Mastery of Wing Chun

Zopa Gyatso

Yun Hoi Yuen Kay San & Pin Sun Wing Chun Kuen Kwoon

 In all my decades  in the martial arts I don't think I've actually read anything specifically addressing the topic of how mastery is attained. Whilst I've encountered a lot of cultural cringe, hype and myth concerning mastery I've not encountered any non- cryptic analysis of how it is to be pursued.  If newcomers to martial arts, or even "old hands", for that matter, hold any assumptions or beliefs about it they are likely ill-informed or even superstitious.

It seems that by far the vast majority of Wing Chun practitioners hold the paradoxical belief that mastery is not for them.  They spend time and money in an activity they believe they will never complete and believe they will never master.  Given that there are degrees of mastery and it is a process not an end-state per se, I find this unusual. Perhaps this is not unique to Wing Chun but as I practice Wing Chun and keep "an ear to the ground" more closely than I do with other martial arts in general I tend to think it is more marked with respect to Wing Chun. It seems most practitioners may believe they can become very good at the art - but to master it?  No.

  There even seems to be a strange and utterly illogical assumption extant in many circles which I dub the "Oriental myth" - that mastery of gung fu - in this case Wing Chun - is only for Chinese.  As one of the first "gaijin" to hold a karate dan grade in this country, I recall the Japanese certainly held this belief in the early days of karate in the West.  I distinctly recall them holding the very fixed cultural attitude up until the 1970s at least in many quarters that no-one could "really understand" karate unless they were Japanese. Later, as this began to be modified with Westerners equaling and in many cases exceeding the abilities of the Japanese masters, this view morphed into the notion that anyone hoping to be really proficient in karate really needed to be totally fluent in Japanese and immersed in Japanese culture.  Both were utterly false beliefs yet many Westerners subscribed to them.  And in the process, limited their aspirations and their achievement of their potential.

   I recall not too long ago reading an article wherein a Chinese Shaolin monk especially focused on this "Oriental myth" belief and demolished it. Yet it seems a lot still believe it or give it lip service.  Many Chinese subscribe to it.  Often it is expanded with the foolish notion that unless one is a scholar of Chinese language and literature they cannot really understand Wing Chun. No matter how gently or politely this view is put it is condescending and ethnocentrist. The mystery is that often it derives from the minds of Westerners themselves!  It's utterly ludicrous, and totally false, of course!

  Often, there is also a pseudo- humility operating as a basis for the notion that we cannot achieve mastery. I wonder why so many people seem so dedicated to their chosen martial art yet so few seem to aspire to, or achieve, mastery.  A misplaced notion of what constitutes the virtue of humility may be present and a false pride operating?  I seriously wonder why so many people train so hard to reach a goal they consider mystically elusive! We can win sports competitions and happily accept titles like "champion" or "grand champion" in a chosen sport but with respect to Wing Chun many hold mystical beliefs on mastery.  It seems that some people believe mastery so unattainable that when anyone achieves it, it is apparently considered the conjunction of chance elements or exceptional talent rather than a result of a mixture of a number of factors. Talent of course is required - but in most cases an adequate degree of it can be developed if it is not naturally present.

   In the context of any activity, Wing Chun included, "mastery" can be defined from the dictionary listing for "master": "One who has the power of controlling, using or disposing of something; a person whose teachings one accepts or follows; a workman qualified to teach apprentices and carry on his trade independently; a person eminently skilled in something".  Many Wing Chun practitioners would seem to legitimately qualify as "masters" by his definition. Yet most people are reluctant to award the accolade "master" - to others - or in their own mind (no-one likes self promotion) - to themselves.

 The problem with mastery is in some respects it can be seen as comparative - as "better than" another rather than as on an individual  developmental continuum relative to the skill and knowledge dimensions against which it can be evaluated.  As we know, Wing Chun seems, amidst a quite political martial arts scene generally, to be exceptionally politicized.  It seems that even attempts to ostensibly delimit this politics are actually thinly veiled political ploys within themselves once the personalities and agendas are exposed. So, one man's master is another's  imposter, also-ran or incompetent. In some circles any experienced practitioner is accorded the title "master". This seems to be a cultural phenomenon in the United States where the term "instructor" has progressively been replaced by "master" in martial arts publications.  Of course the two can obviously overlap. The phenomenon I refer to is that you will see in many martial arts publications where every person appearing in the magazine articles is "master so-and-so".  In the old days we simply used the terms "sifu" or "sensei".   And - they were few and far between!

 And, of course, as any Wing Chun practitioner can tell you there are a number of "grandmasters" and "great grandmasters" or other zanier titles I have heard (leaving aside the considerable controversy surrounding the actual legitimacy of them).  In this connection there is the "there-can-be-only-one" myth.  This is the process whereby deluded individuals assert (invariably totally erroneously) that their master/\grandmaster/great grandmaster is/was the one and only legitimate one.  Now whilst there are a number of imposters in the Wing Chun world there are a few legitimate lineages who all have masters.  (There are a lot of illegitimate lineages, too!). This "our guy is the last/one true/only heir/inheritor/grandmaster of the only legitimate Wing Chun" is patently and transparently childish marketing nonsense.  Anyone who willingly subscribes to it deserves all they get - or I probably really ought to write, to be blunt: "all they don't get"! However, this is not what I'm talking about here.  I'm talking about a personal process of mastery - titles and accolades are really very much simply fictions and delusions of the mind.  Ego run rampant!

 I'd like to present here an alternative view on part of what will enhance legitimate mastery.  Long ago when I was a young man, an old teacher of mine once said to me, in response to me saying how unattainable his skill level seemed that he was "only human" and added with a wink: "Just like you!"  The inference was immediately clear to me - if he could do it then so could I! On another occasion, and more bluntly, another much younger and physically much smaller teacher once said to me with a mean squint: "If I had your body I would do amazing things!". I trained harder after these revelations but it was not for some considerably lengthier time before I learned to train smarter and divest myself of my delusions concerning mastery. These were the days when you had to find the masters, be accepted as a student and discover how the masters thought and trained and things were not sold or "pearls thrown in the mud before swine", as the saying goes. You had to really earn your acceptance, respect and art.  The price was not only cash but blood, sweat and tears and fierce determination and loyalty to one's art, one's teacher, and one's self.  It was even later that I believe I began to learn to think as a master does. 

 Given the logically pre-requisite attributes of being normally fit and healthy and persisting with the right training under a legitimate teacher who himself is not deluded, anyone ought to be able to attain mastery of a gung fu art.  Although I by no means equate Wing Chun with sport, by way of example, look at Olympic athletes - do they take interminable decades to master their sport?  No. Obviously not. Otherwise our Olympic Games would be geriatric events rather than events for the young!  Why then do we have so few masters and a vastly disproportionate number of students of gung fu?  The amount of time spent training is certainly a factor in mastery, admittedly. Similarly, dedication over time is pivotal. Yet many trainees have sufficient spare time and spend a great deal of time training and are often  fanatically dedicated yet  still don't get to master the art. 

 Leaving aside the difficulty of finding your way through commercial hype and outright deception - often almost incredibly believable in some cases - which is tragically part of the Wing Chun scene, accessing a master who can not only perform the art correctly but is able and willing to teach you, then the answer as to why so few achieve mastery can possibly be: you are not training "hard enough".  This is unsatisfactory as an answer to me as I see lots of people train hard, I even see some training "smart".  Yet still mastery seems elusive if not utterly unattainable.   Why?  I guess the answer has a number of parts.  I'd like to focus on what I consider is the most significant. 

 As a Tibetan Buddhist who is also a psychologist, both of my trained ways of thinking dispose me to assume the reason is very likely then one of belief, attitude or what I would call "mindset".  In other words, I believe that very often the practitioner limits himself with his own perceptions, attitudes and points of reference.  Sifus and other practitioners (unwittingly) collude in this too.  They limit themselves and their students with mind clutter.

 When most practitioners are enculturated into Wing Chun they take on a set of beliefs.  One is that Wing Chun can be "learnt" in a shorter time than other gung fu arts.  In fact many have reduced this time to a few too short years by minimalising their Wing Chun.  Different lineages and sub-lineages hold varying beliefs on how long it takes to learn Wing Chun Kuen.  A lot naturally depends on how often and how long a practitioner trains. Nonetheless Wing Chun isn't Tai Chi Chuan and we ought not to be talking or thinking of mastery taking twenty years!  Wing Chun can be learnt well or badly in the same period of time.  The difficulty is in knowing what "well" and "badly" means  and why! 

 Incredibly though, co-existent with the notion Wing Chun can be "learnt" in less time than other martial arts, is the belief that "mastery" is inconceivable, that it can only, if ever, occur at some far and dimly distant time way into the future.  I very sincerely doubt if those people who are today considered founding masters held this view and began their Wing Chun career thinking they would never master it or master it only after decades of esoteric transmission of knowledge/skill.  I think they trained thinking they would certainly achieve mastery in a reasonable period of time and certainly wanted to beat everyone whom they faced in combat.  They knew mastery was relative in some respects and that they could always improve. But they didn't believe there was no point at which they would one day master their art. Many fights back then had more serious consequences than many in the  modern world, I would imagine. Hence, losing may well have meant serious and permanent injury, an end to one's martial career or death.

  Falling victim to the belief that mastery is so unattainable that they don't aim for it, trainees today seem to overlook a key principle of Wing Chun - simplicity.  Mastery is also simple - at least in one sense.  Given that a practitioner has found the right teacher, has been conscientious and trained hard and smart for a reasonable period, the reason they put mastery over the horizon is mindset.

  Mastery - delusions aside - relies on, and is in, the mind. People fail to realize mastery is in this very moment. It is not a state you attain per se - masters can simply generate reliably predictable responses at will whereas the beginner either cannot generate an appropriate response, is variable in its predictability, or allows his mind to freeze in a perception.  Mastery is a moment in which skill is employed correctly and achieves its aim. People look straight at it, past it and through it all the time.  The politics of Wing Chun also trains people not to see the mastery of others. Here I'd have to distinguish between three categories: (i) genuine masters - often those in gwoons around the world who often aren't "names", (ii) the self anointed or martial arts marketing and media generated "master", and, (iii) the everyday Wing Chun practitioner.  I am only interested in offering guidance to the third category as the first category doesn't need it and the second are so deluded they don't realize they need it.

  Trainees  seem to think that "if I change this or that"  or "if I could only get sifu to teach me this" or "if only sifu didn't play favourites" - all sorts of things rather than seeing that allowing their minds to delude them and lead them astray from focusing objectively on the moment is the problem. They seem to follow the pattern which I call the "brothel model" (because under it Wing Chun is seen as a saleable commodity or sampling of wares rather than an unshakeable faithful commitment).  I recall a master who once taught that Wing Chun could not be bought.  I believe he was correct and applaud this sentiment.  However, quite tragically this same master sold his Wing Chun and his stamp of approval when he saw fit.  There are variants of this approach but it is basically a transactional view which places dependency for meeting one's needs on others or external events. In psychology it is referred to as "attribution theory". In essence it says that you believe your success or failure in Wing Chun can be attributed to others.  Whilst we respect our teachers we also have to respect ourselves and realize it is we who achieve our own mastery.  In a very real sense we are our only sifu.  Our sifu is clearly responsible for teaching us - but only we can be responsible for our learning.

  Mindset then is the essential factor. I have not fallen for Lee-idolatry, as I think he was a smart-mouthed and arrogant person with much over-vaunted ability and achieved much of his fame from re-wording old Chinese wisdom with which the West was not familiar  as his "insights", but,  Bruce Lee is known for once pointing out that mastery is not as much what you add but what you subtract from the situation that may be crucial. This, of course, is based on Buddhist and Daoist thought and pre-dated Lee by thousands of years.  He said it in a glib fashion - as he was wont to do and I think his followers have distorted it beyond belief - but the basic notion was essentially correct. In this sense, I think that the Wing Chun practitioner needs to thoroughly learn the theory, principles, concepts, strategies, tactics, structures and applications of his Wing Chun but to then not be imprisoned by letting his mind be entrapped by them.  I don't mean we break from our  training and any old thing becomes "Wing Chun".  I don't mean anyone can excuse incorrect technical expression of Wing Chun based on being "individual".  What I do mean is we free our mind from attachment and from becoming fixed - to relax the mind.  Instead of agitating the mind we need to progressively develop the skill to allow the mind to relax and sink (familiar words?) into itself in order to experience its own clarity, steadiness (rootedness - another familiar word?) and completeness.  This brings about a state called changeless change.  At first, with the right training methods, this state is only there for an instant - a few seconds.  Later it can become minutes then later hours.  We train to achieve it in meditation or stillness then transfer it to motion.  We need to be able to let go of the factors we cling to - physical and psychological which inhibit the correct mindset.

  Amongst the ways which a student of Wing Chun can both accumulate the essentials and discard the unessentials are: (i) practicing the forms - but practicing them correctly - which may not necessarily be the way many are taught and in many cases, brainwashed into fanatically believing is correct;(ii) face-to-face verbal interaction with a master; (iii) hand-to-hand bodily interaction with a master; (iii) academic study of the writings of those who are not motivated by self-promotion or marketing and actually really know what they are writing about, (iv) participating in Wing Chun class training activities - basic technique practice, various types of  san sau and chi sau drills and unstructured interaction; (v) studying, understanding and practicing Mo Duk; (vi) studying, researching and incorporating into one's neuromuscular responses the principles, concepts, strategies, tactics, and applications of Wing Chun, (vii) understanding and regularly practicing internal methods, (viii) becoming aware of how opportunities present throughout the day to maintain the correct state of awareness and finding opportunities to practice in daily life. 

  How many times have I seen sifus teach a student only to watch them seemingly say to themselves they are doing as they were taught - yet fail to self correct?  I myself laughingly recently had a relatively senior student, in front of a class, tell me I'd changed a form - that he'd learnt it a different way!  I hadn't and he hadn't, of course!  The same student later complained about training "all this basic shit"!  I decided there and then we would part company forever.  Such  students  cling to their unexamined pre-conception of how they think things ought to be rather than let go and see them as they are.  How is it a sifu can say exactly the same thing to more than one student simultaneously yet one listens, understands, watches and does what has been demonstrated and the other does not listen but thinks they know and consequently thinks they are doing what was taught when in fact they are doing something else - something incorrect?  Often enough, unfortunately!

  The quality in the successful student of freeing the mind from misinterpretation, of not clinging to a pre-conceived notion of what they are doing and examining it objectively, of listening carefully to the sifu and watching for every detail of what he does, of not being trapped by ideas agitating the mind is what distinguishes the successful student from the unsuccessful student. Ultimately, it also distinguishes the master from the student.

  Hence I see the process of mastery as: incremental - step by step; additive

- successively adding appropriate knowledge, skills and attributes in a cumulative and interactive fashion whereby synchronicity operates making the whole greater than the simple sum of the parts; and, what is most often forgotten or overlooked - subtractive - removing things which impede the process of mastery - tension, pre-conceived notions, mindsets based on martial arts media trends, distortions or misunderstandings of the teachings or models of Wing Chun masters, and, often, trendy distortion of the teachings of Zen applied to martial art.  I guess, on reflection, the synchronicity I am thinking of in this process is actually simply yum yeung (Yin Yang) operating!

About the Author 
Zopa Gyatso is a disciple of his guru, His Holiness Sakya Trizin of the Sakyapa Tibetan Buddist lineage. Having formerly been a student of Zen Buddhism, he now studies and practises Tibetan Buddhism with Lamas Choedak and Rigzin. Zopa has been a Wing Chun practitioner since the mid 1960s when he met and trained with Yip Man student, Choi Siu Kong. He later met and trained with other Wing Chun "names" including Sum Nung of Yuen Kay San Wing Chun. Zopa has had a varied education, holding five university qualifications, and is both a qualified teacher and psychologist. He lives
in Australia where he teaches Wing Chun Kuen at Yun Hoi Wing Chun Kuen Gwoon to selected students.