Commentary: Origins, Part 2

Just who came up with this stuff?

That's a question that periodically crops up in my mind with kung fu. All I'm studying is one style of kung fu, and a single version of that style at that, but there is a lot of stuff in it. A lot of stuff.

Just who came up with this stuff?

Oh yeah sure, everybody knows the founder of bagua (or bagua zhang, as it is more properly known) was a man named Dong Hai Chuan, who formed the style sometime in the mid-1800s.

But can we honestly believe that 1 man made all this stuff up?

Again, there is a lot of stuff. Hand drills, foot drills, pole drills, single-person and 2-person drills. Walking drills. Mother palm. 8 Palms. Xiao ka men. 64 Palms. Throwing techniques. Locking techniques. Striking techniques. Parrying, blocking, opening, closing, movement, rooting, stillness. Chi kung. Breathing. Hand work, foot work. And all this ignores the multiple combat techniques taught and practiced in sparring...and the subtle body movements that increase the effectiveness of the techniques, or the integration of internal and external energy, or the adjustments and variations of each technique, or all the other random nuances that crop up in class and that students take as things to learn but conveniently forget to contemplate as to origin.

How did 1 man make all this stuff up?

How?

And these questions pretty much apply to all the rest of kung fu. Just who came up with this stuff? And how did they do it?

I've heard the argument that founders of kung fu styles were dedicated to the martial arts, and devoted their entire lives to it. Meaning that they basically were focused on kung fu 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With that kind of focus, combined with a corresponding measure of skill, intelligence, diligence, and attention to detail, kung fu masters were presumably in a fertile position to develop fighting styles.

But I seriously wonder about this. People had to take time for other things than just fighting, or training to fight. People had to eat. They had to sleep. They had to visit mom and dad. They had to pay bills and pay taxes to the local imperial administrator. They had to avoid road rage of horse carts, peasants, and nobles. They had to make nice with the local cops. They had to travel by walking or paying for a horse or cart. They had to stopover at the local noodle house. They had to visit the doctors sometime. In short, they weren't 24/7 into kung fu.

I strongly suspect that when people say a particular person "invented" a style, they don't necessarily mean that individual person "created" the style as in magically conceiving everything in their minds and offering it to the world fully developed, but rather that a person "invented" a style in the sense that they likely "synthesized" it from things they knew or had observed or had picked up during their lifetimes. As a result, a founder of a style probably incorporated their own original work with a pre-existing accumulated body of wisdom acquired from prior teachers or popular knowledge.

This shouldn't be interpreted as discrediting anyone. There is as much skill in synthesizing something from disparate sources as there is in making something entirely original--you can analogize to musical artists who use "sampling" of other musical works to create unique and new works of musical art, in that you can hear something familiar in a song but still see it as something distinct and special. As a result, Dong Hai Chuan really is the founder of a style called bagua zhang, since he was the person who distilled a cacophony of ideas and concepts and techniques into a recognizable coherent style united under a particular philosophy of combat marked by its title ("bagua" is roughly interpreted as "trigram"--as in the trigrams from the Taoist I Ching--and "zhang" is translated as "open palm," which makes "bagua zhang" the fighting style of open palms based on the trigrams of the I Ching). But I still suspect that he relied on pre-existing things he noticed and acquired from the real world as much as he relied on new and undiscovered things he imagined in his mind.

Of course, this suggests that the various styles are in truth a product of a far broader, far older, and far richer base of contributions than is popularly recognized. It concurrently suggests that the history of kung fu truly is an integral thread in the fabric of Chinese history, with the entire body of fighting wisdom a development of thousands of years of empirical observation, experimentation, and conclusions.

I hypothesize that the mass of martial arts knowledge in ancient China grew with each generation, and became so great that invariably certain individuals took it upon themselves to organize the information in a way that made it more digestible and easier to learn. Given the quantity of information gathered over the millenia, there were a multiplicity of ways to organize them--and with more than 1 way being effective in achieving victory in combat. These ways or organizing information, if found effective, likely became what people consider to be "styles" of kung fu. The individuals, either working alone or in conjunction with others, who devoted themselves to synthesizing and distilling the information so that it could have the organization and effectiveness necessary to be recognized as a "style" became the popularly recognized "founders."

As a current practitioner, this all likely doesn't really make much difference. I mean, if all you want to learn is to fight and win a fight, you really don't care who's giving you the information and skill, you just care about the effectiveness of the information and skill themselves.

But I think it's important for the following:

1. Understanding and seeing the connection between various styles, and recognizing that they may have similarities for a reason.


2. Seeing which styles may use similar sources of knowledge and philosophies, and hence be compatible in terms of being combined with each other by a martial artist seeking to expand their skill sets.
   
3. Tracing the development of techniques, since it helps highlight what aspects of a style may have appeared at what points in time, and so have been an endemic component of the "original" style or a subsequent addition made by later students seeking to change the style. This helps in preserving a particular kung fu style as a discernible "style."

Having said all this, I have to admit it brings no real answer to the original questions: Just who came up with this stuff? And how?

I mean, I am really curious as to who the random peasants, farmhands, merchants, nobles, monks, politicians, policeman, soldiers, whatever really were who actually stood around and played with their legs and arms and hands and feet to determine what techniques were effective. I am equally just as curious at to how they did this. Did they really stand around and look at each other and discuss how to beat people up? Did they really punch bricks and trees to see what strikes were most effective? Did they really compare punching with a fist made one way with a fist made another way?

And just why does this work the way it works?

I don't have an answer. But following the ways of Tao and Zen, I believe that sometimes having the question is necessary to find the matching answer, and I at least have the question(s).

For the last question, at least, I probably already have the answer--as somebody in my class drily commented: "Dude, it just works...That's why it's called kung fu."