SRKF Clan Titles
I founded Silent River Kung Fu in 1987. It was a humble beginning with me teaching my classes out of Stony Plain school gymnasiums. Eleven years later in 1998, I took out a second mortgage on my house, cashed in my RRSPs, and put a down payment on the first two bays of our current location. In 2011, we acquired the Ecowater bay and expanded our facility by almost doubling our training space. Two years later in 2013, we purchased the Tanarama bay and now own the entire east strip of the Stony Plain Professional Centre.
The point I am trying to make by sharing this information is that we did not arrive where we are today all at once. We slowly evolved to arrive here and now. It is important to note that our arrival here has been coloured and influenced by many unforeseen factors and events, including the current global pandemic. Back in 1987 I never dreamed that I would be an 8th degree black belt with master level students. Nor did I foresee the future problems that were being created through my inexperience and misplaced humility. I made two specific decisions way back then that now need to be addressed in order for me to lead Silent River Kung Fu toward a brighter and more secure future. Decision one was to use the Belt Ranking System, and decision two was to use the title of Sifu for all of my Black Belts.
As most of you know, Kung Fu is unique in the marital arts in that its hierarchy is clan-based (experience) as opposed to military-based (absolute rank). You have heard me say it before: “All Black Belts are equal but some are more equal than others”. This is the Chinese approach. We value wisdom and experience as much as, and sometimes more than, outright skill. What is most important and pertinent is how long you have been training and who you have been training under. The second that we start putting absolute ranks on people, we are classifying them within a hierarchy that does not necessarily conform to the hierarchy of the clan. To complicate things even further, I have given the title of Sifu to every adult Black Belt because of, as I mentioned earlier, my misplaced humility in my youth. When I started promoting students to Black Belt, I felt they should have the same title as me. Now thirty years and seven degrees of black belt later, I am having to deal with the issues that this approach has created, including the issue of pulling us even further away from the clan hierarchal approach and deeper with the militaristic hierarchal approach.
Today we are going to ‘reset’ and pull things back on track. Beginning immediately, I am adjusting our use of titles to conform to their traditional definitions. This will bring us closer in line with traditional Kung Fu clan titles:
師父 Sifu (Teacher/Father) - Master Black Belt (5th degree and higher)
師兄 Sihing (Teacher/Elder Brother) - Black Belt (4th degree and lower)
師弟 Sidai (Teacher/Junior Brother) - Junior Black Belt
徒弟 Toudai (Disciple/Junior Brother) - Student
For those of you who have been attending the Ging Wu Chinese New Year Banquet, you will have noticed that every time they ask all the visiting Sifus to come up for a group picture, Silent River Kung Fu always has way more people in that photo than any other group. We are not bringing more Black Belts than any other school, we are just giving the title of Sifu to more Black Belts. By making this switch to more traditional titles, we will be more inline with most Kung Fu schools.
Lastly, you will have noticed that we now have a title for non-Black Belt students. This is to bring the students in line with the gender independent Black Belt title terminology. We have never used the feminine format of the titles and we want to move forward with that approach for all our students. This will also address a long-standing issue that our non-binary and transgender students have had to contend with by dealing with the gender specific pronouns of Ms, Mr, he, and she. Moving forward we will be utilizing the Toudai (pronounced TOE-DIE) prefix when addressing a student. Therefore rather than calling Ian Repay Mr. Repay, we will address him as Toudai Repay. If you find this transition difficult to navigate initially, please use their first name until the Toudai title becomes more normalized.
Jeff Brinker