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Kung Fu Master…and the Secret of Light Kung Fu!

One of the neatest things in all of TV history was when David Carradine in the old Kung Fu television show walked the kung fu walk on rice paper. Rice paper is extremely flimsy, and the bare moisture on the bottom of the foot, along with the weight of a persons body, is supposed to be sufficient to tear the stuff apart. The legend of the matter, of course, is that there is this martial discipline called Light Kung Fu, where one could actually make the body so light that they could maybe even levitate it!

Now, me and my friends would watch David Carradine, Kwai Chang Caine, and wish we had a kung fu master to teach us how to walk on rice paper. Why, we could do all sorts of things if we could only know Light Kung Fu! Bad guys would be nothing if we had that awesome ability!

So, a little thought about what Kawi Chang Caine was doing, a little western ingenuity, and we came up with a solution. Unroll a roll of toilet paper on a linoleum floor. Now, with a dropper, put a small drop of water in the middle of each square. Now, walk the walk.

We thought that wet toilet paper would be like rice paper, you see. So we danced our gentle kung fu pattern, and…the thin stuff was ripped apart. Hmmmm.

We cleaned the floor and unrolled the paper again, placing the foot and not turning it at all. Squoosh, squoosh, squoosh! Darn stuff just ripped into a mess.

So we tried putting a long row of chairs next to the unrolled toilet tissue, and tried supporting ourselves with our arms as we walked the walk. Squish, rip, and darn! This rice paper stuff was tougher than we thought.

Now, to be truthful, we never did manage to walk the walk, and not tear the filmy stuff into shreds. And, to be truthful, I don’t think it is possible, toilet paper is designed to dissolve in water, and rice paper is not. But something really neat did occur because of this intense interest in being able to do what the old masters did, even if they were only actors on TV.

In trying to walk on rice paper we ended up working out long hours. While waiting for the floor to dry we practicing kicking and blocking, we did our forms again and again and again. In the end, though we never did manage to walk the light kung fu walk, we became masters by another means, through dedication and long hard work and by being inspired by our dreams!

Al Case has analyzed martial arts for forty years. A writer for the magazines since’81, he is the founder of matrixing technology and neutronics. You can walk on rice paper with him, or, least get a free ebook, at Monster Martial Arts.

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