Pukulan Cimande Pusaka - Fon Jerng

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Cimande Animal Styles

by Pendekar Sanders, May 2007

In seeing the Mas Jud students perform all of the animal styles that I was taught many things made sense. It was very exciting to see the same moves I was taught being done in Juru fashion but even more so to come to some very clear conclusions.

If one examines the fighting application two man form of Monyet Juru one you will see a sequence of blows that precedes a lead leg joint kick.
The sequence is:

Right down to parry a punch, left hand parry on the punch, right hand to face as in eye or throat blow then the hand is moved and the lead leg joint kick follows.

That hand sequence and eye shot is the exact sequence of the seated Village Cimande Pendekar Mama seated juru called POMMONYET! This to me proof that when the Muslim faith started removing the animal mannerisms from the art they used stripped down portions of how the animal moves, as in this case, two alternating hand moves on the punch followed by the eye gouge and they left it at that. Of course the real combat effectiveness is largely gone without the balance of the animal type moves.

This was a big move to humanize all of the art and remove the animal influences. This battle was still raging in the 1980's when Pendekar Jafri told me he split with the IPSI over removing animal mannerisms which he was by the way completely against as he felt it watered down the real art.

Now many people have been BRAINWASHED into believing Cimande is a peasant art of farmers because in its present form it was hijacked by the religion and revisionist history created around its roots.

Practitioners like the Mas Jud students of the Abangan type faith had and have no such constraints (probably why he was being hounded by the extremist Muslim groups he was fleeing from) and maintained the original combat forms. Today we have people who sincerely believe no Cimande system ever contained any animal mannerisms even despite the fact they have in many cases, like in the Tarians, kept the names of the animals.

So if you read somewhere that this or that Cimande contains no animals remember it is a more current adaptation of a changing culture and Religious influence, but if you want the original animal mannerisms they are alive and well with the chosen few who are fortunate to be the heirs from the real Mas Jud lineage.

In retrospect at the time I had no concept of the vast change this revisionist act of removing the animal mannerisms was having on Pencak Silat when Pendekar Jafri told me how upset he was over it. He was upset enough to give up his job as USA representative for the IPSI. Upset enough to fly in the face of many big and powerful people which could have gotten him in big trouble.

Now I know why he was screaming and furious as he watched his Pencak Silat get watered down and down and down. I always wondered why the beautiful deadly art I was shown was so hard to see in Indonesia on my travels through the villages and now understand more so, why our students were so successful in sparring in the many villages across Java. We were using their art against them, an art they had for the most part only received a skeleton version of in a combative sense.

Funny also that some came to us in awe of these very moves at first and they raved about how it was the finest thing they ever saw. Some were getting quite good at the animals, then later they actually thought were manufactured, or were Kung Fu and the REAL Cimande etc was a farmers art that had no animals.

They simply closed their eyes and bought the snake oil that some of the Indonesians fed them, who perhaps because of their young age or religious zeal were blind to see. The sad part is they had the real thing and gave it up for the revisionist watered down version devised to not offend a religious idea.

On the plus side anyone who looks at the two and can’t see the combat superiority of the intact art are not of the chosen few who deserve this rare and very intact version my teachers always said this art belonged to. It is almost as though the new version is not even designed to really fight, as the oldest styles were but are rather stylized calisthenics that at least require heavy decoding to be really combat effective.

The good news is once one knows how the animals were intended to fight, the roots of the village Jurus are seen and then the book opens on what they were originally used for and the combat applications leap out at you. Then you see you need both, just as Mas Jud had, The Basic ABC's become a masterpiece of literature.

I am very pleased we can offer our students a look through both sides of the door so they can see for themselves.