The English martial arts internet is awash in people reciting
100 days of bare hand, 1,000 days of spear, 10,000 days of sword,
unless it's
It takes 100 days to learn the spear, 1000 days to learn the sabre, and 10,000 days to learn the sword,
unless it's
unless it's
Learning a form takes 100 days, bo (i.e., staff) takes 1,000, and Tai Chi sword 10,000 days
or
It takes 100 days to master a spear, 1000 days to master a dao (single-edged sword), and 10,000 days to master a jian (double-edged sword)
or
or
It takes 100 days to master the broadsword (dao) but takes 10,000 days to master the straight sword (jian)
Everyone seems to get the basic idea that mastering the Chinese longsword (剑) was hard, but everything else in the "quote" moves around and absolutely no one ever gives a Chinese form of the quote or a source for their "traditional proverb".* The only Chinese source I found with some form of the English quote is
from an article by the guys who took over the Shanghai Daily quoting an American taiji master studying at Fudan. It's unclear if he picked it up from his teachers in the US or from someone in Shanghai.
These all look like they could come from a Chinese original, so I searched Baidu for 百、千、万 and 天 and 剑. The only common phrase I could find was
百日练刀,千日练枪,万日练剑
One hundred days of practice [to master] the dao, one thousand days of practice [to master] the spear/gun, ten thousand days of practice [to master] the longsword.
or closer to the intended meaning (since almost everyone reading the translations in English seems to take the numbers literally)
It takes a short while to master the dao, much longer to master the spear, and forever to master the sword.
which my friend with better Chinese says probably came from The Legend of the Condor Heroes (《射雕英雄传》) by Jin Yong (Louis Cha), who wasn't an ancient Chinese master of anything but a tubby 20th-century journalist and wuxia novelist from Hong Kong.
So the questions are:
- Is there any Chinese version of this expression older than 1957?
- If not, could you describe the context of the quote in his book?
- Especially, what did Jin Yong mean by 刀 here?
since it's usually translated as 'knife' these days but actually covers most large single-bladed weapons, including Chinese sabres, machetes, and halberds. (枪 today usually means 'gun' but, as pointed out in the comments, can also mean 'spear', which is presumably what was intended here.)
*The only exception I found was here, quoting e2, loosely quoting a line in Musashi Miyamoto's Book of Five Rings: "To know how to win with the sword... a thousands days of training to develop, ten thousand days of training to polish."