These individuals are labouring under the widespread but not necessarily correct apprehension that something great can only be created by an even greater thinker, and that after all, something as complex as WT could hardly have come about by chance, e.g. by observing animal behaviour.
Just as they belie their own experience and assume that a great fighter must have had an even greater fighter as a teacher – as nothing can come from nothing – they believe that our ingenious WT was conceived by an even more ingenious thinker.
Of course if one chooses not to believe charming fairy-tales about observing fighting snakes, foxes, monkeys or cranes, all one has left is an omnipotent creator such as Ng Mui or Yim Wing Tsun.
It does not occur to most of these people that there may be an alternative somewhere between pure chance and an ingenious creator.
The author is not one of them, at least when he considers the still existing, frighteningly primitive styles from which WT is said to have taken its origin.
Standing in front of the massively impressive edifice that is our WT as it is today, it is hard to believe that anybody but a genius reached such heights starting from nothing, i.e. from a standing start.
But if we take a look at the rear of this building, we might see that it consists of thousands of scaffolds on which just as many individual builders created this apparently homogeneous work of art on the basis of ”trial and error” over thousands of years.
Like Rome, WT was not built in one day, and we do not have one ingenious creator, but rather many, many quite average mothers and fathers to thank for it.
     
We should therefore not stand paralysed with awe at the ingeniousness of WT’s creator. We should take heart and do what our antecedents did. We are at liberty to change what proves to be unsuitable, and to add what is lacking.
And we are also entitled to criticise, for we must criticise what we love!

On 7.11.2007 my Si-Fu wrote the following in an e-mail to me:
"If somebody were to teach a much better fighting method than mine, I would change over at once."

I find this frank and honest statement by my master, which clearly shows that he is basically only concerned with effectiveness, and that he is amazingly indifferent to tradition, to be an incentive and encouragement for all those of us who constantly want to improve our WT further by means of scientific research!

And finally here is another well-known quotation, this time from a Japanese:
"Anybody observing a master performing his art, listening to him and concluding that he could never reach the same level is a weakling."
Hagakure, The Way of the Samurai
by Tsunetomo