaolin monks became famous for being righteous, ethical bad-asses.  So everyone emulated them and everyone and their grandmother attached their history to Shaolin.  So much so that it’s often difficult to tell which martial art really originated from the Shaolin Temple.  But no matter, its real legacy is that it permanently attached ethical and moral teaching alongside good ole’ fashioned fighting techniques as two sides of the same coin and this is what got spread around everywhere and what makes Shaolin truly great.

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Filed under: Chinese Martial Arts • Some Fundamentals... • The World of Martial Arts

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