Worlds Apart

拳怕少壯, 棍怕老郎

The fist fears the young and vigorous, the stick the old gentleman.

若能棍，則各利器之法，從此得矣¹

As skilled with the stick, then the method for each sharp weapon is henceforth obtained.

赤手空拳

Unarmed and defenceless (empty hands and empty fists)

The first meaning brought by such a saying is, of course, that boxing and fighting with weapons are actually very different.

The legend of empty hands may partly be something from our modern times. Misunderstanding the rationale behind empty hand training, nationalism, the transition to entertainment are some of the reasons.

Old martial arts did evolve when they became a practice for civilians, which makes it hard sometimes to decipher their original true methods of training. Nevertheless, at least two justifications behind empty hand training can still be found:

• In practices where a deep transformation of the body is required, empty-handed routines (most of the weapon ones too) were made to improve power, speed, precision, flexibility, nimbleness and acquire certain skills, but not to learn how to fight. Fighting was taught separately and mostly by, practice makes perfect, fighting….
• Training empty-handed was a way to firstly find how to correctly move one’s body according to the martial skills sought, the body shifting more freely when one does not have to handle a weapon.

The change of name of a known art from Tang, a reference to the Chinese, to empty, using the homophony (in Japanese) between the characters 唐 and 空 to bow to Japanese nationalism before the Second World War has also added to the confusion. Indeed, thus the Way of the Empty Hand was born and, little by little, the stories to justify it. In our present days, nationalism definitively remains a trend in Chinese martial arts² and one shall be cautious about it.

Martial arts have also become a fully pledge entertainment³ and demonstrations where an empty-handed person overpowers a few armed opponents do look good.

It used to be said that one can sleep naked but never without his/her weapon at hand. In modern days, the difference some make between ritual and survival fights and a lot of self-defence schools are remainders that fighting with weapons follows a separate set of rules where actually skills (the old gentleman) supersede over sheer force (the young and vigorous). The choice of stick as a weapon either follows the first quote spirit or is just a way to stress that ‘even with a stick, needless to say, with blades…’

On the other hand, one has to come to terms with the fact that, as far as empty hands fighting is concerned, it will be sheer force which is more important than skills, a fact long forgotten by a lot of practices.

More than just pointing out the difference between empty hands and armed fighting, the saying is also a way to describe two needs, improving the body and experience, the next post.

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1 劍經 明 俞大猷, Sword Canons, Ming Dynasty, Yu Dayou. This opinion can be tempered as another theory stipulates that the stick is the mother of all the rigid weapons while the chain all the flexible ones. And, as far as sharp ones are concerned, sword and spear both had flexible and rigid versions, blocking, thrusting and paring, 攔, 拿, 紥 against overturning, piercing and bending upward, 翻, 鑽, 翹 for example.

2 Numerous martial arts TV shows with foreigners being shown the superiority of Chinese martial arts being one of the typical examples.

3 In the old days people would make a difference between demonstration forms, meant to be performed during festivals, flowery enough to please the crowd, and skills ones, meant to study the art.