My Response to Ben Judkins’ Review of my Book
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My friend Ben Judkins recently reviewed my new book Tai Chi, Baguazhang and The Golden Elixir, Internal Martial Arts Before the Boxer Uprising. Unfortunately, I believe he misunderstood it. The crux of his misunderstanding is with a theory I developed called the YMCA Consensus. I assemble the work of dozens of scholars to show that there was a consensus to separate martial skills from theatricality and religion. This consensus began taking shape immediately after the Boxer Uprising in 1901 and grew in strength through the 1920s to become official policy of the Republic of China and then the Chinese Communist Party.
Here is a summary of the main points of my argument:
—The recent works of Hsiao-T’i Li and Mark Meulenbeld lay out the precise way in which Chinese Opera and theatrical “literature” were extracted from their martial-religious contexts to create a political theater disconnected from its origins and shorn from its ritual meaning by the “anti-superstition” movement.
—Half a million temples were destroyed from 1898 to 1940. By 1976, religious institutions were in ruins having endured decades of execution, torture, imprisonment, and re-education. Scholars of religion agree on these facts, but the period is still poorly documented (Rebecca Nedostup’s book Superstitious Regimes is indispensable here, along with the work of David A. Palmer, Vincent Goossaert and others).
—Martial/Ritual groups were unanimously blamed for the Boxer Uprising. They were the first and most persistent targets of the anti-superstition movement. Groups like Jingwu Hui (Pure Martial Society), and Guoshu (National Martial Art), and terms like Tuyi (Physical Culture) were created to obscure the origins of Chinese Martial Arts in religion and theater and to create a new reformed context for these arts to continue to exist.
—The YMCA Consensus describes the successful effort by intellectuals and government officials to reform religion, theater, and martial skills. They were not simply changing three distinct areas of society, they were attacking a single institution; an institution which integrated martial skills with theatricality and religious culture, an institution which only exists today in fragments. The YMCA Consensus was so strong it included radically diverging voices such as Kang Youwei, Chang Kaishek, Mao Zedong, Yuan Shikai, Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Xiang Kairan, Chu Minyi, Wang Xiangzhai, Sun Lutang, and the Su Prince.
Whether one takes sides as a partisan in the YMCA Consensus, believing it was for the better, wishes it had been more moderate, or never happened at all, is irrelevant to the question of whether it did in fact happen. It did.
The YMCA Consensus was so effective in changing the framing of martial arts that prominent Martial Arts Studies scholars have asserted that Chinese Martial Arts are largely a creation of the final days of the Qing Dynasty and the early Twentieth Century. The most obvious problem with this claim is the sheer depth, precision, and diversity of Martial Arts throughout China. Are we expected to believe that all these martial arts came down from the mountain or crawled out of the ocean fully formed? The other problem claimed by scholars and practitioners (and scholar-practitioners) whose research and personal perspectives leads them to repeat uncritically the Pure Martial Arts agenda of the early Twentieth Century is an alleged “scarcity of historical documentation” prior to the Boxer Uprising. There is no shortage of documentation, they are simply looking in the wrong places, while ignoring the plentiful research from religious studies. The situation is so bad that Peter A. Lorge declared in the introduction to his Cambridge history Chinese Martial Arts that the subject he was writing about, military history, had no direct connection to the subject the rest of us call martial arts, namely those forms, styles and systems we all practice. This is totally unreasonable and I hope through my books to set the record straight, and to open up the possibility of studying the history of the martial arts we all know and love.
How could this be done? Simply do what I did, look for theatrical and religious origins for Tai Chi and Baguazhang. There is a huge quantity of easily available yet unexplored material that can be uncovered; with a library card, an internet connection, a Chinese dictionary, and a curious mind.
This is a list of some of my key findings, my studies are in no way comprehensive and I joke throughout the book about how little effort it took to find this stuff and how much more material is likely to be out there:
—General Qi Jiguang, who published a song with twenty-nine of the named movements from the Tai Chi form in 1563, had a deep and lasting connection to the sage Lin Zhao’en, who taught him the Golden Elixir and claimed to be a direct student of the Immortal Zhang Sanfeng.
—Every single academic mention of the Immortal Zhang Sanfeng in relation to martial arts, in English, has made the erroneous claim that the Immortal was not associated with martial arts during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The earliest version of this mistake comes from Anna Seidel (1970), who probably relied on YMCA Consensus informants. The problem was compounded by Douglas Wile’s (1996) assertion that an Epitaph from 1669, which credits Zhang Sanfeng as the creator of Internal Martial Arts (Neijiaquan), was an analogy and thus we should disregard the plain meaning of the text. His reasoning is complex. The author of the Epitaph, Huang Zongxi, was critical of Golden Elixir teachers in his other writings and therefore he could not have looked with favor on Zhang Sanfeng as a famous Golden Elixir teacher, but instead, intended readers to deduce that Zhang Sanfeng in the Epitaph represented only Chinese Culture in general. This is clearly an error. The Golden Elixir is indicated twice in the Epitaph. The first time, as Wile notes, by naming Zhang Sanfeng, the second time, which he neglects, in the expression “flipping Shaolin on its head by reversing its principles.” To a practitioner of the Golden Elixir, like myself, this is a self-evident description of fruition (a point I explain in detail in my book). On top of that, the Immortal Zhang Sanfeng was already famous for his martial prowess in the 1597 play Sanbao Taijian Xia Xiyangji. In the play Zhang Sanfeng fights twenty-four palace guards using thirty-two distinct movements, called quan 拳 or fists, many are in the Tai Chi form, and eighteen were used by General Qi Jiguang in his famous fighting song.
“Yue Fei in Hell Revealing his True Form (zhenxing) King Garuda.” From The Reed College Hell Scrolls Collection
—Wang Zongyue, the second “author” of the Tai Chi Classics, has been a point of major contention for historians and practitioners. Who was he? I settle this debate by showing that the name Wang Zongyue refers to the Buddha’s guardian King Garuda who, in theatrical literature is a previous incarnation of the loyal heroic General Yue Fei. Everyone knew this before the Boxer Uprising because it was part of New Years celebrations. It is only because of the success of the YMCA Consensus that this obvious cultural reference passed into obscurity.
—I explore the obvious mime in the Tai Chi form for the first time (third time in print for me, and there is more work to be done).
—The combination of the Golden Elixir and martial skills is the only coherent definition of internal martial arts, because 1) this combination shows up in a long list of historical documents, 2) it is a major trope used for five hundred years in the theater, 3) it was a prominent religious concept in popular religion, sects, redemptive societies, and invulnerability cults, and 4) it produces a unique form of martial prowess.
—In the second section of the book I made a list of thirteen elements of Baguazhang that are unique for a Chinese martial art. I then looked for a religious or theatrical source which shared all of these element. I found it in the theatrical-rituals of the god Nezha, whose attributes are a perfect iconographic fit with Baguazhang. In addition to having these unique attributes, Nezha was important to:
Nezha Riding a Wind Fire Wheel, the Patron Saint of Caravan Guards.
Caravan guarding organizations
Heterodox rebel groups
Militia formation
Daoist martial-ritual visualizations
Possessed spirit-medium enactments
Dragon King Temple cosmology
The City of Beijing, which was called Nezha City
The invulnerability rituals of the Boxer Uprising
Having set up this quasi-scientific analysis, I engage in speculations about Baguazhang’s religious and theatrical significance. These speculations line-up well with the oral histories transmitted about the first identified practitioner of Baguazhang, the eunuch Dong Haichuan, who may have lived in the Palace of the Su Princes. No one has done any research into this area even though there is an abundance of source material, including photographs from people known to be interested in movement arts and friendly with the Su Prince. Much of this material is buried in boxes in library basements available for research.
—The biggest realization about Baguazhang’s origins came to me by accident. I realized years ago that there was a strong movement connection between Kathak (a form of Indian martial dance that I studied professionally) and Baguazhang. After reading Meir Shahar’s book on Nezha, I gained a plausible explanation for why the two arts are similar! Kathak is also called “the dance of Lord Krishna” and, as Meir Shahar pointed out, Nezha is the Chinese name for Krishna. The two gods share a creation story which was a common ritual performance in both cultures. This discovery unlocked the meaning of symbolic movements in Baguazhang which were easily cross referenced with statues and living traditions in Taiwan and Singapore.
—The final section of my book is a thorough presentation of my practice of the Golden Elixir. I explore how it was used by theater professionals, how it enhances martial skills, and its role in religion, cosmology and perception. It is perhaps this chapter’s openness about my own practice that led Ben Judkins to describe my book as a “faith-argument” and an example of “apologetics.” This is fair. I am a Daoist. A foundational precept of Daoism is to “practice not-knowing.” It is indeed my creed, my faith-position if you will, to approach all conceptions from the presumption of not-knowing, this bias no doubt permeates my work.
As you can tell, I am disappointed that my reviewer missed my most important contributions. Are my ideas speculative? Of course, all research is. Are my ideas fanciful and unfounded? Far from it.
