I'm sure that the majority of mcdojos of any given style don't intend to give you dodgy instruction and likely believe they are teaching exactly as it should be taught.............. but they're not
Bad instruction perpetuated is a vicious cycle of token practice and unfortunately, for those students who really are dedicated, often not what they're paying for at all.
I spent about a year in china, and though it doesn't sound like long, when you're exposed to it in this capacity and where it was created , it is an experience tyhat I couldn't get in 5 nor 10 years at home!!! It's everywhere and in all styles conceivable. You go out in the play ground, and they're playing gongfu, you go out early of a morning and they're playing taiji or doing bagua palm conditioning. You turn your back in class to write something on the board..and when you turn back around, the students are dimmaking each other ............. You have a meeting with your principal or a colleague and end up sparring. And every one has a new story to tell from history ( and the ppl you meet on those long 1 and 2 day hot and dirty train rides across the country is an awesome experience of its own) , to information on political influence, to religion to origin to training methods and ,medicine to other gwailo ( foreigners ) you meet on the same adventiure as yourself that you can have a laugh with about how sick you are and bad you smell, how much your legs ache when you have to do a squat toilet ( with no toilet paper or light) after a days training and so on. It's a poor, often extremely hot or cold crazy gongfuing nation. If you haven't done the extended trip, I highly recommend it to everyone!!!! In fact I know a guy who did the same trip for 6 mths, did a very quick stop in Taiwan for the same , and went to Cambodia, wrote a book about it , won a few titles and now is doing kungfu movies!!!! lol........ extremely cool stuff!!
In that year I spent abbout 4 mths just near the Henan Songshan shaolin temple ( and only 20 mins on a bus to the very first buddhist temple in china ever in luoyang ) , spent time at the most famous and best reputed gongfu schools in the world ( tagou), spent time with monks, played with their students, and also visited and got instruction from schools, shifu, ex-champions from both china and abroad, police, army officers and a couple of masters from Beijing, Shenyang ( Manchuria) , Shanghai, Guangzhou, Anhui and had a quick look at HongKong.
I was there to both study as much "authentic" gongfu as I could possibley find, and research gongfu history and philosophy for my phd in chan buddhism. I also taught English to make a living to post grads and teachers , so I was exposed to alot of academic and historical information. I also had quite intimate contact with a couple of disciples ( one with a school and few monks of his own (
) , and another who is a writer , reporter and publisher for quite a successful gongfu magazine with an abundance of scholarly information and similarly many contacts endowed with information himself) daily for the most part for about 14mths. Alot of my students had history degrees and majors and helped me interperate many a chinese language document or translation that would have otherwise been inaccessable......... alot of these works and so on not being translated anywhere in english, and until we get a programme that converts chinese characters into english, likely never will.
I have been extremely privilaged to have learnt what I have, but am always open to consider new or different information and understand thoroughly that there is always more to learn and always will be.
Hope this helps
Blooming Lotus
) that was your assumption and we all know what assumption does. What I said was ( or meant to if I didn't literate clearly enough) is that when asking, gesturing to indicate and speaking about taiji, locals referred to as ba gua, just like when demoing dimmak they refered to that as chin na. Go figure a local mind. I've even had shaolin called wushu, and it is anything but, shaolin gongfu being closer to the original style and wushu being a governmental compulosry and dictated style created during the CR, more akin to gymnastics and performance but also a term meaning martial arts in general.
