Weakness With a Twist

Everybody who has ever studied with a traditional Chinese teacher knows the expression, “Tasting Bitter.” A standard Chinese prejudice against Americans is that we have never tasted bitter and although we may have talent, be clever, or even achieve some semblance of self-discipline, we will never understand things the way a Chinese person does. This is all due to the “fact” that we haven’t “tasted bitter,” we haven’t experienced profound hardship.

Well, this article certainly spells it out. We ain’t changing!

Performers have complained that they sustained injuries from slipping during rain-drenched rehearsals or fainting from heatstroke amid hours of training under the relentless summer sun.

Cheng and 2,200 other carefully chosen pugilist prodigies spent an average of 16 hours a day, every day, rehearsing a synchronized tai-chi routine involving high kicks, sweeping lunges and swift punches. They lived for three months in trying conditions at a restricted army camp on the outskirts of Beijing…..(snip).

North Korea is No. 1 in the world when it comes to uniformity. They are uniform beyond belief! These kind of traditional synchronized movements result in a sense of beauty. We Chinese are able to achieve this as well. Though hard training and strict discipline,” he said. Pyongyang’s annual mass games feature 100,000 people moving in lockstep.

Performers in the West by contrast need frequent breaks and cannot withstand criticism, Zhang said, citing his experience working on an opera performance abroad. Though he didn’t mention specific productions, Zhang directed an opera at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006.

NOTE: I maybe posting in bunches for a while until I fix the timer on my blog.

Long time readers have heard me say that the greatest source of medicine is war.  Where else do you have the resources to do big experiments?  Where else can you get the experience of having more injured people than you can possibly treat?  Where else do you get huge numbers of sick people?  (Historically, more people have died from illness, starvation and disease during wars than through trauma.)

Chinese medicine is no exception.  Check out this article from Military.com called Battlefield Acupuncture.

If you have ever seen the over-the-counter Chinese Herb Yunnan Baiyao you may have noticed that this ’stop bleeding’ formula has a tiny red pill to be taken only in the case of gunshot wounds.  The story is, Yunnan Baiyao was in the North Vietnamese first-aid kits.

Check out a great post from Martial Arts Blogger Jianghu 2.0. First he gives his explanation of keeping one’s tongue on the roof of the mouth and then how one should conceptualize baguazhang’s mud walking.

I was taught an additional reason for putting the tongue on the roof of the mouth:  In meditation/stillness, it allows saliva to pool and then descend down one’s throat with out creating the gag reflex or having to actively swallow.  Not particularly useful for pure martial arts though.

Perhaps because of my California coastal experiences with mud I think of baguazhang mud walking happening in sticky mud, instead of the slippery or calf-deep mud he describes.  The advantage of sticky mud is that it emphasizes the opening and closing (kaihe) of the joints while giving the same emphasis to the back foot that calf-deep mud would.

Of course, if you have been practicing with the slippery mud idea that has the advantage that you don’t rely on a fixed root; a higher level practice actually.  I suppose the next level up might be walking on top of quicksand, or really high level–water.

Self-defense, narrowly defined, is the ability to hurt someone quickly and get away. How someone carries themselves, how we are perceived by others, is not generally considered part of self-defense, but it should be the main subject. Usually this aspect of ourselves is unconscious and people will resist paying attention to it. Taking stock of how we carry ourselves can be life transforming.

All of us have known people who manage to get in fights on a semi-regular basis and seem oblivious of the possibility that the way they carry themselves, or the way they smile or use their eyes, may in fact be provoking these fights. And we’ve also all known people who just act like victims, and because of that, such people often end up making life choices that shield them from contact with potencial perpetrators.

Both of these behaviors are true for all of us. To at least some tiny degree, we all at times slip into victim, challenger, and perpetrator roles.

There are some theatrical and real life extremes which are worth considering. Gilligan, of Gilligan’s Island fame, is a character which was adapted from Comedia dell’arte. One of Gilligan’s qualities is that he never gets hurt, he is plastic. His clothes don’t fit, he slumps, he flops, he swings, and he is always over stepping the Captain’s personal space and getting whacked. He is a great protagonist because he can innocently go anywhere, do anything, get in a whole mess-o-trouble–and yet he maintains this, “I’m not worth it” stance. His physicality tells us that he is just too weak, too accidental, to bother holding accountable–he is just not worth biting, boiling, or beheading. As he trips over the most important prop in the scene and lands face down in the lap of danger, he says, “Just pretend you don’t see me, I’m not really here, heee, hee, heee.”

Now compare that to a model on a catwalk. “Pffff, if I need to describe it for you…YOU obviously aren’t in the know…is this like, the first blog you’ve ever read???”

O.K. most models don’t even think WE are worth talking to, but that’s what they would say if they stooped down to our level. The model flaunts her vulnerability with high heals, a tight skirt, and a long bare neck.  The model is provoking us to attack, like an alpha wolf sticking out its neck. We don’t dare bite.

Like our untouchable model, the male alpha wolf dares by jutting out its neck, “Go ahead, hit me, I’ve got nothing to lose, how much damage could you possibly do? You’re going to be reeeeally sorry, but heck, its your call, throw the first punch.” Dirty Harry did this with the line, “Go ahead, make my day.”

The physicality  of the vulnerable wolf and the physicality of a bumbling Gilligan can both be used to get out of a fight.

In the old days when you captured someone, stripping them naked was a way to make it difficult for them to run away.  With the invention of prisons and work camps and some forms of slavery, hobbling a person with chains, which restricted the length of a person’s stride, became a common way to keep people from running away.  But with the advent of guns, chains became less important.  I’m not sure where the idea originated, but the Russian Gulags, as early as 1920, gave every person a pair of pants that was too big for them.  With no belt, if you wanted to run you had to do it naked or with one hand holding up your pants.  This also made it really difficult to fight because if you let go of your pants to take a swing at someone, your pants would fall down.

Since that time prisons everywhere have adopted the over-sized pants techniques.  American prisons are no exception, prisoners here wear baggy Levi’s with no belt.

And thus the fashion of sagging was born! At first, we knew a person had just escaped or been released from prison if they were wearing Levi’s half falling off their ass.  We knew such people were probably dangerious.  But then it became a fashion thing.  Pre-teens started doing it to imitate their dangerious uncles.  What a mess.

From a fighting point of view, having your pants hanging halfway down your ass is just stupid. Sadly, the two worst prejudices against black men are that they are dangerious and stupid.  Sagging perpetuates both prejudices.  Since this is obvious to everyone, we have to ask, why do they do it?

The central deity of religious Daoism is the god of fate and the North Star, after which I’ve named my school.  The actual god which sits in this central position at the North Star has actually changed several times in Chinese history.  The current deity is called Zhenwu (the perfected warrior) or sometimes Ziwei, or Xuande.  Before Zhenwu sat on the throne, it was occupied by the Jade Emperor, before that it was Laojun (the source of the Laozi), and before that it may have been Xiguanmu (the Queen Mother of the West).

But our interest lays in Zhenwu before he got promoted to the throne at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368 CE).  Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior, wasn’t always perfected.  Before he was perfected, he was just Fearless.  At that time he was depicted with wild hair and barefeet.  Now-a-days if you see someone with wild hair you think, “Homeless dude,” but in those days it meant something different.  It meant you were a crazy shaman warrior who answered to no lord.  It meant you were so far out of conventional thinking or morality that you were beyond nobility, rank, or status. You were fearless because you had no attachments, no loyalties, nothing to lose.  Zhenwu in those times was also depicted with a straight sword in his hand and no scabbard.  His sword was always out.  In fact he usually dragged the tip of his sword behind him on the ground as if to say, I’m so dangerious I don’t even care about keeping my sword sharp.  “You wanna test me…bring it on?”

In my experience, when I do my Zhenwu routine in front of a couple of isolated  young guys with sagging pants,  they  usually start doing their  Gilligan routine pretty fast.  But if they are being watched by other people from their neighborhood, they’ll jut out their neck and say, “Shoo…you wanna start something?”

I see sagging as an attempt to project an image of fearlessness.  It communicates, “Look!  I have nothing, no loyalties, no morality, nothing to lose. If you are seeking status or power or even a quick buck, I’m not worth attacking! I may look vulnerable with my pants hanging down, but if you do attack me, I will fight you fearlessly to the death.”

If I felt trapped in a dangerious place, where the people around me were seeking power through direct violence and intimidation, I have to admit, sagging might be a good strategy.

As cults go, I find the cult of sagging pretty horrible, but perhaps in the next era we will promote these deities to a higher court.

I said in the previous post that I would compare the philosophies of George Xu and Adam Hsu. 

Orthodox thinkers generally regard the received tradition as so vast and rich in its depth that with dedication and perseverance the full range of knowledge from the past can be revealed. 

Reform thinkers tend to view tradition as a source, but as a broken source.  They see inspiration and knowledge from the past as either lost, obscured or inadequate for the current era.

People often make the mistake of thinking that orthodox thinkers are inflexible, but that is not true.  They simply take traditional sources as the guide and measure of change and innovation.  It is clear from Adam Hsu’s book that he is an orthodox thinker.  He is a creative innovator who sees orthodoxy (or orthopraxy if you prefer) as the source.  He tells us that because most people do not have time for traditional gongfu we should find ways to accommodate them so that the arts will continue to have broad appeal.  However, the heart of gongfu is in preserving and passing on what our teachers’ practiced.  Through our practice of tradition we have a direct link to the past.

Reform thinkers run the risk of being shallow in their perspective.  They tend to oscillate between lofty goals and pragmatic dogma, so they are easily sidetracked.  Still, if the reform thinker is correct in his assessment that traditional lineages are a broken source of knowledge, then he is also correct in seeking to rediscover the original source of inspiration outside of lineage transmissions. 

While I was studying 3+ hours everyday with George Xu in my twenties, he was constantly seeking to unravel the mysteries of a legendary past while simultaneously looking to improve on the practices of his teachers.  He was convinced that his teachers had not just hidden information out of a misplaced obsession with secrecy, but were actually transmitting errors because they were cut off from the sources of inspiration.

I’m an orthodox thinker by nature, given a choice, I’ll usually choose depth and discipline–accepting that the results are somewhere on a distant horizon.  But those years of listening to George Xu took their toll on me.  It occurred to me that there must have existed at one time a milieu which was capable of producing the internal martial arts, and it was pretty clear that neither my teacher nor his teachers had experienced such a milieu.  This insight slowly lead me away from George Xu because the questions he asked tended to keep him focusing on the simple and absurdly pragmatic:  Is it good for fighting?

Of course George Xu was/is aware of the pitfall of shallowness; given a choice between two methods of training which have the potential to produce comparable results, he would invariably choose the one likely to be better for one’s health.

George Xu now claims to have corrected the major errors of his teachers through his own experiments.  His writings are difficult to understand, as literature they are more rant than poetry or prose (you may find yourself trying to translate them back into Chinese).  Yet, I find them brilliant and compelling. 

Still, he has not rediscovered or recreated that mileu of the past which inspired these arts.  He has more or less solved a puzzle, found a mathematical proof.  My interest still lays in that original mileu.  In the end I reject both of these teachers nostalgia for the distant past.  I hold to the notion that the complete source of inspiration is available to us right now, contingent only on us letting go of aggression.  (I know, it sounds weak right?)

While we need not draw battle lines between orthodoxy and reform, ensconced as we are in traditional practices, we must walk a path, consciously or unconsciously, which privileges one of these two views.

Between the ages 20 and 22 while I was studying Northern Shaolin with Bing Gong, I had the habit of practicing each new movement of the forms on both the left and the right sides. So that by the time I had finished a form, I could do the mirror form just as well. I had the appetite of a lion.

So Bing decided that I should study with someone who could give me more. I scouted around a bit over a month and we had several talks. He decided that he would give me a formal introduction to either Adam Hsu or George Xu. Although Bing was a senior student of Kuo Lien-ying, he had studied with Adam Hsu long enough to learn a very beautiful Heaven & Earth Sword-Tiandijian, and thus I was already familiar with some of Adam Hsu’s basics. But because I said I really wanted to test and prove my real fighting abilities, he ended up introducing me to George Xu.

So this past week as I was reading Adam Hsu’s 2006 book, Lone Sword Against the Cold Cold Sky, Principles and Practice of Traditional Kung Fu, it was with the idea that I almost had the fate to be his student.

The book is an enjoyable collection of essays, and many others have reviewed it in the two years since it has been out. Adam Hsu and George Xu were/are friends so some of his students came to visit our class and occasionally someone would switch teachers. Adam Hsu himself would sometimes stop by and the Shifu’s would practice tongue fu. Adam Hsu’s movement was like his voice, soft, lively and clear. His voice as I remember it comes through in his writing. I also had regular opportunities to watch him teach and watch his dedicated students practice because for years his outdoor weekend class was about a block from the tiny room I rented during that phase of my life.

Adam Hsu’s love of Chang Chuan or Long Fist is a love I share. What he calls Long Fist, I tend to call Northern Shaolin, but I do that because that’s what my first teacher called it– but Long Fist is a better name for it. He makes the case, and I agree with him, that there are many layers and levels of Chang Chuan practice. Over the years its logic, depth and stored-up power reveals itself in unexpected ways. At one point he criticizes the “opera style” high kicking of the first style of Chang Chuan I learned (from Bing), saying they serve no purpose outside of performance, they have no application. He would have a point, if that was all I had learned, but I would counter that those “opera style” kicks hide not only some unseen training advantages (not applications) but also the true origins of gongfu, nay of Chang Chuan itself– in a religious milieu in which performance was a central function of the art.

He also asserts that Taijiquan is a form of Chang Chuan, and I find myself agreeing with him. The Taijiquan Classics do use the term “chang chuan” at one point to describe taiji. The opening of Chen style also has the same exorcism feel as the opening of a Chang Chan set. A modified Big Dipper step no doubt.

His sections on Baguazhang are also fun to read. First off he suggests that Bagua Zhang has an alternate origin in a system called Ba Pan Zhang. The name means Eight Plates Palm. He explains that the term “pan” actually means “round” or “turning,” the steering wheel of a car is called the steering “pan.” But I was struck by the obvious performance implications of this name.

Both Baguazhang and Indian Classical dance use a particular type of movement quite frequently which is also used in the circus. The movement involves moving one’s palms over and under the arm while keeping the palm facing skyward. If done with actual plates of food, it is possible to spin the plates around without spilling the food. The first time I saw this I was about 9 years old at the Pickle Family Circus. A waiter was trying to get two full plates of spaghetti to a waiting customer while being chased around by a gorilla!

In another essay he explains that the purpose of the Baguazhang Linking Form is to transmit the uses of each of the eight palm changes in conjunction with eight stationary posts. He says post training is very important. I wish I had a place to plant eight posts in the ground, I would try it out. I usually just practice with a single metal post on the playground, and even that not so often. I see why he thinks it is important, but I think perhaps there are other ways to get comparable training.

Probably my favorite part of the book was when he writes that the purpose of Baguazhang forms is to teach us to improvise. That’s what the forms inventor’s were doing! (They mainly come from the second and third generation after Dong Haiquan.) Adam Hsu gives us a challenge:  He says that when we really know all the palm changes we should improvise our own form! I’ve been improvising for years but it never occurred to me that I should be making my own form. I think I will. My thanks to Adam Hsu for that idea and for the book!

(Tomorrow’s Blog: The philosophical differences between Adam Hsu and George Xu.)

Honestly, when I started this blog, I had no idea how easy the writing part of it would be.  I mean heck, where does all this material come from?

One of the things that has made it possible for me to write 340 posts in a year was the invention of the notebook and the mini-ball-point pen.  Actually they were invented before I was born, but I only discovered how valuable they are in 2007.  They make it possible for me to stop what I’m doing at anytime of day and quickly jot down my thoughts.  With out a notebook the blog would be impossible.

There is a rule of thumb in management circles (so I’m told),

“If you want to make sure something gets done, give it to someone who is busy all the time.”

I have a corollary to this rule of thumb which I discovered through Daoist experimentation,

“If I want to make new people I meet hate me,  I tell them I’d really like to meet with them again–at any time they are available because my schedule is totally open.”

You may be thinking at this moment, “Mr. Weakness, where are you going?”  And honestly, if I were asked, I’d have to admit, I don’t know.  Improvisation also makes blogging possible.

The management rule about giving things to busy people is counter intuitive, but true.  I’ve been really busy this year, and so if I wanted to have any chance of blogging everyday, I had to schedule the time very carefully.  Since I’m less busy this Summer, I haven’t had the obvious need to schedule, so I haven’t.  If I have 8 hours free tomorrow, why do I need to schedule?  It will be easy to squeeze in a an hour of blogging, right?

Not so fast lefty!  That 8 hours can slip by before you even know it!  Gone!  With out a blog!

It’s a mistake many martial artists make, they think they can “find the time” to practice.  Nope, in my experience, it doesn’t work.  You have got to schedule that time, you have got to pre-designate that space.

And with that I have a brag/confession to make.  I have not missed a day of practice in five years…until last Friday.  (Do long international flights count?)  I missed practice on Friday because I had food poisoning so bad, I forgot that I even practice gongfu.

So what about that rule of thumb above that gets people to hate me?

Well, about 10 years ago, I started taking various Daoist precepts.  It turns out that what makes keeping precepts difficult is not in the nature of the precepts themselves.  The difficulty is in the hundreds of conflicting commitments (call them accidental precepts if you like) that we accumulate over our lifetimes, starting at about age 3.  Some of those “accidental precepts” are small, personal and childish like, “Why should I go to bed,” others are big and idealistic like, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”

So, following this line of thought, I just started saying “No” a lot.  The less “other” commitments I had, the easier my Daoist precepts would be to keep. My first internal response to a request was no.  Then I would think, “Is this necessary to maintaining other commitments that I’ve made? (like paying my rent, and not overly worrying my loved ones).  Is there a simpler way?  Is there a more flexible way?”  After saying, “No” for about six months something very unexpected happened.  I suddenly had an enormous amount of free time.

Most people will say they want more free time, but believe me, it can be a scary thing for an American.  Anyway, the free time allowed me to slowly make new commitments that were more appropriate to my true nature (de).

And then came the shocker.  When I was saying “no” all the time, people just kept coming.  But when I tried to get new and interesting people to meet with me for projects or to talk about ideas, I got no takers.  Conversations would go something like this:

I’d say, “Wow, you’re doing really interesting stuff, would you like to get together and X about Y.”

They’d say, “Sure, that sound fun, especially the Y part.  When would you like to do it?”

I’d say, “Well, I pretty much have an open schedule, we can meet anytime you’re available.”

They’d say, “You know…I’m really just too busy.”

Chansijin or chansijing depending on which character one chooses means roughly, silk reeling power.  Last summer I posted this list of the seven types or levels of chansijin.  I’m linking to it now because it never got any discussion at the time.  There may not be much to say about it, but I still think it is a cool list.  I think there is a suggestion in this list that the entirety of Taijiquan can be transmitted through any one practice if that practice is ridden all the way out.

I’ve been searching my blog to see what I’ve written about this year and I realized that although I’ve mentioned the dantian plenty, I’ve never tried to define it.

But don’t get too excited, I don’t think a definitive definition is within reach at this moment. Never the less it’s worth thinking about.

The term dantian literally translated means cinnabar field. I don’t know the earliest usage of this term but what it refers to is a flat, square, platform of packed earth perhaps as large as one mile square. Raised platforms of this sort were used for state rituals from before written history. One could argue that Beijing has several large “public” squares which are indeed used for state ritual.

Going back into pre-Han (200 BCE) history, it is problematic to used terms like Daoist ritual, Chinese, or even the state. Historians sometimes use words like fangshi or ritual expert to designate the priests or leaders of these rituals if they were not performed by the heads of state themselves.

By Han times, the two most important rituals were the sacrifice to heaven and the sacrifice to earth. Grand rituals which demonstrated military prowess, scale, and unity were also very important. If we look over the scope of time, I think it is sensible to think about a continuum of overlapping ritual traditions. Shamanic journeys on behalf of a ruler, ancestral sacrifice, funerals, rituals for the unresolved dead, theatrical tales of gods and demons, trance possession exorcisms, and Daoist rituals for the rectification of qi–all require a sanctified, ritually purified, space in which spacial and cosmic boundaries are defined. They all require a stage.

The dantian is a stage for the performance of ritual.

This early part of Chinese history also supplies us with two other sources of our tradition.

External alchemy, which should really be called early chemistry, was centered around rituals using a furnace and a cauldron which could be vacuum sealed. Clearly, the dan (cinnabar) in dantain, comes from this tradition in which the most basic experiment separated cinnabar into mercury, lead and other trace elements. The literature of this experimental tradition was highly developed by 300 CE when the Upper Scripture of Purple Texts Inscribed by Spirits, was written (See Early Daoist Scriptures).

Meditation, as we call it today, is first clearly described in the Neiye, which is part of the Guanzi, and dates to approximately 400 BCE. Originally it was a practice taught or practiced by kings. While it is impossible to get inside the minds of those early kings, it is worth noting that this earliest meditation text supplies information about the three walled “quite room” in which this practice was to take place. Diet, posture, incense, and the idea that this meditation would have an effect on the conduct of the kingdom, were all present from the beginning.

Many scholars believe that the Daodejing (~300BCE) was originally written for kings and royal families, but by the time Zhang Daoling became the first Orthodox priest of religious Daoism (1st Century CE) the Daodejing was being taught, along with meditation, to anyone who wanted to learn.

These three traditions ritual, meditation and alchemy merged. By the Tang Dynasty (~600CE), members of the imperial family were studying Dzogchen, Tantric Buddhism, and a new school of Daoism called Shangjing (Highest Clarity). The innovation of the Shangjing school was that it used the metaphor of external alchemy in combination with meditation to create a stage for Daoist ritual to be performed inside the body.

The process of a chemical transformation conceived in alchemy became a way to describe the transformations that take place in meditation. The vocabulary was synchronized so that a discussion of one sounded like a discussion of the other. From that base, and under the influence of Dzogchen and Tantric Buddhism, the complexity and detail of Daoist ritual became internalized. As time passed, Orthodox Daoism (Zhengyidao) adopted the idea that efficacious ritual must take place both outside and inside simultainiously.

To understand the meaning of Dantian, it helps to remember that we are talking about a world in which most people are practicing an animist religious tradition. A tradition in which the world is constantly animated by unseen forces–spirits, ghosts, gods, demons.

The Dantian is a purified stage on which internal ritual takes place, inside an internal world animated by ten thousand unseen forces. The external ritual–the dance if you will–happens both on the stage and in an unseen animated world which is rooted in the dantian.

So the dantian is the place where the inner world merges with the outer world. A still place prepared for ritual. A ritual in which the chaos of the cosmos is danced into the dantian. A ritual in which the chaos of our total inner/out experience is brought into or onto a completely stable, mile square, platform of packed earth.

In Taijiquan, when we say, “Sink the qi to the dantian,” this is what we mean.

In internal martial arts we rarely hear about these roots, but clearly the vocabulary is meant to invoke them. It is meant to invoke an animated world in which outer and inner are simultaneously and mutually self-recreating and self-rectifying. A world where the influence and potency of our conduct is with out limits.

All those explanation you have read about the dantian being a point or a ball below or behind the navel, the center of gravity, or a feeling of coordination…they were all correct. It is all those things… and it is also a container big enough to hold the entire ocean, and then some.

From the Daodejing:

I have three unchanging treasures. Hold and preserve them;

The first is compassion, the second is conservation, and the third is not imagining oneself to be at the center of the world.

Last night I went to see Half-Life of a Dream an exibhit of contemporary Chinese artists. What the artists all have in common is that they were trained to make art as Communist state propaganda and they all have supurb technical skills.

I haven’t put up images of any of the art work in because the images from the show that I found on line are not big enough or photographed well enough to do justice to the work.

Every piece of work in the show is good enough to provoke a conversation. In that sense the work is conceptual, but much of the work is also worth looking at for its technical virtuosity or its experimental prowess.

If you can handle darkness and ambiguity, you’ll really like this show. Speaking of ambiguity, there is an artist, whose name I can’t remember. I just tried for twenty minutes to figure out which artist it was and came up sort. Anyway he only had one piece in the show and it was clearly designed to get people’s goat. It is a technically simple piece consisting of about ten 3000 to 5000 year old neolithic ceramic vases covered in brightly colored industrial paint. From an archaeological point of view, this is vandalism. Thinking about this piece as a martial artist or a Daoist, it poses many interesting questions, which my readers might like to consider (in no particular order).

1. If we have simular ceramic vases which are 6000 to 8000 years old, does it really matter what happens with these 3000-5000 year old ones?
2. Isn’t industrial paint more useful and practical than dark colored clay?
3. Isn’t a replica of an ancient artifact more valuable than the original? At least you can pick it up, feel it, or put flowers in it?
4. If you could be put in a cryogenic sleep for 3000 years, wouldn’t you be embarrassed to find your scratched up discolored Tupperware in a museum?
5. When the government controls archaeological research and publication, instead of working archaeologists, are the results any more ethical than if artists were in control?
6. The ancients had a nice sense of form but had poor knowledge of industrial materials and mass production.
7. Is the surface more important than the story behind the object, person, or event?
8. If the past can be improved, should it be?
9. Is reverence for old stuff a form of vanity?
10. What makes something valuable? Its story, history, rareness, function, location, age, or the meaning/experience we derive from it?

Check out the show, and if you are no where near San Francisco check this list to see if anything from Contemporary China is headed your way.

I noticed these two images in the San Francisco Examiner last week.

The first one is of the creepy Chinese police training to kill unarmed civilians on Segways. It would have been simple enough to construct bullet proof shields on the front of the Segways if there was any intention to use them against people with arms.

The second is of the latest competitive format for showcasing masculine prowess. Five bouts of boxing interspersed with a game of chess. I don’t know what the head phones are for. Seems like it would be more interesting if they had to concentrate on the chess game with a crowd of unruly boxing fans screaming, “Take his knight, you big oaf.”

Here are the rules!

To practice any style of Chinese martial arts one must align with the Six Harmonies.

Six Harmonies can be divided into the three fundamental categories of all Chinese cosmology, Jing, Qi and Shen.

The jing category of Six Harmonies is usually expressed like this: Wrists match ankles, elbows match knees, and shoulders match hips.

The jing category is easy to see in many orthodox martial arts postures because each of above pairs (wrist/ankle etc.) line up vertically. But it is important to understand that the postures are not static, they are not held. The postures must have this alignment in motion, constantly. So if you think of a particular posture, say for instance Single Whip in Wu Style Taijiquan, the alignment must be felt not just in the posture but while entering it and while leaving it.

So the jing category is often simply thought of as correct alignment. But the jing category in Chinese cosmology cuts across generally conceived categories of Western thought. Jing is not simply one’s underlying structure, it is also the origin of that structure. In other words, one’s alignment must follow its own developmental pathways. It must come out of, and be informed by, the way we are made–the way we grow and develop form a single cell to a fully formed adult.

Thus the rules for correcting alignment are not rooted in the simple pairing of wrist with ankle, elbow with knee. They are rooted in kinesthetic awareness of the most fundamental patterns of a person’s growth.

The qi category of Six Harmonies is like falling through the doors of perception. A joint can not be seen as a joint. It must be seen as a dynamic animated force. A force which is animated simultaneously in six direction, three planes; up/down, left/right, forwards/backwards. (George Xu calls this Space Power.) When a person animates a joint simultaneously in all three planes, spiral power will naturally emerge. But it is not really the individual joints which take on this quality, it is all the joints simultaneously, it is the whole body as one thing.

The ability to differentiate jing from qi emerges effortlessly from the aggressionless feeling of the whole body traveling between movement and stillness as a single thing. Once this differentiation is made, we can move just the one qi, or in better English: move the qi as one.

The shen category of Six Harmonies is the process of revealing one’s true nature. It is the simple quality of finding one’s place. In Daoism we call this returning to the source.

The shen category of Six Harmonies is usually described like this: One’s mind, body and spirit align with Heaven Earth and the Ten Thousand Things. I hesitate to unfold this one because each of those six terms is a potencial hang up. Should I define them one by one? Will that help?

The method is this: Practice the jing category until it reveals your origins. Practice the qi category until your qi moves as one. Then, look and perceive outwards, allow your sense of space to feel limitless. Next, simultaneously feel the ground supporting, solid and expansive in all directions. And finally, let go of your person hood, that which makes you think/feel you are separate from all other things:

“To be preserved whole, bend,

upright, then twisted.

To be full, hollow out.

What is worn out will be repaired.

Those who little, have much to be gained–

having much, you will only be perplexed.”

-(from the Daodejing.)