08.31.07

Kuo Lien-ying’s Diagram

Posted in Martial Arts, Taijiquan, Books at 12:49 pm by Scott P. Phillips

The T’ai Chi Boxing Chronicle, Compiled and Explained by Kuo Lien-Ying, translated by Guttmann, (1994, North Atlantic Books), contains this diagram.

The top third and the bottom two thirds are two different diagrams. I find the bottom two thirds the more interesting of the two. Stand yourself at the top where it says “Centrifucal force.” The ‘wiggle’ below the word Peng is, I think, meant to represent “An jin” or hidden power, just below that is the bridge to your opponent.

There are lot’s of things here for all you push-hands players out there to think about. For instance, notice that Pivoting and Grabbing are almost out side of the picture, far beyond the opponent’s center.

I believe he intended us to see Ji, Lu, and An (I can’t bare to translate them) as contained in the words: Open, Close, Give, Empty Receive, Adhere, Evade, Connect, and Stick.

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08.30.07

The Bridge as a Metaphor

Posted in Fighting, Martial Arts, History at 2:25 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I often hear the bridge metaphor in martial arts talk. It has a number of different meanings. Zhang Xuexin used it to describe what he called the bridge stance. His metaphor was a rainbow bridge, probably bamboo, which was a brilliant Chinese structural innovation of the Sung Dynasty.

The idea is that your legs are like huge bundles of bamboo stuck in the ground at angles leaning over a river. These bundles then have more and more bundles tied to them at progressively lower angels until the two sides of the bridge meet in the middle. By staggering the bundles you create many triangles in the structure and it becomes a self supporting woven structure, which is both strong and quite flexible.

In other words, he was saying that the two legs are a connected structure which is constantly redistributing the weight of the torso.

Luo Dexiu and the gang over at formosaneijia are using the metaphor to mean the act of crossing over. If you are going to have a fight at a bridge and you meet your opponent in the middle, you both have equally limited space to maneuver. Step back and you are below your opponent, step side and you’re in the drink.

However; if your opponent decides to cross the bridge first you can gain an advantage by attacking him just as he is exiting the bridge, at the moment where his maneuverability is limited and yours isn’t.

This complex metaphor is used to talk about how we enter a fight and close the gap between us. Speed, power, technique, and the use of timing all change dramatically as the two fighters get closer and closer together. (Basically we move through this approximate progression in an instant: Kicks, jabs, stomping, slaps, hooks, throws, knees, elbows, shoulders, more throws, grappling.)

Thus the bridge is often the movement or technique one uses to get in closer. If you “cross the bridge first” your technique should compensate for that moment of vulnerability just as you “get off the bridge.” For instance, someone will often step in fast faking with the back of their hand outstretch, if this is met by the opponent’s hand, one can can sense the opponents intentions, direction, and power at the moment of contact and spontaneously use that information to inform the next part of their attack.

Others, like the Blacktaoist, are, by extension, using the term bridge to mean one’s arm. If the arm is the first contact with the opponent then it needs to have extraordinarily good structure, so that it can take all the heavy traffic that is going to be traveling over it!  More traffic, more power.  If you have a weak bridge (that can’t handle much traffic), it doesn’t matter how good your techniques are, your opponent’s bridge will send more heavy traffic (o.k. how about troops then?) to dominate your side of the the bridge.

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08.29.07

Strength vs. Weakness

Posted in Qigong, Health, Weakness at 8:24 am by Scott P. Phillips

Many people find that the idea of “strength in softness” challenges everything they’ve ever been taught about how to be. When I say “experiment with cultivating weakness and not controlling outcomes,” I really mean it. Embodying this may change your experience of the world and all the little things you do, like opening doors, picking up spoons, and brushing your teeth. I am not asking you to take what I am saying on faith, do your own experiments, trust your own experience.

That being said, it is not easy to communicate the “reason” we do certain practices, like standing still. I’m glad I didn’t ask a lot of questions about the purpose of standing still when I first learned it. The truth is I made a bunch of assumptions, some of which were actually wrong. Fortunately in my case, I got help and figured it out. Most people hang on to their false assumptions (or their teachers misleading explanations) and end up disenchanted. (And here I mean both definitions of disenchanted.)

I’m not convinced that someone can understand the reasons for standing still until they have done it without fail for at least a year. Understanding would at that point emerge spontaneously in conversation. Perhaps I can sit here and type out a brilliant explanation of standing, but the truth is, it’s too simple for that. The purpose of standing is that it reveals what we actually are.

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08.28.07

Four Types of Teaching

Posted in History, teaching, Daoism at 12:47 pm by Scott P. Phillips

The Daodejing (Tao Te Ch’ing), the central text of Daoism was written at least 2300 years ago. It is understandable to us today because around 2000 commentaries have, over the years, been written to explain it. Many chapters refers to a type of person called a Shang. In many commentaries this is often understood to mean a ruler or a king, but it could also be a Shaman-king, or simply a wise person, a sage, or even an adept or a teacher.

So in Chapter 17 (of the Wangbi edition) I take the liberty of translating Shang as Teacher.

The best teacher is one you don’t even know is a teacher,
the next best is intimate and kind,
after that is the type that inspires fear,
and lastly the one that cuts you off.

Now Tom Sawyer painting the fence comes to mind immediately when I think of the first kind of teacher. Yes, but we’re also talking about someone who is just a presence. They teach by example but they aren’t even obviously teaching a method, their just making you a cup of tea and hanging out with you.

The second type of teacher is everybody’s favorite, they praise us, we feel like they’re really helping us. We believe in their goodness.

The third type of teacher uses fear to teach. They rile you up, they intimidate you, they inspire outrage, they make you push back and stand up for your ideas, your reasons for learning, and who you think you are.

The fourth type of teacher inspires revolt. If you won’t leave on your own, they’ll kick you out. Their gift to you is that they hack you off. They know that in certain situations the best relationship is complete disassociation.

All four types of teachers are actually four types of teaching and all good teachers use all four.

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08.27.07

Appetite and Discipline

Posted in Qigong, Health, Martial Arts, Bagua zhang, teaching, Daoism, Qi Jocks at 2:46 pm by Scott P. Phillips

One of the biggest challenges of being a teacher is that students are always trying to get me to equivocate. For instance, I say, “Practice standing completely still for one hour early in the morning, everyday, before you eat breakfast.”

Some student will always want to know what will happen if they don’t? I usually answer, “Sifu will kill you!” But they always laugh, and then ask what if they only stand for 20 minutes? or do it in the evening? or every other day?

The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve always practiced the whole thing, without equivocation. I can guess or I can ask other teachers. But honestly, what I really know is what I’ve practiced. The reason I don’t stop practicing is because I have a real appetite to practice as much as I do. I stand in the morning for the same reason I eat in the morning.

There is another way, and I’ve used it on solo retreats. It is called the Wandering of the Mare. I have several artist friends who live this way all the time. They eat when they are hungry, they sleep when they are sleepy, they paint, or read, or call up a friend totally spontaneously whenever they feel like it. I’m never surprised to hear that they have been up all night painting.

On a solo retreat, I’m the same way, I sleep until there is absolutely no more feeling to sleep, and then I close my eyes one more time to make sure. I sit still, or stand still, or walk the Baguazhang circle, until I’m done. No schedule, no limits.

But most of us work for a living. We have people to coordinate with.  We have to at least try to stay awake during meetings. Five days a week we have to get the kids off to school with a good breakfast and matching socks.

Hermits and anyone on a long, private retreat, can freely follow their appetites. Many of the most potent and profound Chinese disciplines were created by hermits. What to a hermit is natural discipline, may seem to us, living as we do in the world with other peoples needs and expectations, like “militaristic discipline.” To spontaneously follow one’s personal appetite(s) is to be in an on-again, off-again, conflict with the social world.

We might do better to think of Taijiquan, Baguazhang etc… as the “ritual resetting” of our appetites.  By “winding” us back to zero once a day, they allow us to follow our appetites spontaneously–within the social world.

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08.25.07

Perfection

Posted in Health, teaching, Weakness, Daoism at 1:22 pm by Scott P. Phillips

There is a line from the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) that goes:

The purist white is easily soiled.

or sometimes

The purist white appears soiled.

From earliest times, Daoism has played with the paradoxes inherent in the human quest for purity and perfection. During the Sung and Ming dynasties the Chinese government gave out official titles to Orthodox Daoists. (Actually, even at times when the government had an anti-Daoist outlook, Daoshi, invested priests, had the status of “prince” if they were dragged into a magistrate’s court. When the British won capitulation at the end of the Opium Wars, one of their demands was that Christian Missionaries be given the same status in court as Daoists. This was later one of the grievances of the Boxer rebellion.)

Anyway the titles were funny like: The Perfected Immortal of the Purple Mist, or The Most Perfected Immortal of Mysterious Moon-light.

I lectured on perfection to this mornings class and at the end one of my students said, “My problem with perfection is that it is boring.”

I’ve said before that Daoism is not a self-improvement scheme. But Daoism also doesn’t reject self-improvement as an experiment. If a person has an “appetite” for self-improvement, Daoism has many methods for exploring that “appetite.”

The problem with perfect alignment is that it is so easily disturbed. If your alignment is really perfect, you’ll be totally thrown off by a little kid who crashes into you screaming and crying, “Help me rescue my dolly!”

For years I’ve practiced regulating my diet. One of the methods I used was to eat rice porridge (jook, congee, baijou) every morning as my main meal of the day. I’d look at my tongue, take my pulse and feel my appetite. Then I’d select different ingredients to go in the porridge, everything from mustard greens and beef stock, to chestnuts and pork-ribs. Still the base was the same and the additions were always based on bring me back to balance, really a type of purity.

My digestion was spectacular, and my practice really benefited from it. But I couldn’t travel, or go out to eat. I went to stay at my sister’s house for a few days. She made some fancy fried thing one morning and my tongue turned black. The variation was too much of a shock.

So after that I kept the same porridge diet, but twice a week I would spontaneously have something weird instead; like eggs, granola, or a cheese danish. This created a kind of syncopated jazz rhythm in my diet that allowed me to travel, eat-out, and experiment further afield.
The Daoist concept of “Perfection” is really about experiencing and accepting what we actually are.

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08.24.07

Talisman (Fu)

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, History, Daoism, Books at 5:54 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Formosa Neijia posted the last two paragraphs of this article by the Author of Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals, Brian Kennedy.

The Dark side of Talismans
It was March of 2006. A pregnant woman and her unborn baby had been murdered. The Taiwanese police had narrowed their suspects down to one person, the boyfriend. A police raid is conducted on his house and the police find a most eerie thing when they burst through the doors.

The murderer has plastered hundreds of Taoist talismans over every square inch of his apartment. His purpose was obvious, at least to Taiwanese observers, and that was to protect himself from the ghost of his murdered girlfriend and their unborn murdered child.

Although Taoist priest and pundits were quick to try and distance “legitimate” Taiwanese Taoism from the dark evilness of the murderer, nonetheless folk belief in Taiwan is that such talismans are, for better or worse, “morally neutral,” meaning they will work regardless of the motive or personal morality of the users. It is noticeable to any observer of Taiwanese Taoism or any observer of Taiwan’s criminal element that the two things often go hand in glove. For example Taiwanese gangsters often wrap their illegal firearms or knives in Taoist talismans.

First of all let me recommend a really great Horror Movie on the subject, Double Vision (Taiwan, 2002) [review].

Kennedy is right that Talisman (as a whole category) are “morally neutral,” but so are Emergency Rooms, Technology, and the Law. An emergency room will take anyone who bleeds.

Confucius listed four categories that he would not discuss. One of them was random/domestic violence. His reason was that it is so common, it happens everywhere to all types of people. The horrible scene above is all too common, a young man, probably in a possessive rage, kills his pregnant girlfriend. If the story is like so many others, he was instantly filled with unbearable guilt.

Kennedy says the Talisman are Daoist. It would be more accurate to say “Red-Hat Daoist,” sometimes referred to as Wu, and in this blog what I have been calling Trans-mediums. However, there is no central authority in Daoism, so if someone puts on a black hat and calls themselves at black-hat-orthodox-Daoist, they may be able to get away with it, especially where people are uprooted from their traditional communities.

The Chinese term for Talisman is fu. Fu means contract. A fu, in this case, is a contract between the living and the unseen world. Those talisman he put up around the murder said something. Probably not “I’m sorry” and also probably not, “burn in hell,” they were likely an attempt to protect the man from his own intense feelings of guilt. He was afraid, as anyone in that situation would be, that he was going to carry feelings of guilt for every minute of the rest of his life. The newly dead, had in a very real and even physical way, implanted themselves in his body.

These fu were likely a request that the dead be resolved as quickly as possible. When people die, especially young people, and especially people who die violently, they often leave intense unresolved problems, and feelings behind.

Does ritually creating and hanging a contract asking for resolution actually bring about resolution? I don’t know, but I’ll bet he is going to do some time behind bars.

footnote: The ad photo for Double Vision at the top, has a slogan for the English speaking audience about belief. It ain’t in the movie.

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08.23.07

Three types of Teachers

Posted in Martial Arts, teaching at 11:05 am by Scott P. Phillips

In the martial arts world I’ve encountered three basic types of teachers, all of which are great and all of which have draw backs.

The first type is the Perfected Example. This type demonstrates the physical and energetic height of the art. Students tend to develop from the outside inward, meaning that the students try to copy the look and feel of the teacher. The teacher is a perfect example of what one should strive for.

The second type is the Refined Guide. This type specializes in being able to explain, and come-up with exercises which reveal, the deep inner workings of the art. They can explain how to modify or adapt the practice for different types of people or to achieve different types of fruition. A high degree of refined skill is made up of lots of smaller skills. This type of teacher breaks everything down into digestible nuggets. They tend to be interested both in innovation and in the history of how each aspect of the art developed.

The third type is the Constant Trainer. This type teaches the student how to train every aspect of the art. Their motto is, “One day missed, ten days lost.” This type will usually practice with the student, so that the student sees exactly how to apply constant discipline to any training method. Without constant, yet natural, discipline, even the greatest methods produce mediocre results.

For Chinese Martial Arts to survive and thrive into the future we need all three types of teachers.  Ideally, everyone should have access to all three types.

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08.22.07

Eyes and Baguazhang (continued)

Posted in Fighting, Health, Martial Arts, Bagua zhang, Weakness at 9:06 am by Scott P. Phillips

In the fourth Palm Change, the eyes smoothly transition back and forth between looking far off into the distance and zeroing in on a point, like clouds forming and then dispersing and then forming again.

In the fifth Palm Change the eyes are trained not to respond to, or get drawn off when arms come in and out of the field of vision. This is done by circling the arms in the coronal plane, while turning and walking. It is also used for training us to not blink when bursts of air or hands come suddenly toward the eyes.

In the sixth palm change the eyes do the same thing they do in the third palm change, but instead of spinning the body, the head looks spontaneously form side to side, creating a similar blur or whirl effect while doing the palm change.

Again, it is easy to imagine these uses of the eyes becoming different types of possession. The fourth, taken to extremes is what people who are manic look like after not sleeping for a few days.

The eyes of the fifth are important for any type of fighting, but would be dangerous walking through brush because we need to close our eyes quickly if a branch is snapping toward them. I know of an old Gongfu master who worked bank security and kept a bit of metal-filings dust in his pocket to throw in peoples eyes if necessary. Better hope your blink reflex is operating if that happens. Taken to a possessed extreme, these are the bug eyes we sometimes see on crazy people.

The eyes of the sixth can be many things, among them an Exorcist head spinning type of effect, also seen in African and Chinese possessions.

If it is not obvious already, there is some danger in trying these yourself. The danger is minor as long as you:

1. Are relaxed, the eyes should never ever feel like they are doing work.
2. Understand that you are learning what not to do.
3. Are comfortable trying to be just below average.
4. Know in your heart that cultivating weakness is O.K. because we humans are strong enough already.

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08.21.07

Eyes and Baguazhang

Posted in Martial Arts, Bagua zhang, teaching, Daoism at 12:22 pm by Scott P. Phillips

As most readers know, when we practice baguazhang we walk a circle, sometimes around a tree or a pole. If one is practicing different ways of changing direction on the circle, as opposed to a form or routine, we call this “practicing the changes” or practicing “palm changes.”

There are many different ways of organizing information into categories so that it can be remembered by students. By putting teachings into categories it makes them easier to remember (especially for the illiterate, or when what you are practicing might be illegal). Thus in some schools of Baguazhang all the teachings are divided into 8 categories. Each of the 8 categories has one Mother Palm and an assortment of teachings and variations, sometimes called qi transmissions.

The teaching about the eyes for the first Palm Change is one I have described in earlier posts. It is to look into the distance with relaxed eyes. If you do this with your hand up while walking around a pole, you will see two illusions. One, the hand will appear double, and two, the pole will look like it is turning on its own.

The teaching about the eyes for the second Palm Change is that the eyes relax and draw in. Like I described predictor eyes in a previous post.  If you use this type of gaze to move toward someone it feels like they are getting closer to you, as if you were drawing them in. This is a subtle but important distinction. Usually when we walk toward someone we have a sense of our body getting closer to them, predator eyes are intrusive.

In the third Palm Change, we practice spinning. While we are spinning we relax the eyes so that they don’t catch or focus on any one thing, even at the moment when we stop spinning, or change direction. This means we are practicing becoming comfortable with the whirl or blur of the world passing by. The moment one locks on to something with their eyes, they have to keep repeating that, or they will get dizzy.

(Dancers and acrobats generally use a different technique something called “spotting,” which means they focus intently on a point and then whip around to see that point again. One can also whip around from a point to another pre-chosen point. In North Indian Classical Dance we would “spot” on all four walls, spinning one and a quarter turn between each split-second turn. This cool effect was sometimes used to create the illution of a multi-armed, multi-headed deity.”)

Normally our eyes are changing all the time. It’s easy to imagine meeting someone whose eyes are continuously suspended in one of these patterns. If you saw someone gazing far off into the distance as they were getting on a bus, you’d wonder if they were seeing paradise just a bomb blast away. This is a yang use of the eyes, and is associated with, among other things, heroic martyrs.

I described the yin eyes of the second palm change in the brutalized assassin I mentioned in an earlier post on eyes.

Everyone is familiar with the eyes of the third palm change, it’s what happens when we drink too much alcohol. Drinking alcohol and spinning, or dancing in a circle, until one falls down is a staple method of shamanic practice used to contact spirits in many parts of the world.

Previous posts on Eyes and More Eyes

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08.20.07

More about Eyes

Posted in Martial Arts, Bagua zhang, History, Daoism at 11:58 am by Scott P. Phillips

There was a debate with in the Zen community a few years back about whether the eyes should be open or closed. In the Orthodox Daoist practice of jindan, the eyes change between being closed, open and half open. Some scholars have suggested that a method mentioned in the Zhuangzi called “fixed staring,” is actually a form of meditation. In my opinion it could only be a form of trance, there is nothing “fixed” about the eyes or the focus in the practice of meditation.

The popular religion of China is a trance-medium tradition. There are many variations of this. In some places an individual within a locale, will be the only person who becomes possessed by the local deity. He or she may channel the voice of the deity, may physically embody the movement of the deity, or may violently black-out and then recount the visit from the deity after waking up.

Some mediums are also adept at channeling multiple deities. If a new person becomes possessed by a known deity, villages have a mechanism for determining if the possession is really the deity it claims to be or an impostor. Possession has always been one of the ways to challenge authority. One of the ways of determining the authenticity of a possession is to observe how the eyes are used.

Mediums were so pervasive in China that the government certified certain mediums to testify in court on behalf of the recently murdered. One of the first signs that a medium is going into trance is a change in the eyes.

The term Daoshi (sometimes translated Daoist Priest) is like so many Chinese terms in that it has more than one meaning. One of its meanings is, an expert at identifying the type of Qi involved in a trance, a possession or even an entire cult. Detailed descriptions of Deities, spirits, demons, and ancestors were collected into books called Registers.

At the risk of over simplifying, we could think of a collection of Registers as sort of a cross-referenced Deity phone book. A place where a Daoshi could look up all the characteristics associated with a trance and find a match. The sounds one hears, the claims made by the channel about the deity, colors and smells described by those present, the physicality of the movement, the emotion, and the look of the eyes, were all details which could be cross-referenced to figure out what type of deity was present, how powerful it was, how dangerous it was, how it could be controlled, negotiated with, or appeased.

Part of the training to be a Daoshi is to actually practice all the different ways of going into trance, but never falling into full on possession. It is again, a practice that teaches you what not to do. Obviously a key part of this training is learning all the different things that can potentially happen to your eyes, or your gaze, as you fall into trance.

This little bit of Daoism, is part of the teaching of each of the eight mother palms of Baguazhang.

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08.19.07

Eyes

Posted in Fighting, Martial Arts, Taijiquan, Shaolin at 12:50 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I went to two parties after teaching all morning yesterday, so I haven’t had time to edit all the comments in moderation. Sorry I’ll get to it soon.

On the way home from one of the parties Sarah, the possible future mother of my possible future children, said people at the party were laughing about how I used my eyes. Apparently there was a certain woman I consciously, or unconsciously, did not want to talk to–and everyone knew this by looking at my eyes. Fortunately, this particular woman also had a sense of humor and made a lot of jokes about it.

George Xu once said that many fights are determined by the eyes before the fight even starts. Bing Gong taught me to begin a Shaolin form standing still, looking far into the distance, then drawing everything I see into my eyes, then down to my feet at which point I should lift my foot, stamp the ground and sink; this will bring the shen (spirit) to the top of the head.

It is a very effective way to start a performance.

Bing also taught me to relax and “soften” my focus while doing standing meditation and while doing the Guang Ping Yang Style Taijiquan form. This means that when something enters your field of vision, your eyes do not track or latch on to it.

Years ago, George Xu talked about developing “killer yi.“ Yi, which roughly translates as intentionality, can be partially read by looking into someones eyes. At the time I understood “killer yi” to mean your gaze should pierce your opponent very much in the literary sense of, “if looks could kill!”

He now says, “Your eyes should drawn-in the distance the way a predator’s eyes do. When you move forward, you should have the feeling that objects- people, rocks, trees- are being drawn-in toward you, not that you are getting closer to them.” (I’m paraphrasing here.)

I interviewed a street-level assassin once who was trying to get out of the business. He was beaten often as a child. He said that when he got involved in acts of violence he would remember the very beginning, entering a space, seeing a car pull up, and then he would remember surveying the carnage as he left. But he rarely remembered actually fighting or killing. He would in some sense black-out. His eyes were like deep pits. You could look into them but he neither appeared to be looking straight at you, nor did he appear to be avoiding your gaze.

It is clear to me that this brutalized gaze is what Chinese martial arts is, at its core, trying to avoid.

I learned eight distinct different uses of the eyes in my baguazhang training, which will be the subject of a future video and blog post.

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