Recently I received an email from a gentleman named Liu Fong with a question about issues of antiquity regarding Shuai Jiao and Wuji Quan. I believe it was a thoughtful question and one that is of interest to persons all over the world who love Chinese Wushu both the modern and the traditional.

Being also that I am an American and would not want to claim any special knowledge or priviledged infomation about such matters, I wanted to address the general subject of historical certainty. It comes to mind that there are many claims about a great many martial arts and the problem of human subjectivity and opinion always creates difficulties in arriving at any kind of certainty.

Mr. Fong in his email made an argument that Shuai Jiao being the oldest of the martial arts in the Chinese history and not Wuji Quan and in the process initially made reference to evidence going back to the Shang Chiao (Shang Dynasty) and later modified his position to the Qin Chiao (Qin Dynasty) after doing some reflective research on the issue because of our communication. I applaud the efforts of Mr. Fong because we are here interested only in what is true and not concerned about whether the truth we uncover supports previous theories. We are interested in what helps us to arrive at a greater understanding of the arts we love. Such is the discipline of our method.

What this underscores in my view is that there is a propensity as in all human endeavors to accept things we hear that may coincide with our current view (believe what supports our already established opinion) and not hold the view that what we know is always a result of incomplete knowledge combined with personal intuition and so forth. There is nothing wrong with this as such a process is absolutely necessary for survival and is the way people think and walk through the world. We should not want it any other way. However, from a standpoint of research and scholarship such "mental short hand" is too cursory to yield accurate or serviceable results.

Now to the issue; Historical Certainty and Martial Arts

What is not well known and needs to be accepted among martial arts enthusiasts is that up until very recent times there was little to nothing with regards to available documents or reliable research, certainly in the public domain and also in the domain of scholarship about Martial Arts. The secretive nature of societies of martial artists in China, the fragile nature of all historical documents, the cruel and unrelenting march of time which erodes our official memories and the frailty of our humanity which wants to recall things differently than they were at their inception, makes almost any statement made about historical fact even more than a few years a matter for dispute among the scholarly class.

There is also the insistence or rather the need of a comprehensive, unbiased, theoretical basis for the interpretation of any information to avoid interpolation and the unfortunate but all too real skewed lever of personal hopes and aspirations which lend certianty to words ascribed but unproven or even worse, to have been entirely fabricated for the purpose of lending credence to that which has but shallow root or worse emanated from a source corrupted by ignorance or bias and have as its sole recommendation the fact that it is ''old''. Thus we are called upon to be less dogmatic and more open to sources of information outside the realm of Martial Arts societies while at the same time giving due weight and reverence to the knowledge contained therein.

We shall take for instance the quote in the Karate-Do Kyo-Han the Master Text written by Ginchin Funakoshi he writes:

"Training in karate was always conducted with the utmost secrecy in Okinawa, with no one teaching or training openly in its arts as is done today. For this reason, books or written records on karate are almost nonexistant."

The Okinawan art was in fact Chinese Chen Po (Quan Fa) mainly of the Fungian White Crane, Tiger and Shaolin Lohan style of pugilism, however, traces of the arts of Ba Gua, Xing I and Taiji Quan can also be found in its techniques if one knows how to look.