The Illusion of Conscious Will

Wow, isn’t it ironic that I sometimes want to write about something but can’t find the words.  It’s actually so common an experience that we hardly even notice the irony.  It’s as if I have to not care too much to be able to write.  I have to let go, or trick my conscious will out of the way to improvise the actual text through my fingertips.  Martial arts have similar requirement; and  healing does too.  I suppose that letting go is the fruition of non-conceptual meditation.  Is the ability to improvise is an indicator that a person is seeing things as they actually are?

I generally don’t like psychology much.  Perhaps it is because I have a tiny lingering unconscious desire to do damage to the psychiatrist I saw from age 4 to 7.  In my 20’s I went back and found that very psychiatrist. My mother, my father and the psychiatrist all have different explanations for why it was desirable to sequester me twice a week in a room with a desk and venetian blinds.  Not only was communication lacking in the process, but no one could agree on what the intention was.  It makes me wonder whether agreement is actually a significant factor in cases of consensus activity, even in situations where people say they agree.

How do we know what we know?  What causes unconscious behavior?  How do we attribute agency? Asian arts present us with a challenge in that they are rooted in a cosmology which presumes that all agents are mutually self-re-creating.  Is the art making me? or am I making the art?

So with all that in mind I recently read The Illusion of the Conscious Will, by Daniel M. Wegner, which is an exploration of how conscious will effects our actions.  It is a very wide ranging survey of mostly psychological studies and experiments dating back to the 1800's, with some anthropology and neurology studies as well.  With an eye to exposing the mechanism of conscious will and how it interacts with spontaneous action and unconscious action; the book explores multiple personalities, hypnosis, trance possession, and many other more mundane ways in which we doubt whether a persons actions are consciously willed.

Chew on this:

Perhaps the experience of involuntariness helps to shut down a mental process that normally gets in the way of control.  And, oddly, this mental process may be the actual exercise of will.  It may be that the feeling of involuntariness reduces the degree to which thoughts and plans about behavior come to mind.  If behavior is experienced as involuntary, there may be a reduced level of attention directed toward discerning the next thing to do or for that matter, towards rehearsing the idea of what one is currently doing.  A lack of experienced will might thus influence the force of will in this way, reducing the degree to which attention is directed to the thoughts normally preparatory to action.  And this could be good.
The ironic process of mental control (Wegner 1994) suggests that there are times when it might be good to stop planning and striving.  It is often possible to try too hard....

He concludes that conscious will is an illusion, we feel like we are willing our actions because our actions usually correspond with our experience of willing them, not because our conscious will actually causes our actions.  But conscious will is like a compass on a boat.  It tells us where we are going, makes us feel guilty so that we change course, or proud so that we charge ahead.  It manages our preferences.

Re-reading what I just wrote, I imagine it is hard to follow.  This particular conundrum resists language; if you are not in control, how can you change coarse?  The book is great because it doesn't rely on philosophical or psychological language, instead, it describes experiments one after another.  For instance, when a person wills themselves to not do something, they make themselves statistically more likely to do the thing.  Despite my intentions, I always use to throw the Frisbee at my elderly neighbor's window just at the moment when she was looking.

We are not our minds.  We don’t actually know what we are.  If we use our conscious mind in a fight we will probably lock up or freeze.  But that remains an interesting debate.  When  faced with an opponent who we believe intends to do us harm, what happens to our will?  It seems that intent also has a great potential to get in the way of our ability to respond.  We talk about intent in internal martial arts a lot.  I argue, following Wang Xiangzhai, that if an opponent's intent comes to a point or to a line or a curve, he will be easy to control.  Only if my intent is spherical can I really hope to reliably defeat a larger opponent who is trying to hurt me.

No shortage of irony here.

From reviewing the scientific experiments in this book,  I find evidence of an active awareness underneath our conscious will.  Freud pointed to the Id, a primal self.  In Daoist cosmology we refer to a qi body which can act very freely and spontaneously.  In observing that this qi body coincides with a person, we could brake all protocol and just call it Laozi, an old baby, (lao=old, zi=baby).  This Laozi doesn’t have it’s own stop button.  Without the conscious will to inhibit it, it would do silly things like walk off of cliffs or try to squeeze through keyholes.  The qi body is both the source and the ingredient of inspiration, but it is not at all articulate.  It doesn’t have preferences or opinions or hidden agendas because it has no memory.  All memory belongs to the realm of jing, not qi.  All inhibition comes from trying to use the mind to control the composite body-structure-memory.

Thus, if we want our jing, our structure body, to be free, it must follow the qi; but if the qi leads, our fighting techniques will stagnate at the developmental level of a 2 year old.  So, we say, the spirits (shen) must lead the qi.  What are the spirits?  Perhaps they are a blend of our imagination and the kinesthetic experience of our environment, without the conscious will?

This is a great book.  It isn’t easy to read, but hardly anything I recommend is.  Terry Kleeman recommended this book when I met with him at the food court under Ikea in Taipei.  I was presenting my theory of Baguazhang’s original connections to Daoist ritual, describing how bagua can be organized around different trance states.  He was very friendly and skeptical, pointing out as so many others have, that perceiving Taiwanese rituals in terms of trance is a Western intellectual construction.  On the other hand he said that his Daoist priest informants consider their martial arts prowess to contribute to their ritual efficacy and potency.

But back to the book.  It is a really good Eastern-Western bridge to understanding why Internal Martial artists talk about experiencing shen (spirit) outside of the body.  It also threw me into a spiral of self-doubt.  I started asking a lot of, “Am I fooling myself?” type questions.  Am I hypnotizing myself? Am I hypnotizing my students?”  For this reason alone I would recommend it.  I decided that the possibility that I am fooling myself or my students is high.  Not all the time, but certainly sometimes.  And that’s not always bad either, but ignoring it is a recipe for disaster.  I’ve started catching myself in the act of self-hypnosis.

For instance, I was teaching push-hands the other day and I stopped myself from striking a student who was making the mistake of forcing my hand into his head. This is a flaw in my teaching even if I stop and explain it to the student because the student probably won’t learn from his mistake unless he gets hit.  But even worse, it’s a bad habit because I’m training myself to not hit in certain situations.  So whether in the dojo or the cafe, beware of nice people! Only princes, psychiatrists and con-artists are charming!  The next time he made that mistake I clocked him.

Now that I’ve done all this writing, by tricking my conscious will out of the way, I’m going to re-establish control, good-bye.

History in Three Keys

A review of:  History in Three Keys, The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth, by Paul A. Cohen, Columbia University Press, 1997.

So I was doing a little workshop with George Xu last month and he was talking about using Spiritual Fist.  Spiritual Fist is what we might call an unconscious level of mastery.  Once all the internal and external types of integration, embodiment, differentiation and liveliness are in the right order, they are harmonized by the spirit.  That is, we experience the motivation for movement coming from outside the body.  This is called Spiritual Fist, or Shen Quan in Chinese.

So I said, "Shenquan?  Isn't that what the Boxers called themselves before the Boxer Rebellion?"

"Yes," said George, "That is what they called themselves.  True.  But all Chinese arts are called Shen at the most advanced levels."  And then after thinking for a moment (we were practicing some circular explosive movement during this conversation) he said, "The Boxer's problem was that they lacked Harmony.  Right?"

Harmony, I thought to myself, what?  Then it occurred to me and I said, "That's what they changed their name to, Yihequan, literally --One Harmony Fist."

George looked perhaps flustered for a moment, but he quickly dropped the issue and moved on to showing us another inner secret.

It was a stunning reminder that ways of knowing and understanding history often do not transcend culture and language.  I have no idea what harmony could mean in that context.  (Yihequan is sometimes translated, Fists United in Righteousness.  Did he mean they weren't righteous? enough?)

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The Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1900 was a bloody uprising in north China against native Christians and foreign missionaries and at times Ching Dynasty Troops.  They dressed in Chinese Opera costumes and claimed to be invincible to bullets.  Using swords, spears and magic, they took to burning large parts of Beijing, Tianjin and other cities.  The boxers were finally put down by foreign troops who took the opportunity to demand concessions and loot the imperial palace.

__________

Paul A. Cohen's book, History in Three Keys, has a simple enough premise which he uses to divided his book into three parts.  The first part is his best shot at what actually happened.  The facts and documents sorted in such a way as to give the most likely account of what happened.  The second part of the book is an account of what people said and thought about the event at the time.  The third part of the book is about how the memory of the events lived on and were manipulated in political debates over the next 80 years.

The first section is only 42 pages long and starts off pointing out that, most people know more details about the Boxer Uprising than they do about the Taiping rebelion, even though the scale of the Taiping Rebelion (20 Million dead over 20 years) dwarfs that of the Boxer Uprising (10's of thousands dead over a year or two), and Taiping was led by a man claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ.  He then recommends people read Esherick's Book, The Boxer Uprising, because Esherick did such a good job of showing the local development of the Boxer Movement.  But Cohen puts together an excellent summary of the events and adds to Esherick's take details about the wider effects of the event particularly in the far north.  He also includes details on the large numbers of Chinese Christians killed by the Boxers.  The largest Christian groups in China were, ironically like the Boxers, both anti-foreiner and participants in mass possession rituals.

The second section attempts to delve into the mindset and experiences of the people who participated and witnessed the Boxer Movement.  In order to do this, my regular readers will love this! he dives into studies of African religion.  He does this, of course, as a way to gain perspective on Chinese popular religious practices of possession and trance.  (I'm feeling an African Bagua part 3 coming on!)

The entire second section is great.  He presents an enormous amount of evidence that, although the Boxer Uprising was a unique event, it's defining characteristics were far from rare.  Theatrical presentations were the most widespread form of religious activity in China.  So called Chinese Opera is a type of martial arts training.  Accounts of trance based forms of conditioning against bladed weapons are found through out the Ching Dynasty.  Possession rituals were much easier to do and more common in the north than they were in the south (which explains why Taiwan is not a good model for understanding north China).

In chapter 4 titled, Magic and Female Pollution, he explores the boxer beliefs about women and the wider exceptance of those beliefs across northern China.  For instance, when boxers actually got shot and died, or when they tried to burn down a single house they said was owned by Christians and it spread to everyone elses house too, they claimed it was because a woman contaminated the scene.  (I can see how this kind of thinking gets started, whenever I have trouble finding something like my keys or a book, I right away blame my half-wife.  I mean who else could it be, right?)

The book explores how the Boxers' were viewed by other Chinese at the time in many complex and interesting ways.  However, it is safe to say that belief in their magical powers and martial prowess was widespread.  Ideas which connect religious devotion, theatrical (Opera) characters, magic, and martial arts were not only widely held; they were the stuff daily life was made of.

The Boxers regularly attributed the casualties they suffered in fighting with foreigners in Tianjin to the latter's placement of naked women in the midst or in front of their forces, which broke the power of the Boxers' magic.  The story was also circulated and widely believed by the populace that a naked woman straddled each of the many cannon mounted in the foreign buildings in Zizhulin, making it impossible for the "gunfire-repelling magic" (bipao zhi fa) of the Boxers to work properly....

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Dirty water, as a dextroyer of magic, was unquestionably related in Boxer minds to the most powerful magic-inhibitor of all: women, and more particularly uncleanness in women, a category that, for the Boxers, included everything from menstrual or fetal blood to nakedness to pubic hair.  Water was of course a symbol of yin, the primeval female principle in China, and there was a long-held belief that the symbolic representation of yin could be used to overcome the effects of such phenomena as fire (including gunfire), which was symbolic of the male principle, yang.  Several groups of rebels in the late Ming had used women to suppress the firepower of government troops.  During the insurgency of 1774 in Shandong, Wang Lun's forces used and array of magical techniques, including strange incantations and women soldiers waving white fans, in their assault on Linqing.  the imperial defenders of the city were at first frustrated by the effectiveness of the rebels' fighting tactics.  An old soldier, however, came to the rescue with this advice: "Let a prostitute go up on the wall and take off her underclothing...we will use yin power to counter their spells."  When this proposal was carried out and proved effective, the government side adopted additional measures of a like sort, including, as later recounted by Wang Lun himself, "women wearing red clothing but naked from the waist down, bleeding and urinating in order to destroy our power."

Such magic-destroying strategies were clearly well established in Chinese minds.  The nurse who took care of the famous writer Lu Xun when he was a little boy once told him the following story about her experience with the Taiping rebels:  "When gorvernment troops came to attack the city, the Long Hairs [the Taiping] would make us take off our trousers and stand in a line on the city wall, for then the army's cannon could not be fired.  If they fired then, the cannon would burst!"

Paul A. Cohen does not appear to be a martial artist or a person with a performing background, so he doesn't go into depth with either of these.  However, he makes it clear that martial arts and theater were always part of the mix.  Here is an excerpt from an article about a famous martial artist whose martial arts family were leaders of the Boxers.  That means that in addition to being Traditional Chinese Medical Doctors, bodyguards and caravan guards, they performed magical spells to protect themselves while killing Chinese Christians, while dressed in Chinese Opera costumes, possessed by hero-gods of the theater.

Pei Xirong was born in 1913 in Raoyang county in Hebei province. His father was a core member of the Yi He Tuan [the Boxers], and his mother had also participated in the ‘Red Lantern’ movement [the female part of the Boxers movement, dealt with extensively in Cohen's book]. His uncle, Qi Dalong, was a bodyguard in the caravan agency established by Li Cunyi who guarded caravans traveling between Tianjin and Gubeikou. When the Allied Forces invaded Tianjin, he and Li Cunyi battled against the invaders at Laolongtou Train Station. He fought courageously, sustaining several wounds.

The third part of Cohen's book is also good.  (I quoted from it twice in my review of Rovere's book about xingyi in the Chinese army.)  It deals extensively with the process of internalization and self-torturous humiliation that came to produce the modern ideas about pure Martial Arts and the guoshu movement (national arts).

One reason this is personal to me is that in the period directly after the Boxer Uprising, my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying studied and performed the roll of monkey in Chinese Opera as a teen-ager.  The character/god of monkey was one of the most common gods to possess the Boxers during battle. Kuo also competed in Leitai fights (staged on a platfrom), he could still sing Opera parts 70 years later, and he was still doing drunken monkey gongfu too. Kuo was part of the pure martial arts movement, and guoshu, and an early student of Wang Xiangzhai. He worked as a bodyguard too. And he could tie a rope dart around his chest under his coat and shake in such a way that the dart would fly out and stick into a tree. And he could tie up any of his actively resisting students with the same technique.  None of his students learned the rope dart. And the one student who learned drunken monkey no longer practices. I think we owe it to the last generation, who brought these fantastic arts to us, to try an recover as much of the full picture as we can.

The last section of Cohen's book deals with the Cultural Revolution.  It has a few interesting facts.  Probably the most prominent cultural reference to the Boxers during that time, a time when George Xu was fighting in the streets on a daily basis, was a play called Shen Quan, Spiritual Fist.

If we are ever going to have a chance of understanding what the origins of Chinese Martial arts are, we are going to have to drop the stories of purely rational martial tough guys.  There is still so much that can be recovered from these arts, because they were designed as storehouses of knowlege.  Perhaps, once upon a time, there were legitmate arguments for dicarding central aspects of the tradition, but now, that time has passed.  Nobody believes anymore that womens' underpants can protect them from bullets.  It's time to see the whole thing for what it is and what is was---a deeply religious, theatrical, health sustaining, fighting arts tradition.

More Humiliation

I just finished reading Paul A. Cohen's book, History in Three Keys, The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth.  Expect a positive review in the next week.   I mention it now because some quotes from the book are included in the review below.

I bought a copy of, The Xingyi Quan of the Chinese Army, Huang Bo Nien's Xingyi Fist and Weapon Instruction, by Dennis Rovere, with translation by Chow Hon Huen.  It's published by Blue Snake Books, Berkeley, California.  It's a waste of money.  I bought it because Dojo Rat gave it a positive review. I realize now that he gave it a positive review because he thought it might be of interest to those of us who like history.  Well--I'll be damned--I'm going to get my money's worth by having some fun reviewing it!

The book is a translation of a short manual about Xingyi training from the 1920's, supposedly used by Chang Kai-sheik's army and the KMT.  It would have been a pamphlet except that Dennis Rovere added a lot of his own useless material, explanations and pictures.  With the exception of a section on Bayonet Fighting, which we will address shortly, the original manual is nearly identical to material already published in nearly every Xingyi book.  Take for example this translation by John Groschwitz, The Xingyi Boxing Manual.  This kind of manual is meant to be memorized and contemplated, but every single detail needs to be taught and digested over years.  They all read like a teacher's lecture notes.  (That's OK, I guess, but did we need another one?)

Why was the manual published in the first place?  Dennis Rovere doesn't seem to know.  The answer is that it was a salvo in a political debate of the 1920's.  Take for instance this satirical note by Lu Xun (probably the best known intellectual of the "New Culture" movement) comparing Kungfu guys to the Boxer Uprising, published in New Youth, 1918:

Recently, there have been a fair number of people scattered about who have been energetically promoting boxing [quan].  I seem to recall this having happened once before.  But at that time the promoters were the Manchu court and high officials, where as now they are Republican educators--people occupying a quite different place in society.  I have no way of telling, as an outsider, whether their goals are the same or different.

These educators have now renamed the old methods "that the Goddess of the Ninth Heaven transmitted to the Yellow Emperor"..."the new martial arts" or "Chinese-style gymnastics" and they make young people practice them.  I've heard there are a lot of benefits to be had from them.  Two of the more important may be listed here:

(1)  They have a physical education function.  It's said that when Chinese take instruction in foreign gymnastics it isn't effective;  the only thing that works for them is native-style gymnastics (that is, boxing).  I would have thought that if one spread one's arms and legs apart and picked up a foreign bronze hammer or wooden club in one's hands, it ought probably to have some "efficacy" as far as one's muscular development was concerned.  But it turns out this isn't so!  Naturally, therefore, the only course left to them is to switch to learning such tricks as "Wu Song disengaging himself from his manacles."  No doubt this is because Chinese are different from foreigners physiologically.

(2)  They have a military function.  The Chinese know how to box; the foreigners don't know how to box.  So if one day the two meet and start fighting it goes without saying the Chinese will win.... The only thing is that nowadays people always use firearms when they fight.  Although China "had firearms too in ancient times" it doesn't have them any more.  So if the Chinese don't learn the military art of using rattan shields, how can they protect themselves against firearms?  I think--since they don't elaborate on this, this reflects "my own very limited and shallow understanding"--I think that if they keep at it with their boxing they are bound to reach a point where they become "invulnerable to firearms."  (I presume by doing exercises to benefit their internal organs?)  Boxing was tried once before--in 1900.  Unfortunately on that occasion its reputation may be considered to have suffered a decisive setback.  We'll see how it fares this time around.  (This is from p. 230-231 of Paul A. Cohen's, History in Three Keys.)

The introduction of Rovere's book claims that the famous martial artist's Sun Lutang and Wang Xiangzhai both taught for the KMT. The question however, is not who taught there, but what was being taught.  If you pick up a copy of Marrow of the Nation and read chapter 7, you'll see that the Guo Shu (national martial arts) movement was wide spread in the 20's.  No doubt xingyi was part of the curriculum.  But I've yet to see any evidence that students of the military academy actually developed into top level martial artists-- perhaps they did--but that would be beside the point.  The point being that what mattered was organization, leadership, machine gun practice, strategic thinking, etc.  Bayonet training was the one form of hand-to-hand combat training that had some significance for modern warfare.  And that training came directly from the West where it was well developed.

Quoting from History in Three Keys again:

In a letter to his sister, Pvt. Harold Kinman of the First Marine Battalion, who initially saw combat in the Philippines, then in China, and after recovering from a wound in the U.S. Naval Hospital in Yokohama, again in the Philippines, provided an American perspective on the march from Tianjin to Beijing [this of course during the Boxer Rebellion, 1900]:  "That march is imprinted on my memory that nothing can efface.  It was full of terrible experiences, short of water, and forced to march after you were almost unable to walk.  Fighting for your life every day, surrounded by Chinese Imperial troops numbering from 30,000 to 40,000 strong.  Cutting your way out at the point of a bayonet while the shot and shell were flying all around you."  On one occasion, after "putting the Chinese to utter rout," the marines watched as the crack British cavalry, composed of Sikhs, turned and fled in the face of a Chinese charge.  Appalled at the "cowardice" of the Sikhs, the Americans, according to Kinman, sprang to their feet and charged the Chinese cavalry with fixed bayonets:  "There were hundreds killed and wounded we gave no quarter nor asked for any so you see we took no prisoners we killed them all that fell into our hands.  I will now close by wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year."

Nearly half of The Xingyi Quan of the Chinese Army, is dedicated to Bayonet Fighting.  It makes the claim that Xingyi is used to teach bayonet fighting, that the techniques originally come from spear fighting.  It is obvious to anyone looking at the pictures that this is just a political claim, meant to give xenophobic cover to what was essentially a humiliating imitation of "Foreign Imperialist" training methods.  All the techniques pictured in the book can be found in any army manual, anywhere.  The book makes four claims for the uniqueness of Xingyi Bayonet training; 1) the back heel is down, 2) stick to the threat's weapon rather than knock it, 3) don't hit with the butt of the gun, 4) don't lunge.  All of these claims are obviously absurd.  Just look at the pictures I pulled off of Google Images.  They also have nothing to do with Xingyi.

Needless to say, I do not recommend the book.  I don't know what Blue Snake Books was thinking when they published it.  However, I did get a good laugh out of this bio:

Dennis Rovere is an internationally recognized expert in military, close combat and Chinese military strategy.  He is the first non-Asian to receive special recognition as a martial arts instructor from the Government of the Republic of China, and the first civilian to train with the Bodyguards Instructors' Unit of the Chinese Special Military Police (Wu Jing).  Since receiving his instructor's certification in 1974, Mr. Rovere has taught martial arts to both civilians and military units, including reconnaissance instructors and UN peacekeepers....

Them's some pretty heady credentials I've never heard of, and what is an architect from Calgary teaching those UN peacekeepers anyway?

UPDATE:  A link to this post got a whopping 36 Comments on a Forum called Rum Soaked Fist! My Youtube Videos African Bagua 1 & 2 and  Pure Internal all jumped up about 600 views in the last day.  I'll put my response to all the controversy in the comments section below, and on the forum.   Join the fray!

Real Lineages

One of my students pointed out that in the previous post on the early 20th Century I asserted that lineages were invented to defend gongfu against attacks by Modernity, claiming that there was continuity between an older pure martial tradition and certain contemporary styles. They were all trying to avoid associations with performance, ritual, religion, or failed rebellion.  Where as in the book Qigong Fever, we see that after the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977) lineages were invented to make qigong appear ancient and mysterious, pre-Modern claims of authority.

Still, in both eras movement artists desired to have the authority of some all powerful "science" on their side; a desire which seems absurd now, in a time when no one is contesting my right or my duty to practice and teach gongfu.  Politics is not a rational process.   Lineages are a political tool, not a rational one, and certainly not scientific.

Perhaps I accidentally implied that no lineages are real.  Shaman, Wu, Tangki, magicians, even puppeteers pick disciples to whom they give the responsibility of passing on a classical art or ritual tradition.  In India, Japan and China the disciple is often a family member, but if the extended family hasn't produced any suitable offspring, a disciple will be adopted.

The more illegal (remember legal/illegal is a continum in China) an art is, the more likely it is to be secretive.   Also, magicians, martial arts and ritual experts usually had good reasons to keep trade secrets close to their chests.  Lineages served this political purpose well.  The early 20th century ridiculed secretive behavior none the less, and people at least pretended that all their secrets had been revealed. (I believe Cheng Man Ch'ing wrote a book on  Tai Chi book called, "There Are No Secrets.")

I don't believe there are real historical martial arts lineages which were devoid of performance, ritual, religion, or rebellion.  But lineage, by its nature, is a changing thing and could certainly purge itself of these aspects and remain a lineage.  But be suspicious, a martial art that has had a lot of purging will also have a lot of inexplicable baggage.  It's a lot easier to assess the value of an art when you have the whole thing intact, and NOBODY seems to have that!

I suspect there was some previous era where martial arts were shared freely.  Buddhist temples had open courtyards where locals could get together and practice.  Villages had clan halls where people could get together and practice.  I think there was always some paranoia, but it may have been more like basketball secrets.  Every village and every temple sponsored a team, and everyone wanted the quality of their competing teams to be high--so after dominating for a few seasons-- you traded coaches.

I'm optimistic that the commercial world is leading us into an era of great sharing.

If there was a "how to" martial arts literature prior to the Ching Dynasty, it seems lost to us now.  Martial arts have come down to us primarily as the arts of the illiterate.  I do believe at one time martial arts were "high-culture." The evidence for that is in the philosophical literature of the Waring States Era.  It is entirely possible that the Tang and Song Era had these too,  but perhaps they were destroyed during the years of Mongol rule.

The other group of people who have lineages are Daoist Priests, Daoshi.  Daoism is a lineage tradition, everyone given the title Daoshi was included in a lineage and each individual teaching or text had its own lineage.  In the event that someone set off on their own and created some new supportive practice or teaching, after a generation or so it/they would be incorporated/adopted into existing lineages.  Scholars have their doubts about just how far back some of these lineages go, but no one doubts that they do go way back.  But it is also true that most of these lineages are secret. The ones we know about are the ones that stopped being secret to some extent.  I suspect that martial artists, beginning in the Ching Dynasty, started imitating Daoist (and Buddhist) ideas of lineages.  Martial arts may not have had lineages before that.

Then again their may have been secret Daoist lineages of martial arts.  As Shahar points out in his book Shaolin Temple, the popular literature of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties grew out of theater and is perpetually making fun of Daoists, Buddhist, officials, and martial heroes (xia) with their secret techniques.

I've been looking through the index to the Ming Dynasty Daoist Cannon (Daozang) which was just published last year.  There are a lot of texts which describe physical practices in conjunction with ritual, purification, astrology, meditation etc... There may even be a few texts which are primarily movement oriented (requiring lineage transmission, of course), but I see nothing resembling martial arts.  If such texts ever existed they are either still hidden, or they were destroyed 900 years ago a long with thousands of other texts during the Yuan Dynasty.

Marrow of the Nation

I just finished reading Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation, A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, UC Press 2004.

Before I tell you about that I just want to say I've got a lot on my plate before I leave for Taiwan and so I apologize if my blogging seems rushed and...

My advanced students from ER Taylor Elementary School are performing again, Saturday May 16th, this time at San Francisco's beautiful new De Young Museum.  They'll be on the Outdoor Cafe Stage at 1:45 PM, it's free.

Marrow of the Nation contributes an important piece of history to our understanding of why Chinese Martial Arts History is such a madhouse of unsupportable fiction (and also why, as Chris at Martial Development pointed out, some comic fictional films are closer to the truth than the books historians have written).

In the early 20th Century Chinese people, particularly urban people, were deeply humiliated.  For 300 years they had been under foreign Manchu rulers, forced to wear their hair in a queue as symbolic slaves.  The Chinese people saw themselves as collaborators in their own oppression.  They were unable to work together to overthrow a weak corrupt government until a group of 9 foreign powers allied to bring China to it's knees.  All the foreign powers were Christian, except Japan, and all were promoters of Modernity.

Scientism, Rationalist extremism, absolutist truths, and the relentless quests for purity of form, and transparent clarity--swept the country like wild fire.  China turned on itself.  Anything old which required oral transmission, anything mysterious, secret, difficult to learn, or regionally particular, was viciously attacked as the cause of China's past failures and humiliations.  Thus it was claimed, Martial arts were practiced by dirty herbalists, religious nuts, and desperate performers who gather up ignorant crowds and block traffic.

Martial Arts were to be replaced by tiyu, Physical Culture.  By that they meant Western Sports fitness and Olympic style competitions.  Physical Education Departments opened up in schools all over the country.

Huges swaths of Martial Arts culture were wiped out, never to be seen again.  Imagine having spent your life developing an extraordinary "spirit fist" only to be surrounded by ridicule on a national scale.  Most chose to take their secrets with them to their graves, many probably committed suicide.

Those martial artist activists who resisted the onslaught of hysteria did so in the name of Modernity!  The first powerful voice for making Kungfu part of Modernity was called The Pure Martial Society (Jingwu Hui).  They argued that martial arts could be a sport like any other sport.  All the other sports came from the West, having a Sport with Chinese roots would be a great source of pride which would help build the nation.   For Kungfu to be a sport it had to be totally open, accessible to women, have a clear standard curriculum, have a health and fitness component free of terms like jing, qi or shen, and be competition oriented.  Jingwu swept the country and Chinese communities in South East Asia.   As political fortunes changed it was surpassed by the Guoshu (National Art) movement.   The Kuomintang Government of Chang Kai-Shek (he was a Methodist Christian) implemented Guoshu schools all over the country, at least where he was in power, and used the competitions along with academic testing to pick officers in his government and armies.  But everybody who taught martial arts started calling it Guoshu, meaning that they agreed with the modernizing, scienticization project.

They tended to argue that in the past there was a pure fighting art that had been corrupted and could now be extricated from the mildew of history by being simplified and mixed with fitness training.  But there were lots of arguments.  Some argued that martial virtues had been lost.  This was the period when people started making up lineages and publishing teaching manuals.

The lineages allowed people to pretend they came from a great and pure martial line of masters dedicated to nothing but martial virtue and pure technique.  Inventing the lineages allowed people to write religion, rebellion and performance out of history. Some of the lineages may have been real, but they were not pure.  By claiming a lineage people were also renouncing the past, both real and imagined, they were saying in effect,  'Now THIS art, which was unfortunately secret for many generations is now totally clear and open!  Anyone with four limbs and two ears can learn it!'

There was a guy named Chu Minyi who served as a minister for the Kuomintang.  He invented something called Taijicao (Tai Chi Calisthenics) and in 1933 wrote a book called Tai Chi Calisthenics Instructions and Commands.  "Whereas traditional tai chi was simply too difficult for any but the most dedicated martial artist to master, tai chi calisthenics were pleasingly easy to learn and practice."  They could be done in a few minutes and they used a counting formula like jumping jacks.  He also gets credit in the book for inventing the Tai Chi Ball practices.  (Hey, I didn't write the book, but those tai chi ball exercises always looked a little too much like rhythmic gymnastics for my taste.)

Chu's Tai Chi Calisthenics were performed on stage at the 1936 Olympics.  Fortunately or unfortunately he was a peace activist and so naturally supported the Japanese when they invaded and was later executed for treason.  But not before performing one last taijquan set in front of the firing squad.

Check out the book.  All the good stuff is in Chapter 7, "From Martial Arts to National Skills."

This is all great background for understanding Wang Xiangzai's challenge to every martial artist in the country to either fight him or sit down and explain their art in plain language.  It explains why he wanted to to throw out forms, shaolin, performance, philosophy, theory, religion, etc...  It also helps explain why his students were confused enough to go in three different directions; 1) standing still as a pure health practice, 2) fighting is everything, and 3) knocking people over by blasting them with qi from a distance.

(hat tip to:  Daniel)

UPDATE: Here is a video of Chu Minyi! Yeah!

Dangerous Women

Courtesy of San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum

Dangerous Women, Warriors, Grannies and Geishas of the Ming, by Victoria Cass came out in 1999, but I just finished reading it.  It doesn't have a lot of information about martial arts during the Ming Dynasty but it does a great job of describing what life was like.  I highly recommend it.

Cass divides the Ming Dynasty into three realms of action.

The first was the fanatical cult of the family.  40,000 suicidal mothers were officially recognized as martyr goddesses by the Ming governments (1350-1650).  Conforming to this cult was a way for women to gain power.  I love that she takes the subject most often referred to as "ancestor worship" under a "Confucian" doctrine--and labels it fanatical.

The second realm was Urbanity.  China under the Ming Dynasty was the wealthiest country in the world and it had a lavish vibrant urban culture, particularly in the south east.  The so called "Education District," was the center of theater and art in every city.  Female artists and entertainers of every imaginable sort were not only able to make a living, some got wealthy enough to retire to a country garden with a couple of servants.

The third realm was Solitude.  There was the option of being an eccentric outsider.  On the one hand there were female bandit leaders who lived in mountain strongholds, Daoist hermits, and hairy recluses who ate only insects.  And on the other hand there was an idealized worship of solitude which found expression in private urban retreats, islands of tranquility with perfect artistic wives (Cass uses the Japanese term geisha, the Chinese term is ji, an artist) in grass huts and rock gardens with poetry and exquisite incense.  There was a whole milieu of artistically inclined people who competed to see who could be the most reclusive with out leaving the city.  Eccentric hermits could tour the urban scene as guests of the well-to-do.

From her description of the three realms, Cass sets off to describe the different types of lives women made from themselves with in those three realms.  I was surprised by how common female doctors were.  There were also thousands of female spiritual leaders and teachers of every sort.  Women could be painters, writers, and actors.  There was only one female general, but women were often referred to as "Warrior types."  These warrior women for instance would dress up in beautiful armor and tour around the city doing martial performances on horseback.  She points out that some of these women were just artists and some were known for sexual prowess.  Most no doubt started from desperate circumstances, but Cass points out that most women artists in America have sex with multiple partners too.

The section on Grannies is great too.  Older women had hundreds of ways of making independent income; as fortune tellers, as nannies, as sales reps, dealers, matchmaking, connecting people, organizing, curing illness, consoling.  They were uniquely  un-threatening experts in many realms, especially dark realms, and they had the ability to get intimately close to the workings of everything. Ironically, for this they were also feared! and blamed!  The a-moral, strategic, sexual, articulate, trickster granny was among the most popular of literary heroes.

Hey!  It's a google book, you can search the whole thing!

The Origins of the Boxer Uprising

The more I think about it, the more I like Joseph W. Eshrick's The Origins of the Boxing Uprising.  He published this book in 1987 (UC Berkeley Press) and the fact that I hadn't read it before now, shows where the holes in my (self) education are.  (Please feel free to suggest related books in the comments, even if you think I have read them, I'm sure my readers will be appreciative too.)

I suspect by now my regular readers join me in being easily offended by the lack of scholarship and basic questioning in the history sections of most martial arts books.  While we are justified in finding this failure inexcusable, we must answer this question:  Why would 20th Century martial artists deliberately obscure their history?

In the process of explaining the origins of the Boxer Uprising of 1899-1900, Eshrick gives us many clues which will help us understand what martial arts were in the 1800's.  Let's first imagine that the same individual people took on at least three of the following if not all of the following roles:

• Performing Chinese Opera


• Practicing Martial Arts


• Devotees of Martial Deities or other heterodox (fanatic) cults


• Bandits (Rarely robbed their own villages, which meant that in places like Western Shandong province people often thought of their neighboring villages as being full of thieves.)


• Officially organized volunteer militias


• Anti-bandit gangs (These were created because official militias couldn't cross provincial boundaries, much like American Sheriffs can't cross state lines.)


• Political Rebels and Revolutionaries

20th Century people who wanted to create revolution, preserve religion, train martial arts, or perform opera, all had incentives to cover up the connectedness of these historic endeavors; to claim they were always separate and to attempt to reform traditional practices so that they would appear to have always been separate.

Everyone wants to say that their system of martial arts was used exclusively by bodyguards.  No one wants to say their martial art was developed by a group of Opera performers who practiced in secret over generations in order to train groups of rebels which were consistantly put down by the central government.

Modern people tend to think of stage performing as a non-religious practice.  But Chinese Opera was performed for the Gods.  The statues of Gods were carried out of the temples and set up facing the stage before performances.  That's the meaning of Ying shen sai hui, one of the names given to Chinese Opera.  In fact, attending the Opera was probably the most widespread collective religious act in China.

People who got part time work as bodyguards had reasons to be great showman.  Anything which would spread your reputation or demonstrate your prowess served duel purposes, it could get you new business and it could disuade criminals from challenging you.

The standard way for martial artists to attract new students was to give public performances with acrobatics and other feats of prowess. (What? you knew that?)

So called, "Meditation Sects," often practiced martial arts along with popular ethics (keeping precepts), healing trance (qigong) rituals, and talisman making.  Performances of quan (boxing) were often used to recruit new members.

All rebellions in China were religiously inspired to some degree.  "Meditation" sects were generally more rebellious than the other popular "Sutra" chanting sects.  The lines (or slopes) between illegal and legal were different from village to village, province to province, and year to year, depending on how much civil unrest and civil war there was.  [During the 1800's each "Meditation" sect associated itself with a particular trigram from the Bagua, like Kan (water), Li (fire), Xun (wind) etc... The trigram they chose likely represented the category of deity they were devoted to (through sacrifice, invocation, possession, channeling etc...).  This practice gives some credence to my theory that Baguazhang was given its name because it emerged from a Daoist lineage which performed secret ceremonies which ritually included all known religious traditions and experiences. Each type of experience was cataloged in the performers body and remembered as belonging to one of the the eight trigrams (bagua).  There were many large and small rebellions by these groups, one in the early 1800's was actually called the Bagua Rebellion and had troops separated into trigrams.]

In 1728, "...the Yong Zheng Emperor issued the only imperial prohibition of boxing per se that I have seen.  He condemned boxing teachers as 'drifters and idlers who refuse to work at their proper occupations,' who gather with their disciples all day, leading to 'gambling, drinking and brawls.'"(Esherick p. 48)

According  Avron Albert Boretz’s 1996 dissertation: Martial Gods and Magic Swords: The Ritual Production of Manhood in Taiwanese Popular Religion, the devotees of martial deities in Taiwan train martial arts and are heavily involved with smuggling, drinking and petty crime.  So it seems reasonable to assume that some of the boxing teachers the Emperor is condemning are leaders of small religious cults, and some are just Dojo Rats.

Quan, boxing groups which trained in public squares and performed and competed at festivals, were quasi legal because they promoted martial virtue (wude) and actively prepared young men to take the military entrance exam.  Boxing groups could be non-religious; However, it is hard to know because they were mainly reported in official documents only when they were part of "meditation" cults.  Heterodox religion was more illegal than boxing by itself, even if the sect didn't practice boxing.  Still sects were very popular and wide spread.

Most of the time when martial arts are reported in the official histories it is because they were involved in an unorthodox cult.  So most of what we know supports the idea that martial arts and religion were intimately connected, we simply don't have much information about non-sectarian martial arts.  It is probably true that there were individuals who practiced only forms, applications and sparring like the our modern day stereotypes, but it is very unlikely that "a pure martial arts" lineage or family ever existed.  Everybody had a gongfu brother, uncle, or great uncle who crossed over into performance, ritual, religion, banditry or rebellion.

Boxers captured by the Americans

Esherick gives a lot of attention to the overlap between martial conditioning practices like iron t-shirt or golden bell, and invulnerability rituals which incorporate magic, talisman, trance, and possession by local deities and heroic characters from popular opera.  There is a continuum from, "Go ahead, hit me, I can take it!" passing through, "Blades always miss me" moving toward,  "Due to my amazing qigong, blades can not cut me," and finally ending up with, "Bullets can't harm me, I am a god."   Setting aside the question of how well any of these techniques work, it isn't hard to see why 20th Century martial artists, opera performers, religious devotees, and revolutionaries would all want to disassociate themselves from these practices.

In the scramble to invent history, dotted lines have been drawn between "real iron t-shirt" for "real" martial artists, "tricks" used by street performers, "qi illusions" used by magicians and charlatans, and suicidal devotion to a cause--like standing in front of a tank.

It is time to admit that in the 20th Century, embarrassment has been a driving force in the creation and reformulation of martial arts, especial where history is concerned.

Marketing Without Advertising

Well, Amazon is getting better, I think.  They recommended I read my father's book.  Since I've already read it, I think I'll recommend it to you.

Marketing Without Advertising, by Michael Phillips is a must read for small business people and even people running one-person businesses.  If you are a self-employed teacher of the movement arts, reading this book will help you think through exactly what you need to do to market yourself effectively.

My father was the first Business Guru, and he was also the leader of what someone looking back might call the "Business Hippies."  He started the first Business Network which was called the Briarpatch.

As someone who thinks evolution is cool, I'm also enjoying the recesive economy.  (The ramen store around the corner just dropped its prices, and a new Japanese Curry place opened up next to the burrito shop.)  My readers might just enjoy my father's eternal, The Seven Laws of Money, now published in more languages than I can count;  Or Honest Business.

Chocolate (2008)

We were told that the new film Chocolate would be released in February, it never showed up.  It looks like San Francisco is now a second rate film release city.  I think it got a two day release in Cupertino.  Or perhaps it just went straight to DVD.

So anyway we rented it this weekend.  They stole my idea!  I said that great martial artists probably have a subtle form of Asperger's syndrome.  Well the guys in Thailand who made OngBak have made a Kung Fu movie about a girl with Asperger's syndrome who can kick, kick-it-i-kick some serious booty.  She starts out fighting all the guys at the ice factory, think ice claws, picks, and saws.  Then she takes out all the guys at the giant Bangkok butcher shop, think cleavers, hooks, bare chests.  And I think you get the idea.  There are some yakuza moments and even an Asperger's capoeirista (I think) in one scene.

My g-friend/0.5wife cried at one point, so I'm not giving this up as a date movie, but we both liked it and there are some truly great kung fu routines.

The name is autistic.  It has nothing to do with the film.  It should have been called "Fists of Asperger's," or "I Kick 'o yo' Asperger's."

Fear vs. Danger: The Real History of Martial Arts and Trance

Sgt. Rory over at Chiron has been talking about the difference between fear management and danger management and the comments are interesting.  Basically Sgt. Rory says that a lot of martial artists are using a fantasy of martial prowess to convince themselves that they are capable of real fighting.  They do this with a combination of bravado, group think, and talismanic power emblems like 'The Black Belt.'  For someone like Sgt. Rory, who does danger management for a job, fantasies can get you killed.

So the real question is, if martial arts were created for real situations, why is everyone acting so dumb?

In other posts and in his book,  Sgt. Rory has made much of the powerful hormone cocktail that takes over your body and mind when you are in a real fight.   How did traditional martial arts deal with this?  They must have known about it.  Why isn't it a part of the average dojo training these days?

Early Chinese martial arts were trance based.  They started from experience and worked backwards.  The first experienced fighters who set out to train students did so by scaring them 'out of there wits.'  As these arts developed they started to include ear splitting metallic gongs and frenetic drumming.  They told frightening war stories and sang haunting songs filled with enmity.  These were soon followed by the invocation of supernatural forces and drunk dancers channeling gruesomely demised soldiers. The teachers were using these techniques to trigger the powerful hormone cocktail in their students so that they would know what to expect.

Cults devoted to martial hero/demons are as old as Chinese civilization itself, and they are still with us.  These days they are more associated with outcast smuggler types, but historically they were the village militia.

Violent situations are full of surprises.  There isn't just one type of trance which is "best" for all fighting situations.  There are many different types of trance.  As martial cults developed they taught different types of trance, often associated with different deities or animal spirits.  Often a movement style or sequence would be taught first and then, after some amount of practice, the spirit would be invoked, at which point the routine would be dropped.   The 'student' was practicing going berserk.  They were practicing being on a high dose of naturally occurring hormone cocktail.  They developed many measures to test if the trance was real including inability to feel cuts or burns and various degrees of memory loss.

When the really fight was about to happen, they would put themselves into trance, essentially preempting the 'shock' or the 'freeze.'

The big problem with this type of training is that it shortens your life.  That hormone cocktail is really bad for your long term health.   The kinds of permission people give themselves when they are in deep trance tend to lead them to bad decisions.  Also the wild movements people do, and injures they ignore, when they are in trance really hurt the day after.



What began as trance invocation movements became dances and martial arts forms.  One of the early purposes of martial training was to make ones body strong enough to survive the more extreme trance possessions the early 'teachers' developed.  Over many generations these martial 'forms' started to include actual 'techniques' and even 'applications.'  It was a slow evolution.  In peaceful times everyone did the forms as entertainment and the music got better, and then as times turned for the worse, they re-invoked the spirits and sanctified the ground with blood.

It isn't hard to see how great performers grew out of this tradition, especially if you know that trances weren't just used for movement but to get people talking and singing.  Poetry was written in trance too.  Imagine a bunch of talented people on stage all in deep trance and each invoking different historical figure improvising their way through history with swords and masks and you are more than half way to Chinese Opera.

It's a long story for another day how all this interacted with the military, but it is an important story because although Chinese armies did sometimes use people in trance, they also had good reasons for discouraging it.

Religion and martial arts parallel each other in that both have had a long history of social movements trying to distance themselves from trance without every totally dropping it.  As we all know, doing these martial arts forms and drills without the trance or the music became a way to train fighting all on their own.  In the religious realm, meditation, stillness without going into trance and without any deity invocation, became a religious practice all on its own.

On the other hand some people became experts in many types of trance.  I believe that Baguazhang was originally a collection of eight classes of god/demon possession.  Each one distinct in its powers but woven together through ritual walking.  Such a collection of forces would have been a very secret transmission.  Althought people would have encountered it, there was no system until someone came along and transformed the god/demon forces into types of qi named after the types of gods each represented --heaven qi, earth qi, wind qi, water qi, thunder qi, fire qi, mountain qi, and lake qi.