Tim Cartmell

Back in June of this year while I was attending the Daoism Today conference in Los Angles I had the opportunity to visit and take a Sun style baguazhang lesson from Tim Cartmell.  Tim is one of the most well known teachers in the American internal martial arts world.  His book Effortless Combat Throws is widely acclaimed.  His more recent book The Method of Chinese Wrestling, which is a translation of Tong Zhongyi's book first published in 1935, is one of the most beautiful books on the market.

I made my way down to Tim's studio in Huntington Beach around noon.  His studio is all mats with big windows and great lighting.  It turns out that he currently only teaches the Chinese Internal Arts (Taiji, Xingyi, Bagua) in private lessons and workshops.  The classes held in his studio are all Jiujitsu Mixed Martial Arts oriented stuff.  There were a few guys in their twenties hanging around and a few showed up around the time I did.  Tim told them they could practice their grappling over on the side while we used the center of the space for my lesson.

My sense is that Tim has created a sold institution.  His studio is a place where mostly guys in their twenties can come and let loose.  A place where it is safe to learn ethics and explore natural aggression.  This kind of milieu is an enormous gift to any community and I was both impressed and inspired by it.  If students are interested, the internal arts are their for them too, but they are not the main product he is selling.  I like that, it takes the economic pressure off of a tradition which really requires adoption levels of intimacy to learn.

Personally Tim was warm and welcoming.  His teaching was very clear and it matched his theory.  He showed me the first two palm changes of the Sun style of Baguazhang and tested my structure through out the movements.  He showed a couple of applications which involved close contact throws.  Over the years I've learned many versions of the single and double palm change but each time I learn a new one it is like opening a different window into the original physicality of this arts distant past.

At one point in the second palm change there is a heel spin with both feet turned out.  A bit like Indian Classical Dance but since we were working on a mat I was having trouble with the spin.  So Tim showed me a straight line practice in which turning in (kou) and turning out (bai) alternate with a spin.  I immediately recognized the stepping pattern from a diagram for walking an Yijing (I-Ching) hexagram found in Jo Riley's book Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance.  We had a short discussion about it and he seemed genuinely interested but obviously it was a much longer conversation for another time.  (I don't have Riley's book handy but if anyone does and wants to scan that page for me I'll post it in an update.)

I only had one lesson with Tim so it is quite likely that I misunderstood something or only saw a small part of what he does.  But this is what I got.  Tim's idea is to use a very soft-light touch with precise footwork to attain a strategically superior position.  From there he uses superior structure to close in, at which point an effortless throw happens.  During the throw I noticed him melting his structure some what, becoming heavier like water.  So he appears to have three modes: soft-light touch, structure, and water.

I think this is an excellent method and I highly recommend Tim as a teacher for anyone living near Huntington Beach.  The method is very close to the one I practiced for may years but I've since changed my theory.  However, I still believe that what Tim is teaching is necessary to learn, it is probably more exact to say that that I think of it as a developmental stage in a larger theory.

I've explained my theory countless times but it comes out a little different each time, so once more with gusto.

Structure training is necessary because everyone is already using structure even without any training.  Structure training teaches you exactly what the best possible structure is so that 1) you can break someone else's structure when you encounter it and 2) so that you are familiar enough with the feeling of structure in your own body that at a more advance level you can totally discard it as a strategy for yourself.

Water training is a necessary stage leading to total emptiness.  Water is not very effective for fighting on its own, but it is a superb aid to fighting in close contact --throw or be thrown-- situations because it allows you to add weight anywhere at will.  Water is also useful for avoiding strikes and for rolling on the ground.

The importance of learning to achieve a spatially and structurally advantageous position should not be underestimated.  The best way to learn this is to practice with a very light sensitive touch, weakened, so as not to rely on strength.  In this weakened state you will lose unless you truly have the best position, the position of dominance.  With practice you will slowly get better at finding that position.  Once you are good at this, you will always know if you have a great position or a terrible one.  The next step is to always practice from a terrible position, that way no matter what position you get into you can still fight.

In order to fight well from a terrible position you need to transform from water to steam and from steam to emptiness.  Steam will give you the superior power but it is slow.  Emptiness will make you fast again and make it impossible for your opponents to feel your intent until it is too late.

Most of my current theory developed from recent encounters with George Xu, and since he is constantly changing his theories I suspect my theories will keep changing too.

Tim has tons of videos and discussions available on the web...Check it out.  Tim was very cool about setting up lessons, so if you are near Los Angles drop him a line.

What is Medicine?

Hey, don't look at me. I'm not crazy enough to take on this question. It is the title of a book by Paul Ulrich Unschuld, who is one of the top scholars on the history of Chinese Medicine and Medical Anthropology.
The full title of the book is, What is medicine?: Western and Eastern approaches to healing. You can read the whole thing on Google books, but this is his attempt at a popular book so finding it at the library or just buying it is easy. It is a translation from German and you can really tell that because the only way you know he is excited about something is by attending to the exclamation points at the ends of sentences...like this...!

But I did really enjoy the book because it is about ideas, and about how people think, know, and change.  It is a comparison of the History of Western Medical traditions beginning with the Greeks (~500BCE) and moving all the way to the present--and the History of Eastern Medical traditions beginning with Mawangdui (~150BCE) all the way to the present.

Here is the hard cold summary.  There are three distinct categories:

1. Therapies


2. Scientific Theories


3. Medicine

This is counter-intuitive so bare with me.  Therapies are as old as dirt and new ones are being invented all the time.  They include shouting Hallelujah, popping pills, brewing herbs, and surgery.  Scientific Theories are models of what is happening to the body (usually on the inside).  They interpret what is visible, like changes in skin color, and then assign a theory to explain what is invisible.  The theories tend to follow from social and political experience!  The models are based on things like government, geography, mechanics, electronics, or construction materials.  Medicine happens when one of these models is checked directly against real data collection.  Medicine is the adaptation of a model based on evidence.

It's a bit of a brain twister to get with this organization of the three categories, but the conclusion is that the number of models about what a human body is are quite limited and severely limit our ability to think.  On the other hand, we get results so what a lot of fun it is.  Weird view, right?  Check out his table of contents!  All 100 chapters.

I'm happy I read this book, it sharpened my thinking.  Because Unschuld doesn't have a background in martial arts models of the body he is missing the most basic cosmological theories about how our experience of body, perception, and action gets tested in a theatrical-martial-senario-application context.  Thankfully he has left that field wide open for you and me.

Now check out these awesome images from Edo-period Japan!  Here are a couple, but there's more if you follow the link.

Am I Dead Yet Sgt. Miller?

Saturday morning I crossed the bridge to the bad part of Oakland.  The workshop took place in the clubhouse of the notorious East Bay Rats Motorcycle Gang Club.  It’s a block from a small park, which is an open drug market for addicts.  (My Mom lives nearby!)  The clubhouse is a little bigger than my living room, with a bar and a roll-up door to a small yard, but my living room doesn’t have a dirty concrete floor, a motorcycle in the middle of the room, or sharp edges and protruding things everywhere.  And my living room certainly doesn’t have  a motor-ski-plow-sculpture!  The yard had a lot of beer cans, dirt, some broken glass, trash cans, things for grilling meat, tools, and a beat-up all-weather boxing ring.  Twenty men and women showed up for the two day workshop.  Objectively speaking, there was enough room in there to teach Tai Chi to 4 people.  The stage was set for Sgt. Rory Miller's workshop.  (I reviewed his wonderful book Meditations on Violence here.)

Back in the days when I led adventure ropes courses, we would try to create a feeling of maximum risk with minimum actual risk.  At Rory's workshop, right from the get go everything felt risky.  He started off with a safety talk and then had us work with partners doing action exchange drills.  This is a slow motion practice in which one person begins an attack and the other fights back, but the moment of initiative consciously switches back and forth between the two fighters so that if one of them stops, all action stops.

The fact that the space felt so risky helped keep us non-competitive, which was essential for what he was trying to teach.

Sgt. Rory Miller

You know you are dealing with a great teacher if you experience the stuff you practice everyday failing, and yet you leave feeling elated!  My fighting system is based on not stopping at all, I try to fight like a waterfall.  So it’s not surprising that everything I do can fail if it is squeezed into an action exchange drill.  It was a great way to practice because it forced us to release more efficient whole-body violence into shorter and shorter periods of time.  It also allowed people with very little martial arts experience an opportunity to recover against people with a lot.  The exercise is also designed to insure that no one gets injured, while insuring that everyone feels pain, discomfort, disorientation and emotional boundary violations.  I got my nuts squeezed about twenty times.  I had people's fingers on my eyeballs over a hundred times.  We gradually built a lot of trust.

I’m so full of energy today it’s hard to write.  Hormone surges all day long especially during the scenario role-plays on the second day have left me a bit wired-up.  While I really enjoyed my failures, I left feeling that my training is superb.  My stuff transferred well to fighting in confined space and rolling on the concrete. The BJJ-Mixed Martial Arts people, by the way, had a lot of un-training to do.

Back in my twenties I did a lot of two person forearm and shin conditioning.  After a while it became really addictive, I just craved that rough contact, it was getting me high.  This morning when I went to do my practice I was craving that rough contact again.  I never realized this before now, but I think this type of conditioning training is really a way to practice bringing on and dealing with the hormone surge.  My morning classes for the last 3 or 4 years have had about 5 minutes of gentle external arm and leg conditioning.  But I think my internal practice is giving me another kind of really effective conditioning.  My body is primed to instantly pump up when I get the hormone surge.  Today I have that Arnold Schwarzenegger feeling in my body.  Not stiff--just pumped.  I’m sure it will go away in a day or two if I don’t feed it.  But it’s an important lesson about how the body works.

The familiarity with real violence that Rory brings is chilling.  One thing I realized is that George Xu trained me in vigilante violence, which in a dark kind of way is great because it includes many different types of violence-- Self-defense, domination, monkey dance, group monkey dance, police work, and surprise attack. Rory demands that we refocus our training on what is legal and ethical.  He also recommends that we stop training things which may be ethical but would be too much of an emotional identity destroying act for us to pull off (I guess some people have a problem with blood and guts).  What’s legal and ethical is usually clear in retrospect (not always), but rarely easy to act on in the moment.  Which is why training scenarios are essential.  Deciding what acts would be identity destroying is very personal.  I'm not sure where my limits are, all the encounters with violence I can remember have had at least some identity destroying power.

Reflecting on my training with George Xu I see that legitimate self-defense has always been a component of it, but it was part of a larger subject of vigilantism.  For instance I remember getting in George Xu’s head and practicing scenarios in which I was the aggressor with a knife fighting against another aggressor with a knife in which the goal was to incapacitate but not kill (terratorial dueling?).  Rory’s workshop brought up a lot of weird stuff like that.  For everyone I think.  But my somewhat rambling point here is that in order to make what I do fit the self-defense model I have to make a slight mental-emotional adjustment.  It’s an adjustment I made intellectually long ago, but I hadn’t fully considered how imperative it is that I actually change the way I train.

Because boxing is designed purely as a display of dominance it has very little resemblance to asocial surprise attacks or self-defense.  A boxer would have to make big adjustments to actually train for self-defense.  What I do most of the time is close to what Rory is teaching, but I do sometimes think in terms of dominance.  I'll imagine a monkey dance in which I approach a fight eye to eye, attacking straight-on like a rutting buck in order to assert dominance.  This is what he is training us not to do.  Fortunately I'm quite talented at a more Rory-esque self-defense style of training like getting behind someone and throwing them head first into a wall with pictures of guys with tattoos on it.

Readers are probably mocking me, "Ah what a fine ethical distinction."

Rory had us play so many cool scenarios.  He was wearing full body armor and a helmet.  The climax for me was when he came in from the back shooting his gun.  I looked up to see that he had already shot me and I froze as he shot me again and then shot the person next to me.  People near the door, after fumbling with the lock, opened it and started to run, but Rory entered and fired into the space the way a person experienced in killing everyone would do it.  I must have been one of the first to break my freeze because I remember beginning to run the five paces towards him and then the next thing I remember I had him pinned with my hand wrapped around his larynx, one knee on his xiphoid process, the other knee on his arm, and my left hand holding his gun hand flat on the ground.  During the debrief he said I was the hero who took a lot of lead (bullets).  The day before we were talking about how police assess whether people are lying or not, and he said he doesn’t believe it when people say they don’t remember what happened.  But between the time I started running and the moment I was on top of him positioning my knee on his xiphoid process-- I don’t remember what happened.  It is particularly interesting because I’m really good at recreating detailed two person movement sequences that happen spontaneously with my students in class.

He told me later that I scared him.  That coming from Rory felt a little like I accidentally won a gold medal at the Olympics or something.

My biggest criticism is that there were no undead in the scenarios.  Zombies next time!
The biggest surprise was how totally awesome the other people at the workshop were.  It was really fun hanging out talking afterwards.  New friends!  New ideas!  New inspiration! (More to come.)

Mao's Last Dancer (Review)

I just saw the movie Mao's Last Dancer. As my readers probably know, I love horror movies and kungfu movies, and scifi-action type stuff. I love the types of movies which give me that male hormone rush! Which is probably why I hate drama and romantic comedy, you know, chick flicks. My half-wife and I now joke that watching chick flicks is a form of estrogen therapy. But whatever, sometimes I give in to my weaker side.



Mao's Last Dancer gets an A grade for acting, and an A for the storyline. I spent about two years training ballet very seriously, but going to the ballet is not usually my thing; ballet is usually so focused on stimulating female hormones what am I going to do? But this movie is a true story about a great male dancer and the guy who plays him (Chi Cho) is a great dancer too. You get to see the best parts, the male parts, of classics like Swan Lake and Rite of Spring. Lots of great dancing and great choreography. So it gets an A for dance too.

The politics aren't perfect, I give it a B+, but for a non-horror movie that's high praise. I love when his mom tells the party officials to f--- off. Politically it feels honest.
Taijiquan practitioners will love the hard-ass but caring dance masters. What do they demand of their students? "Fa song" (relax!).

Alright, whatever, I cried. I sobbed. I simpered. I'm a confident macho man with a sleek hairy one pack (not a six pack), but if you have any doubts about your manhood, avoid this great movie. (Perhaps you should rent 300 instead.)

Ling

The top Character is Ling

It is with trepidation and excitement that I begin this post. The Chinese term ling is a pivotal taboo concept in North Asian cosmology.  Ling can be translated very roughly as power harnessed from the unseen world.  The character is made by writing rain yu above the character wu, which has three trance-mediums with their mouths open.  Like many taboo subjects it is not the actual word which is taboo, it is the context which matters.  For comparison, the word money by itself is not taboo in English, but discussing personal financial data and decisions is.  Talking about sex is very taboo, but it’s OK to do it with your therapist and it is expected that you will do it in a socially approved way with your children.
Ling has many common usages and I believe it would be easy for a non-native yet fluent speaker of Chinese to miss their origins-- which are in the fear of unseen forces.  Ling is a common word.  In popular usage ling means agile or dexterous and potent or effective.  It can also mean intelligent, clever or tricky.  It means spirit, spiritual, mysterious, elf, and it means a coffin with a person in it.

No two languages or societies have exactly the same taboos but there are enough overlaps that English can be helpful here.  We have the expressions ‘a smooth talker,’ ‘slippery fingers,’ or ‘nimble fingers,’ all of which describe someone who is good at stealing but can also be used to describe admirable qualities in a person.  Someone who makes a ‘killing’ on the stock market can be described as intelligent, agile or ‘sharp as a tack’ because we see him as wielding and manipulating forces other people don’t see or understand.   If you get in trouble with the law you may need a lawyer representing you who is both clever and tricky, perhaps one who can call in favors from other attorneys or officials.  All of these qualities in Chinese can be described as ling, the ability to harness powers from the unseen world.

My dictionary also has this sweetness which will appeal to horror film fans everywhere, “when a television remote control fails it is do to ling.”  The entry does not state to whom this ling is assigned, but presumably it does not belong to the person who is failing to operate the remote.  It is a mysterious unseen force.

Talking about ghosts is taboo in China, rather then say “ghosts” people often refer to them as “our good brothers.”  A ghost (see this article on ghosts) is an intention which is too weak to resolve itself.  These unresolved intentions linger about the living looking for enough qi to complete themselves.  When a person dies, most of what she wants, her will, dies with her.  But obviously some of it lingers on.  That’s why we write a last will and testament, we want to avoid having our intentions distorted after we die.  After we die our will lingers in things we have said to others, in things we have written and in how our actions are remembered by the living.  Without the ‘help’ of the living our intentions would of course disappear.  Certain types of intentions can be passed on to others as strange or negative behavior or personality traits.  For instance a parent who has a traumatic experience with a dog can easily pass on that fear to a child who has had no such experience.  Sometimes quirks are passed on without any obvious content.  In the graphic novel Maus, the son of a Holocaust survivor is obsessive about collecting matches. Even after he learns that his father’s habit of collecting matches developed because matches were a traded commodity in the death camps the son still can’t stop himself. His kitchen drawers are full of match books.  This is a ghost, in the form of a behavior.  These ghosts are often surrounded by intensely conflicting emotions and strange behavior.  Not knowing the reason behind a strange behavior can make it even harder to stop.  Lingering conflicting emotions which have no apparent explanation are often passed on to our children.  Humans are full of weird quirks we inherit from our families.

If I understand it correctly, Chinese religious custom thinks of negative influences from the dead as ghosts, and positive influences as ancestors.  But the principle is the same, and if we could transcend the taboo I suspect it would also be obvious that some positive lingering influence comes from outside the family and some negative influence comes from our direct ancestors.
Most of what I’ve said about ghosts or ancestors up to this point can easily be re-worded into psychological language:  Ghosts are unresolved conflicting emotions which linger on after whatever caused them is no longer there.

However, to understand the concept of ling we must remember that Chinese cosmology does not posit a separation between spirit and substance.  There are no outside agents, all things and events are mutually self-re-creating.  Chinese cosmology understands all thought, for instance, as having some substance tied to it.  Heaven is tied to earth, the living are tied to the dead.  Imagination needs a body to birth it.  When you leave your heart with someone, it’s not just a promise without substance, there is a component of it which is biological-- even if we may not be able to see it with a microscope or a blood test yet.

The substance people leave behind when they die is ling.  Intense commitments, pledges, and contracts are often sealed with blood.  When I was a kid and we played “Cowboys and Indians” we would sometimes make cuts on our wrists and squeeze the wounds together pledging, “We are now Indian blood brothers forever.”  A traditional Chinese contract between sworn brothers requires a smear of deer's blood across the upper lip of each brother.  There is a brilliant depiction of this in the movie “Temptation of a Monk,” about a general who is betrayed during the Tang Dynasty and has to go on the run.  The blood in all these cases is ling.

If you want to make a love potion in Africa, Europe, Asia or America, you need a locket of the persons hair for the spell.  The hair is ling.  Voodoo dolls are ling, so are animal sacrifices and collections of scalps captured in battle.

Every culture has notions of pollution and most cultures have the idea that certain professions are polluting not just to the person doing the job but to his or her decendents as well.  In India, Japan, and Korea butchers and people who worked with leather, and people who worked with human waste belonged to hated outsider castes.  They were pariahs. The word pariah is a South Asian word for a drummer.  (It’s not clear whether this is because drummers played on goat skin drums or because they were musicians.)  In China, leather, human waste, and meat processing were all polluting and the people who worked with these substances were degraded, but they were not pariahs.  They were socially above professional musicians and actors who were truly pariah outsiders, literally “mean people.”  No one seems to know exactly what was polluting about actors, my best guess after reading Chinese outcasts: discrimination and emancipation in late imperial China by Anders Hansson, and everything else I could get my hands on, is that it was a combination of two types of pollution.  First, actors had a degree of sexual freedom and probably took money for sex some of the time.  Second, they were obligated to perform certain expert ritual functions such as exorcisms.

Lingering ghosts are attracted to sexual activity just like they are attracted to fighting.  Lingering ghosts need sustenance to keep on lingering and the possibility of spilled blood is a bit like food for ‘hungry’ conflicting emotions.  I may be walking out on a dangerous limb here but it seems like the strong moods associated with menstruation are traditionally framed as the spirits of ancestors showing up once a month with a longing to continue their unresolved ambitions through a new birth.  “Wasted” semen probably had a similar association.  Sex has the potential to produce abortions or illegitimate children.  It was of course common for women to die in childbirth and common for children to die before the age of 5.  And venereal disease may have contributed something too.  All that pleasure we associate with sex mixes in a potent way with all that conflicting emotion and sucks in ghosts like nobodies business.

Musicians and actors, as far as I can tell, were viewed as having a certain amount of sexual freedom, which made them popular and admired, but also contributed to their status as outcasts.  It appears that they were often involved in sex for money or sex by obligation as an aspect of entertainment services required of them by regional authorities or powers.  Musicians and actors are masters of creating and manipulating mood.  In an animist worldview mood is sometimes viewed as the presence of gods--and the opposite is also true--the presence of the gods is sometimes reified by the acknowledgement of particular moods ("We're all crying, the gods must be here!").  All of this infuses the most potent tools of an actor with ling, masks come immediately to mind, but I suspect that many implements of the profession had some taint of this ling.

So ling is the polluted substance itself, the ability to control unseen forces associated with it, and the power which that ability confers. A powerful Daoist priest is said to have ling.  I suspect ritual implements also contain ling, but can be cleaned.  Both purification and emptying practices presumably would remove ling.  Ritual action, be it for exorcism, a funeral or some other purpose, can be understood as the manipulation of ling.  There are at least two ways of looking at.  Ling, as spiritual power, can be accumulated to wield against weaker ling.  Or apophatically by completely emptying oneself of ling, the conflicting emotions and deranged powers of ghosts and demons have no place to sink their tentacles and there for they can be controlled.  My understanding is that control is not a goal unto itself. The ritual helps ghosts and demonic forces come to completely resolved deaths--or helps them find their way to a realm of safety where they will no longer cause harm to humans.

One of the mechanisms of exorcism is to either destroy ling, render it neutral or brake its link to the living.  It is ling which is sealed inside pickle jars during exorcisms.

In the realm of martial arts I’ve heard George Xu talk about the importance of fighting with ling, which he translates as intelligence.  He describes this intelligence as instantaneous, spontaneously expressed knowledge about the best way to fight.  It is fighting with the mind but it is not a thought process.  It is the ability to wield all available factors like the direction of the sun, variations in the surface of the ground, changing perceptions, leverage, momentum, gravity, sound, emotion, etc...  If you saw the recent Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. he fights entirely with “intelligence,” 007 does it, and so does the character Michael in the TV series “Burn Notice.”  Of course, on the silver screen we see it in slow motion with narration, in real life it happens faster than the human mind can comprehend.  So ling means potency and prowess too.

Gangsters acquire wealth and power by killing, stealing and subordinating people to them.  The unseen forces they manipulate are all tainted with ling.  Con-men manipulate by tapping into our conflicting emotions and our unfulfilled desires, both of which are traditionally framed as the influence of lingering ghosts.  I’ve recently been reading Actors Are Madmen by A.C Scott.  Traditionally whoever was in power had a close relationship with the great performers of their region because performers were necessary for ritual and they provided entertainment for all those important banquets which seal agreements between men of prowess and power (Ling again).  Scott describes Tu Yueh-Sheng a gangster who practically ran Shanghai and controlled all the theaters too.  He was a master at manipulating ling.  Such people are also often known for being extremely generous protectors of those who subordinate to them.  Scott says it was known in Shanghai that if your watch was stolen in the morning you could have it back by evening if you went to the right people, Tu tolerated no competition.  But of course getting your watch back would taint you with a little bit of his ling.  When a person like this dies, people make shrines to him.  At first it is to placate his ghost, but over time people will come to the shrine to ask for favors, a new bicycle, a laptop, a raise.  The ling of a gangster takes a particularly long time to resolve because people don’t forget them, we still talk about Al Capone and Jessie James.

Reishi mushrooms (lingzhi) have ling in the name because they suck in such complex qi spontaneously form the environment and they are blood red.
Lingshu is the name of the second half of the Han Dynasty classic of medicine, it is usually translated Spiritual Pivot.  Here it refers to the ability to perceive the changing nature of an illness and all of it’s causes-- to find the acupuncture points and the time of day to use them which will reverse the illness with the least harm.

Fengshui is not a tool for redecorating your apartment. The purpose of fengshui is to limit the influence of the unresolved dead.  It is the manipulation of ling.

One of the great justifications for anthropology is the notion that in our attempt to learn about another culture we mainly end up learning about ourselves.  This is particularly true when taking on a subject which is taboo in another culture--both because we end up understanding our own taboos better and because our ‘other culture’ informants are particularly unreliable when it comes to discussing taboos.

Wealth accumulates almost entirely through commerce but kings and bandits accumulate it through violence and taxation.  Marx called money “dead labor.”  I don’t really care what Marx thought but it does help explain some taboos.  Marx was restating a common notion of his time in order to make a distinction between money and capital.  Marx’s idea of money was wrong, all money is also capital.  All money represents the value of an exchange which is an extremely complex calculation which factors in all previous exchanges of goods and services.  Money is a steaming pile of ling.

Chinese Imperial magistrates enlisted yamen runners and other toughs to serve warrants, bring in criminals, guard jails and torture suspects. Yamen did not get paid by the court, they got all their money from bribes.  They were also a degraded caste, not as low as actors but low enough that their children were forbidden to marry a commoner or take a civil or military exam.

Exquisite weapons probably accumulate ling too.  Wars were often commemorated with exorcisms and individual soldiers sometimes sought exorcism to deal with the lingering conflicting emotions of battle.  Fighting in wars must have been polluting, but interestingly it was not a polluting profession.  A soldier could reach the highest levels of society through marriage, adult adoption and promotion.

One of the things that makes martial arts so fun is the lively mix of danger and power.  Of course it is about ling. It is about the manipulation of unseen forces, extreme emotions, extraordinary agility, vigor, sensitivity, and surprise.  It is about the possibility of death, guilt, longing, fear, and triumph.

At this point my readers would be forgiven for wondering if there is anything that doesn’t mean ling.  Terms central to Chinese cosmology like ling, qi, jing, jin, shen, yi, xin, de, etc...developed by accumulating layers meaning.  Most people did not read or write or speak the same dialect as the villages in the next valley, they weren’t making distinctions between “characters” in a dictionary.

This language openness has at times been blamed for the retardation of science in China.  Perhaps, but it should also be given credit for preserving a very dynamic world-view which is now giving the rest of the world a much more open idea of what a human body is and what that body is capable of.

New Jet Li Movie

At least the movie had some cool swords!

The new movie Warlords staring Jet Li comes out this Friday and I would have had to see it even if I hadn't been given a free preview ticket because it is a historical epic film dealing with the Taiping Rebellion! This film is really dark and normally I love darkness, but in this film I just couldn't see the point.

I just happen to have been re-reading Jonathan D. Spence's classic God's Chinese Son, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan.  There is so much truly great theatrical material in the actual history of the Taiping Rebellion that is truly inexcusable for a contemporary film to bore us by following the bond between three men of prowess--two bandit leaders and a Qing Dynasty general named Pang (Jet Li).  There are a couple of OK fight scenes but we've come to expect so much more, stay home and re-watch Once Upon A Time in China if you want action.

Ching Shih 1836, Female Pirate Leader

I rarely get on my high horse and defend women, probably because none of the women I know actually need defending, but as I walked out of the film with my friend, who happens to be a female martial artist, we turned to each other and the first thing both of us said was, "What was that woman doing in the movie?"  You see, the film makers wrote one of those romantic subplots into the story.  It was totally irrelevant and uninteresting.  You're probably thinking, yeah, whatever, but consider this:  During the period of the Taiping Rebellion there were many well known female bandit and pirate leaders. That's great theatrical material that was completely neglected, no?  These were powerful leaders, some of whom actually went back and forth between being pirates and being bandits--from horseback to sailing-- These were women with skills! Damn it, I want to see that movie! Not some drivel about men who fought for 5 years without taking a bath.  Hello.

But there is more:  During the Taiping Rebellion, copies of the Bible in Chinese were widely distributed.  At one point there are so many people going into trance and becoming possessed by Jesus, Mary, Moses, God, God's wife and other characters from the Bible, that the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion have to go around from village to village authenticating Prophets--you know--is that really Jesus talking, or is it the devil pretending to be Jesus?


And this was a huge war that lasted for more than 15 years, with millions of combatants.  The Taiping population was fanatical.  They separated men and women into different encampments during the whole rebellion.  It's possible that hey fielded millions of female troops for battle.

Would it be too much to ask that they make a better movie next time?

Performers are Mean People

It would seem the most obvious thing in the world that martial arts are performing arts.  I mean, Jackie Chan, hello?  But denial of this notion is deeply embedded in contemporary Chinese culture.

Beijing Opera (Jingju) has as its most basic physical training something called "da" literally hitting or striking.  The warm ups I learned as a kid studying Northern Shaolin are the very same ones used in Beijing Opera.  The stage roles are divided into either martial or civil categories (wu and wen).  Extensive weapons training is given to everyone because much of the traditional repertoire involves depicting historic conflicts and battles.  Probably the best piece of evidence is the most famous Chinese Opera star of the 20th Century, the female impersonating dan Mei Lanfeng, studied Baguazhang with one of the toughest internal martial artists of his time!  It was said to have improved his sword dance.

Yet people will tell you that Chinese Opera has nothing to do with martial arts.

Beijing Opera is just one of many forms of physical theater in China.  There are urban regional styles like what Jackie Chan studied as a kid and there are rural regional styles.  There are also village lineage families, and there are amateur village and regional styles.  And within all of those categories there are ritual styles.  This is a quick gloss to give readers a sense of the scope--there were probably more than a hundred styles of physical theater in 19th Century China.

But there is a big problem here.  Denial.

Jackie Chan has said in variously self deprecating ways that he doesn't know about fighting.  And although it is well known that the Physical Theater of the Red Junks was created by the first Wing-Chun masters, it is also reported that they kept their fighting skills entirely separate from their performing skills.  Even today tight lines of distinction are drawn---at least in peoples minds---despite the fact that the stances used in fighting and performing are the same, and it is hard to know when a martial arts form has crossed-over into theater.

And everyone knows that Bruce Lee left Hong Kong for the US because he wanted to come here and teach Cha-Cha, right?  It's true.

Martial artists go to great lengths to deny any links to performing arts; the "New Life" and other nationalists movements in the 20th Century set out to completely separate martial arts from religious ritual and theater.  Sometimes they went ahead and just changed the arts, like Yang and Wu styles of taijiquan.  For example, Chen, the older style, is chockablock with pantomime training.  Other times they just discarded whole categories of practice, like back bends and high kicks, and sometimes they went for straight faced denial:  "No, that movement isn't for cueing the music, it's for poking your eyes out!"

Mean People!

I have not even finished reading David Johnson's new book, Spectacle and Sacrifice, The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China, but the chapter on Entertainers is so astounding I just had to blog!

Entertainers (yuehu) were a degraded caste in China.  Long time readers of this blog may know that I was deeply shocked and offended by my experiences of caste in India in the 1990's.  Chinese culture is not nearly as shocking to my American sensibilities, but then again, I've been studying Chinese martial arts for 32 years and no one has ever spelled it out to me as clearly as Johnson does in his book.

An entertainer had to move off to the side of the road to let "good people" pass.

[Performers] were known as jianmin, "mean people": they could not marry commoners, could not sit for examinations, and could not change their status.  In some cases they were required to be on call to the local yamen to entertain at banquets and other occasions.  (Just what their responsibilities were is never made clear, but they may well have included sexual services.)  They were treated with contempt by the general population....

While there were two major categories of entertainers, there were also castes within castes.  The basic categories were coarse (cu) and fine (xi), generally it appears that the coarse played music and the fine played music but also had acting skills.

"Mean people" were used for everything from entertaining visiting dignitaries, to weddings, to the most sacred rituals of a region.  "Opera Families" were profane outsiders who lived in separate districts or separate villages and yet were paid to entertain and purify--to bring order and expel evil.

A caste of hated artists brings to mind Roma (Gypsy) culture in Europe [hat tip to Liu Ming for the analogy].  The "mean people" were considered profane, but they were a necessity for the maintenance of the sacred.  Ritual Theater was the most common and widespread religious experience in China before the 20th Century. (Here are some links to previous posts.)

There were many different types of ritual performance throughout the calender year and every single village handled things differently.  So it is important to note that amateur commoners performed important roles in rituals and theater, as did Daoist priest, Buddhist monks, Yinyang masters, military personal, local elites, children and even high officials.  In fact, I think it is fair to say that some village rituals had a role for everyone.

Which brings us back to martial arts.  Martial arts were used extensively in these rituals.  It seems almost too obvious that the basic physical training for popular and rarefied physical theater in China was in fact martial arts training.  Each region had it's own style of gongfu (kung fu) and it's own style of theater (ci).  But the basic training was the same.  It could be refined for either fighting, performing, or both.

What I've just now realized is that the ideology of modernity functioned in China as a cover for the deep animosity towards the performing castes.  These castes are now probably close to extinction.  Of course it's risky to generalize, but we now have a better explanation of why most martial arts lineages did everything they could to deny their past participation in ritual performance (lion dance being the big exception).  While the entertainer castes were officially liberated, their historic vocation as ritual experts was derided as the root cause of China's humiliations and failures as a nation!  I suspect that in some cases individual artists from degraded castes managed to survive by first denying any connection to ritual theater, and then skillfully transforming themselves into pure martial artists.

Now I have to re-think what qigong is in this context.  Kind of gives a different meaning to the expression "secret teaching," doesn't it?

(Remember if you are reading this on facebook you can see more images by clicking "original context" below.)

Spectacle and Sacrifice

"Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China"

a new book by David Johnson, Professor, History Department, UC Berkeley

DATE: Wednesday, January 27, 2010
TIME: 4:00 PM
PLACE: IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor, Berkeley, CA
FORMAT: IEAS Book Series: New Perspectives on Asia
SPONSORS: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

"In the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China, temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. UC Berkeley History Professor David Johnson's new book describes the great festivals as their supreme collective achievements, carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay.

Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

Introduced and moderated by Wen-hsin Yeh, Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Professor of History, and Director, Institute of East Asian Studies."

--I'm going to go hear this talk tomorrow, I haven't seen the book yet but it looks interesting. Join me if you've got the time and you're in the area.

1000 Words for Rebel-Bandit

Winter is such a good time for working-out and getting extra sleep; not a great time for sitting in a chair and  writing.   But you're in luck because this book in my lap is due back to the library and it's full of notes that would be lost if I didn't do this blog thing now.  Also, I'm sipping some super-duper, so secret 3-ears-never-hear Chinese herbal tonic.

In my quest to try to understand the origins of Chinese Martial arts I've come to the conclusion that in the past there were people who practiced a religious tradition of exorcistic theater interlaced with Daoist liturgy, meditation, and daoyin, who used sophisticated internal martial arts technology, healing, talisman, re-telling history, with dance, puppets, mudras, music, processions, and animal sacrifice-- all together in a single art-event, ritual happening.  The people practicing these traditions did so through violence times, sometimes as participants in rebel movements, sometimes as part of bandit societies, and sometimes as citizens of weak or powerful central governments.

And I have also come to the conclusion that all of these skills could be arts unto themselves, that individuals throughout the ages have sometimes chosen to be exclusively musicians, or martial artists, or dancers.  And, each of these traditions easily lend themselves to composites of more than one art.  For instance, it was common for a scholar, a man who had passed an Imperial exam, to spend his evenings singing or reciting the histories while playing music with friends in a wine house.  It was also common not to do both. (Just a note here, because it keeps coming up:  For some reason only historians understand, a person who passed the lowest level of the Imperial exam is generally referred to in English texts as a member of the gentry or the elite.  I'll never be comfortable with this.)

I recently read David Robinson's  Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven, Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China .  Great book!  Remember that lame cliche that goes, there are a 1000 words for snow in the Eskimo language.  Well, reading this book one is inclined to think there are a 1000 words for rebel-bandit in Chinese.

Here are some of the fun ones:  ..."(W)ulai" (local tough), "liumang" (hooligan), "youshou" (loafer), "xianshou" (idler), "wangming" (desperado), "guanggun" (bare sticks), and "wuji zhi tu" (unregistered ones) on the one hand, and [there are] more ambiguous appellations, such as haojie (unfettered hero, "haojun" (unfettered hero), "renxia" (knight errant), and "youxia" (wandering knight errant) on the other. (p.21)

Robinson breaks through a lot of conventions.  He chooses to write about the middle of the Ming Dynasty (around 1500) because it is considered a time of relative peace, but he shows us how totally violent it was.  He challenges the standard focus on "gentry," meaning men who have passed the lowest level of civil exam, and instead looks at the entire breath of men and women, powerful, and not so powerful.   But his particular interest is the unfettered man of force and his ability to transcend and traverse all levels of society.

"Illicit violence was an integral element of Ming society, intimately linked to social dynamics, political life, military institutions, and economic development.  Nearly everyone in China--from statesmen and military commanders to local officials and concerned social thinkers, from lineage heads and traveling merchants to farmers , transport workers, and peddlers in the street--grappled with the question of how to use, regulate, or respond to violence in their lives." (p. 2)

"The role of marital arts, martial ethos, and military institutions in late imperial society forms an important if still little-explored facet of China's economy of violence.  Violence in theater, literature, and the visual arts provides valuable insight into the economy of violence, as does the role of physical and symbolic violence in religious practice, doctrine, and imagery....and popular concepts of honor, justice, and vengeance in various parts of China during the different historical periods...(p.2)

Robinson focuses on violence closest to the capital, exploring the idea that it would be more likely that the government would have some sort of monopoly on violence nearer to the capital than in far away provinces.  In fact, if that was true, and the 40,000 pirates off the southern coast (far from the capital) at the time would suggest it was, than violence was everywhere--because the capital was teaming with bandits and rebels.

....[P]rohibitions forbade bearing arms in certain contexts, most notably the strict laws against arms in or around the capital, especially the imperial palace.  Despite the extra security measures taken in Beijing, the prohibition against bearing arms in the capital was not observed.  Gangs of lahu, or urban gang members, brandishing knives, metal whip-chains, cudgels, swords, and various other weapons were frequently reported on the streets of Beijing during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  The violations certainly owe something to Beijing's enormous and very mobile population (between 800,000 and one million by 1500). (Robinson p.93)

He convincingly argues that it was common for bandits and various sorts of highway robbers to be part of patronage networks.  These networks protected them to some extent but also meant that local magistrates or other types of officials or men of power were getting a cut of the loot.  This allowed for complex negotiations which might mean that a particular group of bandits lived in one region and robbed in another.  The Ming Dynasty was enormously wealthy and probably the best commercial environment on earth at the time.  It may have also been the most crime ridden because nearly everyone was "on the take" in one way or another.

This jives with Esherick's description of Shan Dong province during the late Qing Dynasty in The Origins of the Boxer Uprising.  Esherick describes a situation where it was common for bandits to rob neighboring towns across provincial boarders but to play the roll of protector for their own villages.

During the Ming Dynasty these patronage networks permeated the society right up to the eunuchs surrounding the Emperor and even the Emperor himself.  (In 21st Century China we call these networks "guanxi" or "connections," and the result is widespread corruption.  However the current government seems to have effectively suppressed armed bandits on horseback.)

There is a huge ethnic component to the violence and banditry but it is sometimes hard to sort out.  I also recently picked up a book by David A. Graff called Medieval Chinese Warfare, 300-900. Graff explains several things which are highly relevant.  During the lead up to the Tang Dynasty (600 CE) the region we call China developed every conceivable method for putting together groups of men to fight. That accumulated knowledge of military organizational experiments was well documented and continued to be used in all subsequent Dynasties to gather huge armies, militias, retainers, or rebels.  The other factor is that while infantries were used extensively and, if well trained, could be effective on the battle field, they were most useful for occupying an area or defending against a siege.  Cavalries were what won most battles and most wars.  Graff picked the year 300 to start his study because that was the era when the technological innovation of stirrups became pervasive.  Cavalries were made up mostly of Turks and Mongolians.  Lastly, reading about the early Tang Dynasty it is easy to get the impression that China has at least nine distinct regions capable of raising armies for the purpose of defending themselves or attacking their neighbors.  A civil war with nine different regions competing for dominance is always brewing underneath the apparent stability of every "Chinese" Dynasty.

Jumping back to the Ming Dynasty,  the Turks are gone (they went to Turkey) but there are lots of mounted Mongols serving as elite forces guarding the boarders, putting down uprisings, and sometimes protecting trade routes or even the capital.  There were also Hui people, Muslim families who are ethnically Han, who lived largely in the regions just south of the capital.  The Hui were heavily represented in the cavalries, and in the military in general.  The regular, and the various irregular but official, troops lived in large concentrations near the capital.  When the country was not actually at war, the horses used by the cavalry were supposed to be kept 'ready for action' by families registered for that purpose.  So war horses were widely available throughout the empire.  And everybody had weapons.

Robinson found this legal code:

Everyone who privately possesses armor for horse or men, shields, tubes of fire [a primitive gun], a catapult for throwing fire, banners and signaling devices and the like--military equipment that is forbidden to the people--will, for one such item, receive eighty strokes of the heavy bamboo.  for each [additional] item, add one degree.  If he manufactures the items privately, add to the punishment for possessing it privately, one degree.  In each case, the punishment is limited to one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo and exile to 300 li.  If it is not complete [so it can not be used], there is no penalty.  He may be ordered to deliver it to the government.  Bows and arrows, lances, swords, and crossbows, as well as fishing forks and pitchforks, are not within the category of prohibited objects. (Robinson p.91)

Eunuchs are an interesting part of the story.  Many of them came from Hui villages.  There are accounts of whole villages castrating their young men because they heard that the Emperor was seeking new eunuchs.  It was common in certain regions for the third son to be castrated in hopes that he could become a eunuch.  So there were a lot of eunuchs running around (just in case you were wondering).  Eunuchs did fight, and often commanded troops. Just as an aside, I wonder if there were martial arts practices specifically for eunuchs? Is this another possible source for the development of internal martial arts? It would make sense because without the male hormones they wouldn't be able to build or keep muscle.   They would have had a type of weakness which did not have to be cultivated, but which might lead to a unique sort of martial prowess.  After reading about all the eunuchs, I'm starting to believe the story that Dong Haichuan (the founder of Baguazhang) was, as rumored, a eunuch.

The complete separation of civil and military (wen and wu) legal systems was a real disaster because it meant that wherever a military group was stationed, small groups of soldiers could rob and loot without being subject to the civil authorities.  This led to all kinds of patronage and intimidation.  And if you got pretty good at organizing bandit groups, why not strike out on your own?  Even start a rebellion?  Individuals with in these bandit groups often managed to keep their identities as soldiers or imperial cavalry, sometimes going back and forth, or simply maintaining both identities simultaneously.

In order to maintain control, both the central government and local government often chose to enlist, appease, or co-opt rebel-bandits:

Integrating these various kinds of violence into a bureaucratic order was always a calculated risk, and the line dividing defenders of the imperial order from its challengers often blurred with disturbing ease.  Writing on developments in Jiangxi during the early sixteenth century, Lin Ruozhou observed, "One variety of fierce bare sticks initially claims to be assisting officials to kill bandits, but in the process colludes with them, storing stolen goods for profit.  Later these folds take up for a living the false accusation of commoners to extort goods from them.  The only thing they fear is the return of peace." (Robinson p.90)

There is lots of cools stuff in this book.  At one point the wife of a rebel-bandit named Tiger Yang takes over and goes on a series of raids on the capital before finally being caught and executed.  At another point 350 monks from Shaolin Temple are used to help put down a rebellion but 25% them are slaughtered in the first battle.

It is easy to forget that food was always scarce in the old days.  Soldiers often worked for free in the hope of being fed.  One common system was that as soldier's family was responsible for keeping him supplied with food or money.  It was a form of tax on the family, and since not everyone had family serving in the military it was a tax with some prestige.  Still families often wanted to get out of it, which was made easier if the soldiers were far away, or if they were gone for a long time.  Sometimes they were two months away from receiving a message for as long as twenty years.  Long enough to start a new family.

Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven is not light reading, but it is very readable!  If you like this topic, I recommend it.  I got the book because I read the "Conclusion" on Google Books (p. 163) and found it intriguing.  Perhaps you will do the same?

Mistakes

Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Being Just begins by explaining that there are two types of mistakes we make about beauty. The first is the mistake of thinking something is not beautiful and later realizing that it is. The second mistake is thinking something is beautiful and later realizing that we've been duped. She then goes on to argue that it is our experience of these two types of mistakes which gives us our sense of justice. It's a sweet argument. (I'll come back to this.)

What is the role of the artist?  This question has been bugging me lately.  Recently an experienced arts teacher, who is a director of an organization I work for, came to observe and evaluate one of my kids classes.  He gave me a stellar review.  Saying that I'm doing everything right, that my teaching is nuanced, that I inspire creativity, kinesthetic awareness and critical thinking, that my classes produce results, and draw on a deep knowledge of art and culture. He even wants to bring beginning teaching artists to watch me teach, as a model of great teaching.  But, I learned... and this is a kicker... that I'm terrible with other adults and lack professionalism in relationships with other artists and administrators.  For instance, I show my annoyance at meetings by putting my head on the table and groaning quietly to myself, I start arguments and I make shocking comments that no body understands (cognitive dissonance).

Is this what being an artist is for me?  I'm not apologetic.  I dropped out of high school because I didn't want to sit in chairs anymore.  I get a guilty conscious if I think I've been too nice in a situation which required bluntness.

The arts organization I work for used to have a Japanese Artistic Director.  She had a deep respect for artists.  It now occurs to me that part of that respect may simply have been her Japanese upbringing.  In Japan, artists are expected to be outrageous, unusual, spontaneous, unpredictable and moody.  Japanese culture has enormous tolerance for non-conformist behavior from artists.

I hear sometimes from my left leaning friends that artists aren't rewarded enough for their art unless they "sell out."  That it would be a better world if artists could easily find monetary support for making their art, even if what they do doesn't sell or isn't saleable.  I wonder if the opposite is true.  Does our society try to pay-off good artists so that they will be less disruptive?  That is, in effect, what I'm being told, "You get paid to come to meetings, can't you just be more like everyone else?"  No, I answer, it isn't worth the pay.  But I worry that some day someone might pay me enough to be nicer than I want to be.

Then I start to question that list of things in the second paragraph which I'm supposedly doing right.  My teaching is nuanced? Really? More like boldly physical and deeply respectful of natural aggression.  I guess I do inspire creativity, "Invent a new way to break your partner's arm. You have 30 seconds. Go!"  Critical thinking?  I think that was an accident.  How about, I expose people to the profoundly irrational nature of the heart mind connection.

Getting back to the first paragraph, what is the relationship between an artist's role in society and beauty itself?  I believe it is my duty to point out mistakes about beauty.  I believe that recognition of the enormous number of mistakes I've made about beauty inspires me as an artists and as a person who seeks justice.  I feel a missionary duty to make beauty, whatever that may be, available and accessible.  And also to protect beauty from forces which might destroy it.

It's overwhelming to contemplate all the mistakes I've made in my practice as a martial artist.  I look back at the years and I see so many mistakes, things I thought were correct, things I thought would lead to greater beauty, but which later turned out to be distractions or wrong turns.  It's almost as if my practice is simply the process of discovering and correcting errors about what's beautiful.

As a teacher my job is, my calling is, bringing out beauty that otherwise would go unnoticed, unclaimed, uncreated, or unfelt.  In that sense, I am armed and dangerous.

The first time I met George Xu, 22 years ago, he said to me, "What's the point of punching if you don't have enough power to break bones?"  At that moment I realized that there was something beautiful about breaking bones that I had been missing.