Crikey a lot happened since I last checked!
Well you won’t hear that from me. To me it’s just all motion. Tell me it’s a block and watch me use it as a strike. Good on you for exploring. You could just use it as such on a resisting opponent and make a video.
Gone are the days where a person says "kung fu technique does this" Sometimes you just have to show how it works through application.
No it was on another forum. I said about how I regularly used the technique (in a different way) in sparring and they were essentially like "no, its still not a strike, just because you use it as one, doesn't mean it is one"
I mean it's dumb because most Shaolin practitioners teach it as a strike! Some people have drank a little too much of the everything is a throw Kool-Aid. Sure somethings are, but doesn't mean they aren't other things too.
One guy even tried an appeal to authority to prove the application I was talking about was wrong, saying a highly respected master had told him it was a throw, and I was like yeah, nice try, but the guy who you're name dropping is the one that taught this specific application of this move!
The yao (Cantonese for soft, supple) concept is differentiated from gong (hard) in the same way yin and yang are (in fact, gong is yang, yao is yin), but in practice since you are doing these movements isotonically in the fist sets, it's never 100% one or the other. There are a bunch of kuen poems about this along the lines of "hard but not too hard, soft but not too soft".
The Yao step (bu) from changquan probably isn't related to the southern Yao (southern Shaolin bridge), but I was curious if there was a connection. Doesn't seem to be a lot of material out there on the Yao Bu (as Damien pointed out, often this stuff is just taught as-is the way it was passed down).
So Yao Kui in Mandarin would be Róu Qiáo, so a different concept that Yao Bu. 搖 as opposed to 柔, shaking rather than soft. It's an odd name. Of course characters being what they are, it could also be sway, twist, rotate, brandish, astound.... but my teacher learnt it from his teacher, Cui Xiqi as shaking, and he's generally considered one of the greats of his time. But as I've mentioned before, literacy is not exactly a pre-requisite for being a good martial artist, and they have the same tone and character, so at some point in the past someone may have just got confused! So it's likely that the name got changed over time. Yáo Bù as twisting or rotating step would make more sense in the context and help to distinguish it from Gōng Bù.
Northern Shaolin does have similar principles of softness and hardness in balance though. For example if your hard strike misses and you over extend, you collapse your body into them to give you the opportunity to recover. And there's the basic ideas like straight but not straight, move backwards to go forwards etc, all with that idea of multiple directions or approaches being linked.
We don't practice the same standing work you see in some southern styles though, such as the posture
@Oily Dragon showed. Northern and Southern Shaolin are really completely different styles, though of course everything has parallels when you're talking applying body mechanics. Styles with the same or similar names are another cause for mass confusion amongst the kung fu community! I mean there are so many different Hong/Hung styles out there, but they're not all related. A poor grasp of language, attribution to legendary/historical characters and myth learnt as history have a lot of explaining to do!
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