Fate

Well I took a nice long break from writing. Actually it took me six days to delete all the unopened emails in my box. I also went up north for a few days where I stayed close to a wood burning stove at a Hippy hostel called Jug-Handle Creek Farm. Even considering the conspiracy theorists we shared a fire with, it was pretty sweet.

I would say my fate has been good, even princely perhaps. Most people don't want to believe in fate. They figure only silly people and Asians believe in fate. What is fate?

First of all I should point out that there are Daoist Precepts against predicting the future, and if that wasn't enough to convince you, there is a precept against making a living from fortune telling.

Let's start from what everybody has, a body. The body we get at birth is fate. Yes it may make a difference if your mother ate a lot of rocky-road ice cream during her pregnancy, but there are still some basic parameters that will determine your body type. True, it matters to some degree what we eat over 20 or 30 years. But we don't actually have direct control of our appetite.

Appetite is a key concept in understanding how fate relates to martial arts. Everybody gets hungry, everybody has an appetite, just like everybody gets angry, everybody has aggression that can explode.

Part of growing up is a process of refining our appetites. It's a touchy thing we don't have direct control over, but you can make yourself sick of even the most tasty dish by eating it every night for a week. Imagine how bad tuna casserole would be after eating it six times in a row. Likewise, if you deprive yourself of chocolate for a couple of months and then accidentally bump into a friend eating a bar of Scharfenberger's.... They'll be lucky if they get to keep half.
If you have a wide range of food choices and you understand the different qi qualities of those foods and how to combine them, you can really start to play with your appetite. The qi quality of a particular food refers to the categories of foods which have a similar effect on your body and your appetite. So cabbage and kale are pretty similar while chocolate is in a category by itself (Yes, I agree that carob is good, but it is not chocolate).

The body we have is pretty much fate. But it is a kind of flexible fate. Meaning it is unlikely that I'm ever going to have long sharp teeth, but if tattoos got old and teeth sharpening became like the new hip urban craze, I could at least sharpen my teeth. We do have some control over what we want to eat, but a lot of it is fate. If you are Polish and you haven't had black bread and sausage in like a year, just me saying this is going to make you jones for it. Polynesians and pineapple, Norwegians and lutefisk.

Martial arts work the same way. You have a body that wants certain kinds of movement, it wants certain kinds of stillness too. It's like an appetite. If you have a wide range of training options and you understand how they will effect your body, you can play with that. What you do everyday will actually change what your body wants. A great deal of it is just fate, but there is also room to play around.

Where we live, the kind of gongfu we practice, the languages we speak, what we eat for breakfast--as humans we have some flexibility up to a point, and no doubt you can move to a foreign country, learn a new language and forsake you grandmothers recipe toffee, but most of us, most of the time, have a fate, a rhythm, a set of patterns that make us feel comfortable.

More in the News

Here is one of those cutesy articles that the New York Times Magazine likes to print. It is called The Newest Mandarins. The article is optimistic about one of darkest subjects in history: Is it possible for people to think for themselves.  (I tend to be more negative on this account.)

On the word yong (courage), Lei Bo cited chapter seven of The Analects, where Confucius told a disciple that if he “were to lead the Three Armies of his state,� he “would not take anyone who would try to wrestle a tiger with his bare hands and walk across a river [because there is not a boat]. If I take anyone, it would have to be someone who is wary when faced with a task and who is good at planning and capable of successful execution.� No one ever put Confucius in charge of an army, said Lei Bo, and Confucius never thought that he would be asked, but being a professional, he could expect a career either in the military or in government. And his insight about courage in battle and in all matters of life and death pertains to a man’s interior: his judgment and awareness, his skills and integrity. This was how Lei Bo explored the word “courage�: he located it in its early life before it was set apart from ideas like wisdom, humaneness and trust. He tried to describe the whole sense of the word. The business students and their teacher were hooked. They wanted Lei Bo back every week for as long as they were reading “The Art of War.�

The one thing I have to add to the this discussion is that in my mind "courage" is related to "compassion." This is important because the word Compassion is a key concept, and a key precept, in Daoism.  The word compassion in Chinese is made up of the  characters for roughness and heart.  The Daoist idea of compassion is that it is natural courage, the courage a mother tiger uses to defend her cubs.

Milieu

I've been reading the book Qigong Fever, it's good, but I'm not ready to review it yet. However, part of the methodology of the book is to investigate the milieu which inspired the invention, expression, and propagation of qigong as a "movement."

I like this kind of thinking. When I was in high school I was in a School of the Arts and I did a lot of ceramics. I got really interested in Sung Dynasty (900-1200 CE) Chinese ceramics. Then I went to Australia where I had a ceramics teacher who was also totally into Sung Dynasty glazes and was trying to replicate the way they made them with natural local minerals (like ash from near by forest fires) and at the same time adding some scientific analysis.

I also got way into dance, dance history, and improvisation. What these two things have in common is milieu. Modern dance, for instance, came out of a very specific cultural milieu and I think it started to stagnate when that milieu ended. Sung Dynasty ceramics had huge cooperative workshops with dragon kilns that burn once a year up the side of a mountain. Each group got the right to fire its huge kiln from the imperial court which held regular competitions for its patronage. If your kiln won the competition, you supplied the entire royal family for a year or so until they had a new competition. This created a really competitive environment where everyone was making imperial quality work, but only one "kiln" was getting to sell it to the royal family so there was literally tons of extraordinary art work floating around. This milieu created the worlds first antique markets.

So when I was in my early twenties and studying gongfu 6 hours a day it occurred to me that neither my gongfu teachers, nor their teachers had lived in a milieu that was capable of inspiring the creation gongfu as I knew it (Shaolin, Taijiquan, Xingyi, Bagua).

I held and thought about that question for many years.  I was still asking that question when I really started getting into Daoist Religion.  (Daoism isn't directly responsible for the creation of gongfu, but it is in the mix.)

My point is this: The main reason I have been writing this blog for the last six months is to both explain what I have learned over the years about the milieu which inspired Chinese Martial Arts generations ago, and to create a new milieu which will re-inspire the arts.

A Wonderful Alliance

When it comes to the subject of Experiential Anatomy and Physiology, Daoism and Modernity fit quite beautifully together. Here are some questions and observations common to both traditions.

Does a baby experience pleasure before it learns to smile?
Do we experience time in the womb? Do we feel it, or is it experienced as some other kind of change?

Do we experience space or balance while we are in utero?

When and how do we begin to recognize distance, or inside vs. outside, expanding vs. contracting, wrapping inward vs. wrapping outward? When do we gain the ability to spiral one way and then the other? Is it simply an unconscious part of growing or do we have some volition?
Stages of development are quite well known, but like taijiquan training methods, a child can develop out of order, skip a stage, or even create a unique transition.

I once knew a great dancer who had skipped the crawling stage of development, he went straight from scooting to walking. He was naturally flexible, rarely wore shoes, and never needed to stretch before a workout.

Do we start from a feeling of having a body, or do we start with a feeling of having no boundaries?

After birth, one of the first things we do is turn our head to find our mother's breast. Is this part of your internal martial arts practice? Does a baby feel its bones, or its muscles? Does it feel hungry? Does it feel the turning? Where does the movement come from?

Eventually a baby will find its hand with its mouth. It will start to see, and track. Eventually it will point and grab, and push and pull. How does a baby initiate this movement. Do children feel outside of their bodies?
How does a baby get control over its arms? Is this a question you ask yourself when you practice internal martial arts?

Henri Maspero, Wilhelm Reich & Katherine Dunham

Wow, it was fun putting those three names together.

Actually they don't fit so well together, but what they have in common is that they all crossed metaphorical bridges that make this blog possible.

Henri Maspero was the first sinologist to recognized the scope of Daoism as a religion. Of course there were a bunch of sinologists that preceded him, but I think he was the first to think about Daoism outside of a Christian framework. He was murdered by the Nazi's at Buchenwald in 1945. Scholars of comparable depth didn't surface again until the 1970's, mostly in France (probably do to his influence there), and not until the 1990's in English.

Wilhelm Reich was a student of Sigmund Freud. He is such a weird character in history that most people are reluctant to credit him as a significant force in the development of ideas. But he is also hard to dismiss. He was the first scholar to try to prove that sex is good for you. Perhaps I should be crediting Oscar Wilde instead, or someone else who said such things but used humor as a cover. But Reich was the first person to use the expression body armor (and character armor) as a metaphor for explaining physical tension. He was the first person in Western Civilization to say that emotion can be stored in the body as tension.

Reich is also extraordinary because he was probably the first to say that Nazi's and Communists are the same. His reason was also way ahead of his time: They both used the same repressive physicality to perpetuate fear of self-awareness; a fear which makes people want to be told what to do.

Most people agree that when Reich came to America he went off the deep end. His coolest invention in that regard was the Cloudbuster. But when you read his writings on Orgone Energy you are going to think, "Oh, he means Qi." I believe it is highly likely that Reich was reading some kind of Chinese cosmology. So in that regard he represents the very worst part of Modernity; the habit of an taking an idea from another culture and pretending like you invented it!

Katherine Dunham was the great antidote to that lame habit of Modernity. She invented Dance Anthropology (or Ethnology if you prefer). She made the serious study of movement and physicality both central and indispensable to the process of understanding culture. Because of Katherine Dunham we can laugh at all the scholarship by stiffs who think that they understand something because they saw it or even read about it, and at the same time we can treasure the voices of those who actually join the dance.

I don't know much about the earliest film documents of martial arts, but 1936 was pretty early. Dunham caught some great stuff!

Daoism in San Diego

Here is an article from SignOn San Diego about a Dragon pacifying ritual and academic conference at the University of San Diego.

When the dragon was complete, the priests began an elaborate ceremony replete with drama, dancing, music and even some martial arts. As about 200 people watched the colorful scene unfold in a courtyard at San Diego State University, the dragon was consecrated and blessings were sought.

The article gets a sound bite from Charles Taylor who wrote The Ethics of Authenticity. Since I didn't like the sound-bite, but did like his book, here is a sound-bite about his book by another great thinker, Richard Rorty.

London Review of Books : The great merit of Taylor's brief, non-technical, powerful book...is the vigor with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are social...Being authentic, being faithful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people...The core of Taylor's argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are wonderful just because you are you, and that 'respect for difference' requires you to respect every human being, and every human culture--no matter how vicious or stupid.
--Richard Rorty

Daoist Shoes

I've been looking for information on Daoist ritual shoes. I was sure that somewhere I'd seen special Daoist ritual shoes which are 3 inch high stilts. These shoes make it impossible to put weight on the toes or the heel since the stilt post goes down from the center of the foot. Since the base the the stilt is thicker at the bottom, kind of like a mushroom, there is a plenty of space to balance. The problem is I have been unable to find these shoes (so no picture). Did I dream them? How embarrassing.

Dream or not, these shoes represent ultimate shamanic power. The symbolic steps Daoists take in ritual cover huge distances. They circumambulate the empire, the world, and they traverse the distances between stars in the sky.

It gets confusing. Daoists are not shaman, but there is a part of Daoist ritual in which they take on the role or the position, or more accurately, the qi of all shaman. This is done by taking on the physicality of the Chinese prehistory shaman the Great Yu, and acting out key parts of his life. The difference between normative shamanic power and a Daoist embodying the Great Yu is the difference between power and potential power.

There is a direct parallel with taijiquan and other internal arts. First a taijiquan student develops the ability to clearly and unambiguously demonstrate and replicate peng jin , lu jin, an jin, and ji jin (ward-off, rollback, etc...). To get these types of power one must know exactly which part of the foot to use. Then he or she strings peng-ji-lu-an seamlessly together so that these types of power are part of a continuous circle. To achieve this one must be continuously shifting from the ball of the foot to the heel. Once this jin level is achieved the student then moves on to the shi level. Shi roughly means potential, it implies a strategic position, a drawn bow, and having ones hand on a lever.
The jin level is like shamanic power. The shi level leaves power unexpressed, unused.

Shaman get power through covenants with spirits, deities, or even natural forces. The physical "fear and trembling" necessary for summoning shamanic power requires engaging the "pushing and pulling muscles" of the legs which involves pressure in the balls of our feet or in our heels. With these Daoist ritual shoes on, our legs would easily stay in a weak potential state. At the shi level of taijiquan we do not push from the balls of the feet or the heels. Our power remains potential.

UPDATE 12/21/07: Here is a picture of the shoe, it's called a Manchu Shoe. I have now written more on this subject!

The Celestial Masters: Tianshi

 This is a continuation of my series on basic facts about Daoism.

All Daoist’s recognize Zhang Daoling as the first Tianshi, which means Celestial Master.  The title Tianshi was first given to Daoist priests by the emperor during the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) in acknowledgment their ritual mastery (shi) of the Celestial (tian) realm.   The title was then applied retroactively one thousand years, all the way back to Zhang Daoling.  Zhang is the founder of religious Daoism who met with Lao Jun (Lord Lao), the source of the Daodejing, on mount Heming (Heron Call) in the Year 142 CE and formed the Covenant of Orthodox Unity.  (See article Zhang Daoling.)

There are many Tianshi lineages but there is one individual in each generation who is the central Tianshi.  This person comes from a continuous family lineage going back to Zhang Daoling.  During the Dynastic eras of China the Tianshi had a palace at Dragon Tiger Mountain (Longhushan).  To get a sense of the importance of the Tianshi it helps to understand that all building and construction in China has always been regulated by the government.  No building was allowed to be built larger than the Emperor’s palace.  We get a sense of how important the Tianshi was by noting that the Tianshi’s palace was specifically built (roughly) six feet smaller than the Imperial Palace.  Needless to say, the role of Tianshi was central to the religious life of the country and the functioning of the state, and because of this, the Tianshi is sometimes called the Daoist Pope.

When the Communist government took power in 1949 it banned all religion, and as a consequence the Tianshi fled the country.  During the Cultural Revolution in China (1967-1977) the Tianshi’s palace was completely demolished.  Recently the Tianshi’s palace has been rebuilt and Tianshi Daoism is making a tenuous recovery.

The Priesthood
The Tianshi  priesthood is the oldest Daoist movement.  Its primary activity is the performance of ritual. Rituals are performed in private on behalf of a cosmic, national, or local constituency.  To be a Tianshi of the highest rank one must be married to another Tianshi.   Both men and women are equals, the difference between them has more to do with society at large than any doctrine within Daoism.  Male Tianshi have historically been the ones who interact with the public.

Tianshi are required to keep precepts.  These precepts are from three overlapping categories.  First they are derived from Daodejing and are consistent with its teachings.  Secondly, they regulate appropriate social conduct related to one’s priestly role or position.  And third, they support ritual purity and transcendent practices.

Becoming a Tianshi
Most Tianshi lineages are passed down within families, but it is also possible to be adopted into a lineage.  Each Tianshi gets a name which is taken from a line of a secret lineage poem.  Every member of a generation in the same lineage has a name chosen from the same line of poetry.  Since the Tianshi tradition is very old and has spread wherever Chinese people have settled, this secret lineage name allows Tianshi to identify each other.

The process of becoming a Tianshi usually begins with investiture.  Investiture entails the taking of precepts, the passing-on of ritual vestments and ritual implements, receiving and copying sacred texts (which are usually also committed to memory), and the receiving of registers, which are secret documents used in ritual to regulate the gods, ghosts, spirits and demons of the Daoist Pantheon.

Rank
The type and number of sacred texts a Tianshi is invested with determines his or her ritual rank.  This list is absolutely secret, it is shown only to other Tianshi in specific ritual circumstances.  For example the list could be shown when a new text is transmitted or at the beginning of  a new course of study.  Thus the rank of a  Tianshi is not a personal achievement and all Tianshi are considered equals--there are no true earthly hierarchies.  That being said, there are indeed heavenly hierarchies.  A Tianshi’s role as ritual master is intrinsically about the recording of meritorious acts on earth,  in heaven and in the unseen world.

Zhengyi and Tianshi
The terms Zhengyi and Tianshi are somewhat interchangeable.  The designation Zhengyi  literally means Correct One; it is the name for the original covenant made between  Zhang Daoling and Laojun (Lord Lao) on mount Heming in the year 142 CE.  In English we refer to it as the Covenant of Orthodox Unity.  All Tianshi are also considered Zhengyi.  Zhengyi is perhaps better understood as the category of orthodox  practices, which are in contrast to all practices which are unorthodox (Buzheng).  It can be applied to other Daoist movements and lineages as well, such as Quanzhen or Shangjing.  The trend has been to include Daoist movements and practices under the designation Zhengyi as they are understood to be in conformity with the Original Covenant.

The picture above came from here.

The Dao of Learning

There is a common convention of Chinese culture in which the word Dao, meaning the way, is applied to any field of study. Thus we have the Dao of archery, the Dao of writing, the Dao of mothering, and even the Dao of basketball. This expression refers to a way of knowing and embodying which is unique to each pursuit, and implies both ease and confidence. It is somewhat like saying in English, "She really has the knack of tree climbing." In addition to implying that a person is really skilled at something, it implies that the activity itself transforms the person who does it, it is not just an act of doing, it is an act of mutual self-recreation.

Truly knowing a skill, or even a subject, further implies a curriculum. Thus many books have been written describing the Dao of Archery, the Dao of making Tea, or even the best selling book The Tao of Pooh.

In Japanese, which uses Chinese written characters, Dao becomes "do," in many familiar arts like Karatedo, Judo, Aikido, Budo (the warrior code), and Chado (the art of tea).
For most of the last 1500 years in China the first lessons one received when learning to write calligraphy were instructions on how to sit without obstructing circulation, how to hold and move the brush in coordination with ones breath such that the student might start discovering the Dao of writing from day one. In fact, implicit in this idea is the notion that one is learning how to embody the physicality of great public officials of the past. This is also true of all traditional subjects, music, martial arts, medicine, weaving, etc. In traditional Chinese culture the physical process of acquiring knowledge is not subordinate to knowledge itself-- How one learns is, in a sense, given priority to what one learns.
This idea is beautifully illustrated in the story of Cook Ding in the 300 Century BCE text, the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu). The story is an ironic tale in which Cook Ding butchers an ox in front of the king, it is the title story of the third chapter called "The Mastery of Nourishing Life." In the story, the king is amazed by the dance like beauty, grace, and ease with which Cook Ding butchers the ox. When asked, Cook Ding explains how the naturalness of his skill came about and in the end the king declares that listening to these words has taught him how to nourish life.

Daoist Art at Brown University

The website for the Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University is beautiful. They have a collection of Daoist Alter Paintings and some interesting things to say about them.

"The Marshals are guardians positioned at each wing of the altar. Their duty is to bar the way to demons and unclean malevolent influences. Marshal Chao Yuan-Shuai guards the left and Marshal Teng Yuan-Shuai guards the right. The red inscription at the top right of the painting of Marshal Teng reads “Five Thunders Flashing Lightning (lit. Electricity)�. Mien priests use the summoning of the Five Thunders magic in exorcism ceremonies. The Marshals are six in number: Marshal Ma and Marshal Chang are the two smaller figures below Marshal Chao, and Marshal K’ang and Marshal Hsin are the two figures below Marshal Teng."