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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04.29.08

Taijiquan’s Language of Exorcism

Posted in Taijiquan, History, Daoism at 1:28 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Long time readers know that the relationship of martial arts to exorcistic rituals is a pet topic of mine.

Wayne Hansen who comments at the Formosa Neijia site offered this wonderful linguistic explanation of peng [bing1], the most basic and pervasive form of taijiquan power (jin).

Peng is the lid on a quiver.
Imagine a cane laundry basket with the lid just caught in the lip at the top,by pressing the two sides the lid springs open. I am told this is how the Chinese quiver worked. With a press of the back muscles the top, which was covering the feathers from the rain, sprung open.
Peng jin works like that and so the name.

Archery competition now a days is mostly about accuracy at hitting a static target. But great archers had to be able to hit deadly moving targets and hit static targets while galloping on horseback. And perhaps even more importantly, they had to be able shoot arrows in rapid succession– One arrow per second.

So popping the lid off of your quiver with a little rounding motion would have been a very threatening act. In fact you might translate it into words by saying, “Back off!” The standard translation of peng is “Ward-off.”

To explain this difference, I imagine I’m riding along on a mountain path and I sense something threatening. My first instinct is to pop my quiver lid, which would in fact make a “pop” sound if it were water tight. Even if I haven’t seen the actual threat, I can prepare myself, and I can let who ever is lurking know that I’m aware of them. This sort of communication could easily be translated as “ward-off.”

Hold on because it gets better.

Common exorcist rituals begin with fire-crackers. The purpose? To ward-off ghosts. Ghosts and demons who are strong enough to need an exorcism, don’t usually leave when they hear fire-crackers, but their groveling sidekicks and entourages do take to the hills. The fire-crackers are meant to give mediocre ghosts who are just lost a chance to get away. But particularly malicious demons, the ones that feed on chaos, will actually be attracted to explosive sounds in hope that they will find suffering and death.

The next ritual action would be the “offering of spirits.” In both Chinese and African traditions this is done by drinking from a bowl of strong alcohol and then suddenly forcing it back through pursed lips to create a spraying effect which turns into a mist. The mist attracts mischievous spirits. Alcohol is spilled on the ground too.
In the beginning of the taijiquan form, peng leads directly into ji. Ji is a small quick burst of force, sometimes described metaphorically as liquid spraying out of the fingers. Ji by itself doesn’t do much– it can be used for a throw only if your attacker has uprooted themselves by first pushing against your peng. (Of course ji directly in the eye would hurt!) I was taught to project ji into the opponents “empty” spots, those places where they are unaware, because it will stir them to attack and thereby make themselves more vulnerable!

The opponent’s attack naturally leads into lu, the next move in the taijiquan form. Lu is a gathering and a drawing-in of your opponent (usually translated “rollback”). Lu defuses the attacker’s force.

After the “offering of spirits,” the next ritual act is the drawing in and capturing of demonic forces. Offending demons are drawn into a pickle jar and then trapped there.

The final movement in the taijiquan beginning sequence is an. An is usually translated “press,” or even “press down.” It is very much like resting your hands on a rounded pickle jar lid and weighting them so that whatever is inside won’t get out!

The final ritual act is called “Applying the Seal.” The seal is like a piece of tape that holds the lid on the jar and records the date the spirit was trapped, what type of spirit it is, and when it can be released. (It is considered ritually irresponsible to just leave them there. Some are starved to death, some are transformed in bi-annual rituals, others are freed after “serving time.”) Michel also posted in the same thread I linked to above. He quoted the fabulous Louis Swaim:

“If the opponent wants to change hands in order to apply Push (an), I then extend and open my right hand, pulling it toward my thorax to the point where the two palms are facing in and diagonally intersect like an oblique cross-shaped sealing tape (fengtiao), preventing the opponent’s hands from getting in. It is just like closing the door against a robber. This is why it is called ‘like sealing’….The image used of “sealing tape”refers to fengtiao, which were strips of red paper pasted across parcels, doors, crime scenes etc…, as seals.”

All those other uses of “seals” are historically derived from the exorcist’s seal.

That ought to liven up your form!

Here is the best site on Chinese Archery

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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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04.03.08

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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02.22.08

Monkey Swings

Posted in Health, Taijiquan, Bagua zhang, Shaolin at 2:14 pm by Scott P. Phillips

Last month I was at a family gathering and there was a five month old girl who was crying. Her aunt, who has several wild children of her own, tried rocking her and then bouncing her, but the baby was still crying. Then with a big grin she announced, “We are going to have to try Monkey Swings.” I can now verify from my observations that monkey swings are an effective crying control mechanism.

The standard Taijiquan, Xingyi and Bagua zhang instructions tell us to lift up our heads from the Baihui point on the very top of the head. Some Shaolin and meditation schools say to lift from a point a little further back so that the chin comes in slightly. Further, I have heard lift from the roof of the mouth, lift from the base of the skull and even lift from a point in the air about one foot above your head.

All of these instructions are useful gates. It is vitally important to develop awareness of head position, centerline, dingjin (upward power), and zhengqi (upright, self-correcting vigor). However, I think these instructions alone will not produce a high quality final product.

I’ve now spent way too much time looking at baby pictures on google images, I may need some time to recover my manliness. Unfortunately I could not find a single picture of a monkey swing so I’ll have to describe it. Here is how you do a Monkey Swing^TM:

While sitting down place the baby on its back in your lap with the its feet facing you. Take hold of an ankle and a wrist in each of your hands. Then lift up and swing the baby’s bottom toward your face and then it’s head out and away, using your forearms as the pivot. Continue swinging until the desired results are achieved.

As you are imaging this, you might think that the baby’s head would flop backwards like that of the child on the swing above. But it didn’t. The baby’s head stayed right in line with its torso. This was a five month old I was watching, a younger baby probably would have had a floppy head. An older child would certainly be able to do this, but in most cases it would be obvious that they were using voluntary neck muscles.

The baby I watched did all this automatically. Her head was inside her dantian!

The highest level martial artists put their head inside their dantian.

Here is:
A baby development site.

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02.21.08

Slow Down?

Posted in Taijiquan at 3:01 pm by Scott P. Phillips

You would think, that Taijiquan being known almost universally as the “slow motion” martial art, that actual taijiquan push-hands practitioners would consider slowing-down a self-evident method. But most don’t.

I could make a long list of all the reasons for practicing Taijiquan slowly, but I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to talk about one reason.

There are probably a hundred ways of practicing push-hands. Judging from Youtube videos, most people use push-hands to practice applications. I think that’s fine, but applications can just as easily be taught as a separate subject. Push-hands is better understood as a competition.

There are many continuous linking set routines in push-hands, the main purpose of which is to make sure both people have continuous power (jin) while moving through various ranges of movement. When one person’s power is broken they lose; however, if their partner compensates for them, then the routine can continue repeating itself. If either person is trying to win, it is not possible to do a continuous linking routine because as soon as one person’s power is broken, the other must act.

In spontaneous push-hands, there is no routine, just a set of rules or parameters. The two most common rules are no punching and no moving your feet.

Anyway, last year I took a workshop with Master Yun Yin Sen and George Xu together. At one point about 6 of us were taking turns pushing hands with Yun Yin Sen. These were all people who had being practicing for years. He was pushing with each person for about 20 seconds and then he would push them out and call for the next one. But when I pushed with him he never tried to push me out. Like 5 minutes past and I started to feel guilty that I was monopolizing him so I just stepped out. Then everybody got another 20 second turn and it was my turn again. The same thing happened.  We pushed for about 5 minutes until I gave up, in order to give someone else a chance.

What was happening? Every time my fellow students got in a tight spot, they tried to get out of it by adding something; either speed, technique, power or aggression. Every time I got in a tight spot I simply slowed down. Master Yun Yin Sen would always respond by also slowing down and giving me a way out. We could practice forever like that.

Even if you are practicing with a superior opponent who wants to beat you, still the appropriate response when you get in a losing situation is to slow down and give all your attention to understanding/feeling what your opponent is doing.

I don’t think I need to point out that this might be a good strategy for living, in general. When things are challenging or full of conflict sometimes it is a good strategy to slow down. Obviously that doesn’t hold when you’re crossing the street and the light changes color.

If any of my readers have ever tried bullfighting, I’d be curious to know if they think slowing down could be a good strategy there.

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02.19.08

Shaped by the Sea

Posted in Martial Arts, Taijiquan, Bagua zhang, History, Shaolin at 3:13 pm by Scott P. Phillips

The way martial traditions are shaped by the environment is an interesting topic at many levels. In a hundred years Californian martial arts will have been re-formed by and for people who spend lot’s of time in cars, drinking coffee, and typing on computers.

Southern Shaolin, like Choy Li Fut, seems like it was formed by people familiar with fighting in confined spaced, narrow corridors, and tight corners.

Northern Shaolin, on the other hand, seems like it was formed for wide open fields of battle, spear training particularly.

Liuhe (Six Harmonies) style of Xingyi seems like it might have developed on narrow rice paddy pathways.

Baguazhang is harder to place, but from my experience walking in the mountains, I would say there is a strong case to be made that carrying something around on narrow or steep mountain ledges is a likely possible origin.

Taijiquan comes out of the water.

Years ago I had the opportunity to meet Willem de Thouars who, as a child in Indonesia, studied Silat. After achieving a significant level of martial skill at an early age, his family told him to ask the Chinese people living down the road if they would teach him.

The man he ended up studying with eventually taught him Baguazhang, Taijiquan and other arts. The teacher’s first condition for allowing young Willem to become a student was for him to go to the river and jump off of the bridge onto the slippery floating logs that were part of a local logging operation and balance there. He said it took a long time to learn and it was very brutal.

(If you are not going to try this method yourself, at least think about what it would feel like. How relaxed do your legs need to be? How much mobility do you need in your torso?)

If you’ve watched all my Youtube videos you know that I have a little experience fighting on fishing boats in Alaska. The first couple of times I went to sea, I got seasick, but with a little coaching I learned. To avoid seasickness first you have to keep your eyes gazing out on the horizon. Looking at the boat or the water will make you sick. This is very simular to the kind of vision we use in Taijiquan, we soften our focus and gaze way off into the distance.
The second part of not getting seasick is just relaxation. If you try to “hold” your balance, or “hold” your internal organs in place, you will vomit. You have to just let your whole body move around on its own. Trust the rolling of the sea– again, very simular to taijiquan practice.
We worked 20 hour shifts on one of the worst fishing boat in the fleet (worst because the skipper’s brain wasn’t equipt with the re-evaluation process). All the guys got sore knees, except yours truly.

The secret to my knees not hurting like everyone else’s was that I was rolling my dantian and keeping my knees bent the whole time I was on the boat. At that time, when I wasn’t working 20 hours, I was doing about 4 hours a day of Chen Style Taijiquan Chansijin (silk reeling exercises).

When I came back to San Francisco my teacher at the time said to my fellow students (probably hoping another student would use his words as an excuse to challenge me to a fight), “You all have been practicing here with me all Summer, the Priest (that’s what he liked to call me) has been away in Alaska and he has progressed more than any of you have.” (Yikes, competitiveness encouraged.)

The last thing I want to say about water is that if you’ve ever poled a boat through the water or used a Chinese style stern oar, you might have noticed that it is a lot like the Taijiquan movement, “Grasp the Birds Tail.”

Oh, O.K., one more thing. If the founders of Taijiquan were actually fisherman, then it would explain how the modern day practitioners’ picked up the habit of exaggerating (the size of the fish that got away).

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02.16.08

Summer Training Camp

Posted in Fighting, Martial Arts, Taijiquan at 5:07 pm by Scott P. Phillips

George Xu just put up new information about the Summer Camp he co-teaches every year with a different Chinese Martial Arts Master. The Camp is held in the woods in a place called La Honda, near Santa Cruz California. Here is the scoop on his co-teacher this year:

Master Yu Chen Yong Born in 1943 Tian Jing, China. Started his training as a wrestler in 1953 then moved to Tai Ji in 1957 with famous Master Wu and Master Niu. He also studied Ba Gua with famous Master such as Gao Yi Sheng and Yang Ban Hou large frame Tai Ji with Master Niu Lian Yuan and Zhao Bao Style Tai Ji with Master Hou and Master Yue. One of his teacher is the very famous master Han Mu Xia whom defeated the Russia champion wrestler in 1930, which he then went on to win 10 gold metal from 10 different countries. The metals are now in the China National Historical Museum. In 2000, the master performance in Tian Jing master Yu got 1st place for the title of “best Master performance”. In 2005, Master Yu acquired famous master Zhao Bao Tai Ji title from Wu Dang Mountain.

Master Yu will be teaching all his secrets in this year’s summer camp in California

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02.15.08

Keep Your Fingers Straight

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, Taijiquan, teaching, Shaolin at 2:05 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I have a friend of a friend who, last I checked, has been studying Shaolin and Taijiquan with the same teacher for nearly 20 years. This friend is convinced he is becoming the greatest of fighters. This particular teacher claims an important lineage and has both nurturing qualities and a fierce temper.

There is a shadow side to the previous discussion about metaphorically passing through difficult gates or crossing over bridges of unnecessary practice.  That shadow is the sometimes desperate pathos of the student-teacher relationship.

Perhaps if you are a teacher you’ve thought to yourself, “Why are so many of my students lesbian vegetarians? Is it something about me?” Perhaps if you are a student you’ve wondered, “Why do I keep accidentally calling my gongfu teacher MOM instead of shirfu? He doesn’t look or act anything like my mom!”

When I think about it, I doubt that the younger me would have studied martial arts at all if my teachers had been the sort of people that expect me to call them “Master.”

There are many teachers out there that make good second mommies or daddies. In the South Asian traditions they just go right ahead and call the teacher some version of Ma, or Dada.

I find it hard to resist having a little laugh at this phenomenon, but in all honesty I have great respect for people who provide this kind of support to the emotionally needy. I have known a great many people who have attached themselves to a teacher who really cared about them, and through that particular type of intimacy made disciplined and rewarding changes in their lives.

Some people need a fierce father figure in order to thrive. Others need a nurturing mother figure to give them the confidence to face decisions the rest of us see as routine. I’m rarely fierce or nurturing, so students that come to me looking for those qualities tend not to hang around.

But we digress. I have this friend of a friend I mentioned at the begining. The teacher he studies with has been very exacting and demanding and has truly nurtured him in a way that brings out his better qualities. As far as martial arts goes, he gets posture corrections and that is it! He has gotten one Taijiquan instruction in 20 years, the same one over and over, “Keep your fingers straight.” He keeps expecting that some day he is going to get to learn push-hands, and many other secrets too.

It would all be sad and pathetic if not for two factors. The posture corrections are good, so his Shaolin and Taijiquan forms, which he practices without fail everyday, are pristine. The second factor is almost funny. The instruction, “Keep your fingers straight,” is wrong by most accounts. But because he believes in it and practices it so diligently–because he uses it as a measure of everything he does– he has actually made it mean something true. Every millimeter of his body movement is calibrated to “keep the fingers straight,” what ever that even means.

He has no knowledge of functionality or applications, no subtle power or push-hands experience. But I have to admit, his form looks good!

And on that note, here is a quote from Henry David Thoreau, (from memory of course)

Why are we in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps if is because he hears the beat of a different drummer, let each step to the beat which he hears, however measured, or far away…

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02.10.08

Journal of Asian Martial Arts

Posted in Health, Martial Arts, Taijiquan, History, Daoism, Books at 6:09 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I was excited to see Douglas Wile, one of the heavies in terms of martial arts scholarship, writing an article in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts.

Fifteen years ago when this magazine first came out I was ecstatic. Imagine a martial arts magazine which insists on footnotes and bibliographies in every article! I thought it was a dream come true after years of wishing I was still 10 years old so I could appreciate martial arts writing.

The current addition has 13 contributors. There are two without degrees, two have M.A.’s, one has an M.S., one is an Acupuncturist (M.A.), and eight have Ph.D.’s. Wow, and still most of the writing leaves me wishing for younger days. To be fair, most academic writing is genetically predestined to be boring. At least this stuff is mostly written by people involved in the arts, not by “objective outsiders.”

I guess I am a child of the Internet, because I’m finding it harder and harder to read full length books and articles. I still love old media, but it takes so long to get to the point. I mean this stuff should have one of those “Don’t operate heavy machinery” warning labels. Again, to be fair, I’m addicted to pithy blog posts and I needed to catch up on some sleep.

Douglas Wile’s article is called “Taijiquan and Daoism; From Religion to Martial Art–and Martial Art to Religion.” To really do it justice I would have to read the whole thing again. Honestly, I’m in one of those deep practice phases where a few hours of profound internal training makes me want to sleep– y’all will have to settle for my vague dream like memories.

The gist of Wile’s article is that facts about Taijiquan prior to 1900 are really hard to come by but that hasn’t stopped lineage holders and historians from freely making sh-t up and pretending it’s factual.

One can easily understand why a lineage holder would want to make stuff up. It makes them seem like they have the only key to the chest of treasures while at the same time allowing them the (false) modesty of claiming that their teacher’s teacher’s teacher was like, dude, really, really good.

It’s harder to understand why historians would make stuff up. In America if we catch a historian making stuff up, we use their books for compost. But then again, the various “wings” of the Communists and the Nationalists, were in a propaganda war to prove that only their (death cult) ideologies and allegiances would make Chinese people better and stronger.

Even though Wile spends a lot of time explaining what all these 20th Century scholars thought, I have the feeling he would agree with me when I say, taijiquan has picked up so much baggage we ought to throw out all the books and start over.

Wile dances around the question: Why in light of so little direct evidence for Taijiquan’s Daoist roots, are there so many people trying to prove a connection? He writes about Taijiquan’s “inventor,” the magical dreamer Daoist immortal Zhang Sanfeng:

For sheer contentiousness, the Zhang Sanfeng case can only be compared to issues of racism, sexism, abortion and homosexuality in American culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, the pendulum has once again swung towards the myth-makers. Western practitioners of taijiquan, with their monotheistic, atheistic, or “only begotten son” backgrounds are apt to view Zhang Sanfeng as simply an historical figure with some innocent Daoist embellishments. They are not likely to understand China’s culture wars, polytheism, or embodied immortality…”

In summary, his point is that Taijiquan never really had much to do with Daoism, until 20th century people started mixing in a lot of Neidan (inner alchemy), TCM jargon, some quotes from the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, and claims about health. Oh yeah, and some stories. And then a bunch of fake modern scholars said none of that is true– but what they said wasn’t true either (so there!). Now that running a business isn’t banned in China, there is this new feel good, feel strong, feel Chinese, feel Taijiquan-is-part-of-Daoism, marketing ethos. No real content.

And Wile gets kind of mad about it,

“Daoist Chauvinism should never be underestimated, and we need only remind ourselves that some Daoist apologists have claimed that Buddhism sprang from seeds planted by Laozi when he rode westwards on his ox.”

Them’s figtin’ words. Bumper stickers have all but disappeared from San Francisco (which I attribute to uniformity of thought); however, I spotted one today. It read, “Lighten Up!”

For the record, those Daoist “apologists,” were not writing history, they were writing secret scripture. The name Laozi means “old seed,” but if we are talking about the Santianneijing (3rd Century), then it was Laojun (the inspiration behind the Daodejing) which actually incarnated as the Buddha so that the western barbarians would have their own version of “The Way,” and would thus have their own home grown basis for mutual cooperation and understanding. Never mind, that’s an argument for another day.

I respect Wile’s contribution to understanding the history of Taijiquan, I thank him for letting us know it’s all a bunch of lies!

My argument with him is this: Orthodox Daoism never claimed Taijiquan as a Daoist art and I doubt it ever will. Monastic Daoism has of late decided that Taijiquan is part of its shtick. Since the 1980’s is has also decided that gongfu movies are part of its shtick, big whoop. Monastic Daoism never really had a central authority, from the sidelines it kinda seems like Buddhism with a little inner alchemy for the “we must appear to be loyal Chinese” set. All this means very little.

If you want to know what the origins of Taijiquan are, you are going to have to soften your definitions, and blur your categories. Taijiquan only came into being because it was able to obscure it’s origins in religion, popular culture, and secret societies. By the start of the 20th century participation in trance cults or exorcistic and processional dance, was considered politically dangerious and ideologically backwards. That’s why they invented and then tried to tack on the suspicious label, “purely philosophical” Daoism.

Likewise, some combination of fear, modernity, and ideology led people to strip down their communal ritual performance traditions into pure “Martial Arts.”

People over here were arguing about why they took the Fajing (power issuing?) out of Yang and Wu styles of Taijiquan. I’ll tell you why. Fajing is a way to strike terror into your audience, a way to let people know the god has taken possession of the dancer.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go put the Fajing back in my form!

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01.24.08

Song Zhong Jin

Posted in Martial Arts, Taijiquan, Bagua zhang, Shaolin at 3:24 pm by Scott P. Phillips

I just wanted to throw this term out into cyberspace and see if anyone is interested in discussing what it means.

Song, (first tone in Mandarin) often written sung, is a homonym with pine tree, it means to let go of status, to slack, to relax and to sink.

Zhong means “center,” as in Zhongguo (China, center country).

Jin means a type of power which can be cultivated through practice. The word is almost always used in compound form and so it can mean widely different things, like gongjin (empty force, pushing without touching), or tingjin (sensitivity, literally “hearing power”).

I believe that song zhong jin means something like: Non-structural power. Perhaps it means power which does not rely on a clear center. It may even mean power which is not transfered or generated through the back, the spine, the bones, or the centerline.

What do you all say?

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