willywrong wrote:jonathan.bluestein wrote:Some people can have excellent gongfu even when they cannot fight with it... Other can fight but will never have gongfu.
Please give me your definition of Gongfu (kungfu).
There's the gongfu (training over a period of time) where it's solo, practicing and training done in order to know yourself, know your own body.
Then there's the gongfu of fighting, where you need to know the opponent and how an opponent moves their body. (This is more difficult to learn because
really you have to actually fight in order to practice your gongfu for fighting, or gain knowledge of how an actual opponent moves. And if you get hit in the head too much during this training, then all the knowledge you should be gaining is just being knocked out of you.)
It's a conundrum, but in China they kind of solved it by arranging fights between equally matched students of different schools. There's enough rivalry between the students that it was still as close to a real fight as you could get.
'Knowing yourself, and knowing your opponent, [and you will have] a hundred battles, and a hundred victories.'
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