Wanderingdragon wrote:The one single most important thing my Teacher told me when teaching the animals was, we are human, we cannot imitate the physical structure and movements of the animals, we don't walk on all fours or crawl on our bellies or fly, to embody the animal we must try to understand the nature , the spirit, as humans we think , an animals life is strictly survival. I will go so far as to ad this, the dragon, a mythical creature, is the one animal to allow the human mind to take part, though the dragon spirit is real, as it has survived the test of time and spanned all cultural bounderies .
Andy_S wrote:When I learned HsingI under Ray Wiley about 15 years ago, this was the first animal I learnt - for good reason, I think. More than any of the five elements, Dragon (with the kick and jump) is a tremendous plyometric exercise: A raw power generator. For generation of spring force, it is a superb technique
Re: Strategy and Dragon (as an animal)
I won't comment on strategy. Strategy is for generals and chess players; it has a little bit to do with ring fighting; and has even less to do with self defense. Granted, individual styles of martial arts have a (very, very general) overall strategy, but beyond that, for H2H fighting, tactics are everything.
Dragon as an animal - a more interesting question, particularly as this animal is referenced in so many CMA.
IME of dragon - a bit of HsingI, Chen Taiji and (for comparison) two snake forms of Hung Ga - I would say:
Dragon specializes in vertical (up-down) movement. This is visible in HsingI's dragon, Chen Taiji's sparrow ground dragon, and (to a lesser extent) in Chen's Blue Dragon Comes out of Water. This seques with many traditional Chinese visual representations of dragons spiralling and swooping down from clouds and mountain tops, or bursting up out of the ocean.
Dragon is more powerful than snake. Snake, as I have learnt it in Hung Ga, fires light, whippy movements to vital points using fingertips; this is equally the case in Chen Taiji's snake spits tongue. Dragon does not use finger slashes or strikes, it uses palms and fists (and maybe claws in some CMA). If the original dragon in human thought was a dinosaur skeleton, then this makes sense: A big, powerful reptile, very different to the lowly snake.
OTOH, the qualities of dragon - coiling and uncoiling like a serpent - are very snakelike. I wonder if the dragon is simply a bigger and more powerful but also more "noble" snake in the Chinese mind?
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