A Note on Forms
My sifu Vernon Rieta was a master fighter. He would analyze every least movement in a form and find the fighting applications. Nonetheless, I always suspected his forms were a bit sketchy—partly because he changed them so often. He'd teach them to me one way, then later teach them to someone else a different way. Still, I always assumed any discrepancies were mine.
Then, I moved from LA to San Francisco for two years, and while I was there, I trained with YC Wong. I'm not sure I ever saw him demonstrate a complete form, but nonetheless, I had a sense that his forms were more pure. After all—he learned them in Hong Kong, direct from Lam Cho. As in many Hung Gar schools, YC taught a two-man sparring version of Gung Ji Fook Fu. Everyone learned it, then promptly forgot it when they learned the sparring set for Fu Hok Sheung Yin—it had almost everything in the Gung Gi sparring set, plus a whole lot more. I was no different.
Well, I returned to LA, but went back to visit San Francisco from time to time, and always stopped in at YC's studio when I did. So one time, I'm watching two students performing a sparring set that I'd never seen before. I asked my si-hing what they were doing, and he told me they were doing the Gung Ji sparring set. I said it looked nothing like the form I learned, and he said, "Yeah. Sifu forget the second half. But when he went back to Hong Kong, he picked it up again."
It was then that I realized: there's no such thing as a pure form. Like languages, forms evolve over time—sometimes by design, sometimes by default.
That prompted me to reexamine my forms, and to focus on those sections that seemed somewhat out of place. I discovered that while there may not be pure forms, there are general rules that dictate how the forms are created. For example, with the Hung Gar, you do a series of moves with one hand, then the other hand, then both hands (or vice versa). And for both the Hung Gar and Choy Lay Fut, there should be no waste, no shuffles, no vague maneuvers: it's one step, one stance, one technique.
(Check here for more on this subject).
Using these and other basic principles, I modified my forms to achieve something that seemed to make more sense, both logically and physically. Do I practice my forms the way I learned them from my teachers? Not exactly. But then again, I don't think my teachers practice the way they were taught, either. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that you find a reason for every movement you make.
Many of us rightly view knowledge as a gift—and as they say, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Ultimately, though, I think we do ourselves a disservice by simply accepting the gift of knowledge without taking it apart and putting it back together. That's how we progress from knowledge to understanding—which is what our teachers were aiming for in the first place.
