Sunday, October 5, 2008

Kuntao Silat de Thouars is an Indonesian martial arts system with heavy Chinese influence. It is an extremely comprehensive system of great breadth and depth. Notwithstanding, it is very simple. As Uncle likes to say, "Primitive." An excellent word to describe the mindset and the idea behind the movements. Often, it will appear quite the opposite, however, the seemingly complex is typically a combination of primitive movements compounded appropriately with expert timing, angulation and leverage. Our system utilizes empty-hand (stand-up and groundfighting or grappling with extensive use of throws and sweeps), stick (short, medium and long), knife (a great deal of knife, the small karambit to the large golok) and flexible weapons (sarong, sash, rope, chain, etc.). At the higher levels of training the internal aspects of Uncle's art are stressed although my personal instruction tends to teach certain aspects from the beginning of training adding as the student goes farther into the practice; therefore, by the time a student reaches the advanced levels they have been adhering to most of those internal principles already, they just didn't know it at the time.

Only a few people seem to have the resolve to actually learn an advanced martial art. Many are interested enough to come by and have the usual beginner's enthusiasm, but as time passes and it becomes apparent that skill and knowledge come only through constant practice and often grueling repetition, the vast majority fall by the wayside with numerous rationalizations as to why they wouldn't continue. Notice, I didn't type "couldn't" but "wouldn't." It's almost always a personal choice to stop training, not an outside force preventing practice, but an individual decision to simply believe it isn't worth it for one reason or another. There is nothing wrong with that. Everyone must seek their own path, but the person must understand a path is chosen whether the current one is continued or not.

1 comment:

Teeny said...

Looks awesome, handsome! So glad to see you got it started finally ;-D