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Original Source: www.mardb.com |
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eing an insect,
I’d image, invites several perspectives. On the one hand, there is the
everyday function of leaving the lair to get some groceries without being
placed into the buggy (forgive the pun) by some other creature who has you on
his own grocery list. Then there’s the perspective of sheer size, as when a
small insect is taken to the checkout counter by a bigger insect who then looks
up to see a robin in line behind him. Just as when a human enters a kitchen,
turns on the light, and a cockroach yells to his mates: “Boys, the party’s
over!”
On a grand scale, perhaps no species is as ferocious as the
human sort. We do quite well actually, and if some of the science right now is
correct, we may, give or take a hundred years, have the entire grocery store to
ourselves.
One insect in
particular that enjoys a big fan base in the martial world is the praying
mantis. From the earliest narratives of martial artists intrigued by watching a
mantis fight its battles for both food and survival to the historical branching
out into human fighting system with many branches – Southern Mantis, 6 Harmony
Praying Mantis, 7 Star Praying Mantis, 8 Step Praying Mantis, Tai Mantis, etc. –
we, as humans, have developed a little critter’s daily functionality into a
super sophisticated martial culture.
I haven’t bent down
to ask a mantis lately whether she does the “iron hand”, or whether she trains
in pressure point strikes and dim mak,
or she can attack multiple opponents using every part of her body at very high
speed with or without weapons. I’m sure she’d frown up at me and say: “Look,
we’re busy here. Unless you’re a grasshopper, you best be moving along.”
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Source: en.wikipedia.org |
What fascinates is
the posture of the insect’s forelegs, and the way it uses them in a battle for
supremacy. In imitation, we humans drop our elbows and scroll up three fingers
from the little finger to the middle finger, while extending the index finger,
reinforced by the thumb. The hand posture symbolizes the mantis claw and has
become overall one of the signatures of the northern Chinese mantis systems. My
first encounter with this posture was as the second movement of a famous set of
movements called Bung Bo Kuen. It’s
repeated several times in Bung Bo,
and, of course, other mantis forms contain the movement the same movement.
Mantis teaches us that offensive-defense are two divisive
terms. In Mantis, as in Wing Chun, Pak Mei, My Jong, Hsing I…only the flow
counts, and as in a stream, the Mantis claw negotiates the current, indeed, it
becomes the current. Offense/defense cease to matter; the flow of the fight
matters most.
So we have the
dropped elbows which are, as we shall discover, fighting utensils. There is no
one way in which to use the elbow; Mantis application informs us that there are
dozens of ways. The one claw is held at a bit of a distance in front of the other
which is held at a bit of a distance from the torso. Obviously, these are
stations of attack through which the opponent has to pass in order to hit you. Stations of attack, not defense; offense
is defense.
Then we have the
forearm, the wrist, the hooked shape of the hand…each are weapons of attack,
either in isolation or in concert with other parts of the body. I was taught as
a form of basics to grip an opponent’s arm with the thumb and the three bent
fingers while the index finger points toward a pressure point. So you practise
this movement with the right hand, then the left, back and forth, against a
willing partner, or you practise by throwing up a bag filled with gravel and
catching it – right, left, right, left – or you practise your grip on a staff
or the arm of a wooden dummy, and so on. If this movement were limited to
solely grasping an opponent’s arm, then the mantis would never be able to fill
up the buggy in a grocery store. The claw must have the same versatility as the
Eagle Claw and the Monkey’s claw or Mantis long ago would have been phased out.
The claw adjusts to whatever body part it encounters. If it touches the carotid
artery then so be it, it “eats”, as a mantis would, the carotid; if the
opponent turns his head, the claw may suddenly turn into a strike.
“Have these humans
ever heard about rules?” one might say to the other. “Even in that fight I had
with George the Tarantula the other day…we both agreed beforehand – no hitting
below the belt!”
The Mantis approach
is a volatile mix of rapid angle changes coming at you full blast. Sensei Gary
Hollman, an instructor at 8 Wing Trenton Martial Arts Club, demonstrates two
techniques from the en garde claw position
for us against Sensei Jim Werden, a Black Belt student of Sensei Lynn Dafoe of
the Elite Martial Arts Club in Belleville, Ontario, Canada. Both Hollman and
Werden are Black Belts in Karate and in Jiu Jitsu who also practise the Chinese
martial arts.
1. Hollman encounters one of Werden’s arms during an
exchange. He grasps Werden’s right wrist with his right wrist from the inside.
Normally, the grasp is done from the outside, against the back of an opponent’s
wrist but you take what you can get, so to speak. Kung Fu isn’t a strait
jacket; Kung Fu is alive, and the fight is ever-changing. Hollman’s left elbow
from the Mantis en garde slices
sideways into Werden’s arm, breaking it. Had Werden’s arm been raised higher,
Hollman would have adapted the break…as much as he would have if Werden’s arm
had been held at a lower level. For Hollman, whether the break really works or
not doesn’t matter…he has tons more in his arsenal.
2. A standard throw that oftentimes follows the en garde position sees the left Mantis
claw cutting from the inside to the outside against the side of Werden’s neck while Hollman sweeps Werden’s
right leg. This throw, or takedown if you wish, again adapts in various ways to
whatever the Mantis happens to encounter. Consider just the side of Werden’s
head: the claw can strike the eye, rip the face, tear the ear, grab the hair,
strike pressure points, hit the temple…and if Werden happens to slightly change
the angle of his head, Hollman’s claw adapts.
I’m not sure whether
“going overboard” is part of accepted legal terminology. The term “egregious”
certainly is. Unless you’re in a zone of armed conflict, the techniques
described above are best left to cooperative training environments, where
everyone departs the class as friends. Praying Mantis, as is the case with so
many traditional arts, carries with it a legacy of past brutality. These arts
were a means of survival. When you swear to protect your family, your village,
your country, you will do anything to succeed
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