wpgtaiji wrote:Yes, Chenfu TRIED to make a standard form. That said, few actually understood what he was doing. The result, everyone made up their own, and now there is no such thing as a standard! The ONLY thing we have are the classics.
I have to say i really love your contributions here, despite not being in total agreement with you I find your posts to be well informed and based on a love of the art.
That being said, I was taught something that was claimed to be a standard form, along with it came a bunch of chinese sayings that i never learned, but i did learn the english meanings of them and they basically constitute a way to standardize the 13 postures according to body type and in relation to the form that came with them. Among some of Cheng-fus students the form is remarkably similar, and yet among others it is not.
i agree with you in general however, that each line or school has their own interpretation of what is standard and it is impossible to claim that there is not a great deal of diversity in how things are done in the many Yang style schools out there.
I have to admit that I have studied a lot of form structure and content from many Yang lines, as well as Wu-hao, Sun and Chen styles and it is my opinion that standardized forms did and do exist in a consistent way and that the variations can often be traced to specific individuals who changed content for various reasons.
There are 3 main variations of the Yang long public form out there, not counting Yang jwing- mings variant. Each of these three has sub-variants out there as well, but they can still be identified as relating to the major variations on the theme. One of these is a so called restored long form where people took Chen Man-chings shorter form and then tried to use it with Cheng-fus book to make a long form, this version of the form is widespread in the USA and is easily seen by those who know what to look for because there are things that were not in the illustrations of the book and that are missing from Man-Chings form, so this version of the long form is also missing them.
some of the areas where key differences can be noted are in Single whip, return tiger to mountain, and white crane spreads wings. the versions that come from Cheng-fus students in a direct line have distinct properties and teachings, one example is that there is no shoulder after white crane spreads/flashes wings in the form coming from Cheng-fu. there is something that looks like shoulder to the untrained eye and in the Man-Ching sourced versions this posture, which is not shoulder, is said to be shoulder. Also in the form coming from Cheng-fu himself the spine tends to align with the rear leg in specific strikes and motions, this is missing from nearly all other forms.
The third major variant of the form comes from Cheng-fus son, who did not have much time to study with his father and who did not study with his fathers prominent students.
there is a lot to this topic, it would easily fill a book to point out this matter in detail