Master Tse’s Wing Chun Note 235

Ng Mui Si Tai五枚師太- Part 4

So when was the Wooden Dummy form created? In Shaolin Temple liked to train with wooden dummies. There are stories about Shaolin students, who were ordinary people and not monks. Although they were Buddhist they did not need to shave their hair and follow all the Buddhist precepts as seriously as a monk would, and as they were ordinary people, they were still allowed to marry and have children. There are stories about students like Hùhng Hēi Gūn 洪熙官 and Fōng Sai Yuhk 方世玉, who in order to graduate they had to make their way through a long narrow room, the Wooden Dummies Room 木人巷, which contained 108 wooden dummies.  Each dummy had a certain kind of mechanical movement which attacked them, and if they were not good enough and were defeated they were unable to graduate. The stories go that Hùhng Hēi Gūn and Fōng Sai Yuhk successfully made their way through the Wooden Dummies Room and defeated the 108 wooden dummies.  This would mean that Ng Mui Si Tai 五枚師太 would also have had this skill. She must have known the wooden dummy training before she created the Wing Chun forms. Siu Lim Tao, Tsum Kìuh and Bīu Zī were only created after she saw the Crane defeat the wildcat. She created new techniques and combined them with some of her previous Shaolin techniques. This means that she could have created the wooden dummy form before or during the time she created the other three forms. I do not think she would have created the wooden dummy form afterwards.