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The Taos

Traditionnaly, you study Võ with the Taos (path, way). These are different sets of techniques carried out alone in order to practice various attacks, defenses, evasions and blows form a martial choreography, an imaginary fight which is repeated many times during which you can accentuate a certain aspect (strength, speed...). With this work, the technique sinks in and the student must try to understand the movements, feel and imagine a real adversary.

Certain schools only teach taos and give no explaination. It’s up to the student to understand. There are some taos that copy animal movements: tigre, serpent, crane, monkey, dragon... using posture, attitudes and defense techniques belonging to these animals. You become a tigre, a serpent. Other taos combine these animal attitudes with elements belonging to nature such as lightning, wind, sky, earth...

Each movement in Võ has a poetic name which indicates the attitude, the state of mind or where to strike. When combined, these words form poems which allows you to memorise the Tao. A same name can indicate different movements depending on which school you are in (they come from a personal personal analysis of each Master), some of these words are in old vietnamese, and some are in modern vietnamese which makes it more complicated to understand. Some schools also use several ways to describe a technique.

In the Son Long Quyên Thuat school, there is one Tao per level of apprenticeship, each one more technically difficult than the previous. It isn’t the quantity of Taos that matters, but the way they are studies and put to use.


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