Interviewer: Sifu, we extol more principles than the schools that have minimalised them to a smaller subset. Of our Wing Chun principles, efficiency is one many Wing Chun exponents seem to espouse. Can you comment?
Sifu Zopa: : Yes. Efficiency is one of the core principles everyone seems to express. I guess though there can be different views of what is “efficient” in the broader context as well as in Wing Chun. One person’s “efficient” is another’s “inefficient”. Amongst gung fu styles and fighting systems, Wing Chun is renowned for a number of positive features. Some of the US spin-offs of Wing Chun espouse some of the Wing Chun principles but their material doesn’t seem very efficient to my eyes. A lot is a hodge-podge of bits and pieces of several arts which the originator tries to tack together. It seems there’s a trend in the US – their martial arts market dominates ours in terms of their martial arts magazines with their unexamined agenda of cultural imperialism – of mixing some very poor versions of what they call “Wing Chun” with Filipino arts. It began with Bruce Lee’s friendship with Dan Inosanto. The Filipino arts are very good – they don’t need to be mixed with Wing Chun. Wing Chun is very good, it doesn’t need to be mixed with the Filipino arts. The guys who mix them have mastered neither or they’d understand this! So, yes, the notion of what is “efficient” can vary. Lots of people espouse efficiency in combat. Who wouldn’t? I guess the notion of “efficiency” can range along a continuum. There can be more or less efficiency and the efficiency of arts can be compared. There are arts which are more or less efficient, it’s as simple as that! What’s “efficient”? Return on investment, maximum outcome, minimal input, no waste, minimised risk, assured outcome. We know what it means without getting pedantic or being a diplomatic smart-ass and saying stupid things like “all arts are equal” or “all arts are good, it depends on the practitioner”! (To some extent there is a little truth in that a poor practitioner of a great art may still be lousy. But, I’ve found even a great practitioner within a lousy art is still lousy!) The old saying “you don’t take a knife to a gunfight” immediately highlights how stupid this all-encompassing martial arts diplomacy is. It obscures truth, reality in the interests of group-hug feel-good-ism! Not all arts are equal. Not all arts are efficient or effective. And, decidedly (I’m very qualified to say this!) not all Wing Chun is the same! Much of the Wing Chun I see around the world is far from exemplary!
Interviewer: Efficiency and effectiveness are often juxtaposed. Is there a necessary link, sifu?
Sifu Zopa: Not necessarily! You could beat someone to death with a tree branch or rock. In terms of achieving your aim – to kill them if they were attacking you, that could be considered effective. But it’s not efficient! These hulks who take turns battering or throwing each other around in tournaments might be considered “effective” if they face a less skilled opponent or luck or the rules are on their side. But is this efficient in a combat sense? The incessant pounding of someone can be effective in winning a tournament match or in a real fight but it’s not efficient in terms of minimising energy expenditure, maximising power, minimising the likelihood of counter strikes, attaining a rapid or instant result, being assured of a victory rather than relying on circumstances or chance etc. Effectiveness is another Wing Chun principle, of course. But, our “effectiveness” is not simply “anything goes as long as I survive”. It’s calibrated precisely to applying the art correctly and disabling the opponent rapidly without exposing ourselves to unnecessary risk.
Interviewer: Sifu, judo used to have a saying, especially in the early days which went “minimum effort, maximum results”. It seems this applies to Wing Chun too?
Sifu Zopa: Yes, it does. We have a saying: "see boon pui gong", which translates to "attaining twice the results with half the effort". To do this we have to relax. By relaxation we don’t mean what a Westerner usually thinks of as relaxation, though. We don’t mean floppy. We don’t mean lying on the couch! We mean having sufficient, but no more, tone in our muscles to hold our structures and control any potential collapse. We also mean relying as much as we can on skeletal structures. We certainly don’t mean tensed. I was chatting briefly with another martial artist recently from what is obviously a hard school of gung fu. I’ve seen the chap break cinder blocks so it’s essentially apparently like the harder side of karate. He spoke of tensing as impact is made in a strike as if it was what everyone does, what we do too. I didn’t take him to task and challenge his statement as it may have embarrassed him. He assumed everyone does this the way he does. He was saying to be relaxed until that point of impact then tense. However, what he didn’t know (remember my saying “you don’t know what you don’t know”?) was that this was not the way internal power is expressed. There simply is no tension – not even on impact. “Rock in a sock”! (Chuckles) In his statement he revealed to me his level of mis-understanding.
Interviewer: What then do we need to do to gain this efficiency, sifu?
Sifu Zopa: To be efficient we need a number of things. Really I’m reminded here of a young big-mouth guy from another martial art who once asked (actually he almost demanded or insisted!) me to teach him “a bit of Wing Chun”. How laughable! He came to a free trial lesson but simply couldn’t handle it at all and, very disrespectfully, left early – forgotten he had to go to his grandmother’s funeral or something. His idea was like saying could he have some of a ball! You either get it all or not. You can’t select out and do bits of it! That’s why we see such ridiculous versions of some aspects of Wing Chun being performed, invariably utterly incorrectly, by guys who do arts like Jeet Kuen Do. The “bits of Wing Chun” they try to do are unsupported by the full training course in Wing Chun so they do something that superficially looks a bit like some versions of Wing Chun, uses Wing Chun terminology, but has none of the internal features and none of the principles of genuine Wing Chun. “Some” is useless and whatever it may be it’s not Wing Chun. To be efficient we need a correct stance, we need an understanding of all the other principles. We need to be able to impact with power. To impact powerfully we need the speed that comes from correct relaxation. We need to understand correct jing. We also need the correct structures. We need to be properly aligned. We need to be able to link the joints involved in the joint train through the body. To achieve real efficiency we need to comprehensively understand all the various structures, their technical expressions, the keywords, our principles, attack lines, appropriate targets, capturing of both the centreline and center of gravity, sticking and trapping. In short, you gain full efficiency when you know the full art. Along the way you approach maximum efficiency by adhering more and more closely to the true art and understanding it and being able to apply it freely.
Interviewer: Lots to think on there, sifu! So, to sum up what can you say?
Sifu Zopa: Through a correct training program under a knowledgeable sifu who unstintingly shares what he knows as the student earns the knowledge we ought to be able to achieve efficiency. It only remains for me to remind you to be fully open-minded and pose the question: “how efficient is your ‘efficiency’?” These guys we see in martial arts magazines saying they use some Wing Chun or posing Wing Chun like structures or banging on a Wing Chun dummy are utterly deluded. Their position is something like this: if I want to learn a foreign language I would ensure it is from an educated native speaker. I do it first hand. The Wing Chun wanna-be’s are like people who have learnt some bits of a foreign language but have learnt it not from an educated native speaker but from some-one who learnt a bit from some-one who learnt a bit from some-one who wasn’t a native speaker but had themselves learnt only some of that language. That’s another aspect of efficiency, actually. Efficiency in your learning. Many folk can think they are efficient and that their Wing Chun is efficient. To that I must point to my concept of “reference” and ask: “Compared to what? Compared to whom?”. Sometimes what they call “Wing Chun” is not Wing Chun at all! As an old friend of mine used to say: “assume begins with ‘ass’ ”. Question!