Legends of the Martial Arts Masters

by Susan Lynn Peterson

  Nai Khanom Tom staggered to his corner and leaned against the post. His next opponent prepared to enter the ring.

  “Enough,” said the king, standing, then clapping his hands twice. “Twelve is enough. Nai Khanom Tom,” he called loudly. “Come and stand before me.”

  Nai Khanom Tom left the ring. He wiped his face on a towel, then handed it to one of several men who had taken up a place in his corner of the ring. He breathed deeply, steadying his breath, then turned, squared his shoulders, and walked to where the king stood waiting for him.

  The king looked into the fighter’s eyes, wondering if he would recognize a god if he saw one. What the king saw was a resolve that made him take a step back. This fighter, even after twelve long, bloody fights, could still break him like a twig in mere seconds.

  “Nai Khanom Tom,” he said, pushing the fear he felt down deep where it could not affect his voice, “you have fought well. I am a man of my word. You will be given clean clothes and a chance to rest. Then my captain will personally escort you to the Siam border.” Nai Khanom Tom bowed his head slightly. The king saw the muscles of his neck quiver as he did so.

  “I have never seen a man fight like you did today,” the king said more quietly. “Be assured that in Burma as well as in Siam, the name of Nai Khanom Tom will be remembered and spoken with respect for many generations.”

  Wing Chun is a Chinese martial art. It was developed over three hundred years ago by Ng Mui, a Buddhist nun in a Shaolin monastery. Ng Mui was a very small woman who found that she was not able to make standard martial arts techniques work against people much larger than she was. She didn’t have a lot of muscle, weight, or a long reach. What she did have was speed and the ability to use an opponent’s size against him. After learning her teacher’s style thoroughly, she began modifying it to suit her needs. The result is what we now call Wing Chun, a quick efficient style named after one of Ng Mui’s best students. This is the story of that student.

  Wing Chun

  Yim Wing Chun was in love. Her boyfriend, Leong Bok Chao, was handsome, intelligent, thoughtful, and, most of all, hopelessly in love with Wing Chun. He was also leaving on a long journey. That journey would take him away from the northern mountains, where Wing Chun lived, to Fukien in the southern part of China. It would take him across difficult terrain, through a region at war against the Manchurian occupation. He and Wing Chun would be apart for more than a year.

  “When I return,” Bok Chao said, “we will get married. I will set up a salt shop near your father’s bean curd shop. We will work together and have beautiful children.”

  “Come home safely,”Wing Chun said, holding his hand tightly to her heart. “I can’t imagine a future without you.”

  Life for Wing Chun was lonely without Bok Chao. Since her mother died several months earlier, Wing Chun had done the cooking and cleaning for her father. During the afternoons she worked in the family shop. Having work to do was a comfort. Her mother had always told her that if she kept busy, the loneliness wouldn’t hurt so badly. So she scrubbed the house and her father’s shop until it shone. But life without either Bok Chao or her mother had a big hole right in the middle of it.

  One day, Wing Chun was in the back of her father’s shop making dao fu, a soft bean curd cheese. She heard her father in the front greet a customer warmly. The two struck up a conversation—her father did love to talk. The customer, a servant of a local warlord, noticed Wing Chun in the back of the shop.

  “Is that your daughter?” the customer said.

  Her father nodded. “Her name is Yim Wing Chun. It means ‘beautiful springtime.’” His eyes were filled with pride.

  “She is very beautiful,” the customer commented, watching Wing Chun’s every move.

  “Yes,” her father said. “And she has a wonderful gentle and giving spirit. I don’t know what I would have done without her since her mother died.”

  “My lord is looking for a wife,” the servant said. “He is very wealthy and very powerful. Your daughter would want for nothing.”

  “I am flattered,” her father said, “but Wing Chun is engaged. She will marry Leong Bok Chao when he returns from Fukien. I’m sorry, but it has already been arranged.”

  “I see,” said the servant. “A pity. I know my lord would find her very desirable.”

  The next day, Wing Chun was sweeping the shop when a large, elegantly armored man stepped up to the front window.

  “Yim Wing Chun,” he said gruffly, almost as though he were issuing a command.

  “I am Yim Wing Chun,” she said, setting aside her broom.

  “Yes,” the large man said to his servant, the man who had been at the shop the day before, “you were right. She will make a beautiful wife for me.” “Call your father,” he said to Wing Chun. “The two of you will come with me. The wedding will be this afternoon.”

  “Sir, I’m engaged.” Wing Chun said. “I can’t marry you. I don’t even know you.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “That doesn’t matter to me. I am a straightforward man. If I like something, I take it. If someone stands in my way, I go right over the top of him. I find it makes life much simpler. Now call your father.”

  Wing Chun turned and began to walk home to get her father. She was eager to get away from the terrible man at the shop, and soon found her walk had turned into a stumbling trot and then a run. What an ugly, terrible, altogether nasty man, she thought. I can’t marry him. I can’t. I can’t marry him. Lost in her thoughts and fear, she rounded the corner of a vegetable shop and almost ran into a woman buying a cabbage.

  “I beg your pardon,” Wing Chun said as she looked up to see the woman was a Buddhist nun.

  “And what has you dashing through the market?” the nun asked, a gentle smile creasing her old face.

  “I have to, I have to get my father,” Wing Chun stammered. “He . . . I mean a man, a warlord . . . my father has to . . .”

  “Slow down,” the nun replied. “The warlord and your father are not here right now. Right now it is just you and I. There is nothing here that can hurt you. My name is Ng Mui. I am a nun at the White Crane Temple. Take a couple of deep breaths. If you will tell me what has you so upset, maybe I can help.”

  Wing Chun breathed in and out. Looking into the gentle face of the woman standing before her, she saw a deep calm. The tension drained from her body, and she began to cry. Before she knew it, she had told the kind nun the whole story about Bok Chao, her mother’s death, the warlord.

  “I see,” said Ng Mui. “Let’s go get your father. I think I may have a solution to your problem.”

  “So you see,” Wing Chun’s father said to the warlord sitting in their home. “I couldn’t possibly arrange for a suitable wedding in less than a year’s time.”

  Ng Mui looked on from the corner where she sat holding Wing Chun’s hand. He was handling the situation just as she had coached him. “I need some time to plan the feast. A great man like yourself should be honored properly on his wedding day. And I need to send word to Bok Chao breaking the engagement. With all the turmoil in the country, it could easily take a year to find him. Yes, I think a year would be appropriate. A year from today you will marry my daughter at a wedding that people will talk about for years to come.”

  “A year,” said the warlord. “She had better be worth the wait.” “Oh, she will be,” her father said.

  “A year, then.” The warlord stood, cast a quick glance at Wing Chun, spun on his heel, and left.

  “That gives us a year to prepare,” Ng Mui said. “Mr. Yee, please send a message to Bok Chao. Wing Chun, meet me tomorrow at dawn outside the gates of the temple. A year is none too long. We must work hard.”

  At dawn, Wing Chun walked the path up the hill to the monastery. Just outside the gates in a small garden she found Ng Mui. The old nun stood motionless, he
r feet about shoulder’s width apart, knees bent, her right hand in a fist pulled back to her side at the waist, her left hand open in front of her chest. On her face was a look of complete concentration. As she watched, Wing Chun saw that the nun was not in fact standing motionless. Slowly, too slowly to be seen, her left hand inched steadily forward. Wing Chun sat down on a bench and watched fascinated.

  Ng Mui finished her exercise. Her face damp with perspiration, she turned to Wing Chun and motioned for her to come.

  “It’s your turn to practice,” she said. “I see now why I was sent here. I thought it was just bad luck when the war against the Manchurians drove me from my home. But I see now that I was sent here to teach you. You have a year to learn how to turn power, rudeness, and brute force against itself. Here. Stand like this.”

  Spring turned into summer. Each morning Wing Chun climbed the hill to the garden outside the monastery. Summer turned into fall. Her punches and kicks gained speed and power. Winter covered the garden with snow and ice, and Wing Chun learned to keep her feet under her center while moving quickly and effortlessly. Winter yielded to spring. The day of the wedding approached.

  “It’s time,” Ng Mui said to Wing Chun on the day of their final lesson. “Send word to the warlord that we need to see him about some last minute details.”

  The warlord came into town sitting tall atop a powerful horse. Wing Chun looked up at him, at the heavy armor covering huge muscles, at the thickness of his neck and the size of his hands. He stepped down off his horse and walked over to where Wing Chun, her father, and Ng Mui stood.

  “What is this ‘last minute detail’ that’s so important that it couldn’t wait until the wedding tomorrow?” If anything he had grown even uglier in the last year.

  “It is a matter of honor,” Ng Mui said stepping forward to meet him. “You see, Wing Chun is a member of a secret society of martial artists. As a part of her oath, she promised never to marry a man who could not defeat her in an unarmed fight.”

  “What!” the warlord shouted. “That’s ridiculous. I have never heard of such a thing in my life.”

  “That’s not surprising,” Ng Mui said calmly. “Not many people have. The society is secret, after all.”

  “You’re saying I have to fight her, fight this ... puny little thing?” “Yes,” said Ng Mui. “She is, as you say, quite small. It should be no problem for a powerful man like you. A mere formality, really.” “Do you want this?” the warlord said to Wing Chun.

  “I must, sir,” she said. “I would be humiliated to marry someone who was not my equal.”

  “‘Not your equal?’ Not your equal? Such foolishness. I will be happy to flatten you, to teach you some respect for your future husband.”

  He waved over his servant, stripped off his sword and his armor, and piled them in his servant’s arms. He rolled his head on his shoulders to loosen up.

  “Let’s finish this nonsense quickly. It would be a shame to mess up such a pretty face just before the wedding.”

  Wing Chun stepped out to the center of the street. She faced the warlord calmly. She nodded ever so slightly to him, then brought her hands up in front of her. A crowd began to gather.

  The warlord closed the distance with a swagger. He put his hands up and charged, his hands grabbing for her waist. Wing Chun shifted her weight, slipped his attack, and at the last second swept his back foot out from under him. The warlord went sprawling into the dust. He stood, brushed the dirt from his knees, and glared at Wing Chun. She met his gaze with a look of calm concentration.

  The warlord, more cautious this time, closed the distance again. Brushing down her guard with his front hand, he swung wildly at her head. Wing Chun used the downward momentum, ducked the punch, and came up under the warlord’s ribs with a fast, hard punch. The warlord grunted in pain and staggered backward. Still clutching his ribs, he reached into his belt and drew out a dagger.

  “I will kill you,” he said, “before I will be beaten by you.”

  With a great cry he charged, driving the dagger toward Wing Chun’s belly. Like a door opening, she pivoted on her heels, slipped the attack, and extended a punch at neck level. The force of the warlord’s attack carried him into it, and it crashed into his throat with a force that picked him up off his feet.

  Lying on the ground he gagged and gasped. His servants rushed to his aid. Ng Mui brushed them aside and knelt next to him. She pried his hands from his throat and examined him.

  “He will live,” she said. “Take him away. He is not worthy of my pupil.”

  The servants gathered up their master and carried him off.

  A few days later Wing Chun was working at her father’s shop. She looked up from the bean curd she was stirring to see Bok Chao looking down at her. A look of pain covered his face.

  “Am I too late?” he asked. “Your father’s note said the wedding was two days ago. Tell me I’m not too late.”

  “No, Bok Chao,” she said. “Even if you had not come for another year, you would not be too late. I would wait a lifetime just for a few seconds as your wife.”

  He gathered her in his arms. “But the warlord . . .” he said.

  “Will not bother us. I convinced him I was more trouble than I was worth.”

  “Then come with me, my wife to be. We have a lot to talk about.” Wing Chun and Bok Chao got married. They decided not to open the salt shop they had planned on, but rather joined the struggle against the Manchurian occupation. Wing Chun taught her husband all she knew about the martial arts. Together they taught students who soon came to call the style Wing Chun.

  Tamo has many names. The one name we don’t know is the name his parents gave him when he was born in India more than fifteen hundred years ago. In China, though, he is called Tamo, in India Bodhidharma, in Japan Taishi Daruma. He introduced Zen to China, and he developed the exercises that later became chuan fa, the ancestor of many of today’s Asian martial arts styles.

  The Eighteen Hands

  Tamo, the one they call the White Buddha, once walked all the way from India to China to visit the Chinese emperor and the Buddhist temples there. With him he brought a new way of living called Zen. Eventually, Zen would reach every corner of China and then find its way to Japan. But when Tamo first arrived in China, Zen simply made him an outcast.

  It seems that when Tamo arrived at the royal palace, the emperor bragged to him about the monasteries he had built, about the scrolls his monks had translated from Sanskrit to Chinese, and about the way he was bringing Buddhism to the people. Tamo, never one to mince words, told the emperor that all these good efforts would not earn him Nirvana. He tried to tell the emperor about Zen. But the emperor branded Tamo a troublemaker and kicked him out of his palace.

  Tamo traveled for a while, then arrived at the gate of a monastery. The abbot of the monastery had already been warned by imperial messengers that Tamo might show up. So when Tamo knocked at the gate, the abbot turned him away. Tamo was not upset. He simply climbed the hill outside the monastery and sat down in a cave to meditate.

  In the morning, when the light was right, the monks could see him there from the window of their scriptorium, the place where they translated and copied Sanskrit scrolls. Never moving, he sat, his eyes focused on a single place on the cave wall.

  Eventually, the abbot sent a young monk to the cave with food. When he returned, the monk said that he could feel the force from Tamo’s eyes as it bounced off the cave walls. In fact, the monk reported, if you looked carefully, you could see where Tamo’s gaze had

  worn small holes in the cave wall. The young monk’s words spread like a fire through the monastery. The next day, the abbot sent an older monk with the food instead. When he returned, the monks asked him if what the young monk said was true. He only replied that he would not engage in idle gossip.

  Tamo remained in the cave
for a long time. Every day the monks saw him in the same place, the same position, staring at the wall. Respect for him grew. So did the rumors. Finally, the abbot decided that Tamo should come down and talk to the monks. Maybe the abbot respected Tamo’s abilities. Maybe he just wanted his gossiping monks to see that this man was merely human, like they were. Whatever his reasons, the abbot brought Tamo into the compound, and from that day nothing was ever the same.

  Tamo showed the monks how to meditate, how to sit quietly on the floor, hands in their laps, eyes fixed on a single point. He taught them how to watch their breath going in and out, how to clear their minds, and take in the energy from the world around them. The monks tried. They tried very hard. A few could meditate from the time the sun first appeared over the horizon to the time it was straight overhead. Most drifted off to sleep after a hundred or two hundred breaths. For all of them, sitting for hours was painful and very frustrating.

  One day the abbot and Tamo were walking together through the monastery grounds, talking about the trouble the monks were having with their meditation. They walked through the scriptorium, where dozens of monks sat bent over desks translating and copying. A few napped at their desks. One monk put a hand to his neck and grimaced, rubbing it and moving it back and forth. His neck seemed to have a permanent bend in it.

  “Are all your monks in such poor shape?” Tamo asked the abbot. “Well,” said the abbot, “mostly they just sit and translate. It is hard on the body, but it is a worthwhile way to spend one’s life.”