Everything discussed in this post, along with future ones, addresses the reality and material of the mind and body along with their potentials. It is my hope and desire to disseminate enough of my own direct experience and understanding to help others, like yourself dear reader, reach new heights in understanding and application in this most wonderful, simple yet elegant fighting system. That said, let’s proceed with the introduction.
The fighting system of Ving Tsun Kuen is a near 400 year old Chinese martial art that’s said to have been developed in mainland China in the Guangdong Province in the Foshan region. Ving Tsun is an economical system striving to coordinate and harness an individual’s physical powers and attributes to their maximum potential for combat through a catalog of approximately 18 techniques. These techniques are designed to address a variation of engagements and the multitude of variables within them by adhering to the concepts of simplicity, directness, and efficiency of motion and space control. The difficulty in understanding and applying Ving Tsun cannot begin to be overstated.
Ving Tsun Kuen is a living, breathing thing and so it is difficult to get an exact idea as to what fully constitutes the system, without having spent countless hours and years under high quality and caliber coaching and training partnerships. As human beings, we tend to excel at compartmentalizing and categorizing the world and its constituents in order to more clearly understand it and our place within it. The same can be expected when one embarks on the path of education and apprenticeship in Ving Tsun. The danger of such a mindset developing and its continuation are detrimental to a full and true comprehension as well as application of the system. When we isolate a concept to observe it’s technical structure, alignment, distances etc., we can begin to further appreciate its value and part of its potential. If considered something entirely separate, we can begin to create preferences in place of what’s truly necessary for dealing with a real opponent. Ving Tsun’s truest expression is one of dynamics and so to stagnate the conception of any one of it’s concepts into a isometric, preferential category is to kill the living essence of the system. Ving Tsun is not a choreographed dance, it is an attempt to impose order into the chaotic nature of combat.
In the future, I will be elaborating further on specific items within Ving Tsun Kuen to help hone in on the core of this system through a variety of articles that may help to clarify its holistic composition.
Thank you for taking the time to read this initial entry and stay tuned for future posts!
– Sifu Brandon Schlueter-Cat
