Pu Moshi Yuan Ze

The Principles of the Universal Pattern

A student was asking me to explain the nature of the system in which we train. The best answer I could give him was Pu Moshi Yuan Ze, which means “Principles of the Universal Pattern.”

In the course of the past 35 years, I have trained in many forms of defensive arts, earned master grades in four of these, instructor grades in several others, and lesser grades in still more. At some point in the last decade of the 20^th Century I began the process of codifying a list of principles which I believed were shared by (and thus on some level connected) all of these systems. What emerged from this process was a list of the Seven Internal Principles of Combat, which I began to present at seminars as a means of “Improving and Enhancing Any Fighting Art.” Each of the “Seven Principles” was actually something of a conceptual umbrella, beneath which was a list of finer “tuning” principles which, when applied to one's study, made even the most mundane of techniques truly deep.

In the second decade of the 21^st Century, I was introduced to Shuoshi Raymond Pridgen, grandmaster of Pu Moshi (“Universal Pattern”) Kung Fu and soon became his devoted student. Among the many things which drew me to Shuoshi's teaching was the fact it was almost entirely concept and principle based. While he taught forms and physical applications, the essence of his teaching style fit snugly into my own understanding of the combative and healing arts and, though his terminology was often quite different, a fact I attribute to his background being stronger in the “continental arts” and mine being almost entirely in the “island arts,” our ideas of what makes a system work were each the yin to the other's yang.

Now, all these many years later, I hold a master grade in a Pu Moshi subsystem, Chin Na Shou Chuan, and am counted among Shuoshi's senior most students. Thus, when I chose to reopen my school post-Covid, I sought and received his blessing to use the name “Pu Moshi Academy.” Here, I continue to teach the systems in which I have attained appropriate ranking, but do so using the Pu Moshi Yuan Ze, the Principles of the Universal Pattern, as the basis of the curriculum.