THE ART OF LIGHTNESS AND THE SEVEN-STAR SET
White Crane Flaps Wings
Question
Considering the story of how Sigung Ho learned the Seven Star Set, is there something special about the origins or character of the set that made it suited to a master of the Art of Lightness and his family?
Sifu Mark Blohm
Answer
The Seven-Star Set was taught to my sifu, Sifu Ho Fatt Nam, by his simu, the wife of a Northern Shaolin master who taught my sifu the Art of Lightness. I don’t know the names of the master and his wife.
My sifu was a kungfu apprentice to the master who earned his living as a traveling medicine man. At that time transportation was poor. My sifu told me that he had to carry all the luggage on his back and walked from town to town. With typical Shaolin Wahnam attitude, my sifu said this was good for him as it contributed to his training in the Art of Lightness, which he did not realize at the time.
Every morning my sigung would take my sifu into a woods for training. My sigung would mark ten trees in a large circle which were far apart and not within vision from one another. My sigung and my sifu would start running together round the ten marked trees..
After some time my sigung, despite his age, would be far ahead. Then my sifu would lose sight of my sigung. After a while my sigung, having completed the round, would be behind my sifu. As my sigung passed my sifu, he would hit my sifu hard on the back if the head, saying “You are very slow.” This continued everyday.
“One day,” my sifu said, “I got out of the wrong side of bed.”
I can remember this occasion very well. I was naïve, and asked, “What’s wrong with getting out on any side of the bed, sifu?”
“Oh, it’s an idiomatic expression. It means every thing went wrong that day,” my sifu kindly explained.
“What went wrong, sifu?”
“I refused to go training. I am not going to train, I told my sifu,” my sifu said.
"You’ve done well, my sifu said. Now, let’s continue the training," my sifu continued. "But I was stubborn." I said to my sifu that he told me he would teach me very good kungfu but all he did was hit me at the back of my head during running.
I just listened.
My sifu continued. "My sifu said that he was teaching me excellent kungfu. Now it’s the third time I am asking you. Are you going to train? But, as I said, I got out from the wrong side of he bed. I actually saw my simu giving me an eye signal asking me to continue to train. But I was just stubborn. I told my sifu that even if he skinned me I would not go to train."
My sigung led my sifu to the back of the hotel they were staying. My sigung tugged his long robe under his waist slash.
“Now, don’t blink your eyes,” my sifu reported to me. “I saw my sifu bend his knees slightly, and in the next moment he was in the air, above the high wall at the back of the hotel.”
“How high was the wall, sifu?”
“About 10 feet high. There were pieces of glass on the wall to prevent burglary. I saw my sifu do a summersault in the air above the wall, scrape off some pieces of glass with his long pipe and when he was upright again, stood on one leg on the high wall in the pattern, White Crane Flaps Wings. Then he jumped down from the wall and landed without a sound.”
I listened in awe.
“I suddenly realized that my sifu was teaching me the almost-lost Art of Lightness. I knelt down and beg him continue teaching me. But he refused. It was a tradition among elderly masters that if a student was asked three times and the student did not want to learn, he was not destined to learn it,” my sifu explained.
“I learned an invaluable lesson,” my sifu continued. “So, the next time when I had a rare opportunity to learn from your sigung, Yang Fatt Khun, I just followed whatever he taught me. He taught me One-Finger Shooting Zen, and almost nothing else for more than two years. I just trained what he asked me to. I was richly rewarded. I learned the Art of Dim Mark.”
This was an inspiring story my sifu told me.
He said his simu took pity on him, and taught him her specialty, the Seven-Star Set.
I don’t know much about the origin of the Seven-Star Set except that it was recorded in the Shaolin Classic authored by the Venerable Fu Yu, an abbot of the northern Shaolin Temple, in the year 961 during the Song Dynasty.
The main character of the set is agility, which is most suited to a master of the Art of Lightness. Like my sifu when he learned One-Finger Shooting Zen from my sigung, when I learned the Seven-Star Set from my sifu all I did and almost nothing else was the Seven-Star jump for many months. This practice certainly gave me a lot of agility.
"Seven-Star Thread Palm" form the Seven-Star Set
The above discussion is reproduced from the thread 10 Questions on the famous and legendary Seven-Star Set (七星拳)
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