What Does Kung Fu Mean?

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at some of the philosophical aspects that underpin Chinese Medicine. This may sound really dry, but try and stay with me.

When looking into this, we can look at each character in Chinese as it’s own story. Each one is a kind of a magical sigil with entire stories and mystical aspects built right in.

One concept that I often come back to because I love the Taoist view of flow, is Kung Fu, or in Pinyin, Gong Fu.

We all think of martial arts, which is an example of something that benefits from Gong Fu, but it’s not called Gong Fu.

If it’s not martial arts, then what is Gong Fu? Anyone who has ever been attracted to anything like martial arts for the discipline, and the ideas of becoming really skillful at something, you’ll love this.

Short answer, Gong Fu means skillfully done.

If we take the time to look at the meaning of the characters a little more closely, then we learn that the first of the two characters means “skilfull work”, especially the kind of work that’s done with focused and mindful effort.

The second character refers to something having been done over a period of time.

So when you put the two together, you get something along the lines of “skillful work achieved with focus and mindful effort over a period of time”.

The pincale of this kind of work is when you get it to the point of muscle memory, where it’s so ingrained it can feel almost effortless to do the task you’ve been mastering. When you get to that point, it’s called Wu Wei.

Wu Wei is one of my favorite Taoist concepts. It translates to something along the lines of “doing without doing”. Sounds like it’s straight out of the Tao Te Ching, doesn’t it?

That’s because this is the kind of concept that has shaped the ideas of mastery in China for thousands of years. Surrounding countries have been heavily influenced by this so it’s not just in China.

What’s extra cool about this, at least in my opinion, is that you can work towards Gong Fu, and eventually Wu Wei in anything. You can work on being skillful at the tea ceremony, at calligraphy, and handling the mood swings of your children. Literally anything.

With focused effort and time, we can gain mastery.

In what skills do you cultivate mastery?

*Typos and errors provided for your amusement.