I have my questions on the issue of the use of Sigung, which has come to be applied in the west for master or grandmaster. How is it that one can use such. Is Wing Chun an art that one can say they have mastered the whole of it??? I highly doubt such a claim!!! I have been teaching for 24 years now, and I know of some that use the title Sigung, even though I personally know they have less knowledge of what they do. They learned what they were taught, and decided to not build upon that. When I finished my formal training under Sifu Scott Baker, he instilled in me the desire to continue on with my training, and in the years since, I have come to realize how much I have continued to learn. There is no way to learn all there is to learn of Wing Chun in a lifetime, and therefore, master and grandmaster are empty terms. To me it implies that they a) have either stopped training their skills, or b) are conceited enough to think they are above others. Sigung actually means just grandfather in Cantonese, and has nothing to do with what we think of as being a grandmaster in the west. It is used to denote the master of the house, i.e. the patriarch. In the Wing Chun family, Sigung in China is to denote one as a Grandfather, but here it is used to denote some all-powerful, all-knowledgeable person that has somehow mastered a complete Wing Chun system. However, is there such a complete Wing Chun system, if Wing Chun is constantly growing? I cannot see how...
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 20:20:32 +0000
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