What is Pak Mei?
It is difficult to summarize what Pak Mei (white eyebrow 白眉拳) is. There is so much to say about it. I prefer to define this style by exposing four fundamental concepts: Pak Mei is the art of fast drawing hands, the art of opening the way to gain the advantage right from the first strike, the art of changing your trajectory in the middle of action, and the art of following your opponent with multiple strikes.
The Art of Fast Drawing Hands
Drawing the hands as fast as possible starts with a natural position, which with training becomes a shadowless guard. At first, the arms are loose along the thighs. The hands go up as fast as lightning to take a position that opens the way while protecting the head and other vital points of the body. While the hands go up, we try to sweep the widest area from which any attack targeting us could go through. This movement can start from a hidden guard. Whilst, without waiting for the opponent’s attack to launch, we draw the hands. They shoot from A to B, opening the way and building our first checkpoint.
The Art of Opening the Way
Opening the way doesn’t mean defending ourselves by parrying or blocking the opponent’s strikes. Instead, we try to take the advantage by clearing any strike or attack in front of us. Intercepting, deflecting, or clearing an attack is only a consequence of our way of entering the enemy’s defense. Defending is not our aim because it is impossible to control all the real factors – reaction time, speed of the hands, selecting where to parry, selecting how much intensity to put in the parry – all this without thinking about the other strikes that the opponent is surely launching at us. Many people still think, having seen it in the movies, that it is possible to parry a succession of strikes through a combination of dexterity of technical superiority. During action, there is no technical superiority. If you have experienced methodology and strategy, you know that.
When we try to enter, we enter like firemen do, by breaking through a door. This is not without risks. It belongs to a core principle of Pak Mei - ferocity. We take the advantage right from the beginning and from this spark the fire spreads. We go straight to the heart and strike hard at precise points of the body to finish fast.
Entering with determination is being ready for anything that may happen and adapt to seize the opportunity. This is Pak Mei. We do not try to answer to an attack, we attack and break anything in our way.
The Art of Changing your Trajectory
In order to apply all this, our strategy uses checkpoints. These are like movement marker that cover the widest area of the body and are ready to launch at least three strikes. For example, we can enter by striking twice. At the end of the second strike, we have a checkpoint that allows us to protect ourselves and answer to whatever may happen.
This strategy has been created because we simply cannot predict everything that our opponent may do. We can only make assumptions. Thus, we enter and position ourselves in one of the structures created by arm bridges – the position of the hand, the forearm, and the elbow. This is a solid stance from which we can launch at least three different movements depending on the opportunity, on what we see or just on instinct. This part is free. This is where nothing is written, where we adapt to the situation. We have chosen to enter and now we face what happens. A good Pak Mei practitioner is able to find those checkpoints and use them to go forward while launching successions of strikes.
The Art of Following Your Opponent with Multiple Strikes
Our strikes are made in successions – two or three at a time. We use a springing force built on antagonistic movements. To compare fighting with firearms, we aim to always have a bullet in our chamber, so as soon as one hand strikes, the other relaunches, and so on. We use all parts of the body. Many people think that hand shapes try to imitate the shape of a bird, a tiger, or a dragon but the aim is mainly to be ergonomic. The way we tighten our fingers, the way we present forward the carpal pisiform bone, the tip of the proximal finger bones or the elbow, everything aims to improve power, reach and precision. Angling the hands can improve a strike on a specific part of the body, as can be seen with palm strikes. All this creates a lexicon that the Pak Mei student uses to grasp any opportunity, depending on his own preferences and affinities. When studying this art, you also study your own body and all the parts of it that can be used as a weapon, to choose the ones you want to make your own.
All these words try to describe this strategy in action.
How can you feel this strategy and how can I make you feel it? Often martial arts are described just as sets of movements with different hand shapes and ways of moving but what is the connection between all of them. What makes those tools linked?
Improve these concepts to the mind and the body so that they become natural, obvious, and at last, yours. Just like a drill is nothing without its drill bits, using hand shapes and tightening the fingers are nothing without power generation. Sequences are strikes sprints, they help you develop reaction time, a good cardiovascular capacity, and the methodology of the style but they don’t teach you how to use it, nor how to apply the techniques. By practicing martial applications, you can learn how to enter the opponent’s guard, and develop the accuracy of your techniques, but this practice can never replace real fighting experience. Free fighting improves eye reaction, adaptation, and explosiveness. But it doesn’t teach us the courage we need to enter a brawl, or to start it. All these exercises improve the level of the student, and his technical abilities. Above all, they teach him a method, a way of understanding conflict, and of entering it. Charles Baudelaire said, “The higher the constraint, the purer the idea.” All those concepts must become alive, natural. So natural that they become obvious. That is Kung Fu. Without it, they are a bunch of unrelated movements.
I am the link between all those parts. I choose to practice a method that fits me. I choose to exceed my limits through this method. It is only by walking this path that this method will become my method. Practicing martial arts means being the actor of your practice. It means looking for the truth. Complaining, putting the blame on other people is not part of this way. Just like conviviality teaches us loneliness, being fooled teaches us discernment. Only through practice we can improve the power and the accuracy of our strikes. Only someone more advanced can help us to better ourselves. An old proverb says, “You only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent.” A good student seeks to perfect his techniques with someone who already walked this path. This person can be a friend, a companion, a mentor – whatever the name you give him or her, what is important is the link that connects you, its strength, and the complicity between you two. You are looking for something that already exists. It is good that your art comes from a tradition with its rites and customs, but it needs to be real. The lineage only makes sense when it has something to transmit. Forget the titles for a moment and focus on what’s important. The goal of transmission is to convey knowledge from someone to someone else. It is someone with a good level of knowledge explaining to someone else how to improve, just like a good father teaches his son what he needs to be able to face life’s challenges. After that, whatever the son does in life, he will learn by himself. Experience is the only thing that your father cannot teach you.
This is not an old school approval stamp that you could put on a package to give it more value. What you learn gets multiplied by your own experience. This is your added value, your self-growth. This is the path only you can walk. No mentor, no discipline can tread it for you. Whatever happens on this journey, it is up to you to face it and overcome it. This is what being the actor of your practice means. Let’s not forget that it is the travel that matters, not the destination. Losing time, failing, misunderstanding, forgetting the essential of the practice, being distracted, being fooled, all this will happen, and no one will be there to practice for you. Each time you will have to come back to what is essential.
Practicing is like meeting your own self. It means making choices that will build this trust. It doesn’t mean letting another person decide your goals or decide for you. It means owning those choices, living them, and going forward. Practicing is like a mirror, making us face ourselves.
You can criticize a method, decry some people’s lies, other people’s tall tales, or a martial tradition that is just a set of heteroclite items for those that are not brave enough to go all that way. Sadly, things are much simpler. Just like a good chiropractor doesn’t need to tell you his story so that you know his worth. A good practitioner doesn’t have to tell his own story to show his worth.
Pak Mei exists outside of the fantasy that has been built around Chinese martial arts. It is a real method, with concrete principles. It gives tools to actualize its principles. By practicing for real, a student of Pak Mei will develop everything he needs for fighting. He will still need to practice and build his own experience or all the things he will have learned will be like beautiful items in a beautiful box. Given time, we will even forget what they were made for.
