Kung Fu Manual Pdf

[Joseph]

Insteadof being a fuckup forever, a masked fighter breaks into the temple and steals the guarded Seven Deadly Fists manual, which is just too dangerous to be out there in the world. The only chance against this style is the Five Style Fist manual, which summons five ghosts who each teach a kung fu style. Jackie Chan is just childish enough to attract these ghosts, so he gets to be the badass who benefits from their teaching. Which he does. But not, like, a ton.

This is my keynote address from the recent (Nov. 9-10th, 2017) conference on fightbooks held at the German Blade Museum in Solingen. A full report on this event is coming soon, but I am eager to share this with the readers of Kung Fu Tea. Enjoy!

Today I hope to reveal another example of a lost book that suggests a unique set of insights into the evolving nature of the Southern Chinese martial arts during the late Qing dynasty, a period in which many of the regional styles that we know today (Hung Gar, Choy Li Fut, Southern Mantis and Wing Chun) were coming into being. Just as importantly, I would like to identify the previously anonymous translator of this text and discuss his role in shaping the public perception of the Chinese martial arts during the late 19th century.

The short answer would be poetry. Lister was both a talented literary critic and an amateur poet. And while this part of his writing does not seem to have anything to do with fightbooks, it is important to review because in his engagement with the translations of such noted sinologists as Prof. James Legge, Lister began to lay out his own theory of translation. That had an important impact on how he both translated, and transformed, the martial arts when presenting them to a Western audience.

He remarks that while searching for street literature he came across a libretto for the opera in the stall of a local book seller and immediately set about translating the work. Yet the libretto for a Chinese opera is very sparse compared to a Western script, and so to give his readers a better sense of what it was all about Lister noted that he was adding a list of characters, costumes, stage directions and jokes (typically ad-libbed on a nightly basis) so that readers could get an actual sense of what a performance of this piece looked like.

This grandiose declaration was made for comedic effect. Lister was, after all, translating a farce. But it also gives us some idea of the issues that we should be aware of in his discussions of the martial arts.

Indeed, Lister seems to have been fascinated by the fact that Chinese martial artists, much like their counterparts in the London ring, had developed their own technical vocabulary for describing their actions. And he noted almost immediately that on a sociological level, mastering this sort of vernacular code was used in both societies as a means by which members of the underclass sought to gain a measure of social respect among their peers.

Whether Western or Chinese boxers could actually claim a great degree of social respect was something that Lister seemed to doubt. He was interested in popular culture, but he did not romanticize it. Most of the martial artists that Lister seems to have been aware of were patent medicine salesmen, retired opera singers, soldiers or gamblers.

This last group deserved special consideration in his estimation, probably as the martial artists in the opera that he had translated were also gamblers. An anonymous article in the North China Herald in 1873, almost certainly written by Lister, hits on several of his favorite points. It published an account of a recent fight in Shanghai in which one gambler accidentally killed another in the middle of an impromptu challenge match. The entire affair was a tragedy that destroyed multiple lives. Yet it gave Lister a chance to both explore the social milieu of the Chinese martial arts as well as the linguistic resonances between the technical vocabulary surrounding the Chinese and Western modes of boxing. Just as importantly, it provided him with an opportunity to begin to blend the two for the sake of his reader.

While brief, the book follows a clear organizational scheme. The first two pages (or lessons, as Lister identifies them) focus on unarmed boxing. The next three cover pole fighting. After that there are four discussions of the hudiedao, or other types of short pair swords, in combat. This was a very popular class of weapons in Southern China, often used in militia training and given to security guards. The final two lessons focused on the use of woven wicker shields.

The images themselves are stylistically like those seen in other training manuals. The now widely available Bubishi (a 19th century hand copied Fujianese manuscript tradition that made its way to Okinawa and subsequently inspired some early pioneers of karate) contains a chapter of very similar images. As with that manuscript, these images should be read from right to left. In each case the figure on the right initiates an attack, and the figure on the left responds appropriately. There is a possibility that Lister did not grasp this visual pattern and that may have caused him to mistake the losing technique in fig. 7 for the winning.

Lister was fully aware that most of this information would be incomprehensible to his Western readers. Even highly experienced modern Chinese martial artists know the frustration of sitting down with a Qing era boxing document, often little more than a long list of names, and not being able to make sense of it.

Several authors have already noted that researching the history of the Chinese martial arts is difficult precisely because of their status as popular, rather than elite, culture. It would not be correct to say that rich people never took an interest in boxing or military matters. Yet because these pursuits were never seen as entirely socially respectable, in most cases the Confucian trained scholars who recorded local and family histories played them down or even passed over them in complete silence.

Foreign observers, on the other, were often fascinated by these displays of strange weapons and exotic schools of boxing or wrestling. Period writings by missionaries, merchants and soldiers in southern China is an important, if overlooked, source of information on the development of these fighting systems.

Jingwu did much to define the Chinese martial arts as an open and progressive institution in the public imagination. Still, the early commercialization and industrialization of the Pearl River Delta (due to its importance as a regional and global trade hub) created both a demand for more security and a monetized economy that could support a market in martial services. The emergence of a print market for primers or ephemera, sold to the sorts of working class individuals who were most likely to take up boxing, is further evidence that the regional commercialization of the martial arts was well under way by the end of the 19th century.

At multiple points in this period the male residents of the Pearl River Delta were put under arms, both to protect their villages and to fight battles on behalf of larger gentry-led military forces. What were the three most commonly issued weapons for militia troops? A long pole or spear, a set of butterfly swords and a rattan shield. A few matchlock arms (and later European pattern rifles) might be issued to each unit. The more up to date guns and cannons (which became increasingly common after the disturbances of the 1850s) were typically reserved for regular troops. So most militia members went into battle with either a pole arm or a set of hudiedao. We have some fascinating intelligence reports from British naval officers during the Opium Wars reporting (basically in disbelief) large groups of Chinese recruits drilling with these traditional weapons.

It is thus ironic that the Chinese martial arts reformers of the Republic period would so often seek to legitimate their arts by recreating them as either a rationalized sport on the one hand, or a system of more efficient military training on the other. While Lister may have failed to grasp key elements of his subject, the cross-cultural dialogue that he helped to set in motion would have a profound impact on the development of the Chinese martial arts in the coming century.

In the final analysis, it may be difficult to disagree with his assertion that we cannot translate, we cannot make something legible across cultural boundaries, without at the same time transforming our discussion of it. Yet Lister never anticipated how profound this conversion would be, or that it would come to encompass the very nature and future of the Chinese martial arts themselves.

It must contain the keys to excellence in combat. That is the basis of any good Kung Fu drama. It should no doubt share profound ethical lessons, occasionally drawing on Buddhist or Daoist images. Such a book would probably contain knowledge that could be used to heal as well as harm. That is a well-established aspect of the modern mental image of the Asian martial arts. It might even hint mysteriously at the role of Qi energy in the combative arts.

Its title is the Bubishi: A Classical Manual of Combat. While it is one of the most commonly owned martial arts manuals (my local Barnes and Nobles even keeps copies on hand), it also appears to be one of the less frequently read and discussed examples of the genera. This is especially true within Chinese martial arts circles.

It is thus understandable that students of Chinese martial studies might neglect this text. Yet once you crack its open the pages, what one quickly discovers is a small library of textual fragments dealing with White Crane and Monk Fist boxing, traditional Chinese medicine, combat tactics and martial ethics. Much, though not all, of this literature refers to places and traditions that will be familiar to students of the southern Chinese martial arts. While questions of dating and provenance bedevil attempts to easily relate these texts to modern Karate practice, even a quick look at the various illustrations that accompany the text suggests that Chinese martial artists are likely to find it very interesting.

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