edededed wrote:Hi Wuyiziyi,
How do you write "wei zhao" in Chinese? And could you give details about what the rules are? (I am too old to go to China and get thrown down hard now, I want to avoid it!
)
No prob
Like nicklinjm said, wei zhao 喂招: spoon feeding the skill
In the old days martial art training is a very formal process with long evaluation periods. So the apprenticeship usually start with long period (often a year) of training in something really basic that you can't use for fighting right away, like stretching and zhan zhuang.
The next step in this "useless" training is forms training. Form is a nice way of cataloging all the skills of the style. The major reason there are lots of forms, which people today can't naturally appreciate, is that you have to keep kids interested during this long period of training.
At this point, satisfied with the child's aptitude and character with hard, boring, but absolute essential training, the teacher start the Chai Shou 拆手 process. Breaking down each posture of the form into individual movements, and fully explaining all the attack/defense implications. This is where the idea of wei zhao 喂招 comes in. The teacher only go as fast as the student can absorb the lesson.
So until you go through this wei zhao 喂招, you can't really use it. Today people complain everyone who just does form can't fight, well that is by design
To link a long sequence of movements together from individual skills, we are often forced to abbreviate the end of one movement and beginning of another using circular movement, so they can flow smoothly together. This had the side benefit of hiding the real movement (and therefore application) from any onlooker. This is also the reason why while doing the same form, some masters would insist the students to make the movement more "square", to show they understand the full movements/application intent.
This is where things get tricky:
1) teachers are conservative to start with. Also, unlike the Mr. Miyagi media stereotype, martial art masters as a group before 1949 are mostly illiterate, they are more like professional athletes - people with great skill, but big tempers. My own teacher told us one story from early days of training with Master Wang Peisheng: there was this one Bagua skill that was very difficult to understand, Master Wang showed it on one of them once, he and others around didn't understand. Fine, he's starting to get impatient, he does it again. Again none of the students understood. Finally he got really upset - he's a martial art prodigy, everything came to him easily, he genuinely doesn't understand why it's so difficult for others to understand. So he's like "okay, maybe you didn't feel it because my force is too small, i'm going to do it for real this time, so you can feel what the actual force feels like on the body." Bam, this time, because the movements are even quicker, no one saw anything. Master Wang now stands over the student "do you understand now?!" The student, who hit the back of his head against the ground really hard, his mind is completely blank, being 1) afraid of teacher's anger, 2) doesn't want another concussion, is like "oh yes, I think I got it now. I'll go home and practice it a couple of thousand times. Thank you, thank you..."
From this example we can understand how some great masters like Yang Banhou couldn't keep students around
In that particular instance, they went home, practiced a thousand reps within one training session, and finally got it. Before they went back later in the week, they coordinately beforehand who will just watch Master Wang's feet, who will watch his body movements, who will watch his hands, and who will follow his eye movements...
wei zhao 喂招 is also why trust was paramount to the traditional master-disciple relationship, because the teacher will open himself up to let the student try the skill on him. Because internal by definition is not something can be seen, only felt. And only by feeling it in his body can he tell if the student's neijing is right.
2) So here's why the not changing during the practice is important: if one party change his ongoing movement upon seeing the other person's reaction, then the other person will have to change as well, that often means you are no longer practicing that pre-designed defense skill. The only way for the defender to get enough reps in to practice a particular skill is if the attacker doesn't change. Unstructured, free for all fighting is end stage of fight training, to get there we have to go through the structured training stage first.
This is why Yang Chengfu, after his father passed away, sensing the urgency to improve as fast as possible, hired someone to be his training dummy. That person is super strong, but doesn't know anything about martial art, and Yang didn't teach him. He was hired just to feed Yang forces as Yang asked him to, so Yang could practice his response. The process was a huge success for him.
In every large school there are students who can't put their ego aside during practice, they have to win every encounter. Even after being told by everyone they still change the force when practicing with you. The only thing you can do is to avoid that person. Hence Chen Manching's famous saying "invest in loss". Until someone puts the ego aside, no learning can take place.
Today you rarely see those fake demos in external martial art, especially striking art, because they don't have those skills, and they don't need to do these kinds of Wei Zhao. For example: to practice any type of joint locking techniques, the attacker has to go with the force of defender right? Otherwise he could easily be hurt. I know - I have 2 wrist surgeries (torn TFCC) from practicing Shorinji Kempo. This is why Aikido is the one non-Chinese art with most fake demos right? If your skill don't include wrist lock throws, the attacker never need to cooperate, thereby short-circuiting the teacher-student mutual deception cycle. Same with internal martial art.
So today the fake demo is actually a perverse indicator of group's past glorious history and authenticity - somewhere in the past, perhaps very recently, there were high level masters who can do something like that, some skill that is so incredible it looks fake/unreal, so the students tried to emulate that. If that didn't exist, because it looks so unreal, it would be beyond a normal person's imagination to even come up with a fake skill like that in the first place. They would just do an exaggeration - being knocked back 10 steps instead of 5, but not pop into the air, then fake hop a couple of times, or thrown without being touched...