GrahamB wrote:Steve - a lot of Shaolin forms look, rather obviously, like the sort of thing you'd produce after being 'possessed' by the spirit of an animal (monkey, tiger, crane), etc, or by the spirit of a famous warrior or genereal from the past. People regularly performed rituals in which they used spirit possession to reach back into the world of the dead and find famous practitioners to teach them how to fight, etc.. There's not much demand for that in the karate class at the YMCA or the MMA gym these days...
Is there any evidence that these animal forms as we think of them today existed 100 or 200 years ago? I heard from a film historian and ma practitioner that these are basically Shaw Brother's inventions for the most part.