Pendekar Passes

Paul de Thouars

1930-2013

The Pendekar has died, and I need to speak to it here. He was my teacher's teacher, and though what we learn now isn't quite the same, the genesis of our art came from Paul de Thouars. For that, I am grateful.

I never knew him personally. We talked on the phone a couple of times, back when I started Bukti training and I bought some videos from him. I have trained under one of his most senior students for almost eighteen years.

He was a most knowledgeable martial artist. He was the man who first brought Silat Sera (later Serak, and then Serak™) to the United States. He and his brothers, Willem and Victor, were among the earliest teachers of silat and kun-tao in the U.S., and over the decades, Paul's teachings eventually helped produce some outstanding teachers.

He was, back in the day for our art, the man.

Not that there is agreement on that, but that's what my teacher said, and he would know.

I used to engage frequently in the silat word-wars. I spent way too much energy doing so, and it was, I realized, a waste of time, so mostly I stopped doing it. Now and again, I'd stick my head up and see who was back-biting whom, and the accusations of lying, cheating, stealing, homicide, and my-style-is-better-than-your-style pomp and ceremony were (and still are) always evident.

When Paul passed, it was in full swing, and paused but briefly for condolences:

He is a miserable lying son-of-a-bitch! What? He died? Oh. Well, in that case, he was a swell teacher and a fine human being ...

One isn't supposed to speak ill of the dead, and I won't go very far down that road; then again, I'm not going to gloss over it. I will say what everybody involved with the brothers de Thouars already knows: They were a contentious family, with each other, and with their students. That more than a few of their best students went their own ways, and as often as not, involuntarily so. 

The old joke about Sera players is, you aren't anybody until you've been kicked out of your system at least once, but I was there, I saw how shabbily my teacher was treated by his teacher, and it wasn't funny, it was ugly.

Loyalty is supposed to be a two-way street, but it isn't always. 

Somebody will step up to take Paul's lineage, though who the best-qualified teacher is will be hotly debated as much as anything else. Lineage-holders in our art have been changed more often than a diarrheic baby's diaper. Yesterday's fair-haired boy, who spent a decade or two of close personal study with the head guru and was deemed one of only a couple finished students, will, as often as not, be today's ne'er-do-well ungrateful know-nothing who, when the guru tells it, studied only a couple of weeks, and didn't really learn anything.  

Odd that that happens, but it surely does. Look around.

It won't be Maha Guru Stevan Plinck stepping up to claim Paul's lineage. When I jokingly said maybe we should start calling him "Pendekar," he said, "Please, don't!" Not even as a joke.  

Paul de Thouars has passed on, and it was, for a number of reasons, a sad thing. I mark his passing with mixed emotions. This is not a political post; it's the truth as I see it. 

Passage

I just saw this on Facebook:

Joe Judt

Well, the news is breaking, so I feel safe to post. It is with great sadness that to say that Pendakar Paul DeThouars of Bukti Negara passed away last night. My condolences to his friends, family and students. In particular, my prayers go out to his brothers, who have always been kind to me. We lost a hugely influential martial arts teacher. Godspeed.

Perils of the Pit

The river that was Guru's yard has been diverted, and it has been dry enough this summer for us to reëstablish the sand pit for silat training.

Not so much a pit, actually, as a big pile of sand spread out for a gelanggang–a circular workout area. It tends to creep down the slope toward the chicken yard and needs be shoveled back uphill, but it makes for a nice slow-your-feet-down training surface. 

Churning in ankle-deep sand is not the same as moving on dry ground or a nice concrete garage floor. If you need lightning foot-speed to make a technique work, you need a workaround, 'cause it isn't happening there.

Of course, falling onto sand is somewhat softer than the concrete. Then again, dropping onto a knee repeatedly to practice shoots for single- or double-leg takedowns, and then being tossed by the defender hither and yon for continued groundwork does involve some abrasive action to one's bare skin.

Note to self: Don't wear shorts to class in the sand. Those sand burns take longer to scab over and heal than they used to take ...

Sharps

In our version of silat, there is a fair amount of blade work. A lot of it is with short knives, which we can define here as in the 4"-8" range. Some of it is with longer blades, and currently, we are playing with a machete-length blade (using sticks), of 18-24." Last class, we decided on the spur of the moment to do this, and most of us hadn't brought our practice blades, so we used sticks from Guru's yard. 

 I have a cut-down bokken from Cold Steel, courtesy of Edwin, of a dense and hard plastic that can do battle with an axe handle and survive. Would that I had it at class: the trimmed axe handle Todd used killed two of the wooden sticks I was using in a ten-minute stretch. Busted in half.

The main point here is to not think of this as a stick, but as a short sword, and to always keep your edge and point in mind. A stick is not a blade, and even though they may be utilized in a similar manner at times, the sword is a more efficient and effective weapon. You can use it like a stick, but you can also slice and dice and stab. Better,  else you'd have seen the Knights of the Round Table or the samurai or the vikings all armed with cudgels and not long swords, katana, or battle axes ...

The problem with practicing a weapon you aren't apt to really use is that you need a fair amount of time in grade to get even minimally adept with it. If you were carrying such a thing on a daily basis you could unhusk it and wave it about at odd moments to burn in the moves. Carry a tactical folder, you can practice pulling it from your pocket and opening it in places where nobody is watching. Walk into the mall sporting a sword on your hip, there isn't going to be any place where somebody won't be watching you, and maybe some of them will be police with hands on their sidearms ...

Black Steel

 Balinese Wedung, above;

Keris pejet, below.

Enlarge the image above and look closely, 

you can see where the hot steel was pinched with 

thumb and finger tips ...

Alan Maisey's latest keris catalog is up. If you have a hankering for Indonesian steel, have a look.

Sand

So, a few of us went to Guru's house yesterday morning. Did a workout, and then the dump-truck with four yards of clean sand arrived, and we shoveled and spread that around. Not exactly a sand-pit, because it's on top the ground and will eventually migrate down the sllpe to the chicken yard, but it does create a surface upon which we can fall and roll and do ground work. The combination of that and the slant of the ground makes for interesting footing. 

Plus Guru's granddaughters and cats love it ...

Ch-Ch-Changes ... (For Our Students)

Those of you paying attention here will have gotten it that the Maha Guru Plinck-style of silat has undergone some changes. Guru began showing this to us what? about a year and a half or so ago. The older stuff hasn't been tossed out, but it has been altered, and while I've spoken to some of these changes before, I want to get a little more into them before the new video showing the djurus comes out.

So, I'll speak to what has been done, and why, based upon my own perception and training.

It starts–as everything in our branch–with the djurus and langkas. We have Pendekar Paul's interpretation, but he wasn't the only de Thouars and de Vries student of the art.

In Paul's teaching, the djurus are started with hips and shoulders aligned and facing forward, with the hips "corked," in a front stance. 

In the new interpretation, the beginning stance is an open-horse. (Classic horse stance is as if you were sitting astride a horse with your feet in the stirrups, i.e., feet parallel and at a ninety-degree angle to an opponent to your left or right. The open-stance version angles the feet outward, closer to forty-five degrees.)

Obviously, if you get into a sudden fight, you start where you are, and you don't try to get into a stance to deal with actions that are moving too fast to allow it. Stances are transitional, you don't pose there like Bruce Lee for the camera, you move through them, but we are talking about the djurus here.

Kind of like the old joke about karate players who trained barefoot holding up a hand to an attacker and saying, "Wait, wait, let me take my shoes off ..."

So, why change it thus?

Several reasons:

Guru noticed, in old photographs of senior players, that they used this stance. He started with that, then retro-engineered it: Why would they stand this way? Why didn't we do it now? Did we find something better, or did we lose track of it? 

He talked with and watched seniors in other branches, looked at what they did, realized what they had–and what they didn't have.

This is the mark of somebody who is skilled, and who can connect the dots.

What he understood is that this side stance protects the center better against an opponent on the line of the lead foot. (And, I suspect, that you can also alter your aim to face somebody on the opposite line without having to move your feet.) 

Not that you can't cover your centerline in a front stance, but that the front stance needs the back-up hand more to do it. You can throw up a shield with the lead arm against somebody out there and enter. Entering as you face forward gives them a bigger target. Following your lead shoulder in with your shield up is safer.

The side stance is stronger, and it takes a lot of stress off the knees when you drop lower, a good thing–speaking as somebody who has had knee surgery.

Once you enter, then the front stance is effective; you can turn and cork, to deliver a stronger, hip-driven attack, your center is at less risk because you are already in and past a lot of the opponent's tools. So that's not being thrown away, but used when it is safer and more effective to employ.

This is reflected in the new djurus. Learn this with the first two, and you can alter the rest likewise.

This doesn't violate any principles. New students won't have a problem. Old students? It does take some practice to switch to, after doing it the other way ten thousand times. When I first saw it, I confess I was somewhat skeptical. After trying it? I can see why it is better.

The basic punches have been refocused and altered to suit the new structure. The Djuru 2 highline punch is now delivered with the fist held closer to an anatomical-chart position. 

Anatomy charts show somebody with their arms hanging down, palms forward. From this position if you raise your arm straight up and make a fist, you'll be in the new position.

What this means is the angle of the arm and wrist is such that the palm is upward, and somewhere around forty-five degrees–halfway between a flat-punch and palm straight up. Looks something like a stretched-out uppercut. 

Structurally, a twisted punch is somewhat less mechanically-sound than a flat punch, which is a little less so than the upward-45 punch. You can see this by how the radius and ulna align with each other as you do them. Bones parallel are a somewhat-stronger structure. There was a researched article about this in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts a few years back.

Lowline punches will generally be done with the palm down. Centerline can be done either way, or flat.

Pretty much that's what you'll notice if you see the new forms demonstrated. The changes do ripple through everything, but position and timing and distance are all still there, mostly it's position that has altered. Once you start getting used to it, you can see why it's better.