SifuJerry wrote:I just thought I'd try to start a discussion on the very difficult topic of Kuntao.
First of all; how many of you were taught something labelled as Kuntao?
Second; who taught it to you and who were their teachers?
Thirdly; without getting too specific, how would you describe what Kuntao is?
That's a darn good question, but it's also a loaded question. In the broadest
martial arts sense, separate from our clan's history and politics, Kuntao is simply a Hokkien (Amoy dialect, specifically, I believe) term to generically describe martial arts - "fist way." People who used that dialect called their local gungfu systems "kuntao." A lot of the Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia consisted of people from Hokkien province, so the term went with them, and as it mixed with indigenous martial arts, and eventually spread from Southeast Asia, "kuntao" became more synonymous with systems that are a hybrid of Hokkien gungfu and SEAsian arts (especially silat, but there are also Kuntao/Kuntaw systems in the Philippines, which I suppose means they probably combine gungfu with kali. Chuan Fa ("fist method") is a similarly-generic term for martial arts, in Mandarin, that doesn't specifically refer to one martial art. So, without considering the Reeders clan politics, asking "what is Kuntao?" is, at the most generic, like asking "what is gungfu?", or at the most specific, "what is gungfu when it originates in what is now the Hokkien province of China?"
Technically, Hokkien White Crane is kuntao. And perhaps not coincidentally, Liu Seong the elder was primarily known as a White Crane practitioner.
Within the Reeders family of arts, though, it means something considerably more specific. Even the Liu Seong Royal Chuan Fa system has clear Indonesian influence, but no one considers it Kuntao (We have a "Kwitang Form" ostensibly based on Mustika Kwitang Silat, a silat system that traces itself back to Chinese roots, making it a kuntao system in its own right, even though it's not called that). Aside from being more specific than the linguistic meaning, though, there's not a lot of agreement on what exactly it is. GGM Reeders taught a handful of people what he referred to as Kuntao, but it seems clear to me that they learned different things, and sometimes the differences in the different "Kuntao" variations are as significant as the differences between them and the Chuan Fa or Poekoelan systems. I've also heard speculation that the
family kuntao system may not have been taught to anyone but his children (or maybe just one of them), and they're all noticeably absent from the debates on Liu Seong Kuntao. I don't pretend to have nearly enough historical perspective to say whose perspectives have more or less merit - I'm only observing that the perspectives of "those who were there" appears to vary. I doubt that we'll ever know what is what "for sure" now that GGM Reeders has passed on. All we have to go on are the
interpretations of the different people who learned from him, and those interpretations all seem to vary quite a bit.
I'm happy to be learning what I'm learning, and I'm happy to stick with the fairly generic name of "Liu Seong Gung Fu" for the art. To me, the rest is politics, and if I can stay out of the political bickering by not prominently using the "K-word," that's fine by me.