Reddit reviews Complete Wing Chun: The Definitive Guide to Wing Chun's History and Traditions (Complete Martial Arts)

I'm a traditional Wing Chun student whose Sifu studied modified under James DeMile (who trained quite a bit with Bruce personally and is attempting to make a documentary about it) before learning traditional and then Northern Shaolin and Hung Gar (mostly under GM Wing Lam). A lot of it is "common knowledge" within even the modified system, but what a lot of people are unaware of is that there are around 14 different styles of Wing Chun, so even the "modified vs traditional" debate that so often gets tossed out as "it doesn't matter" does, in fact, matter. For further independent reference, check out "Complete Wing Chun: A definitive Guide to Wing Chun's history and traditions". While I recommend this for anyone interested, I specifically recommend it for any modified students whose Sifus have neglected to educate them on their history. Another interesting but less useful book is "Wing Chun Kung-fu", which was essentially entirely ghost-written by Bruce Lee, but most credit was given to J Yimm Lee in order to get his career going.

(useless, that is, unless you've studied a martial art directly under a master; you cannot learn anything from a book or video without having learned it independently in real life first, so don't even try, you will fail)

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Most of the stories about Bruce's training come from GM William Cheung, Bruce's older childhood friend, and one of the five students whom GM Yip Man (yup, the one the movies w/ Donnie Yen tell some of the story of) taught the traditional Wing Chun he learned from Leung Bik, the old man in the shop in the movie who was actually an old man on a boat in the river in real life. Cheung was Bruce's surrogate older brother in their street gangs, and when Yip Man took him on as a student, Cheung was who taught Bruce everything he knows - at the time, and even some still today, Masters only taught a select few senior students, whose job was then, as payback for the preferential treatment, to then go and teach the rest of the students the beginner basics (a test of knowledge / skill for the senior student, as well). Literally, Bruce would follow William around the room, practicing what he practiced; and would also follow him around in their gang, doing roof-top sparring matches in the streets of Hong Kong, matches which traditionally trained William Cheung supposedly never lost more than a hundred of (but who knows, right?). This was also the time when masters would get shut and locked into theaters by 70+ armed men in assassination attempts, and make it out to live another day, so understand that this was a tumultuous time in the history of modern martial arts in China.

The long story short of Bruce's fall from grace is that at one point, Bruce stood in front of the school and was telling other students that master was sick that day, to come back next week, all so he could end up getting what amounted to private lessons. Curious why his students weren't showing up, Yip Man caught Bruce doing this, took him upstairs, and gave him a private lesson he probably never forgot for the rest of his life (read: beat the ever-living shit out of him). Years later, sort of the black sheep in the school, he was having trouble progressing - no clue whether this was a lack of skill / effort on his part, or if he'd lost the master's trust, but either way, Yip Man wouldn't permit William to teach him the third form, Bil Gee. After a while, Bruce was getting upset, as his stardom as a new cinema presence in China was going to his head, and he attempted to bribe Yip Man with a house/school in return for being taught the next form.

That was the last day that Bruce learned a lick of traditional Wing Chun - from then on, the only other Wing Chun he learned was modified, and unfortunately, due to the nature of how modified was learned by it's originator, certain techniques in modified are just plain wrong. It's also the reason why he was never allowed to call what he taught Wing Chun - he'd have the entire Wing Chun community up in arms if he did, because he never finished the system, and a lot of what he did was "unorthodox" because it borrowed what worked from other systems. Oddly, that's actually a major point of why traditional Wing Chun works so well, and why modified students get so bent out of shape when we insist on the distinction - it's the modified school that had a big issue with things like adaptation, elbows, and high kicks, although that has obviously softened over the many years since then, as well as they've adopted numerous techniques from Hung Gar in the south, covering up many of the original deficiencies in the style.

If you're curious about that story on how "modified/traditional" came to exist, let me relate the tale of how the moneychanger poked a hole in the wall of the doctor and his sons to steal the art from his neighbors during a time when it was only taught within the family, eventually beating up the sons, giving the father the insight to realize his art was being stolen, found the hole, and starting teaching incorrect technique and leaving out all of the footwork now that he knew he was being spied on (and seriously, foot work is the bee's knees when it comes to martial arts) - and how although he's a horrible person for stealing it, and when caught, wasn't confronted, but taught wrong techniques, and then went on to teach numerous people techniques that were purposefully taught to him wrong, he also learned enough before he was caught to have learned a correct thing or two, which allowed him to keep up the farce long enough to gain enough popularity that the sons of the doctor he stole it from decided they had to share their art, thus without his theft, NO ONE would know Wing Chun today!

For reference, the forms are: Sil Lum Tao - Small Idea Way, is the first form, Chum Kuen - Bridge Seeking, is the second, which is all Bruce ever learned; there is, in most Wing Chun, Bil Gee - Thrusting Fingers as the third form, and then the Wooden Stake Man, aka Wooden Dummy, which is a drastically changed form depending on your branch of Wing Chun. In traditional, we also learn to use Butterfly Swords (form name Bart Jarn Do), and the Dragon Long Pole, literally just a 7 1/2' long pole of flexible wax wood with a taper, that originated when a fleeing spear-fighter wasn't allowed to bring the spear-tip into the Buddhist temple, so he snapped it off and created long pole techniques with the haft.

As I mentioned before, Bruce called it Wing Chun Do for a long time, being very insistent that it was the Wing Chun Way, but not Wing Chun, until his change to outright calling it Jeet Kun Do so it could be his own thing that he could market on his own.

It's not that Bruce was a bad guy, or should be lambasted for any of this, but at the same time, giving him credit for the teachings is misleading at best, and disingenuous at worst. In the end, he was a movie star and a badass because he put insane amounts of effort into being the absolute best he could be. I don't mean to detract from that, or other's motivation, but in the end, Bruce Lee was also a con-artist and a seller of shit, who used "tricks" to seem much much faster than he really was, especially as regards "crossing hands" with other people. One of the exercises we do (of which there are literally hundreds of variations) is called "chi sao", or "clinging hand", but the exercises themselves essentially have one party passive while they other utilizes an economy of motion technique - one which quite specifically just lets you look really fast, but is actually about feeling when the partner moves their arm as a "trigger", shooting your hand forward at that point. If you're unaware of the exercise, however, it just seems unstoppably fast, when, in reality, it's just already set up to do that, uncounterable, from the start, as a training exercise. It's things like that that have to be brought up when talking about Bruce, because, like I said, he was a bit of a con-artist.

IN THE END, however, the most important thing is that Bruce was freakishly full of dedication to bettering himself, and didn't let his own failures and fuckups stop him from being the best him he could be. He proved that it's not the 10,000 moves you know, but the one move you practice 10,000 times. He proved that dedication can overcome anything, patience and perserverence are the most important things to self-betterment, and the only thing holding you back is yourself.

I'd just much rather see motivation based on what Bruce Lee actually did and accomplished rather than what he basically reposted from the Eastern common wisdom to a Western audience that had never seen it before.

Give Complete Wing Chun: The Definitive Guide to Wing Chun's History and Traditions by Robert Chu, Rene Ritchie and Y. Mu a try. It is a pretty comprehensive history of wing chun, from what I've read of it. As the foreword by Mark V. Wiley perhaps a little hyperbolically says:

> Complete Wing Chun is perhaps the best book written on the various schools comprising a single martial art form. The authors have done an excellent job in their tireless research and presentation of material into this comprehensive treatise on one of the most controversial and misunderstood arts of this century. This book is destined to become the classic reference on the subject, and has set a standard by which other researchers and practitioners wishing to uncover their art should follow. I highly recommend this book to all Wing Chun stylists and martial arts researchers alike without hesitation. If ever you were to buy just one book on the art, this should be it." --Mark V. Wiley