Over the years people have often asked me about Kung Fu nunchaku sets. Of course that interest really peaked in the Bruce Lee era. For years you could not attend a weapons division without being exposed to someone whipping a pair of silver double “chucks” around his anatomy. If you think this description seems a little auto-erotic you should have seen these performers, after all they were living in a Green Hornet episode of their own. Still the question remained, did Kung Fu have forms developed for short weapons like the nunchaku and the tonfa and such?

Click picture:                   4 Gates Shaolin

The answer to the query is that, no, Kung Fu doesn’t have such weapons and, yes, they do. How so? The situation is a bit different from other martial arts, but just a bit. Let me make the argument and you see if it makes sense. It goes like this: if you knew a staff set it would be a logical assumption that you could use the same moves when you happened to end up with a pool cue in hand, wouldn’t you? (For proof of this refer to every third Jackie Chan movie ever made.) This analogy is pretty obvious. In Kung Fu, which prides itself on using general principles to generalize, the short weapons are often considered simply extensions of the hands, nothing more. As in the pool cue story you just adapt, immediately. So, typically, any hand set can be transformed into almost any short weapon with less effort than it takes to mention.

Click: Tai Tzu Short Stick

While not absolutely and always true, there are a number of cases where this principle holds. Take a short stick like a Yawara typical of hand held persuaders. The way you use such a truncated stick is pretty much like a hammer fist and punch combination, any good hand set will do.

Then there are the short weapons where most of the information is obvious but certain specific movements are included in the repertoire. The fan is a good example. Poking, thrusting, hooking are its normal attributes being shaped like a small stick but there are a few special features such as: open, close (snap) and spin added to the mix. Thus the fan is a combination of small stick (or chopsticks) and a few movements idiosyncratically its own. A good set doesn’t overdue the obvious fan stuff  but shows all the essentials intermixed in appropriate amounts. Otherwise what you have is fan dancing.

Click: Heaven        Wind Fan

Don’t get me wrong. A really nice set with top notch movements by someone who knows what he is creating is always worth the effort of learning. In general more work has been done on short weapons by the Southern Kung Fu masters than those in the north. The movements of short weapons more perfectly fit the requirements of short arm fighting but also these stylists have delved deeper because culturally there is a difference: martial arts in the North tends more toward battlefield activity and in the South toward personal combat.

Click: Shaolin Throwing Weapons

You can even combine short weapons such as stick and fan, dagger and flute. It’s not that they are insignificant and don’t matter what you do,  it’s that more of the movements are already there, programmed into your body and you can access them easily. (Remember to translate the moves when you are playing with bladed weapons. Not everything, after all, is exactly the same. Respect the weapon!)

So if you really hanker to do that dragon fan set of have always wanted to play the fatal flute pick some set you already know and go ahead. Consider yourself free to do so. That’s the tradition, too.