I would say that until today Ngok Gar Kuen is still a little known style, so much so to the outside world it may well be a secret style.

Not much is written about the style. Ngok Gar practitioners seem to be a tight lipped bunch. If you come across a DVD series from China on a style known as Yueh Jia Quan which is the Mandarin name for Ngok Gar Kuen take note that it is not the same style as the Ngok Gar Kuen that I am referring to here.

Even amongst those who learned the style, the majority would not have access to innermost part of the art. This should not be surprising as a similar policy is followed by many other styles of Chinese martial arts in the old days.

I may disagree with this but there’s nothing I can do about it. This type of secrecy can cause knowledge to be lost or misunderstood. My favorite story here is how some Wing Chun practitioners consider the Biu Jee form to be about emergency, recovery techniques.

This might be so, but really? Seriously? If you consider the design of a combative system you would know why I have doubts that Biu Jee is about emergency techniques.

I can understand the need for secrecy though. Think of it this way – if your life depends on your skills to win or at least survive a fight would you openly or widely disseminate the knowledge?

The dilemma is that it is impossible to keep the system entirely secret. How do you practice the techniques if you are not allowed to show it? Problem, right?

And if you rely on teaching the system to make a living how do you attract students if you can’t showcase your offering to the public.

This is where the idea of public forms come in. These are forms you can show to the public without the fear of your techniques being stolen.

I know this idea works because the first time I saw a Ngok Gar Kuen public form I was totally unimpressed. To me it looked like a rough kind of striking art. However, when I had the techniques demonstrated on me, I went whoa……

Later I found out that those techniques that wowed me were the inner techniques of Ngok Gar Kuen. However, don’t get me wrong, you can still see those inner techniques in the public forms. Its just that they do not appear in the sequence that you see for the inner techniques.

You can say that the inner techniques in the public forms have been encrypted. The inner techniques can be right in front of you but you still don’t quite see them.

There’s nothing wrong with learning the public forms. You can still learn something from them, many of the techniques are not included in the secret forms. I think of the public forms as a normal length novel and the secret forms as a digest version of the novel containing the essential parts of the story. Its just that the secret forms contain the most often used, essential techniques. You can consider the non-included techniques as add-ons.

Many Ngok Gar old timers are old, retired or even left this world. From a secret style Ngok Gar Kuen looks set to be an extinct style in the coming years.