05.15.08

A Simple Question

Posted in Martial Arts, History at 11:59 am by Scott P. Phillips

I have a simple question for which I don’t have a good answer.

Is brutality part of the art? Most, if not all, of the old masters used or experienced brutality in their training. Is it necessary or were they just crazy.

Buster Keaton, one of the greatest physical performers of the 20th Century, got his start with his parents in Vaudeville, which had a fair amount of slapstick. As a child aged 3 to 5 his father would drop kick him all the way across the stage. He would land on his butt facing down stage and make a face. The audience loved it.

A Korean martial arts master I knew described his early training this way.

I was a precocious child, so my parents sent me for a year to study martial arts with a group of monks. My training began in the mountains in the early Spring. After my parent had dropped me off one of the monks took me back out to the front gate, gave me a rag and told me to get down on my hands and knees and rub the ice off of the road. The ice was three inches thick. Periodically a monk would come outside to see how I was doing, offer criticism, and then kick me around on the ice a few times.

The thing is, none of us would choose this kind of brutality for ourselves, but this master was so fast he could catch a bullet with his hand–from behind!

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05.13.08

Red Belt

Posted in Martial Arts at 12:55 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I saw David Mamet’s new film, Red Belt last night. I loved it. Great fight scenes too.

The star Chiwetel Ejiofor is a great actor, I just hang on his every word, he played the honor-obsessed interplanetary government Space Martial in Joss Whedon’s Serenity, which I also loved.

This film is from the Theater of the Absurd tradition. The highly implausible changes that occur in the film are meant to further the metaphors which expand in significance through out the film.

Because there are so many important twists in the film, I’m not going to tell you what happens, but feel free to talk about the film’s content in the comments section after you have seen it, and I will too.

As my regular readers know, I’m neither a big fan of Mixed Martial Arts, nor of Honor–and this film is about both. Because the film is meant to be absurd, it would be foolish to go out on a limb and try to say what it is “about.” Still you’ve got to love staring into Ejiofor’s passionate eyes when he finally hands his star student his black belt and says, “It’s just to hold up your pants!”

It is also hard to miss the digs at Mixed Martial Art’s “working class” pretensions, if you want to know more about David Mamet’s personal views check out this article from the Village Voice, but be warned–cognitive dissonance may occur.

The world of martial arts that we all know and love has its own logic. If you try to apply Martial Arts Logic™ to everything else in your life you’ll get incongruence, cognitive dissonance, crazy interactions, deep meaning, and simultaneously find superior isolation and brotherhood (or sisterhood) in unexpected places.

Excuse me dear reader, I must leave you now. I have to go fight my way into the kitchen, and through ultimate will power and sacrifice, I will make myself a disciplined sandwich, with maximum power pickles–so that I can fight for freedom, defend honor, and prevail in my duty to bring humor to blog-land.

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05.12.08

Prowess

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, History, Shaolin, Daoism at 6:46 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I’ve been thinking a lot about prowess lately. The dissertation “Martial Gods and Magic Swords,” by Avron Boretz got me going on it. This is a difficult work to review, especially since I had to return it to inter-library loan a few days ago.

The classical explanation of the basic gongfu bow or greeting is that you are covering your right fist, which represents maximum explosive power, with your left hand, which represents the commitment and ability to control that power.

Wen, the left hand, culture, writing, government, civility; juxtaposed with Wu, the right hand, raw power, martial, chaotic, military.

Historically governments, and scholars generally had an interest in having us believe that Wen naturally dominates Wu, and that we should fear the opposite situation. Certainly, the Daoist pantheon gives hierarchical precedent to gods in civil roles and lower status to gods in military or punishment roles, and even lower status to demons and chaotic forces.

But reality on earth is not always so simple, nor should it be. There are no true earthly hierarchies.

Avron Boretz is, I think, the first martial artist to really dive into the blended subject of ethnology and history. As a martial artist and a scholar, he managed to get himself joined up with a cult dedicated to The Dark Lord (I kid you not, but in Chinese it would be Xuandi) in a small town in Northern Taiwan. All the inner cult members were martial artists and many of them were involved in crime, like smuggling and prostitution, fringe of society stuff. They were a brotherhood of sworn allegiance, prone to occasional fighting with other brotherhoods.  In other words, small time gangsters.
The book takes a hard look at the role of rituals in creating feelings of prowess in men who are otherwise kind of marginal. Because he got quite close to these guys, he writes about many different aspects of the cult. They all go out together to do exorcisms dressed up in costumes as demon generals. Sometimes they get possessed by the demon general they are representing. They all wear thick make-up and go into trance, but they only occasionally become possessed.

One of the ways they determine if a possession is authentic is that the person who was possessed has no memory of it.

The second to last chapter kind of surprised me. It is all about partying with the boys. Heavy drinking nearly every night, women, money, status– all ways that men demonstrate their prowess.

The only time I have done things I have no memory of was after drinking large amounts of alcohol. I wonder if that is what it is like to be possessed. My experience of it was just the opposite of prowess, it was extreme embarrassment. But I have met people who are proud of their black-out moments, perhaps for some rather desperate people, blacking out could be a form of prowess.

Martial arts and alcohol, seems like a bad combo, but so do sports and alcohol and we all know those games used to be played by very drunk individuals.

These martial dances are not martial arts, but they are displays of prowess and they do have many similarities to the martial arts I practice.

One interesting example is the Big Dipper step, or Seven Star step. When a group of demon generals approaches a house or a business they are about to do an exorcism on, they approach it doing the Seven Star step (chixing bu). They then stamp on the ground and run across the threshold into the building.

I realized that everyone of my Northern Shaolin forms begins with a Seven Star step.  In Northern Shaolin, first we stamp on the ground and sink into cat stance, which is like stepping over a threshold. Then our hands shoot out and break apart, as if we were breaking through double doors or the opening in a curtain, and we run three steps, as if we were running into a building or onto a stage, and we do the “monk clears his sleeves” action. I counted it out and it is exactly seven steps. Cool huh?

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05.05.08

Gangster Gongfu

Posted in Martial Arts, History, Daoism at 7:07 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I’ve been reading Avron Albert Boretz’s 1996 dissertation: Martial Gods and Magic Swords: The Ritual Production of Manhood in Taiwanese Popular Religion. I got it through Inter-Library Loan, but it looks like it can be purchased on-line here.
It is really good, and I really hope it gets published someday. I just finished it, so I’m not quite ready for a review. This I’ll say, it makes an enormous number of connections between gongfu and popular Daoist ritual cults to various martial deities.

Just briefly, the inner circle of these exorcistic cults are sworn brotherhoods, gangsters if you will. They are all into gongfu, and gongfu deeply informs their trance/possession routines. Some of them claim historic roots in local militias too.

One cool part of the book deals with a particular ritual called Handan Ye. In this ritual a prominent gangster is carried around on a sedan chair by other gangsters. The locals line the streets and throw firecrackers at them. The gangster is allowed to wear goggles and shorts, but that is it. He is in trance the whole time, possessed by a god. When it is over he is covered from head to foot in burns.

It seems like this it a chance for the locals to help him clean up his demerits in the Book of Life, while getting even with him for terrorizing the community. This raises a lot of questions, which I shall go into later, but I think it is worth saying that this is an extreme form of martial conditioning. It demonstrates actual prowess and creates a theatrical performance image of extraordinary potency and danger.

Watch it on Youtube!

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05.03.08

Indolence

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, Taijiquan, teaching, Shaolin at 9:46 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Indolence literally means “freedom from pain,” but it has come to mean: the rejection of obligation, difficulty, or even honor or class. Since most of us have neither honor nor class to reject–those meanings are rare. Indolence is a synonym for laziness, but honestly if you are going to exert all the effort it takes to call someone else “lazy,” are you really going to go the extra mile and call them indolent? I mean, you might have to explain it.

The question of whether indolence in its literal sense can be a virtue in martial arts training arose last month on Formosa Neijia and on Dojo Rat, but I’m too…you know…to find and link to the exact posts.

On Formosa Neijia the subject was raised in a rather contentions way, through the suggestion that Yang stylists might not work as hard as Chen stylists. Naturally, the comments concluded that it is individual practitioners, not styles, which are variously lazy or hard working.

However, some people did conclude that to avoid pain in ones practice can have positive results. Does this really work?

Diligently practicing to avoid pain won’t work. We actually need to practice what is painful, and we need to practice each and every painful thing until we understand exactly how and why it is painful. I’m not saying you need to injure your wrist on the left side and then do it again on the right side. That would be dumb.

You can certainly extrapolate that if a practice causes injury to one part of the body it will do the same to another. The more quickly you learn what truly hurts, the more quickly you will progress. Learning, in this case means learning not to do what hurts.

But….

I’ve been teaching kids some short Shaolin routines called Stone Monkey. One of the characteristics of the Stone Monkey is that you bang your elbows and knees on the ground and even grind your fist into the ground with your entire body weight on it. If you do it right, it doesn’t hurt. But it always hurts the first few times you do it and if you have a case of blood stagnation from too much time on the cough watching Kungfu movies, it will continue to hurt until you improve the quality of your blood and your circulation. That could take a while.

Good martial arts training works backwards.

About 80% of the people I teach habitually slightly dislocate at least one of their hips. While they are young it hardly matters, young hips are juicy and forgiving. They just develop protective muscles which limit range of motion. But if one of these students takes a lot of weight in a slightly dislocated hip they can have pain. As people age the slight dislocation of the hips becomes a bigger and bigger problem.

The key to training is to notice the dislocation, notice that it causes a tiny bit of pain. The pain is usually so small it quickly turns to numbness if you ignore it, but don’t ignore it! Understand exactly how and why it occurs. Then stop doing it. And when I mean stop, I mean STOP!

You have to take these sorts of mis-alignment-pain seriously enough to re-teach yourself how to walk, how to run, how to climb stairs, how to get in and out of a car, just about everything.

At one point (years ago) in my standing practice, about 40 minutes into standing still, my foot would start to hurt. I’m talking about, “I want to scream,” type of pain. The first 1000 times I felt this pain, I wiggled, and jiggled until it stopped. Finally one day I stuck with it. When I was done standing I didn’t shake out, I moved very slowly and carefully through my taiji and bagua and even while doing push hands. It hurt really badly the whole time. At some point I fell into trance and lost the pain.

But I had held onto it long enough to know that it was a problem I was re-creating with the inefficiency of my movement on a daily basis. So for the next week or so I stood until it hurt and I stayed with the pain until I could identify its causes in my daily behavior.

You won’t really understand what is hurting and why it is hurting unless you push your body through the difficult parts of training. If you want to transform yourself through martial arts, you’ve got to hold low stances, do extreme power stretching and high kicks, get bumps, bruises and twists, and slowly and methodically unravel the bad habits and old injuries–pain is part of the whole package.

That being said, don’t eat an 800 pound bag of potato chips. If something is hurting and you understand how and why, than stop already. There is nothing wrong with potato chips, as long as you don’t eat more than five.

I might add in passing that pains of the heart and mind work the same way; the experience of intimacy is linked to betrayal, and abandoning rigid thinking is linked to cognitive dissonance.

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Note: I got the picture of people doing taijiquan in wheelchairs from United Spinal. Apparently taiji is of benefit for people with MS.

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04.30.08

Jade Maiden

Posted in Martial Arts, Taijiquan, Daoism at 7:34 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Jade Maiden Works the Shuttles is the name of a taijiquan movement/posture. What does it mean?

The full title is a constellation in the night sky. Like all stars, they are connected metaphorically to fate, in this case we have the image of a maiden weaving the fabric of fate.

A Shuttle is the part of a loom that scoots back and forth as the warp and weft are opened and closed. It is like a card or a stick that you throw. It is wrapped in yarn symbolizing, I believe, infinite time.

So each time you do the form you are weaving another thread in the fabric of time.

But what is a jade maiden?

By definition they resists being defined. Even the gender of a jade maiden can be hard to pin down, they are sometimes called jade lads. By the time I finish explaining this, the meaning may have changed.

A jade maiden is like a muse, because it comes to you bringing inspiration. It is also a type of intermediary. Unlike a Chinese god or a ghost, they no birth.  They can deliver messages back and forth from the gods, even take you to visit other realms. The Queen Mother of the West (Xiguanmu) has and entourage of jade maidens pulled by dragon chariots.

Jade maidens also play the role of intermediaries in the Daoist elixir practice known as jindan. They are simular to dakinis in Tantric Buddhism in that they only show up if you are completely and utterly desireless and free of aggressive intent. However, if you get even a flicker of desire, a dakini will go from being the hottest, most intelligent babe-olla you have ever seen in your life, to being a scary filthy hag with sharpened teeth. Jade maidens, in contrast, simply disappear. (Which tells you something about the difference between Buddhism and Daoism.)
Jade maidens are in one sense the opposite of ghosts. Instead of being lured in by dangerious, violent, chaotic, energy draining or destructive behavior; they are attracted to those people who are pure of heart–people whose living hearts have become like cold dead ashes. They are attracted by non-aggression.

Daoist poets like Li Bai (Lipo) would sit perfectly still in meditation with a brush, ink, and paper for hours waiting for a jade maiden to show up. When they come, they come to tease and test, whisper and giggle. They never stop moving and they dance the most alluring and inspiring dance there is. They are beauty itself. They peer around corners and then suddenly disappear.

They sometimes carry copies of the books which hang from the trees on the moon. These sacred texts known as jing, are true for all time, they can appear in any language in any era. Occasionally a jade maiden will hold one of these books and turn the pages for you as you read. This, of course, can only happen if you are completely open to experiencing things the way they actually are, without preconception or agenda.

(The term jing, so often translated “classic,” actually means weft, as in warp and weft! In that sense it is a distant cousin of jin and jing, power and essence, because all of them refer to some underlying structure.)

Is Taijiquan a jing?  Was it originally taught by jade maidens?  If we truly let go, and practice the form without any preconceptions or aggression will a jade maiden show up to dance with us, or whisper instructions in our ear and correct our postures?  Are we the “shuttles” being worked?

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04.25.08

Troubled Kids, Performance, and Society

Posted in Martial Arts, teaching at 12:33 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I have a group of elementary school kids I have been teaching on Fridays after school. I turned down the job three times because I know from experience that kids lose their impulse control on Fridays after school and I didn’t want to deal with that. But for some reason, I no longer remember, I said “yes” the fourth time they asked me.

Well, they are some of the most difficult kids to teach. They get in fights, which never happens in my classes. They mess with other peoples stuff. They whine too, about hunger and pain, it is like being stuck in a giant nest with 20 hungry crying baby pterradactyls.

But something happened that made me think.

The school asked me to do a performance; to have the kids perform at a parent night. I said, “sure,” and I guess because the other acts were things like “kid poetry,” they made my group the headliners. The kids were totally not into rehearsing and I really had almost nothing planned. The night of the performance I had no idea even which kids were going to show up.

But 12 kids did show up and they were really excited. I put them on the stage and just had them do stuff that I had tried to teach them over the last 10 weeks. To my complete surprise, it went well, the audience was cheering and kids were like a dream class: They had presence and focus and they were game for whatever I threw at them. One little girl found her way to the front when I was having them do forms and she did it perfectly with a smile and charisma, and all the other kids were following her like their lives depended on it!

My thought is this: How can we give people who are on the fringe, frustrated misfits, or underworld types ways to be at the center of attention.– I’m thinking “star status,” ranks, roles and positions which give them ritual potency. Rappers and hip-hop celebrities come to mind. This is not about good and bad, it is about establishing order.

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Ritualized Violence (short)

Posted in Martial Arts at 11:49 am by Scott P. Phillips

All martial arts is ritualized violence.

I don’t care whether you are invoking a deity, doing friendly push-hands in the park, or training solo for the UFC.

All competitions, matches, duels, and stagings are ritualized violence. All martial arts forms and improvisations are ritualized violence too.

Even standing still in a martial stance for an hour is ritualized violence.

We are the ones who make these rituals, and we are the ones giving these rituals meaning. They function in some way to make us who and what we are.

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04.17.08

The Sound of Wen and Wu

Posted in Martial Arts, History, teaching, Daoism, Books at 2:27 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I woke up this morning with my arms crossed.  Actually more than crossed, knotted-up would be a better description.  One hand jutting past my armpit, the other arm wrapped around it twice and dangling between my ear and my shoulder.  It took a minute to figure out which arm was which.  My honey says I do gongfu in my sleep.

Anyway I’ve been reading a wonderful dissertation, which I will review when I finish reading it, called “Martial Gods and Magic Swords,” by Avron Boretz.  The Daoist scholar Paul Katz recommended it.

Today I just want to talk about one of his footnotes.  In a discussion about the relationship between wen (civil, scholarly, cultural) and wu (military, martial) he mentions that the drum is wen and the cymbal is wu.  That really got me thinking.

The drum establishes order, it is steady and precise.  The cymbal is an explosion of sound, it breaks the air and shatters the peace.  When I teach kids or perform, I use the drum for stepping, and the cymbal for sudden kicks.

The large gong is, of course, used for bowing, but it is also good for transitions or even moments of transcendence.

The wood-block (called a fish in Chinese) is used for accenting orders or commands, it is often answered by the performer with a stomp of the foot (leading into cat stance or monk stance).  It is a high sharp sound.  Wood-blocks are used for chanting invocations, and by Buddhists for chanting sutras.  The same wood-block sound was traditionally used in formal arguments and teachings to accent an important point that had just been made.

“The Dao which can be named is not the true Dao!” “PAAHK.”

The flutes and reed instruments mimic the human voice.

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04.14.08

Spiraling Bones

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, Taijiquan, Bagua zhang at 7:30 pm by Scott P. Phillips

All the bones in our bodies have a spiral. The direction of every bone’s spiral is pretty much the same on everyone. These are set while we are still in the womb.

Ligaments give the spirals in each bone continuity across joints; from one bone to another. A given bone may spiral more than once while it is growing, but the second spiral will be in the same direction.

A good example of this is the clavicle (collar bone).  You can see that there is a spiral on the left side of the picture where it would attach to the scapula and the rest of the arm.  That spiral rotation is contiguous with the spiral further to the right where the bone would attach to the sternum.  Each of those spirals are actually the same spiral but the one on the arm side grew first, the one on the sternum side happened later.

So if you are trying to figure out how the spiral in you humerus (upper arm) continues through to your sternum, find the first part of the spiral rotating your arm forward/inward, then find the second part of the spiral by bringing your sternum up.

The spirals in our bones are there all the time.  If you know which way each bone spirals,  you can figure out which ways force will transfer through the body most easily.

Internal arts are all designed with these spirals in mind.

Here is a cool website which says something different about human structure, but interesting none-the-less.

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04.08.08

Troops

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, Weakness, Daoism at 9:40 pm by Scott P. Phillips

It is not a great idea to let your muscles lead. When muscles get tired they are like vampires craving blood! Like hormone enhanced teenagers looking for trouble. Hungry muscles will take what ever they can get, they want slow-food, fast-food, sugar, even beer–anything that can be turned into blood.

Thus the metaphor used in Daoism and Chinese medicine is that the muscles are the troops, soldiers. They need to be well trained and well cared for.

If the muscles are making decisions, you will have mob rule. Alternately, the internal organs can function as a government, the heart/mind is the Emperor, the lungs are the chief ministers, the spleen is in charge of ordering, logistics, “ways & means”, and the liver is the general, in charge of delivering blood to the troops and mustering them to action.

Well trained troops certainly can take some personal initiative. If it is truly in support of the larger cause, personal initiative can make or break a campaign, still the troops are rarely in a position to make good independent decisions so most of the time it is imperative that they simply follow orders.

For an army to function well, every stage of leadership must be clearly delegated and the chain of command exact.

Our body has things called proprioceptors which tell the brain where we are in space, where we are moving, and how fast. Most people’s armies are in disarray because their proproceptors –scouts, spies, and communications networks– are poorly trained. I don’t know for sure, but my experience tells me that large numbers of proprioceptors live in the ligaments.

The muscles can move without consulting the ligaments but it is clumsy, the ligaments should lead–calling the troops, the muscles, to order. Once that mechanism is in place and scenarios have been set up and drilled, then the troops can be commanded.

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04.03.08

My comments on other blogs and some reruns

Posted in Martial Arts, Taijiquan, Bagua zhang at 7:57 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I left a few comments on other blogs today.  Two are here on the subject of martial arts metaphors.  Another one (at the bottom) is on self-defense as a way of staying open.

In case you missed these back in August, I’m still rather fond of these four posts on eyes.
Eyes

More about Eyes

Eyes and Baguazhang

Eyes and Baguazhang (cont.)

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