One More Brief Clip of Silat Tua:

A brief display of locking techniques and flow in Silat Tua.

A Couple Quick Clips of Kuntao Mantis (Silat Tua):

In this clip, Pakcik Zainal is giving a brief demonstration of Kuntao Mantis. Various Chinese arts and animal styles fall within the umbrella of Silat Tua under the title of Kuntao (Kuntau).


This clip gives a few applications for Mantis techniques.

A Clip of Silat Embo (One of the Silat Tua Arts)

Its Been a Long Time...

...since I posted anything here. My father passed away a little before Christmas last year and my mother spent some time in the hospital with some health issues. We moved around the same time...which was sooner then we had been planning. It seems our landlord had decided to stop paying on the mortgage of the house we were living in. We found out when the lender came and posted paperwork on the front door. We managed to relocate down in the greater Portland area, in a much better (and cheaper) home than the previous, but the move set us back a great deal and we're only just digging ourselves out. I've had issues with my back. I think they are slowly resolving.

While I haven't done a huge amount of martial arts training this year, I've been actively networking with various people, mostly via Facebook, here in the States and abroad...primarily in Britain and Malaysia. As I haven't really found a silat teacher here in the Portland area that I wish to train with, I'm devoting my efforts to distance training. I'll be taking my first test here very soon (as soon as I can sit down and figure out the camcorder we bought, and how best to film my test) in Pendekar William Sanders' Pencak Silat Pukulan Cimande Pusaka. Additionally, I've begun training in Guru Tuan Hj. Zainal Abidin Bin Shaikh Awab's Persatuan Silat Tua Pulau Pinang. Pakcik Zainal is a respected Malaysian teacher who offers a cluster of family arts gathered under the banner of Silat Tua, running the gamut from Malay, Southern Thai (Pattani) and Indonesian silat styles to Muay Thai and other traditional Thai arts like Muay Seah Khao ("White Tiger") and Krabi Krabong. He's very graciously agreed to teach me across the miles and accepted me into his martial family.

I will have much more to say about all of this in the next week or two, as I am going to be starting a study group here in the greater Portland area! Its always more fun and interesting, in my opinion, to be able to practice martial arts with other, like-minded people. So keep an eye out for the details...

Its Important to Enjoy Your Martial Arts Practice...

by Steven

...and this man obviously does. He is Guru Bang Husin, the Pewaris (grandmaster) of Pencak Silat Golok Seliwa Betawi. A rare, traditional style from the area of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, on the island of Java. I hope people are trying to save what men like this have to teach...

Stonehenge and Silat...

By StevenI watched a fascinating show on the History Channel yesterday. MysteryQuest covered recent investigations into the possible acoustic properties of Stonehenge. A careful examination of the stones revealed that they are curved on one side, suggesting that they had an auditory function. Experiments performed by the team both at Stonehenge, and at a replica in Maryhill, Washington, revealed that percussive sound, such as drumming, if done at the correct rate, would be echoed and amplified by the stones of the site. These sounds fell in the range for Alpha waves, one of the two types of waves conducive to the production of altered states of consciousness in humans.

Further testing in a clinical environment showed that human brains would actually synchronize with the sounds produced at the site. They began to respond almost immediately. Studies of people listening to techno music at raves have demonstrated that ravers heartbeats synchronize with the beat of the music. I think that there is a correlation in some of the newer music used amongst Evangelical Christians. I've noticed there is a certain repetitive rhythm to quite a few of the songs, usually in guitar playing. It seems similar to that used in shamanic drumming, though I'm no expert. My wife once accompanied her sister's family to such a concert, and she felt herself getting “spacey”. When she realized this, the effect abated, just as it did for the investigators on the show, at one point.

Cultures around the world work to produce altered states of consciousness in the course of religious worship and esoteric practices. It would seem that this was the case at Stonehenge. Many cultures use psychoactive herbs and fungi in their rites. There is evidence that both marijuana and henbane were growing in Great Britain during the period Stonehenge was in use. Both would intensify and aid achievement of altered states. Another tool available to these ancient people was light. Additional experimentation during the show found that the sounds produced, bouncing off the stones, could affect the flicker of open flames, causing a rather strobe-like effect. We know that strobe lights can initiate seizures in epileptics, so it is appears obvious that this would have been another amplifier for altered states, especially for those closest to the center of the circle.

The show made me think about the way Silat is often practiced in Indonesia. To the accompaniment of a gamelan orchestra. Gamelan has a great deal of percussive rhythm, and it tends to be fast and rather repetitive. Again, this is similar to shamanic drumming. Its not uncommon for it to be practiced at night, by firelight (traditionally). Traditional Indonesian culture, and Silat, are known for initiating trance states, animal and spirit possession in individuals. There is even a practice (classed as a form of ilmu), in some systems, in which one attempts to contact and be influenced (kaeunteupan) or possessed (sambatan, or “ridden”, to borrow a Vodun term) by one's Silat ancestors. Jurus(short forms) practice can be thought of as talari karuhan, a “rope” or connection to the style's ancestors. A side note to this idea...that specific postures could create a link to previous practitioners, is extremely interesting in light of research done by the late Felicitas Goodman and the Cuyamungue Institute. She did considerable research into glossolalia, possession and trance states, and found that the use of certain postures (found in ancient paintings and sculptures) tended to produce specific types of visual and auditory phenomena in people who are in an altered state of consciousness (she also found the link to certain specific rates of drumming aiding in the achievement of these states). I don't think she did research into martial stances of South Asia, or into the the religious poses, dance postures and mudras of the region. Most of her work concentrated on Neolithic and Native American material, I believe. I suspect that some of the postures found in Silat could (and do) produce certain results, if done in an altered state. And I suspect that traditional, old school Silat training is designed to do just that. The belief is that kaeunteupan and sambatan enhance and accelerate one's learning, and goodness knows they didn't have a decade or two to produce quality warriors. I'd like to see some study of this in the future, before all the traditional styles are gone, stamped out by conservative Islam or absorbed into modern sport Olah Raga and the push for Olympic gold.

I also suspect that we are seeing just one aspect of an ancient technology, predating that of the modern world. After all, we have only been agrarian and “civilized” for a few thousand years. We were hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years, and its a well-documented fact that such cultures require only about 20+/- hours of work per week from its members. In his novel Tropic of Night, Michael Gruber questioned what they did with all that spare time, and suggested that they developed a sophisticated technology involving the use of herbs, phytochemicals and altered states. It makes a certain amount of sense to me, and its something worthy of greater study.

For anyone interested in more information about the research on Stonehenge and sound, here are some links...

http://soundsofstonehenge.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/

http://aphroditeastrology.com/2009/12/stonehenge-spiritual-transcendence-tool.html

http://www.livedash.com/transcript/mysteryquest-(stonehenge)/71/HISTP/Thursday_December_3_2009/116367/

http://2012forum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&p=211077

http://mysticbeats.com/Home.php

Silat in America: Where are the Pure Styles?

By Mas Jonty

Interest in Pencak Silat is growing furiously here in the U.S.A. Almost weekly, new teachers are popping out of the woodwork. However, there is a puzzling question:

Where are all the pure styles? It seems that almost every teacher of Indonesian martial arts in the U.S. is teaching their own personal "Kuntao" blend of different styles. You won't find a pure Cikalong teacher, or a straight Cimande teacher. Even the supposedly pure styles being taught over here seem to be modern Dutch/Indo blends. What gives?

Before we try and answer that question, I'd like to note that I think this is can be a blessing and a curse: As far as I'm concerned, Willem DeThouars can make up his own styles all he wants, but on the other hand I have seen some truly inferior arts in this category.

So I have a few possible answers to our question:

1) People are making up their own arts because they never finished studying any one art.

        There are a lot of "multi-yellow-belt" teachers out there, and Silat is an open field for people to pass themselves off as masters.

2) Traditional Silat styles are small, modular systems that each focus on a narrow set of skills.

        Traditionally you would perhaps have to learn several different styles to round out your fighting skills. This fits with my understanding of the older arts. If you read the Chinese and Japanese classics, the old masters used to learn several styles on their road to mastery. Large, all-in-one styles are more of a modern invention.

3) We have modern, left-brained methods of organizing and teaching our arts that require different approaches to styles.

Please "write in" and discuss. I'd love to hear your ideas.

A Figure of Controversy...

By Steven

One of the big, perennial controversies in the Pencak Silat community has revolved around the figure of Bapak Sera. The popular history put forth about him states that he was a one-armed, club-footed warrior of the Inner Badui, a rather unusual group in Indonesia. Sadly, there are some issues with that story. Personally, I don't think its the background story that makes the martial art. What's important is whether or not it works for its practitioners, and produces people who are a credit to the style.

There are few resources out there that hint at an alternate history for this Bapak Sera, but here's what I have come across so far...

Steven Plinck, one of the more respected American teachers of Pencak Silat stated that a student of Maurice de Thouars (oldest of the de Thouars brothers and the only one to have remained in the Netherlands) indicated that Sera was a nickname of a man whose real name was Eyang Hisak, aka H. Muhroji.

Steven Plinck also stated that some believed Bapak Sera was born in Cirebon, on the north coast of Java, some 130 miles east of Jakarta.

Both Steven Plinck and Willem de Thouars have indicated that family records show Bapak Sera's training included the art of Pencak Silat Banteng, from the area of Serang, in NW Java.

Bapak Willem de Thouars states that Bapak Sera was born in Cirebon in 1860. He further states that his student, Mas Jud (who is another figure of great controversy) had dealings with the Outer Badui.

Bapak Victor de Thouars gives an alternate birth year of 1783, with his death occuring in 1885.
Pendekar William Sanders cites a book, Learning Silat, by Mr. R. Asikin, which states that Mbah Kahir, the creator of Pencak Silat Sera, Pamacan and Cimande, had a well-known student named “'Bapak Sera', who had many students in Depok, Bogor, Jakarta, Tangerang, and Banten.” He said that when he spoke to historians at Cimande Village, they suggested that this man was likely an early student of Mbah Kahir who was fond of his earliest art and had “Bapak Sera” as his nickname.

O'ong Maryono, well-known for his scholarship and skills in Pencak Silat, indicates that Sera appears to be a Betawi (or Jakarta) style heavily influenced by Kuntao (Indochinese martial arts).

Its unlikely we'll ever know for sure who this man really was, or much of his actual history, but I tend to give quite a bit of credence to some of the above information. I lean towards the birth date of 1783. The information from Mr. Asikin is likely to be good, as he has nothing really at stake in presenting it. His book was not about Pencak Silat Sera, specifically. The thing is...Mbah Kahir started teaching Cimande around 1760, and died in 1825. If this man, Bapak Sera, studied with Mbah Kahir, he had to be born well before 1860. It might well be that he had dealings with the Outer Badui. Over time, this connection may have become more important in family history. The Sera of the de Vries and de Thouars families does not bear a lot of resemblance to the art of Sera as seen in the practice of Pendekar Sanders' Pencak Silat Pukulan Cimande Pusaka or in the Suwanda family's art of Pencak Silat Mande Muda. The idea that this man had also trained in Pencak Silat Banteng could account for this difference. O'ong Maryono's observations could indicate influence from yet another, as yet unknown(?) source.

Indonesian Martial Arts

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