Letter Forms of Mang Chaun

[Johnlogic121]

In Mang Chaun Kung Fu, there were about 120 short forms called "letter forms." These were sets that had about ten moves each, combining striking and blocking with the hands. When we practiced these, we would stand facing a vertical posterboard that had a drawing associated with the letter form sketched on it. The visual image helps you remember the form. When you execute the movements, you use your hands to "paint" the lines of the visual image in the air like you are doing calligraphy. Certain letter forms are more effective in sparring than other letter forms, and each has associations of offense and defense with other letter forms. People who knew about thirty of these forms could mentally decide to shift into a certain one of these letter forms during a fight and then they had a few seconds to let their arms "do the fighting for them" as they run through the reflex of the sequences and decide what to do next. It was a kind of simplification to ordinary boxing, but you might almost classify it as a form of "temple boxing" because the assumption is that the other guy will also be trying to apply some of these letter forms in his fighting as well, and normally only the group you train with has those forms in their arsenal. When people spar this way, you do occassionally see unnecessary movements, but if somebody picks a letter form that fights well against the letter form that the opponent picked, you see a clash of hits fall all over the body of the person who picked the weaker choice. Learning and remembering these forms is easy when you follow a diagram, and the concept is very interesting because it gives you a little bunch of movements together in a small set. When you get advanced, you can "paint" the movements of the form sideways or upside-down or in another kind of order rather than the basic sequence, and this makes it more difficult to judge what letter form the other guy is using. Under regimented sparring rules with these forms, you tend to use speed and rush fast to get through the current form you are using before you apply the next one, but if you were applying these movements in a real fight your could naturally skip movements as the circumstances demanded. Has anybody else heard of letter forms? Does any other style practice them? Thanks in advance, -JL

[bushido_man96]

I have never heard of these letter forms before.

Going along with one letter being better than another; I don't understand how this exactly works. If some letters are inferior, then why bother with them in the first place? Wouldn't you just got with the ones that are superior?

[Johnlogic121]

My understanding of the letter forms is that the ones in the first group of thirty that seem inferior to the others are actually superior when compared to certain other forms in the later sets. There are 120 total, and the realtionships between all of them are nonlinear, so you can't just make a list of them in order and have a definitive and clear understanding of what the best ones are. It goes back to the idea that Dragon style can defeat Tiger style, Tiger style can defeat Leopard, and Leopard can defeat Dragon. Three-way relationships between the strength of various forms is one reason why there are apparently thousands of villidges all over China arranged in groups of three, where the family clan in each villidge possesses a style that can defeat the enemy of their enemy but not their enemy directly. Thus, peace is the best long-term option because if you defeat the people you can beat then they are weaker and can't kill off the people who are really good at killing you. That's how my Sifu described it. With the letter forms, you could potentially use any one of the 120 forms against any one of the other 119, and the way the monks carefully designed these forms is that all of them are basically good against about half of the others and weak against the other half. Learning how to fight with the letter forms is a mental exercise that you can learn quickly since you can gain a new letter form in forty-five minutes of a class night because they only have about ten movements each. Like I mentioned above, it could be classified as a form of "Temple boxing" because the assumption is that you will be fighting someone else who is also using the letter forms, but the applications for self-defense purposes are usually pretty good.

[bushido_man96]

Again, I don't know about the "this style trumps this style" ideas. I don't really follow that line of thinking. One should take a holistic approach to fighting.

[Johnlogic121]

What do you mean by a holistic approach to fighting? I'm curious as to your point of view on the issue. Thanks, -JL.

[bushido_man96]

By "holistic," I mean training in such a way that you can deal with a myriad of attacks. Striking, grappling, clinching, etc. There are only so many ways that the body can attack in (efficiently), and therefore, instead of learning a "form" and then a "form" that counters it, you learn attacks and defenses that can be spread over various scenarios.