Weakness With a Twist

Lantern Flowers

Every altar has two candles, an incense burner and two vases full of flowers.

Last time I was in Japan I was talking to my Japanese friend about flowers.  Consider these three contexts:

1.  There is a lantern flower day in Tokyo in which on an annual basis people gather around a specific temple and party while buying, carrying and displaying orange lantern flowers.  These flowers have some medicinal function and it appears that they are being displayed for or offered to the Gods of the temple.

2.  At funerals and a few other solemn occasions, big colorful bouquets of mixed flowers are displayed in large vases on tables.  Are these for the ancestors? For the newly dead?  For the living families of the dead? (To cheer them up?)  For the gods of the underworld in hope that they will be lenient with the newly dead?

3.  The art of Ikebana is a profoundly aesthetic presence in Japan.  It is taught more or less as a pure exploration of aesthetics of seasonal change, space, spontaneity and craft.  I might even venture that it is a ‘high art’ with Modern notions of universality.

My friend insisted that these are fundamentally different categories.  The only commonality being flowers.  Coming from my knowledge of Daoism, which uses flowers on every altar, and sometimes uses a specific species of flowers as an offering to a specific deity (like Purple Myrtle for Ziwei); the difference between the first two contexts seemed to be simply a temple altar to a god, verses a family altar to the dead.  The context of the example of Ikebana seemed like an attempt to take the experience of the reciprocity between the living and the dead,* characteristic of ritual altars, and apply it in an abstract cosmology.  In other words it’s the same thing without any mention of the gods or the underworld; the cosmology is the same but abstract.  (Like with Aikido, in Ikebana they think of squares, circles and triangles; as categories of information about esthetic uses of space, color, shape, texture, etc…)

Well, my Japanese friend said I was wrong, these categories have nothing to do with each other.

It seems I may be up against the same thing in Taiwan with the relationship between martial arts and the dance performances of the demon generals who escort gods on procession.  (Bajiajiang I have been mentioning is just one type of escort used here.)  They are thought of as distinctly different categories.  However, it is obvious to someone like me who has studied marital arts all his life, that they are doing martial arts.  Which presents the question, does experience trump culture?  In any event, it’s not so simple, most people will admit they don’t really know what happened in the past.  They have no way of knowing if martial arts and dance performances were the same thing at some time in the past.

At least I now have loads of video and images to demonstrate my various points.  More posts to come.

(*Gods are the dead in Asia. I wonder if that would have exploded Nietzsche’s mind.
We are, in fact, our ancestors.  Offerings to ancestors must be done by a relative, because we access our ancestors through ourselves.)

Just writing to celebrate that the Taiwan Airport has free Wireless Internet for everyone!  I’m heading home.

I’m really embarrassed that I have come to Taiwan and I just haven’t gotten into tea that much. People who knew me 10 years ago knew me as among other things, a tea fanatic. I find that many people drink tea when they go to the mountains or the country side. Otherwise they drink coffee. I’m really digging the flavor of Ikari blend coffee. It is like a single shot Americano which keeps its foam (coffee creme) on top for as long as it takes me to drink it slowly; not bitter, not sour, not grainy, not burnt, not too strong, not acidic. The machine puts it out the same every time, and the tall skinny kid behind the counter has a squeaky voice that makes me laugh every time I hear it.

It’s pouring rain.

A lot of old women here have kinky hair.

Condoms are the easiest thing to grab in the entire supermarket. They are right at the cash register. Love hotels are everywhere. A love hotel is a place for couples to have sex away from their families, they charge by the hour. These hotels allow you to pay with little or no contact with the staff. However, they are flexible. You can also pay for just the night, which is 6 hours, or stay there like you would at a regular hotel. I’ve been told this is often a good way to get a deal. However, I’ve found that almost every place I’ve stayed was willing to lower the price when I asked for a discount. I suspect that doesn’t work during lantern festival or dragon boat festival when the hotels are packed.

Men and women show a lot of affection to each other in public, but I suspect it’s only certain kinds of people and I just can’t tell the difference. Sex is simply not talked about. While the PRC is having a tantrum about all the kids who would rather look at porn than get stuck in a government job; Taiwan is showing its independence by making Prostitution legal.

Wow, this is it, my 500th post.  I started about 2 years ago with the modest proposal that I would blog everyday and that I would gradually put my book up as a blog.  The book had way too many ideas for a book anyway.  It was always a blog, I just didn’t know it because when I started blogs had not been invented yet.

If you’ve got something to say, start a blog!

And though I oscillate between Shostakovitch, Hard Rock and my own bad singing, this seems like an AC/DC moment:

In Tainan I saw a Tangki (Mandarin: Jitong) at the Tian Tan Gong (Alter to Heaven Temple).  He was wearing shoes, and all yellow cotton clothing.  He was doing a treatment/exorcism on a man in a wheel chair whose legs looked a little swollen, they both looked to be in their late 40’s.  They were directly in front of the gods, in the center of the temple in a small space between a giant incense burning and an altar table.  For the Tangki to dance around the man he had to wheel himself forward and backwards about a foot, which kept him involved while he sat there.

I don’t know what God was possessing the Tangki, or even if he was possessed, perhaps not, or only a little bit (I did not see him “fall” out of trance at the end).  He did a martial arts like dance holding a bunch of incense in one hand.  It was already going when I entered the temple and continued for about 10 minutes.  Using the incense, at times he appeared to be writing Chinese characters in the air around the body of the guy in the wheelchair while making sword fingers with the other hand.  Sometimes he held a posture while pointing his sword fingers at his own abdomen.  Sometimes he touched the man, at one point he pushed vigorously on the back of his head.  He shook and did fajing (explosive power release) a lot.  His breathing was somewhat erratic and audible.

Toward the end, the Tangki had someone bring him a paper cup of something, probably water, and he pointed  at it (concentrating his qi into it?) and danced with it for a while before giving it to the guy and having him spill it and spread it around on his legs.

When he was done he went over to the side and sat down on a bench, he was pouring sweat.  Then the guy in the wheelchair jumped up and started dancing.  Just kidding.  During the ritual I talked to one of several people who were watching, a young man who seemed upset and said the man in the wheelchair was his uncle.

There are many similarities between the Qigong master I saw the other night and the Tangki.  Both are self taught.  Both are called.  Both discover their gift.  Both poke and prod.  Both are doing mysterious healing on someone else.  I believe Tangki’s will accept trivial donations of money, but they essentially, accept a life of poverty along with the job/role of being Tangki, they both express the importance of keeping money out of the ritual.

Frankly, the gongfu performance I saw in the park the morning in between the two had some similarities to the Tangki exorcism too.  The dancing around in martial postures, the importance given to breathing, and the fajing.

The blended ritual I saw is not in these two videos, but a lot of other Tangki stuff is, and Youtube is amazing:

Also, to continue with my stating the obvious jag; There is an enormous wealth of video about Chinese ritual on youtube or google video search if you use Chinese Characters. ?? (Tangki)

The word-processing icon on my laptop is a pen with a cup of coffee.  Do you really think the archaeologists and historians are going to be able to figure that one out in 800 years?

In many ways my project is about stating the obvious.  Obvious to me that is.  Unfortunately what is obvious to me is sometimes my imagination.  And sometimes, it’s just hard to know.

In my first week here, late at night across the street form my hostel, I saw a group of well dressed women standing out on the sidewalk burning large amounts of hell money in a big metal burner that looked a bit like a burned out trash can with holes.  I asked what was going on and a woman said, “ We are burning money so that we will do well in business, we always do this at the end of the day.  We want to make a lot of money!”  I noticed that their business was a beauty parlor.

I thought to myself, they are ritually and symbolically paying off emotional “debts” they have accumulated from dealing all day with people who vainly wish they looked better that they do.  That night I saw a few other small groups of people burning stuff in front of their businesses, and evidence of many others.

I brought this up with a local in Kaohsiung and she said, “No, no, they don’t do it all the time, only on the new moon and the full moon.”  “Why are they doing it,” I asked.  “Every business does it.”  “Really?”  “Yes,they do it twice a month at the end of the work day, and they put out offerings on a table too.”

So I had to throw out my perfectly elegant theory about emotional baggage and vanity, and look for another one.  I theorized that this was some kind of deception meant to take place in the unseen world, in hell perhaps, where it would appear that the business was loosing money hand over fist.  Demonic forces hate commerce and are trying to destroy successful businesses using underworld bureaucratic tyranny at every chance they get; however, when they see that this business is already losing money, they don’t bother with it.

Alternately we could see this ritual as paying bribes to smooth the business through that bureaucratic hell realm; or as extortion payments, again with the goal of getting local demon elites off your back.

This created several questions.  What do 24 hour stores like 7/11 do?  Do foreign owned operations like Starbucks also burn hell money?  Since I’m not in Kaohsiung anymore I don’t know if my informant was correct about what happens there, but here in Taipei only about 15% of businesses are visibly participating in the New moon ritual.  7/11 and Starbucks did not put on a show.  Still 15% means there are altar tables on every block.  The increase in smog may effect the ability of demons to see and breathe.

(How come Youtube doesn’t have a Business or a Religion category?  I filed this under “How To.”)

Professor Yeh met with me again last night along with one of his graduate students in anthropology, Yves  from Holland.  Yeh seemed stunned by my knowledge of Daoism, even though he disagreed with half of what I said.   During dinner he started badgering me to explain the mechanism by which talisman are efficacious.  After that he had me work on the translations into English of the museum’s Daoist artifacts.

So, if burning hell money twice a month is good for business, what is the mechanism?  Perhaps it is somehow linked to cleaning? or accounting? or community expectations of what a good business does?  Perhaps it is like moon rituals of an earlier era in which everyone participated in the public renewal of precepts and commitments.  I think this is likely.  Standing around a pot of burning money with your business colleges must imprint the metaphor in language and image.  If you don’t do your part and consistently look for ways to improve the business, you will find yourself staring into a pot of burning money (real money this time).

What do you think?

I have more video of Lin Miaohua but I’m going to save the editing for later.  His specialty, besides being able to be very hard and very soft, is double leg fajing (explosive release of force).  You can’t miss it in this clip (thanks again Sharon).

UPDATE: Sorry, my default upload makes the videos private, I’m just getting used to it. IT WORKS NOW!

I  visited Xinbeitou yesterday.  This is a hot spring in the city limits of Taipei.  In fact it’s on the the Subway line, about 30 minutes max from anywhere else in the city, it took me about 20 minutes to get there from Central Taipei.
Walking out of the subway you see a park with a steaming river running through it.  The park has a beautiful new library made of wood and stone, warmly lit with views of the park.  I was there at night so I didn’t get to visit the hot springs museum.
There are lots of hotels around the area and I guess some of them have their own hot springs tubs.  But on the advise of Lonely Planet I went to the outdoor public bath.

It cost 1$ US.  There are booths to change and shower in and a place to leave your shoes.  There are also lockers with keys for your stuff but everyone just puts their stuff on top of the lockers, there is very little theft in Taiwan.

There are four large beautiful stone pools in a hillside.  Each is fed by a water fall and the two on top are 40 and 41 degrees celsius, Hot!  There are also two cold pools, where I spent more than half my time because I was already too hot when I got there.

In a Japanese public bath men and women are separate and naked.  Here men and women mingle together and wear bathing suits.  I remember a public bath in Japan where I watched a guy scrub his body 8 times in between soaks.  These were vigorous scrubs, enough to take off skin.  Either he was scraping off layers of skin or his skin was very tough from years of scrubbing.  Anyway, scrubbing is against the rules in this Taiwanese hot spring.  Any scrubbing you want to do happens in your private booth while you are changing and showering.

The mood is very relaxed and friendly, a couple of young women who were with their mothers decided to talk to me.  (Wow, the sexy hairy monkey talks!)  The waterfalls are the dominant sound especially in the hotter tubs where people are ‘cooking.’  But this is no new-age hang-up keep-your-voices-down kind of place.  It’s all flirting and catching up on gossip.  About equal numbers of men and women but no children.

Really worth a visit…perhaps every other day.  I saw no evidence of religion, or stretching, but one guy was doing arm exercises while standing up in the corner.  They close for 45 minutes of cleaning every 2 hours, so it’s clean.

Here is some more video of Lin Miaohau. Notice at the end he briefly does double leg fajing (explosive power). For a 71 year old man, the openness of his upper torso is remarkable. I also wanted to thank Sharon Lee for arranging this introduction.

Saturday morning Sharon Lee came to my hotel with her young friend Kevin (a tri-athlete) and his girl friend Yixian. They took me to his bagua class. I guess we were a little early because instead of going straight to the park we went to his teacher’s house. He and his wife were selling breakfast in sealed plastic cups (like they use for bubble tea). We got to try both types of breakfast, one was a pearl barley wolf berry (gojizi) thing, and the other was a more fruity beanie thing. They were both good. I concentrated on the barley one because pearl barley is known to “drain damp,” and believe me, I got damp. (For those of you who don’t know any Chinese Medicine, damp is how you feel after eating fried food with beer.)

Meeting Master Lin Miaohua I was immediately struck by his long neck relaxed shoulders and open chest. He had the same drum I use in his house and he had a lot of weapons. Next door was his painting studio, all traditional, lots of great looking flower scrolls and calligraphy. He is 71 years old.

He took us to the park and we did a little warm up. Then he demonstrated his Baguazhang. He is a student of Zhang Cilong who was a student of Sun Lutang (1861-1933). So this was great stuff to see. Sun Lutang was famous for his fighting ability, for creating a synthesis of Baguazhang, Xingyiquan and Taijiquan. He taught with “Yang Shao-hou, Yang Shao-hou, Yang Ch’eng-fu, and Wu Chien-ch’üan on the faculty of the Physical Education Research Institute where they taught T’ai Chi to the public after 1914. Sun taught there until 1928, a seminal period in the development of modern Yang, Wu and Sun style T’ai Chi Ch’uan. (quote from Wikipedia) Man, even I’d go back to school for that!

Master Lin is a master of hard and soft. Feeling him attack is like fighting with an electric switch. If he touches you he is sure to give you a shock. He specializes in two legs off the ground fajing explosive power. He has shaking power too. He showed me a whole bunch of forms including some Shaolin and a low ground fighting system called Diliang (I think, it means lay down on the ground). His baguazhang uses small steps and focuses on explosive power. The key to his power is in making the torso like a vacuum which can suddenly suck in the limbs and then cause them to pop out like a fire cracker. Here is a quick video with more to come.

The carving of wooden Deities is extraordinary and the carvings are everywhere.  I think there are more wood carvings than there are people.  I watched several carvers working with very sharp hand chisels in Tainan.  This kind of art is usually called craft because the basic content of the work is almost totally fixed.  But there is artistry in every detail.  I couldn’t help thinking that if a craftsman of this caliber where to go “conceptual” or to fall in with some other contemporary art movement, he would be a sensation.

This guy appears to be carving Zhenwu (Perfected Warrior) or perhaps Xuande (Mysterious Virtue).  He has the wide braid down his back, incredible armor with animals at the joints and bare feet, with the left foot sticking out to the side showing that you don’t need to be perfect to be “Perfected.”
I also saw a guy making a giant puppet. After being in Taiwan for a few weeks I finally gave in and started carrying my video camera around.  Check it out.

Then I had a Gebao.  A simple steamed wheat bun sliced in half with tongue, pickled vegetables, and sesame sauce, served with broth on the side.  The tongue was in honor of my late grandfather (it being father’s day) who could never pass up an opportunity to eat tongue.

The other night I slept through dinner so I was walking around looking for a late night place to eat.  A lot of restaurants are actually storefronts in which everyone sits out on the sidewalk.  I found one with pictures of goats everywhere.  I asked for some noodle soup and he boiled me up some vegetables and some lamb which he put on top of some fine rice noodles.  Then he was like what else do you want?  So I said stock.  There were two stocks boiling away, a dark one and a light one.  I pointed to the dark one but he was like,  “No way I’m giving that one to you.”  I asked what the name of each stock was and he said the dark one was Dangui.  He insisted I take the other one.  Which he called Ji, which means chicken but I must have that wrong because it was really good lamb stock.   When I finished the delicious meal, I pleaded with him to just give me a taste of the Dangui, he relented.  Dangui is a potent herb that I know makes qi rise up to my head so I avoid it, but it was great tasting stock.