To my knowledge, however, no authentic Asian martial art is really able to dispense with forms and techniques.

Forms are the codified knowledge of the old masters, and their legacy to their successors at a time when hardly anybody could read or write, and there were no videos.

Primed by films and magazines, the beginner in the Asian martial arts expects forms and also seems to need them, as they give him a wealth of example material with which he can gradually learn to understand the principles.

The forms and therefore the techniques within them teach the student the principle, and the principle teaches him WingTsun.

Teaching the Asian martial arts therefore begins with forms.

Forms and "off-the-shelf techniques" serve as "play material", and he has something tangible to take home. The beginner is not yet able to understand and apply abstract principles.

But anyone who is an advanced student and teacher, but is still unable to understand and apply the WingTsun principles, and does not understand "adaptation", "giving way" and "borrowing the opponent's strength", remains an eternal beginner, however forbidding and martial his facial expression, and would be better off practicing a style where one must be stronger than the attacker to defend oneself!

It is also worth mentioning at this point that the WT fighter should not have the outward appearance and demeanour of a "fighter", but rather of a scholar. Yip Man was often referred to as a "WingTsun scholar".

This particularly applies to our inner WingTsun (WT!).

Our blood relatives are the styles originating with Yim Wing Tsun, but our kindred spirits are the Taoist styles:

• on the Chinese side these are Tai Chi, Hsing-I and Pakua
• on the Japanese side Aiki, the ancient, extinct Ju-Jutsu and
• on the Korean side Hapkido.

The fact that we move quite differently is another matter.

Where the forms (solo forms, weapon forms and also partner forms) are concerned, EWTO WingTsun follows the interpretation of Grandmaster Leung Ting (born in 1947), who was the so-called "closed-door student" of GM Yip Man.

Extract from GM Keith R. Kernspecht's next book "Beyond Techniques – The Essence of Inner WT", which with a little luck will appear by Christmas. Price etc. not yet known.

Your SiFu/SiGung
Keith R. Kernspecht