Editorial

When talking about "KungFu" you must also think of "India"

For patriotic reasons, the Chinese like to emphasise the aspect of Taoism when talking about the origins of KungFu, as Taoism is a Chinese philosophy.
Chinese masters and authors also like to play down the perhaps even greater importance of Buddhism, as this teaching of course came to China from India.

During my own early training I often heard it said that WingTsun or KungFu has nothing whatsoever to do with old Indian single combat methods. At the time I accepted this view without examining it further.
It was only Prof. Horst Tiwald, whose doctoral thesis was on the subject of Zen Buddhism, who made me rethink.

The Indian prince Bodhidharma, also known as Ta Mo and Daruma (498 - 561), arrived at the Shaolin Monastery in around 520. It was from there that his teachings on enlightenment spread from northern China to the south.

When he noticed that the Buddhist monks were sadly neglecting their bodies in favour of mental development, he is said to have taught them a "Nata" and two "Pratima" from the Bodhisattva Vajramukti method.

The Nata was called "Astadasayacan", which translates literally as "18 victors". It later became known in China as "Shiba Luohan Shou" (18 hand movements of the immortals).
It consisted of breathing exercises, steps, muscular contractions and meditation exercises, and formed the basis for "Quan Fa" (quan = fist; fa = Buddha), later known as "KungFu" (= hard work).

Contrary to popular opinion, this was a form of psychological training leading to attentiveness and self-awareness. The automatically included side-effect was great fighting skill resulting from the cold-bloodedness developed during training.

A monk was seen as a "spiritual warrior" who protected people in distress or made use of an attack to teach the aggressor how senseless violence is.
To this end he practiced on three battlefields to win a three-fold war:

  1. the mind,
  2. speech (breathing) and
  3. the body.

In Chinese this trinity of the mind, body and speech (breathing) is known as "Sanjin" or "Sanchin".
The triangular stance of the same name represents harmony, i.e. balance between the mind and body. More important than learning aggressive techniques (with "Wute", which Bodhidharma had brought to Shaolin) were spiritual development, health and ethics.

During the process of secularisation in which KungFu also became accessible to laymen, not only to monks, this original Buddhist Shaolin Quanfa gave rise to hundreds of different fighting styles.

Apart from Tai Chi Chuan, the most important and most widespread style to have developed from Shaolin over the years is our WingTsun (and the variants Ving Tsun and Wing Chun, which belong to the same family).

WingTsun (WT) and its variants are made up of several older internal and internal styles, though the individual original styles are now either unknown or defunct.

We are able to study the intermingling of Chinese Tao and Indian Buddhist traditions using our WingTsun as an example.

The ready stance in WingTsun, the Yee Chi Kim Yeung Ma, can easily be seen to be derived from the Sanchin stance, which can also be found in Goju and Kyokushinkai Karate, and also as "Santi" in Chinese Hsing-I Chuan (Chuan = Quan). At least the front foot is turned inward in these stances. Sanchin, Santi or Yee Chi Kim Yeung Ma do not stand for certain leg positions, instead they have a role and function in the teaching programme: standing still without movement to start inner processes which make the body and mind ready to act with lightning speed.

In the end, Sanchin, Santi or Yee Chi Kim Yeung Ma have a common purpose: to develop the presence of mind that makes it possible to act (but not react!) immediately and consciously – but not arbitrarily –  when faced with a complex danger.

Taoism also refers to another trinity, namely that of heaven, earth and the bridge between them – mankind.

In inner WingTsun (iWT), which takes its guidance from ancient Chinese wisdom, we see ourselves as suspended between the earth and our point of contact with the opponent (who literally "opposes" us).

We see both points of contact – one with the ground and one with the opponent – as a single point, and we treat them just the same: we do not set ourselves against either of them, and we do not resist either of them. 

In contrast to conventional WingTsun, which additionally uses external forces, we only use "inner" but not "outer" forces in iWT, i.e. no "reactive" forces from the ground, for example.
This makes it very difficult to destroy the balance of an iWT practitioner, as he is always in harmony with himself.

We therefore cite two reasons when we claim that we teach iWT as an inner style from the very beginning:

  1. We start with Chan-Buddhist training in attentiveness from the first day onwards.
  2. We use Taoist yin/yang teachings to organise and refine our energies, so that we are always well-balanced and are able to change as soon as the opponent changes something.

WingTsun rests equally on a foundation of Indian (Zen, Chan, meditation) and Chinese (Tao) tradition: to structure the whole and obtain the two essential mental capabilities from the list of the "Big Seven", namely attentiveness and fighting spirit, we have recourse to Zen-Buddhist psychological training (see Prof. Tiwald's book "Psycho-Training in WingTsun ..."); it is Taoism that supplies the principles for our combat movements.

Your SiFu/SiGung
Keith R. Kernspecht