Wuyizidi wrote:
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 the application 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: 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, 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.
Great story. This is exactly how TCMA was taught in the old days. My teacher had very similar experiences when learning from his masters back in the 60s and early 1970s. Every move was only demonstrated a few times, and applications were never really "taught," but rather had to be "stolen" from the masters.
He and his kungfu brothers would take turns acting as their masters' crash test dummies, so that while one of them was getting his butt whupped, the others would watch closely to see how the techniques were applied.