taken from http://www.taijiworld.com/sudden-violence.html
Sudden Violence
This is an excerpt from Erle's book. "Sudden Violence, The Montaigue System of Self-Defence"
Introduction.
Sudden Violence is an apt name for the eclectic martial arts or self-defence system that I now teach. It has come mainly from the Internal Martial Arts of Taijiquan and Baguazhang. The name, "Sudden Violence" was suggest to me by one of my long distance students in the USA, Doug Skall who wanted a video series called "Sudden Violence". A series that only dealt with the very direct and dangerous street-fighting method that I now teach.
Hidden within the Internal Martial Arts are some of the most violent self-defence methods ever invented. And that's what self-defence has to be in order to survive street attacks. If you try to 'yield' to an attack in the traditional manner that most teachers tell us to, then you invite defeat and possible injury and death in street attacks. And it is so obvious to me that teachers who tell their students that all they have to do it to yield to an attack just to show the attacker that they know what they are doing, have never themselves been in a serious, life-threatening situation. It's all there in the Taijiquan and Baguazhang 'classics'. However, most teachers take these classic saying too literally and try to execute what those classics say before they have risen to a high enough level. You cannot understand what the great old masters have said when you are not at their level to begin with. The old masters did not write the classics when they were beginning! They wrote them once they had understood fully the meaning of 'internal' and 'small frame'. They wrote them when they were very advanced. What is the use of writing a guide for beginners? The beginner can learn the basic movements from anyone who knows them well enough. But once learnt, it is very important to have a teacher who is able to impart the inner knowledge and also to take the student on to the more advanced forms. And only then will the student understand the true meaning of what the classics are trying to teach us.
The whole secret to learning about 'sudden violence' in the internal martial arts, is in the movements themselves and how the practitioner executes those movements. How the body moves is singularly the most important area of one's training. I have seen so-called karate masters who should not be any more than a blue belt because of the way they move. Sure they know all of the movements of the kata, but they cannot do them! You can easily see that they do not have any real power, power that comes from fa-jing, because their body is so stiff!
it helps if you quote the ENTIRE passage.