J.C : How Is this ?
G.L : Pukulan is a street fighting art; it prepares you for that sudden burst of adrenaline and the immediate response needed to survive the initial onslaught. Street attack is akin to an assassination or ambush. As you say it is not meant to be a fair fight. Both pukulan and gayong teach you to respond to this assault with overwhelming power and aggression and potentially lethal force. The initial fight will only take a couple of seconds if you recognise what is happening and survive that you have a chance. Then your regular training and the thousands of reps you do in training come into its own. The other factor that people don’t take into account is proximity. Fights don’t happen at long range but you need to be aware of the potential at long range. They are close quarter, up close and personal. Because of this you need to have trained and acquired the skills of fighting that close – indeed even just being that close to someone your not in a relationship with!!

Part of our pressure testing is to train close up and stay there. Once described to me as the Oh S*** factor.

J.C : How do you replicate realism in training? Do you use safety gear?
G.L : You have to understand the mechanics of an attack or assault and identify the salient elements and extract them and use them. We use safety gear for repetitions but we do a lot of training without pads. If you get hit in a real situation you have to know what it feels like and not be shocked by it. Whenever you get attacked you go through three stages – realisation, freeze and response. You need to realise early, reduce your freeze phase and then your trained skills tell you what to do in the response phase. If you want longevity in martial arts you have to do one thing – protect yourself at all times. One way is proper postures and stances etc, the other is protective gear. There is no point in having the knowledge to fight off an attack if your body is too broken up to do it. One of my teachers ensured we trained for real combat; we did this by ensuring our initial attacks were committed and our blocks caused pain and worked against the committed attacks. To understand the nature of combat and the dynamics of a fight you must have the contact. If you don’t you are training to miss or pull your techniques. In a real life situation this may cost you dearly.

J.C : Do you have forms?
G.L : A lot of Silat styles have different forms for learning techniques, foot work drills etc, the jurus. Silat Lincah primarily does not have these. The reason for this is that being a combat based art we tend to do our work on a partner to allow you to train the distancing, timing and rhythm for real rather than imagined. I believe that the Indonesian systems of pencak have more forms and patterns.

J.C : What is your view on forms?
G.L : I understand the point of them and in some styles I think they are not only functional but aesthetically pleasing as well I think a lot of the modern sport styles miss out on the essence of forms, katas, jurus, by concentrating solely on techniques for the ring or competition environment. Forms teach an awful lot that you don’t always see and therefore have great value.

J.C : Do you think the physical side of silat should be taught, without the spiritual side? G.L : The first thing you’ve got to do is define spiritual. To some people, unfortunately silat spiritual has come to mean the black magic side of it.-cutting yourself to make blood come out from someone else’s mouth, cutting heads off chickens and walking backwards naked down the Champs Elise, curses being put on down the phone. This is what some people think of as silat spiritual. I see spirituality as the path to God, so no matter what religion you are you can teach physical without that spiritual side of silat, which is the mantras and that sort of thing.

You can’t teach a martial art without spirituality, because you have to teach someone how to apply their techniques for the good of society and that’s partly spirituality. You have to use your knowledge for good, so an element of training is learning about yourself, and you learn about yourself through the physical training. On the badge I’ve got, you’ve seen the keris in the fire, the keris symbolises the student in the fire of the training, so you’re tempering their mettle.

J.C : What do you think silat can offer people in our society in the west?
G.L : There are so many things that are missing I think from society in general; honour is missing; respect is missing, I think personal dignity is missing in a lot of things; Loyalty, friendship, brotherhood are missing, so if you teach silat properly and if you learn it in the proper spirit then I think it will give you that. It will give you a sense of belonging, which is one of the reasons you’ve come to it. I’m part of something that is great, it’s gonna be big, and you feel like you’ve actually learnt and achieved something. People want fast food everything, fast food, you’ve got fast food martial arts, they could almost have their black belt in six months. It doesn’t work that way, if it’s worth having you’ve got to work for it. So if you put the work in you get the rewards from it, and I hope I’ve put the work in, and I hope I’m getting the rewards from it.

J.C : Where do you want silat lincah to go from here?
G.L : World-wide. I think it’s got a lot to offer. Partly as a martial art but also as a philosophy and the way of life. So what I’m hoping is people who are on this course will go out and they’ll have heard what I’ve said, they’ll have taken it in and actually made it part of themselves. They can then go out and do the right thing by the people in their communities and they can be (this is gonna sound really naff and cliched) but the pillar of light, the guy everyone looks at and says ‘he’s an git and I hate him because he’s so bloody straight’.

Maha Guru used to say of the Guru Muda that if he asked him to look after a packet of cigarettes and not let anyone touch them, no matter how desperate they were for a cigarette, they wouldn’t get one. He would not do it because his Guru said don’t. Not many people liked him, because if you asked him “Is this right or wrong?” he’d tell you. people don’t wanna hear that. But he’s a very quiet very respectful man. One day someone told him that I respected him and looked up to him but his face didn’t flicker because basically it didn’t matter to him whether I liked him or not, and I was embarrassed that they had told him because I knew it wouldn’t matter. It’s not going to change his life because I think he’s nice. I don’t speak enough Malay for us to actually converse but I’ve seen the way he behaves and I respect that.

J.C : Which part of silat training do you enjoy the most?
G.L : Having a drink afterwards!!
I think the Pecahan more than anything else because that brings it alive. Really it depends on what mood I’m in; if I’m in a mood to work then lankah is nice, if I wanna hit somebody then the pecahan is best because it’s a nice feeling actually hitting someone and getting hit by them.

J.C : How do you feel about the way silat is taught and practiced in this country? G.L : Harsh question, well I don’t know all the people that are teaching it in this country, and I’m not an expert in their style so it’s difficult to say. From what I’ve seen of it, and from what I’ve experienced of it in this country I don’t like the way it’s taught, I don’t like the way it’s being put across. Most of the silat that is on public view is stuff that’s come through the JKD schools and I think it’s unfortunate that it’s got associated with the JKD schools because it doesn’t show the art in its best light, because you are showing it as part of a combination of kali, Thai boxing, jujitsu, and whatever else, so it doesn’t show it as the graceful beautiful art that it is. The people that are teaching silat on its own, there’s not that many of them around that are teaching openly. I can’t see the point of teaching behind closed doors. You have to be sure that whatever martial art you are teaching is biomechanically correct, so that for example one style works very low and puts a lot of pressure on your knees, that’s OK if you’re prepared to accept the consequences of having knee problems three years after you’ve been doing it. I did it for a while I had knee problems, most of the people I know who’ve done it have had knee problems so I personally can’t see the point, and I think as a teacher you have a responsibility to your students to protect them from injury. When I did the competitions people say to me why don’t you bring a team to compete and my answer was always the same, my role as a teacher is to protect my students, why should I them want to put them into a situation where there are rules but nobody adheres to them so my students are likely to get injured. If you go in and say that there are no rules go for it, Gouge his eyes, break his neck, rip his throat out, don’t have a problem with it, just as long as you know that’s what you’re going in for, but if you go in there and fight to rules and someone else isn’t, then it’s lambs to the slaughter, if you’re teaching you have to protect your students. If you’re techniques are going to do you harm then why do em?

J.C : Do you feel that the attitudes of take what you want as in JKD, is it just a misunderstanding in a small number of students or does it exist at a higher level with top instructors? G.L : I am not a follower of the JKD ideas. I am not conversant with the principles. What seems to happen is that people want technique rather than principle, or you could say, you could do this, you could do that, or you could do that, or you could do a Thai kick here or a savate kick there. That isn’t necessarily all that useful because you don’t always learn a savate kick, or you don’t learn a Thai kick properly that way. On that, Bruce Lee went through the a punch is a punch, then I thought a punch was more than a punch, until I realised what it really was and that a punch was just a punch. So many of you have said oh so and so did this technique. So what. Techniques are just that. They are empty without the prior knowledge experience and foundation. I think that if you’ve got a style that will take you from A-Z all the way through a system and it covers all of this you don’t need to say well I’m gonna learn X, Y and Z from here and F, G and H from somewhere else and P, Q and R from another style. You should be able to learn it from one style. What’s happened is that people have been taught say 23 techniques but they haven’t been taught the last 23, so someone else has said well I don’t know the whole system but I’m gonna take a bit from another system to fill in the gap that I’ve got. So that then gets taught as a system, but you miss out a bit of it and it gets passed on. If it works fine, but what you get left with is the collection of techniques. You don’t actually have a system. It’s got a punch from here, a kick from there and a combination of something else from somewhere else. The Malaysians refer to that as silat campur: campur means mixed. So what you have is a mix, which is not very much of anything and is not recognisable as anything. I don’t think it’s valid and I don’t think it’s worth having.

I was at a seminar with Jak Othman several years ago where a JKD teacher attended. Jak taught a few of our hand drills. I have recently seen them on a video as Kali techniques. They could well be, BUT THAT ISN’T WHERE HE LEARNED THEM.