The last few weeks I’ve started to concentrate on training my class on some weaponry, and several instances have come up where students were able to draw analogies between their empty hand form and weaponry. Kung Fu weaponry and empty hand training go hand in hand, one helping the other, beginning and ending, one full circle. The question is, which came first, empty hand fighting or fighting with a weapon? This has always been an ongoing debate. Different individuals claim one or the other. Some claim that empty hand was first and then transitioned into weaponry; another argument says that weapons were first and then slowly modified into empty hand training. These are very unique viewpoints, and both have valid arguments.
Obviously, due to human physiology, it’s very natural for human beings to pick up an implement and use it, be it a tool or a weapon, but it could be just as easily argued that the hand by itself is a tool that can be converted into a weapon. The example would be two kids fighting in the sandbox. One steals the other’s toy, and then they start swatting each other. But they ultimately might even pick up a stick, a rock or their toy and whack their little friend… The beginnings of Kung Fu weaponry and empty hand training. But all joking aside, it is equally natural for the human being to utilize their body or a tool to enhance the functionality of the human body, and this is just my point.
A great example would be this past Saturday, I started a double dagger intensive class, and right off the bat, I got comments from students in the class saying, wow, Sifu, I never realized how much the weapon actually did derive from and support the empty hand movement until we started doing this double dagger set. My retort to the student basically was, yes, you’re absolutely right. With these two small knives, it’s easy to see the direct relationship that it has to your empty hand movement. Sometimes, the longer, more exotic weapons detract from the ability of the student to perceive them as extensions of the body. This double dagger sequence is so closely tied into empty hand fighting that it better exemplifies the yin and yang relationship between empty hand and weaponry techniques. These short, double handed weapons take a direct cue from empty hand fighting. The weapons are held in two hands and act as more obvious extensions of what the empty-handed practitioner would do. Another great example of this would be Filipino stick and knife fighting. Southern Kung Fu systems and that art share many techniques, movements and concepts. This is because both arts were under military law and suppression by those feudal governments that did not allow the layman to have military weapons. Because they were denied military grade weaponry, methods had to be devised to allow for smooth transitions between empty hand and bladed or stick fighting techniques. This can also be seen in Okinawan Karate that draws its roots from Chinese Kung Fu.
The old adage is that if you truly know Kung Fu, then whatever item you pick up can ultimately become a weapon. Articles such as benches, oars, fishing nets, hooks, prongs and all sorts of farm implements were assimilated into martial art systems and became weapons because they utilized the archetypal structure of the empty hand fighting and tweaked it a little bit to help match that tool. Another great example other than the double daggers of empty hand mirroring the weapon and weapon mirroring the empty hand would be the wooden bench which spans the scope of southern Kung Fu systems. Almost everyone has a bench in their system, in their house, in the tea shop. It was the most handy, readymade weapon that you could just pick up and throw down, so that, too, was assimilated and melded to work with empty hand movement. I was just doing a bench class last night and made a point of giving over my bench to one of my students and performing with the class empty handed as though I was still holding the bench but with two clenched fists. Slowly, everybody stopped and stepped back and just watched me perform it as an empty handed form. It worked just as well because I was able to extrapolate the empty hand movement from the weapon form.
So, why so many varying weapons, especially in Chinese martial arts? I think this is a really good point to look at. There is a huge range of different weapons within the Chinese marital arts, long and short, flexible and hard, whip-like, small and large. Weapons are tools, and you need different tools to do different jobs. You can’t use a hammer to do the job of a screwdriver, and you can’t use a screwdriver to do the job of a pliers. Even though they’re held by the same hand, the functionality of that tool is specific to a task; therefor many different weapons developed. That can also be drawn in an analogy to the various hand positions found within many Kung Fu systems. This deserves another blog which we’ll get into at a different time, but the varying hand positions that are found within the Chinese martial arts also mirror those of the weapons. As another saying goes, every finger is a dagger, every hand is a knife, every arm is a sword. The empty hand section of our training serves to forge our hands into different weapons: hammers, sickles, hooks, knives, daggers, spears, and so on. So, again, the actual relationship between empty hand movement and weaponry is extremely prevalent. They are one and the same, or at the very least, an outgrowth of each other simultaneously rather than two different things. In my opinion, the weapon movement should mirror the movement of the system that the individual is studying. The stabbing, slashing and cutting with the weapon relates directly to slashing techniques of the hand, cuts, strikes, blocks and so on. Even the terminology that we use for empty hand as well as the weapon is almost literally the same, so right there that at least blurs the line of separation.
There really should be no argument in the mind of the student; your Kung Fu technique is your Kung Fu technique. Empty hand and weapon are each an outgrowth of the other and feed back into each other. I really don’t see a separation. Having this point of view as taught to me by my teacher has helped me immensely because you are able to assimilate the weapon into your movement. Rather than it being a foreign object, a dead article in your hand, it becomes alive, and you can translate your physical body language into the weapon. Over time as you practice, you begin to assimilate the attributes and techniques of that weapon into your own physical practice as well. One saying that comes to mind is that the weapon is an extension of the body; therefore the actions of the body lend themselves to the use of the weapon or the tool. The weapon follows the physical dynamics of the human body and can enhance and extend the reach, power, speed and dexterity as well as mobility of the human body, therefor creating a diverse way of accentuating the skill of the practitioner.
Both the empty hand and the weapon accentuate, foster and support one another. It’s very evident that the stances and techniques of Kung Fu as played today are an outgrowth of warfare on the battlefield and on horseback, but we can also see it goes the other way around, where personal hand-to-hand combat techniques taught by individual masters can be augmented to work into weaponry. I have done this numerous times with my teacher’s guidance where we readjust empty hand movements to become weapon forms as well as weapons to become empty hand. They should be one in the same; they should be seamless, one closed circuit. The bottom line between the two arguments of whether weaponry or empty hand came first is neither here nor there in my opinion. It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario. You can sit here all day and night and argue about which is more important, the chicken or the egg, the egg or the chicken. The truth of the matter is, I’ll eat both, so it doesn’t matter which one came first. Both equally benefit the other. This should not be an argument of which came first, the chicken or the egg, the weapon or the hand, the hand or the weapon, but rather a complete, unique circle. I think this different way of viewing things will help the practitioner to understand both his empty hand and weaponry training that much more, to see them as a unit rather than as two different things.
-Sifu Paul Koh 高寶羅
