The other night during class Shifu gave us a bit of an impromptu lecture where he talked about a few random things. One of the topics he talked about for quite a while was fighting between kung fu schools.

When he was quite young he trained at Shaolin for 3 years and he said the inter-school violence was pretty bad. A classmate of ours also trained there and said it is even worse now. He mentioned standing alone on a street corner in the town and if a group of students from another school saw you they would come over and ask you if you wanted to change schools. If you said no, they'd beat you up.

Both in Shaolin and here in Wudang, they would send students to the train station and if a young person got off the train alone, they'd just grab them and practically drag them to the school to try and sign you up, whether you'd planned on visiting that school or not.

Shaolin is full of young Chinese students wanting to be the next Bruce Lee and learn to fight so a little violence is not a surprise, especially when there are literally thousands of people crammed together. Even here in Wudang though (internal style) fighting used to be a big problem. Back in the 80's and early 90's there were two very large schools who's students got in fights all the time. The two masters finally had to talk it over and decide to stop the fighting when one student was stabbed in the liver and was very critically injured. Not only were people getting badly hurt, both schools were paying hundreds of thousands of Yuan to the local police as bribes to keep the students out of jail and also to the hospitals. The townspeople as a result had a very bad opinion of kung fu students in general which is only now starting to change. Shifu has a class of local schoolchildren training at the school during the summer and on weekends which would never have happened before.

Even though I generally don't really enjoy the Sanda (sparring) training we do as much as the other stuff, hearing these stories helps me understand why Shifu places so much importance on learning to fight. He's seen first hand how you might need to defend yourself against someone with training equal to your own. None of us plan to fight competitively and Shifu doesn't encourage that either so I often wonder why we spend so much of our time on conditioning and stuff. What I'm really excited about is when we eventually move on to the traditional fighting. Basically self defense training with empty hands and weapons. Less sport oriented and in my opinion a lot more interesting. Shifu showed us a few straight sword techniques the other day...totally awesome! I can't wait!