mantis fist

“That doesn’t look like a mantis at all” went one of the comments on youtube video of Liu JingRu Laoshi demonstrating one of the forms of Six Harmonies Mantis Fist (六合螳螂拳).

I’d never thought about it that way before. Liu Laoshi told us it was a mantis form, we learned it, we do it, nothing more to it. True, he is most famous for his ba gua zhang, and secondly his xing yi quan, but Liu Laoshi’s third art is Six Harmonies Mantis. (See the cover of the Taiwan edition of his book, far more exciting than the cover of my mainland edition). So as far as I am concerned, he is the boss, at least in our particular line.

I am stilllllll working on an interview with him. It has been an endless project , with the actual interviews conducted once in Beijing and twice in Tokyo, then the endless translating and writing.

Somewhere in there I asked him about Liu He Tang Lang Quan, the particular branch he teaches. We were learning two of the eight forms that week in Tokyo. One of them (藏花 or cang hua) is much shorter and not, at first glance, obviously mantis-like. By that I mean no motions obviously trying to “look like” a mantis, as we often see in tournaments and exhibitions. (Then again, in application, it becomes very mantis-like, at least to my eyes.)

The other form we learned, 短捶 or duan chui, is much longer and has a few motions which more closely resemble those of a mantis. That, and the fact that it appears first in his book, led me to think it was a core form of the liu he tang lang quan syllabus.

Yet according to Liu, duan chui was not originally part of the liu he tang lang quan syllabus. It was originally called duan chui quan (短捶拳) and was a family art. Someone in that family (林世春) mastered both arts and passed them down together. We can only speculate how much each art may have influenced the forms of the other.

Anyway, these forms have come down to us and I am doing my best to see them with mantis eyes and to do them with a mantis body.