New Videos from the Bagua Historical Swordsmanship Project: Chopping Sabre vs. Butterfly Knives, and Bagua Knife Experiment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mallewEmmvo
This bout is part of the Bagua Historical Swordsmanship Project, a side-project of Cateran Society president Chris Thompson. In this video, Chris is using the chopping sabre method of Yin Fu Baguazhang against the butterfly knives of Combined Combatives instructor Al Giusto.
Bagua Knife Experiment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUbET7hzBOE
In the study of history, a “commonplace” is a statement that has been repeated so many times that it is no longer questioned- almost everyone takes it as a fact, without ever checking for themselves if it’s really true. “Commonplaces” are a big problem in the martial arts. One often hears seemingly authoritative statements made by respected instructors that have actually never been tested or checked with primary sources to determine their validity. People often become attached to their favorite commonplaces, holding onto them in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
One of the purposes of the Bagua Historical Swordsmanship Project is to take no commonplace at face value, but to check and see what really happens. I expect to find that some of them are true, some of them are false, and with some of them it depends on context. In this video, I’m checking out the commonplace that the principles of Bagua weapons usage are contained in the empty-hand forms of the art, and that it should be possible to use Bagua weapons without specific training in them as long as you train in the palm changes. To test this notion, I fought a bout with rubber knives against an opponent using a different form of knife-work. My goal was to use my knife with a method based on the Yin Fu Bagua penetrating palms. Although I’ve done a fair amount of knife work in general, I have no Bagua-specific knife training and am simply improvising based on my practice of the palm changes. You can judge the results for yourself. Is this commonplace true or false- or something in between?
Two caveats are in order. One is that a single experiment against a single opponent doesn’t really prove anything- it’s just a step in the right direction. The second is that a knife vs. knife duel such as we are depicting in this bout is something that can only happen by mutual consent, the granting of which would be proof of suicidal insanity and/or stupidity. So this should not be seen as a “self defense” type of situation, but more as a “proof of concept” experiment. If it’s really true that the Bagua empty-hand forms contain the basic skills of Bagua weapons work, I should be able to do okay in this bout without any specific Bagua knife training, and I should be able to do so while retaining a Bagua “flavor” to some extent.
You can decide for yourself if I succeeded, but whether I did or not isn‘t really the point. The point is that we should never accept anything at face value merely because we heard it first from someone we respect. We should try to find out for ourselves. This attitude is becoming more and more common in traditional martial arts, yet it still meets with a surprising amount of resistance. My contribution to the debate is to apply empirical methods to the historical Bagua weapons- rather than relying on oral tradition about “the way things were” I want to see for myself to the extent that I can. In this way I hope to get closer to the truth behind the tradition.
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Originally Posted by Grumblegeezer
