ANIMAL STYLES OF KUNG-FU
Kung-fu systems such as Tai-chi-Chuan and Phantom Kung-fu are based on the way animals defend themselves. The student learns to copy the body mechanics and skills of several species in his sparring.
In the 1960’s and 1970’s I owned an animal importing company to provide wild animals to organizations and individuals that were studying how to breed them in captivity and develop captive breeding populations. Every few years, I traveled through the jungles of Central America to study the animals and for adventure.
Up until the 1990’s, I kept a collection of over 150 reptiles, many of which were part of breeding populations and some were used for educational programs. My sparring students were required to work with these animals to get a feeling for their power and body mechanics.
It was exciting to introduce new students to the animals. They had never seen these species before in person. The black, rough necked monitor lizard sat in its own huge cage. At six feet long, thirty inches tall (when straightening out its legs) and about two feet wide (when puffed up), it was an impressive animal, especially when hissing and whipping its tail. Its long neck, covered with large spiked scales and long, narrow head and nose gave it a bizarre appearance. It was as black as Darth Vader.
The students had to enter the cage and, while the dragon lizard hissed and whipped its tail, the student had to pet it to calm it down. Soon the lizard’s hiss changed to what was obviously a hiss of ecstasy. The ability to walk right over to what seemed like a live, angry dragon, changed the perspective of the student. It allowed him to overcome his fears and spar better.
I found that each encounter served to alter the state of consciousness of the student, gradually bringing him or her to be able to connect better with the animals, and with each other. It allowed the student to be able to perceive the consciousness of the animal and understand how he could control his own behavior to control the behavior of the animal so it would calm down. This is an essential skill in sparring.
The pine and bull snakes were great teachers. Their hiss was so loud it seemed like you were standing right next to a steam locomotive. You would walk near the cage and the incredible hiss would suddenly be upon you. It was very hard not to jump into the air with fright even though you knew it was just a harmless snake. The student would pick it up and the snake dug the tip of its tail (which was fairly sharp) into his arm as it stared at him. It looked like it was saying, “Now take that!”
The students soon realized that as frightening as the animals seemed at first, they were very gentle when handled correctly. I once bought a thirteen foot reticulated python from someone because it was too vicious for them to handle. I thought this would make a great animal for my students to handle. But when I brought it into the Tai-chi studio the snake became very tame. We couldn’t get it to misbehave if we wanted to. I had played up this snake as being very tough to handle. I guess it sensed the peaceful atmosphere and felt safe.
I used to have a very large African python. This species is very active and very intelligent. As you hold it, the snake brings its face right next to yours to see you (snakes’ eyesight isn’t very good). Its movements are sudden. It will quickly turn around, come right up to your face and then just stare at you without moving (just sticking out its tongue). I have found that there are some people who don’t like that (though I can’t imagine why. It seems endearing to me) If you can get used to the African python, you can get used to the intensity of sparring.
I used to bring in many species of monkeys and to keep them from getting bored, we would play fight with each other. I got into the cages and just started mixing it up. The monkeys loved it so much that each time I stopped fighting they would complain loudly to keep playing. So many hours were spent fighting with the monkeys that it was easy for me to spar in their “style”. The same was true of snakes and lizards of course. But I worked with many strange animals as well. The best fighters were the tayras and grisons which are related to the weasels but much larger. Each species loved to play fight and they had more strength and endurance than I had. Raccoon-like animals like the coati mundi were also a lot of fun. I probably spent two hours a day fighting with various animals to keep them amused.
Sparring with people then became easy. No person was as quick or had as much endurance as the animals. The animals were my real sparring partners. It would be impossible to duplicate the training you get when working directly with animals. Yet few people have this opportunity. These days I have too much work to maintain a large collection of animals and so my students don’t receive that kind of training anymore. I hope one day to create a training center where people can learn directly from animals as well as from human teachers, as I did many years ago. Wouldn’t it be a great experience to learn martial arts and healing exercises from both a human and from animal teachers?
My students and I used to have long talks about what we learned from our experiences with animals and how to apply them to sparring or to healing. I could tell which animal the student had been working with from how he sparred that day.
You always have to respect the animal’s power, though. I remember working in the Bronx Zoo one summer. I worked with the small mammals, the monkeys and the apes. I opened the shift case for a gorilla. This allows the gorilla to move to this separate cage so you can clean its main cage. After he entered the shift cage, he sat down. I then began to close the large iron door. It weighed five hundred pounds and was closed by pushing an iron bar. It took all my might to gradually push it closed but about one inch before closing, the gorilla placed his finger on the door and flung it back. The door came crashing open. I believe the gorilla gave me a little smirk.
When I spent two months in Nicaragua we had to catch our own food. The townspeople were going on a caiman hunt (caiman are a type of alligator) and I was invited. At night you can only see their eyes reflecting back from your flashlight. The head caiman wrangler used a forked stick to catch the caiman’s neck and he and another man flung it into the canoe. He turned to me and said, “Grab its head and close its mouth”. Now, this 10 foot caiman was snapping its jaws and thrashing its tail. I wasn’t prepared to move towards the snapping jaws let alone to grab them. But the alternative was for us all to just stand there with a snapping caiman in the canoe. So I jumped on top of its head and bear hugged its jaws. The head wrangler then tied the mouth with a rope. We ate well that night.
If you can jump towards the snapping jaws of a Central American alligator, you won’t fear sparring or for that matter, doing anything else in life.
The animal forms of Kung-fu give you a taste of fighting like wild animals. I believe that a teacher of animal styles should have extensive experience with the animals of those styles. Otherwise you are just doing “empty” movements with no real experience of what is behind the movements. When the student spars with the teacher, the student should really feel that he is sparring with an animal because the animal spirit is indeed, in the teacher.
As our civilization moves further away from nature, the Kung-fu forms can help us keep a feeling for the wild so that at least, our bodies can remain natural.
