 |
| Traditional Kung Fu practitioners training in Taiwan |
Taiwan is a thoroughly modern place.
People hurry to work, stare at their smartphones, sit in traffic, worry about careers, education and money, and chase many of the same things people chase everywhere else in the modern world.
But hidden inside this modern Taiwan, another world still exists.
You have to know where to look for it.
Sometimes it is behind an unmarked door. Sometimes it is in a small training hall without a website. Sometimes it appears early in the morning in a public park.
It is the world of traditional Kung Fu.
A Different World
The people who inhabit this world don't necessarily look unusual.
They use smartphones. They drive cars. They have ordinary jobs and ordinary responsibilities.
They are teachers, doctors, judges, bakers, drivers, office workers and business owners.
Then training begins.
For a few hours, their profession and social position become much less important. People who would probably never have met under normal circumstances practice together because they share an interest in something much older than the modern world around them.
They repeat movements that have been practiced for generations.
They practice forms.
They hit pads and training equipment.
They work with partners.
They practice weapons that have long disappeared from everyday life.
They argue about techniques, compare methods, tell stories about old teachers and then go back to training.
It is a strange and beautiful world.
Every Style Is Its Own Universe
One of the things that fascinated me after coming to Taiwan was the enormous variety of Chinese martial arts.
From a distance, people often talk about “Kung Fu” as though it were a single martial art.
It isn't.
Every traditional system has its own methods, principles and training culture.
There are different ways of generating power, different approaches to movement, different forms and partner exercises, different weapons and different ideas about fighting.
Some systems preserve philosophical or medical concepts. Others place much greater emphasis on practical fighting methods. Many contain layers accumulated during different periods of their history.
Once you begin looking closely, a single style can become a lifetime of study.
And there are hundreds of styles.
The More I Learned, the Less I Knew
I have met many Kung Fu teachers.
I have trained with different people and explored different systems. Some became important teachers to me. Others I met only briefly.
One lesson gradually became impossible to ignore:
The more I learned, the more I understood how much I didn't know.
When we begin martial arts, it is relatively easy to believe that mastery is somewhere ahead of us.
Learn the forms.
Learn the techniques.
Understand the principles.
Eventually we will arrive at the destination.
After decades of training, I see it differently.
There probably isn't a destination.
Every answer creates another question.
A movement you have practiced thousands of times suddenly reveals another detail.
A teacher shows you a familiar principle from a completely different perspective.
You encounter another style and discover that its practitioners found a completely different solution to the same problem.
You find an old book, photograph or historical document that changes something you thought you understood.
And the journey begins again.
More Than Techniques
Traditional Kung Fu has also taught me that martial arts are preserved by people, not by techniques.
Forms cannot preserve themselves.
Books cannot practice.
Weapons hanging on a wall transmit nothing.
Knowledge survives because somebody considers it valuable enough to spend years learning it—and then decides it is worth passing to another person.
This is particularly visible in Taiwan.
Some of the traditional arts I have encountered here survive in very small communities. They may never become internationally famous. Some teachers have almost no online presence. Their students may number in dozens rather than thousands.
Yet they continue practicing.
Not because Kung Fu is fashionable.
Not because it will make them rich.
They practice because the art means something to them.
There is something deeply beautiful about that.
A Journey Without an End
When I was younger, I wanted answers.
Now I find the questions much more interesting.
I want to know why a particular style moves the way it does.
Where did its methods come from?
What changed during transmission?
Which stories are historical and which are legends?
Why did different martial traditions develop different solutions to similar problems?
What can modern science tell us about old training methods?
And what have we misunderstood?
There is always another door to open.
That, for me, is the real beauty of Kung Fu.
It isn't the idea of becoming invincible.
It isn't collecting forms, titles or lineages.
It is the possibility of continuing to learn.
I once wrote that even if I had three lives, I probably couldn't completely explore a single traditional martial art.
After all these years, I believe that more than ever.
Kung Fu is a journey that does not really have an ending.
And if there is somehow another existence after this one, I wouldn't mind continuing the journey there.