CI MANDE
THE MOTHER ART OF JAVA

Story and photos by Roger Brockman
 

value of grasping any preconceived notions of what works quickly goes out the window. Willem has little regard for the stuffed-shirt approach to martial arts. He is a master who blushes at the spotlight and almost never even wears a uniform. In Indonesia there is a concept called tata. It is akin to protocol, but is a leftover from the caste system of Hinduism. Willem has no use for the "pre-arranged order of things." He wants to get down to it.

Within the myriad of martial arts practice, overa long period of time a pattern begins to emerge. Even before one can distinguish between his silat and his kun tao, the student begins to see the building blocks of his technique. As it is with viewing a painting by a great master, first one sees what he thinks is the whole picture, before he can study the brush strokes that bring it life. Willem's approach to martial arts finds its way to the core structure of each system he studies. He finds the commonalities in two dissimilar forms, and he uses that to test an art's usefulness.

In Java, the "mother art" of all modern pencak silat is ci mande (chee-mon-day). Its systemization of angles and instant counterattacks has enjoyed enormous variation, well beyond its home village. And though Willem learned almost a dozen styles of pencak silat and eight styles of kun tao before he left his native Java, he came to understand the complexities of this most devastating art from a teacher with direct lineage to its founder in the backyards and basements of Thornton, Colo.

The history of ci mande has been both well-documented and the subject of much misinformation. That is probably because it is the most widely practiced and highly influential system of silat in Indonesia. And considering how few truly legitimate teachers of pencak silat there are in the States, the odds are if you are practicing silat you have a lot of ci mande in your bag.

The best sources in the U.S. for information on this art have been Smith and Draeger's book, Fighting Arts of lndonesia, and various articles by or about Herman Suwanda. Dr. Bahati Merchant of Kona, Hawaii, has studied ci mande in the village of Ci Mande and is currently writing about his experiences as well.

History
Ci mande was founded in the village of the same name in the Praenger Mountains of West Java by the man Pak Kahir, who died in 1360, according to the tradition and headstone carving in the village itself. One story tells that Kahir learned its principles from a Chinese kun tao teacher, whom he killed and then re-named it.

A parallel story puts the origin with a man named Mas Kahir, born in 1760, who married and moved to ci mande near the present city Cianjur (pronounced chee-an-jur). Kahir was said to have been a horse trader who frequently traveled from the city of Cirebon (pronounced cheery-bone) to Batavia (now Jakarta) and was once confronted by a Chinese kun tao expert who had laid in wait to challenge this respected practitioner. Mas Kahir defeated him in a close contest and then healed him and took him on as a student. The local history records Mas Kahir having five sons from which the many branches of ci mande sprang.

So the truth of the origin remains somewhat murky. We know that ci mande is referred to in Java as the, "mother art" of silat, and we know that over the centuries and even into the present day on the Internet the stories seem to change to suit the teller.

What is known for sure is that ci mande means "power that flows from the river." And whether it was Pak or Mas Kahir, it is accepted as fact in the silat community worldwide that the founder practiced his art in the river that divided his village, the river Tasa Makalaya. As the flow and ebb of the waters pulled him off balance, he developed his stance to be both strong and flexible. Moving on the slick rocks developed precision.

This art and the numerous styles that it has influenced can still be found proliferating the area of Cianjur and its sister city Sukabumi to the southwest. Willem urges anyone to visit this area to clarify some of the misinformation that floats around pencak silat.

One of those falsehoods has to do with the system of Serak, and art related to ci mande. The founder, Pak Serak, is alleged to have been one of the mystical Badui people from the most remote regions of West Java. Indeed this is not true. The Badui have a strict religious prohibition against physical contact with outsiders and do not engage in physical violence of any sort. They protect themselves by means of spiritual intercession and magic. The governmentóeven the former Dutch governmentóhave always left them alone. Records in Java indicate Pak Serak was born in Cirebon, nearly 400 miles away. And while living near Batavia in the early 1800s, he learned silat banteng, which derives from the Serang region of northwest Java. From his exposure to ci mande, with his background in banteng, he developed his system even though he had only one useful arm and one strong leg.

Carl Deerns
Willem, who has literally studied dozens of fighting systems all over the world, credits his father-in-law with his ci mande lineage as well as his kwantung kun tao. Carl August Samuel Deerns, who was born in 1915 in Bogor, West Java, was a renaissance man in the Dutch-Indonesian communities (known as Indos) in which he moved. Deerns was educated at the Institute of Technology in Bandung as a mechanical engineer, and throughout his life he managed to learn 18 languages. He studied his ci mande from the famous teacher Pa Atma from 1928-to-1938. In the '30s he studied his kwantung kun tao from a Chinese uncle from Shanghai, who had studied with Shaolin priests before the fall of the old imperial China.

Deerns had three girls and one boy at the time of the family's internment in the Japanese concentration camps in West Java. One daughter died at the age of 18 months from dysentery and another daughter never returned from the Burma railway. After the war, the Deerns family moved to Sumatra where Carl took a job with the Standard Vacuum Petroleum Corporation. He worked on a refinery on the Musi River in the Palembang region, a wild jungle literally filled with tigers, monkeys, Sumatran rhinos, and elephants. Here it was that Deerns gained a reputation as a tiger hunter. Here Deerns brought his teacher Atma to work at the refinery as a "mandur" (foreman) because he spoke Koomeringen, the common tongue for coolies.

Over the next decade the Deerns family moved to Holland where Indos were unwelcome. Then to Hawaii, California, and ultimately to Colorado. Willem met and married Deerns' oldest daughter, Joyce, in 1964, and in doing so inadvertently gained a legitimate pendekar (avatar) as a father-in-law. And the outstanding characteristic of such a man, as an Indonesian from the Kampongs (villages) and jungles will tell you, are charity, caring, and love.

Willem, of course, had a plethora of other teachers throughout his life, beginning at age five. These teachers included many other family members, including his brothers and several uncles and his own father and mother. Willem, the free thinker, has also studied numerous arts after his arrival in America from both American and old-world Asian teachers. This is the broad-based strength of his system and why, through Willem's ability to embrace diversity, his students possess such skill.

Willem moved to Colorado, upon Deerns urging, in 1968, and in the following year began to teach ci mande and ci kalong. Finding fertile soil in the Denver area, he then invited his brother Paul to join him in 1973. Paul followed with the youngest brother, Victor, and began to teach the traditional family system, Serak, and tongkot, a stick system based on Serak.

Willem, who says he has burned more certificates than he has kept over the years, has great respect for those individuals who are working hard to keep Indonesian arts alive in America. He says, "Anyone who bothers to actually travel to Indonesia and research and study their system is legitimate." But "old-timers," like Willem, who have gone back, will tell you that the "fire" of the arts in the islands is going out. Willem is grateful to his brothers, but notes that ultimately his other teachers were more important to his development. He is most fond of his Chinese kun tao systems, but what matters most to him was learning to be open-minded to any new ideas.

Technically, ci mande is based on angles like most Southeast Asian systems. It utilizes both obtuse and acute deviations of the "small triangle" to react to the attacker in an unprotected area. Generally speaking, ci mande is close-quarters art in the extremeóat least the way Willem teaches it. It utilizes timing to surprise and shock, and relies heavily on what Willem calls the body's "polar axis" to knock down opponents. That can be defined categorically as "ci mande." Willem and his followers then embellish these attacks with brutal ground techniques.

In Willem's version of ci mande, the small triangle is used from apex to apex. As the attack comes, the feet shift the body to left or right as though they were moving from point to point around the triangle. This is done both from the "inside" of the attack as well as the "outside." According to Willem and his seniors, this is how ci mande is different from Serak which seems to employ the sides of the triangle to initiate attacks. Both arts use the movement from place to place on the triangle to gain advantage, from which they both throw truly diabolical leg attacks. The sweeps (sapus) and reverse sweeps (bisets) are combined with multiple kicks intended to knock the opponent around in a whip-like fashion. If taken only for its psychological effect, its proximity and severity would send all but the most mindless attackers scrambling up a tree.

Both the effectiveness and the wide variety of combat-tested practitioners over the centuries have produced many local styles related to the "mother art." In the city of Sukabumi, a 90-minute drive from Cianjur, the art is practiced as ci mande, but the entrances utilize a hand that is less a slapping and more hard-gripping. Also in Sukabumi is the art of kari, which features the ci mande entrances and then uses scissors-like techniques from both the arms and legs to break and take down the opponent. In the Praenger Mountains, in the area of the Puncak (poon'-jack) Pass, in the Kampongs (villages) many arts related to ci mande are practiced. Some examples of these are ci kalong; frequently misidentified as the "bat" art, it uses the slapping and nerve attacks of ci mande, but then uses one-handed jointlocks against both the right arm and right leg to hold the opponent while the practitioner beats him with the left.

Related to this system are ci waruga and madi. These arts were developed by ci mande students of very short stature. These arts use the ci mande entrances and then follow with extremely low attacks against the legs and base at very painful angles.
 

The photos accompanying this article show Willem demonstrating two ci mande jurus and their applications. Also shown are three self-defense applications employing ci mande principles. Willem views forms as a sort of "index" to technique. Rarely, if ever, will a student see him do the same application twice from a single juru. This can be very frustrating, even to a seasoned player, but it forces one to look at the arts in terms of concepts rather than a rigid system of repeated movements and choreographed applications.

Willem teaches 21 ci mande jurus and 14 langkas. Although each juru contains a langka, and each langka contains a juru, within this complete set of movements is a formula to apply to nearly any attack. Willem's mode of training is to learn these movements and then test them over and over again to explore the variety of possibility within them.

If you ask an Indonesian, "What's the best way to cook fried rice (nasi goreng)?" you will get as many varieties of technique as individuals you ask. "Unity in diversity" is the motto of the modern Indonesian state, and this describes the myriad variations of all the cultural art forms of the archipelago. So it is inaccurate to say that ci mande, or any other style, is this or that. Don't count on it. There's more than one way to cook rice