The Martial Arts Nerd!

The Martial Arts Nerd is now an American icon.  It is right up there with Superman and Marilyn Monroe.  In fact, in a strange way, Superman, and the guy he shares his body with Clark Kent, may have been an early version of the Martial Arts Nerd. I may look, sound and act like a helpless bumbling straight guy, but underneath this facade I’m a scary powerhouse of flying arms and legs!

It is a good thing that blogs didn’t exist in 1993 because Matthew Polly would surely have used a blog to document his year at Shaolin Temple instead of giving us this wonderful book:  American Shaolin.  Besides being a funny almost lovable nerd, Matthew Polly gives us a bone crushing and forced splits account of what it was like to spend a year at the Shaolin Temple.

Polly is honest, so honest you kinda feel sorry for him in an “I’m glad it wasn’t me” kinda way.  His story telling skills are delightful.  I especially liked his stories about seeking out a trainer in the drinking game “Playing Hands”.  He starts that chapter with a quote from The Dream of the Red Chamber

:

“Drinking games are to be observed even more seriously than military orders.”

His “Playing Hands” trainer is his most important master.  He teaches him, through the drinking game, how to achieve goals, negotiate deals, intimidate a criminal Triad affiliate, and get laid.  Then Polly learns that:

“Earlier European and American writers called the Chinese fatalistic and passive.  This was a mistake.  They aren’t passive; they are introverts.  They study the patterns and wait for their opportunity.  But if opportunities were continually deferred, they exploded.  This was the reason why luan (chaos) was the most feared word in the language.”

Polly was an undergrad at Princeton in Religion and Chinese Language for 3 years before he went to Shaolin.  Unfortunately studying Religion without a lot of History didn’t prepare him enough to actually explain why a Buddhist Monastery would be credited with creating martial arts.  But he takes a shot at it anyway:

“Shaolin Kungfu has eighteen different official weapons, but there are forms for more.  Shaolin has five main animal styles– tiger, leopard, eagle, snake, and praying mantis–but there are more.  It is estimated that Shaolin has more than 200 open-hand forms, but no one has been able to record them all.  Historians of martial arts explain the creation of all of these styles either for self-defense (Shaolin was an isolated monastery often attacked by bandits) or religious reasons (kungfu forms ar e a type of moving meditation), but that doesn’t explain the complexity.  It took me all of a week to come up with my own theory: boredom. Put a bunch of sexually repressed young men on a mountaintop with nothing to do but meditate and practice kungfu and the myriad of Shaolin styles is the result.”

Of course what he learned there was Wushu, not Shaolin exactly.  The Shaolin Temple was destroyed and then, after Jet Li made the movie Shaolin Temple (1982), it was rebuilt to accommodate tourists and the thousands of kids who swarmed there (or were abandoned there by their parents) to learn martial arts.  Wushu was created by the Chinese government to replace kungfu because the Communists wanted an absolute monopoly on sources of power and authority.  It is a combination of Northern Shaolin (what I teach), Dance, and Acrobatics.  He also learned Sanda (kickboxing with Chinese rules), some traditional body surface conditioning associated mostly with performance (like brick breaking), and of course drinking games.  Buddhism doesn’t seem to have been much of a priority when he was there in 1993, although he thinks it may be now.

History aside, the biggest difference between Wushu and traditional Chinese martial arts is that Wushu performers wear out at the same age as ballet dancers, in their late 20’s.  Over stretching is the problem they have in common.

It is a really funny book, and it’s insightful too, but you’ll have to keep reading my blog if you want to find out why a Buddhist temple is so oddly credited as the creator of kungfu.

Or I could have titled this piece, “Does Procrastination Improve Martial Skill.”  I’ve really enjoyed the last couple weeks.  I’ve had a light schedule and I’ve gotten plenty of rest.  But all that ends on Monday and I’ve got mountains of work to do before then.

It seems I’ve been procrastinating.  This is a skill that has always come easily to me, and I suspect that with age my skill is improving.

Great martial arts skill often involves utter calm, even stillness, followed at the very last moment by explosive energy.  The ability to hold back, to wait calmly, to delay as if nothing in the world could move you, and then to suddenly “Do Stuff!” like really important “Stuff,” all at once in a simultaneous blast of energy–sounds like procrastination doesn’t it?

Do years of matial arts training help  facilitate better procrastination?

If you’re just hanging around killing time you might enjoy this funny video:

I justify adding it to my blog because one chapter of the Daodejing (also called the Laozi) just happens to reference mothers milk.  Individual chapters of the Daodejing often have two or three slightly different voices saying similar or supporting things, but this one, more than any other, sounds personal:

Daodejing Chapter 20 (Wangbi)

Get rid of “learning” and there will be no anxiety.
How much difference is there between “yes” and “no” ?
How far removed from each other are “good” and “evil” ?
Yet what the people are in awe of cannot be disregarded.

I am scattered, never having been in a comfortable center.
All the people enjoy themselves, as if they are at the festival of the great sacrifice,
Or climbing the Spring Platform.
I alone remain, not yet having shown myself.
Like an infant who has not yet laughed.
Weary, like one despairing of no home to return to.

All the people enjoy extra
While I have left everything behind.
I am ignorant of the minds of others.
So dull!

While average people are clear and bright, I alone am obscure.
Average people know everything.
To me alone all seems covered.
So flat!

Like the ocean.
Blowing around!
It seems there is no place to rest.
Everybody has a goal in mind.
I alone am as ignorant as a bumpkin.
I alone differ from people.

I enjoy being nourished by the mother.

Randy Fung has put together a site to honor my first teacer’s teacher Kuo Lien Ying.  There is some old 8mm film of him and my teacher Bing Gong also on the site.  The videos are small, I hope he makes them bigger because I’ve seen them as films and the original quality was much better.  Still I’m really greatful that there is some attempt to put these important archieves in the public domain–hurray!

I recently received this comment from Steven Smith in the comments section of this post:

Internal artists of lore could disregard muscle development and muscular force. They lived lives that used their bodies; they worked. These days, much of the supposed “work” fails to utilize our bodies in integrated ways, so we must strengthen ourselves so we can experience weakness.

The comment sounds reasonable, but is it true?

There is little doubt that people in the various forms of the Chinese military were required to be strong, they trained to develop that strength.  However, Chinese culture has always had people who did not work at all and people who did not work doing hard labor.  Martial arts were sometimes practiced by scholars and wealthy women.

Farmers and artisans certainly needed some strength to do their work well.  Generally they developed that strength early, in their teens, and kept it until they were too weak to work.  There is no reason to believe they had any more strength than they used on a regular basis.  A black smith, for instance, had five different sizes of hammers.  Once he could wield them he had no need for strength development.

Was there an historical China where people were as obsessed with exercise as Americans are today?  I don’t know.  From my visits to China it appears that most older people do go to a park to exercise daily, but the same is not true for younger people.  Most working aged Chinese are not getting as much exercises as Americans.

I would like to think that in the past there was another era in which all of China did some kind of proto-gongfu-dance-devotion-thing.  I would like to think that every Chinese village, every “Big Family,” had a style of gongfu that at least some of its members practiced.  I suspect that the percentage of people in each “Big Family” learning gongfu has risen and fallen from era to era.    I would like to think this, but I haven’t seen good historical evidence and as far as I know archeology on the subject is sparse.  (Archeology could settle this issue definitively because one can tell very acurately what kind of training someone was doing by looking at their bones.)

But all of this is a side issue to the central question:  Did Internal Martial Artists of the past intend to say we should reject muscular force and muscular training even if we already have sedentary lifestyles?

Daodejing

I think they did indeed intent to dissuade us from cultivating strength.   The Daodejing is rather unequivocal about this.  It posits that when people are afraid for their survival they will try to accumulate a type of power which is both strong and insensitive.  When people are possessed of desire, they will seek to sharpen their skills and hone their abilities.  Such an approach is qi expensive.  Such an approach wastes qi and jing, leaving us less able to adapt to the situation as it is.  Leaving us rigid, full and hard–at death’s door.

In that sense, it is not a rejection of strength itself, it is a rejection of the idea that we will need strength at some point in the future.

Chinese heroic archetypes include the strong, the smart and the skillful.  All three are regarded by Daoist Orthodoxy as shortcuts to death.  All three invite possession by demonic forces.  All three are forms of power that if left unchecked, may some day require an exorcism.

The Daoist idea that someone might cultivate a body which is neither strong, not smart, nor skillful is among the likely roots of the Internal Martial Arts.  I guess I could have called my blog “Dumbness with a Twist.”

This isn’t easy to do. I’ve never been particularly good at showing my teachers respect. Unless by respect you mean practicing all the time. But I certainly do think teachers should be given respect.

Last weekend George Xu was giving a two day workshop. I’ve been busy and a little under the weather, but I toyed with going for just one day. I rested on Saturday and was considering resting again on Sunday; however, when I heard the weather prediction of rain all day Sunday I knew I had to go.

George Xu teaches his workshops outside in the park, on rainy days he usually moves class to a school entrance area that has some shelter from the rain, but it is still kind of windy. Here is a piece of advise: If a teacher offers to teach a class on a rainy day–GO.

Why? First of all, most people will see it is raining and flake out. The teacher will really appreciate that you came when others did not. Secondly, teachers know that most of the students they teach aren’t going to get it. Why should they put extra effort into making sure you understood them if you’re going to give up before you fully assimilate the material. Showing up on a rainy day demonstrates your willingness to persevere through hardship, a quality teachers respect. Thirdly, there will be fewer students there, so you are likely to get more personal attention.

Rainy days are when secrets get passed. There are three main categories of secrets: Outdoor, Indoor, and Three Ears Never Hear. So I was happy when I showed up in the park along with only one other student and George Xu said let’s just go over to my house and workout in the basement.

We worked out all day in a very small space, one more person and it wouldn’t have worked. But this is where it gets difficult. George Xu is trying to pass on a whole bunch of secrets. One of them is called, “Having a third leg.”

I’ve been listening to bad English all my life, usually I just ignore it and try to understand the content. “Having a third leg” is related to rooting in motion, generating power from the ground, neutralizing the opponents force, sinking the dantian, and lengthening the torso. It is a very specific qi transmission.

Each leg can be said to have a passive function and an active function. Once the active and the passive functions of each leg are distilled, then the passive function can be used continuously in support of the active function. If these two qualities are not distilled, you will get a mixed result, an on again off again result– and your legs will fatigue or become muscular in low stances.

Having “a third leg” means to replicate this feeling for the area between your legs and slightly to the back. The passive function feels like the ground is giving something back, a buoyant force. The active function is the yi (intention) leading the qi (not the yi leading the body and not the yi by itself.)

I can describe it, but with out feeling it, it’s probably impossible to get.

But imagine if you will, the challenge I faced, when my teacher was saying over and over “You need to have a third leg!,” “Here, feel my third leg,” then while while pushing me, “your third leg is broken,” “your third leg is too small, too narrow!” And then, “OK, you have some third leg there,” and then knocking me around this tiny room, bouncing me off the walls saying, “Can you feel my third leg?” “Can you feel it now?”

links: Urban Dictionary, Third Leg® Support.

Ballet has had a dominant role in American and European stage dance for a century because it has been the “thing to do” for 5 year old girls. That has meant that ballet dancers were simply the best trained professional dancers. Unfortunately the chivalrous dainty movements of ballet are mostly terrible for telling stories in the crazy modern world. That has contributed to dance performance often being viewed as the boring fantacies of little girls and gay men. While the 20th century saw the invention of numerous “modern” dance techniques, the sometimes lacking skill of “Modern” dancers and the relentless influence of ballet has kept people from seeing dance.

While there is no doubt that popular dance has flourished through music videos, the last 20 years has also seen the growth of classical and lineage ethnic dance techniques as the basis for telling stories. These are starting to replace ballet in the world of dance performance. Kungfu, Capoeira, Indian Dance, African dance, Indonesian Dance, and circus arts are just some of the in depth movement forms that are replacing ballet. (Please put some of your little girls in kungfu classes, anything but ballet.)

This performance uses Shaolin:

Celebrated Flemish/Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui presents a brand new dance work inspired by the skill, strength and spirituality of Buddhist Shaolin monks. He has collaborated closely with Turner Prize-winning artist Antony Gormley, who has created a design consisting of 21 wooden boxes which are repositioned to create a striking, ever changing on-stage environment. Polish composer Szymon Brzóska has created a beautiful brand new score for piano, percussion and strings which is played live.

hat tip: Daniel Mroz

This is some old Northern Shaolin footage of one of Kuo Lien-ying’s San Francisco students, a gongfu brother of my first teacher Bing Gong.

Check out the latest must read for Daoism scholars.  It’s got some essays by some of the best scholars in the field and it is available free on-line as a PFD from Buddha Torrents.  An unbelievable gift.  Time to make sacrifices for the Lords of the Internet!  Daoism in History. (To down load click on the link at the bottom of Buddha Torrents and unzip!)

Hat tip to: Harry for the link.

Stock up on your reading for the Winter break (Summer if you are in the South).  The Transnational China Project has audio and text of some great thinkers.  Check it out.

I was just about to write another post when I thought I’d look back and see if I’d said anything simular before.  I noticed on a lot of my old post that this symbol is scattered all over the text:

Â

What a pain in the Â!!

How does one even search for a way to solve these problems?  Sometimes it seems like I’m the only one that has to deal with this stuff?  Well, that funny hat on the “a” is called a circumflex.  From doing searches for wordpress and circumflex I determined, dudes, that it is like a deep code problem.  Perhaps the symbol shows up every time I hit the save button.  Whatever, it wasn’t like that before I did an upgrade.  There seems to be no shortage of things out there designed specifically to increase hair loss.

Do me a favor, look at some of my old posts (anything before October) and tell me if you would still read them even though they have that crazy symbol all over the place.  I’ve lost all sense of judgment.  Does it need to be fixed or can I pretend it didn’t happen?  Should I just go live in a cave or is there hope for this world?

UPDATE:  It only effects posts from June to Oct 2008.  Still it sucks.

Doesn't Work

I broke my arm skateboarding down a monster hill on a homemade skateboard when I was 14.  It was a hill I had skated many times but there was a section that required slowing down, a section with increased steepness and a sharp turn.  I was late on my way to school and just didn’t slow on this particular day until it was a little late.  I slid for a distance on the inside of my elbows and my huge brass beltbuckle–both were shreaded.  I know what you’re thinking, “knarly dude.”

But it wasn’t very bad.  A little disinfectant to keep the exposed elbow bones from getting infected and I would have been fine.  Unfortunately I went to see a doctor, more to get out of school than because I felt I needed anything.  Even though I didn’t need it, the doctor put a cast on me for two weeks because he thought it would discourage me from skateboarding.  It didn’t.  But it did mess up my shoulder because I was in the middle of a growth spurt.

Waste of Time

So skip ahead to age 23.  I’m doing 6-8 hours a day of Martial arts and Dance and I figure my biggest problem is that my shoulders are stiff and a little uneven.  I get to work trying everything under the sun and moon.  The first thing I figured out was that I needed to sleep with a shirt on because my shoulders would get cold at night and the muscles would tighten up over night.  Without keeping them warm at night any progress I made in loosening them would be reversed by the cold.

Next I did a thousand experiments with bodywork and massage.  About 3 hours a week for 4 years.  I think this was positive at first but over the long term I simply learned more about how my own body relaxes than the people who were working on me.  Now I almost never get bodywork.

At the same time I started creating tools to help me stretch.  I had poles, staffs, ropes, bungee, a range of rubber balls from small to big to roll on, lots of eye-bolts in the walls with loops hanging from them, slanted boards, I even modified a door frame so it would be a better jig for me to stretch in. I was very disciplined.  My housemates were very accommodating.  I think they liked it that visitors to the house asked if our living room was a torture chamber.

The results, nada, nothing, waste of time.  Stretching the shoulders doesn’t work.

What does work?   Slow qigong movements.  Expanding and condensing from the dantian.  Arm circles.  Making sure your qi gates are open, that circulation is optimised, and that your alignment is efficiant.