Editorial

The contradiction that does not exist

Many students, even instructors and highly graded teachers, are confused by the content imparted to them during lessons in recent years: for a number of years the initial emphasis was on softly giving way, i.e. on adaptation.
Now the management team appears to have embarked on a different course, preaching and teaching the exact opposite.

So did we teach incorrectly in the past, or are we doing it now?
According to our western logic, only one or the other can be correct. Or not?

I have spent days thinking about how I can make this apparent contradiction plausible to you. And once again I received help from my mentor Prof. Dr. Tiwald, who died in April 2013.
"By chance" I came upon the right page in our extensive email correspondence, and read the following:


Hello Mr Kernspecht,

Yesterday I had another look at WingTsun World No. 34, read it through systematically and highlighted passages that I found particularly interesting in yellow.
Here are the relevant passages from "Only will and determination count when things are serious".

My comments:
This is a good example of Jin power, which the body in its ground-anchored stance derives from the ground as a reactive force by explosive stretching and/or torsion in the linkage (centre body, hips), and directs at the opponent through the fingertips via the linkage.

Or one might say that explosive torsion in the "linkage" in a ground-anchored stance causes the relaxed arms to be very rapidly flung (or whipped) forward at the opponent, the reactive force finally being projected into the fingertips as a second rocket stage (by explosive stretching from the body centre!) under whole-body tension.

Naturally of course, depending on the assessment of the attack, it is also possible to use Jin power (sente) to block the opponent's attack and "destroy whatever comes".

However, "Absorb what comes" and "Destroy what comes" belong together like Yin and Yang.
It always depends on what "argument" by the opponent encounters my "function", which requires his input:
In easy cases Plan A is implemented, in difficult cases Plan B.
This is in line with combat dialectics.

Both statements are true, although they appear to be contradictory and only one can be true according to western logic.
This is dialectics!

Simply because "simultaneity of attack and defence" is fundamental to combat dialectics.

Best wishes
Horst Tiwald


What can I possibly add to that?

Perhaps that as Prof. Tiwald correctly saw, our WingTsun movement system (because that is inherent to its nature) has two options when dealing with an attack or an opponent:

  • Adaptation
    Adaptation to the opponent, where I adapt myself to him so that we become one, whereupon I separate from him and defeat him: "Absorb what comes!"
  • Assimilation*
    I adapt the opponent and his movements to myself so as to gain mastery: "Thrust forward when the way is clear!"

And possibly that these two approaches are not contradictory, but rather the two poles of one and the same thing, just as the familiar Yin-Yang symbol is a single entity only divided into the apparent contrasts of black and white, soft and hard, which however belong together.

What remains to be discussed is this: which of these two aspects of the whole should be taught first, the soft or the relatively hard approach? Opinions may differ on this.

But in the end both aspects must be mastered, and in such a way that they can be realised fully consciously, but not arbitrarily, depending on the situation in a serious encounter.

Your SiFu/SiGung
Keith R. Kernspecht

*  See "Course Book" 1st edition, p. 17, 25, 34