The Quest for Power (Part 2)

The Orthodox Daoist take on the quest for power that I related in the previous post likely grew out of a context in which Shamanic and Trance-medium practices were the dominant form of religious expression.

Shaman and mediums use a long list of techniques to reach an altered state which takes them on a journey, or entices a deity to take over their body. Dancing frenetically or for a very long time, altered breathing patterns, chanting and singing, drinking or taking drugs, fasting or eating extreme foods, staying outdoors in bad weather; these are all used by Shaman and Mediums to enter altered states of consciousness, often to the point of passing out.

Shaman and Mediums come back from these performance "trips" with special knowledge, and often special powers which appear to be conferred on them through these experiences.

Orthodox Daoists came to view these practices as journeys toward death. These practices deplete qi, and tend to dramatically shorten life-span. The quest for this type of power entails giving up a part of yourself, a self-sacrifice in exchange for power.

Orthodox Daoists then began to see parallel characteristics in all quests for power. Power begets sacrifice.

A great deal of exercise is framed as a quest for power, they tell you to give up something now for a super body in the future. Push yourself through the difficulty and the pain, put your money down, and you will be rewarded with beauty, recovered youth, or superior abilities.

Often times, quests for power are remedies for the side effects of other quests for power. Working too hard at a job 60 hours a week? Try yoga! That back hurting from the long commute and the all the time in front of the computer? Join our fitness club and we'll not only fix your back, we'll even improve your sex life!

This happens to be the way people are, so the first covenant of Orthodox Daoism is to not get in the way of peoples pursuit of power unless it involves the direct taking of life (blood sacrifice).

Daoism does not reject the pursuit of power. The first line of the Daodejing, (sometimes translated "The Way of Power") suggests that we can have an experience which is unmediated by words, ideas, images, or metaphors. Like power, words are not rejected.

Recognition of the mechanism by which words define and limit our experience does not stop us from appreciating them. The mechanism by which we accumulate power is a fascinating part of human experience, even though it limits our experience and has a tendency to shorten our lives. We have the option of putting on those "power" shoes or going barefoot.

The Quest for Power (Part 1)

The quest for power in the martial arts is a strange one. From an Orthodox Daoist point of view, the quest for power arises from inappropriate conduct.

Some of the most common forms of inappropriate conduct are arguing with someone who isn't interested in learning, pushing yourself to physical exhaustion, drinking too much, or over eating. All of these actions result in loss of qi, they create a deficiency. Historically, starving may have been the most common cause of qi deficiency.

Qi deficiency simply leads to conflicting emotions. Of course this is a natural process, so for instance, if you get in a bad argument and then you go home and take a bath and go straight to bed, you will completely recover. The problems arise when your conflicting emotions combine with someone else's, and it's already past midnight and you have a meeting early in the morning, so you don't have time to replenish your qi.

After a few days of this people start thinking about how they can get more power. Deep conflicting emotions probably arise from fear of death. I think the quest for power is part of our hard wiring. It is triggered when our survival feels threatened, and it arises so that we will be able to survive extreme hardship.

Journal of Asian Martial Arts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Wile gets kind of mad about it,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the mood?

My g-friend and I were talking about going to a party tomorrow. She described her busy schedule and then said, "I want to go, but I don't know if I'll be in the mood."

A few years ago I was doing a lot of ceramics in my free time (instead of blogging). At one point I was working at a local community college with a guy that was really into Song (900-1200CE)and Ming (1300-1600CE) Dynasty glazes. These glazes are really cool, many of them were developed to represent cosmological principles and to demonstrate different stages of the elixir practice (jindan). Glowing translucent celadons, jun-ware that turns from green to purple, a transparent black that reveals hidden patterns when put in direct sunlight.

The glazes were easy to make but hard to fire. In order to get the correct reduction of oxygen, he had to get the kiln very hot over a day and then add too much gas so that it would start to smoke and the temperature would stall and after several hours start to fall. It was a really finicky process. If he didn't add enough gas, the temperature would keep climbing, and if he added too much if would fall too fast. Both scenarios would ruin the glaze. To make it work he had to watch and continually adjust the process for many hours. And it's not like he could just look at a thermostat, the critical issue was how hot the clay was. When the temperature was rising he could look at clay cones which are pre-formulated to melt at specific temperatures, but that didn't work when the temperature was falling or stalling.

Basically there was a lot of guess work, and he would get really frustrated when he guessed wrong. (It didn't help his liver or his mind-set that he had a habit of running out for fried chicken in the middle of the process.)

So I did a little reading and I realized that kiln firing in China was always done according to the Daoist Calendar. The design of the Daoist Calender makes it easy to calculate an auspicious or an inauspicious day for firing a kiln. So I said to this guy, "The people who invented these cool glazes you are into always used astrological and calendrical calculations to decide when to fire their kilns. Maybe they knew something you don't know? Maybe it would make things easier?"

His frustrated response was, "That's all hokum!"

Wouldn't it be great if you could look ahead on your calender and predict whether you would be in the mood for a hair cut? a movie? doing research? washing the car? or going out to a party? Well, you're dreaming. The future is unknowable.

The Daoist calender doesn't predict anything. It is just a bunch of time (rhythmic) cycles that overlap. Each day (or segment) of each cycle has a lists of activities which are auspicious or inauspicious. Some of these cycles or patterns have a logic to them-- not everyday is a good day to clean the house, eat vegetarian, or work in the garden, but such days should come with some rhythmic regularity.

Why should I care? There are lots of reasons to care. Every time you schedule something in your calendar or decide whether to do it or not, you have to ask your self, "Am I going to want to do that on that day?" "Why not pick the day before, or the day after?" "Will I want to rest or party?" Often there is no rational way to make such a decision. So we make the decision irrationally, or emotionally, or by some strange fleeting quirk.

The Daoist calender externalizes our irrationality. The practice of following the calendar
points out just how irrational we are, but it also allows us to distance ourselves from it so we can be more comfortable with the way we are. More self-respecting of our own rhythmically irrational nature.

If the calender says it's a good day to party, we party, if not we're in bed by 9. No more wishy-washy maybe I'll see how I feel kind of dates. From the moment you discover the Daoist calender, your commitments will be clear, strong and unselfconsciously irrational!

Of course when it comes to gongfu practice never forget, one day missed is ten days lost!

Demons with Six Packs

Why do Chinese demons have muscles?

I train a fair bit everyday, and the constant challenge for me is to not build muscle. That's because my body builds muscle very easily and quickly, and that muscle would restrict my circulation and inhibit whole-body integration.

A few winters ago I fell on the ice while trying out snow boarding for the first time. Actually, I fell four times on my back on the ice in one day. The next day my whole body was ripped. I had muscles everywhere, my arms, my neck, my butt, I even had a six-pack. Muscles hurt! Of course if you have them all the time you just become numb and insensitive, so they appear to stop hurting.

I prefer to leave my muscles in a "potencial state." They pop up if I'm in an accident or I work too hard or something but otherwise they are just relaxed and active.

Pain becomes chronic pain, then it becomes tension, then numbness, then strength and then stiffness.

Aggression and inappropriate conduct often result from trying to impose ones fear or fantasy on the situation at hand. This often leads to emotional pain which, if left unresolved, becomes chronic pain which likewise is stored in the muscles. Pent-up tension gets stored in the shape, quality, and movement patterns of the muscles.

A Chinese demon is unresolved emotional turmoil that becomes so intense, so physically overwhelming that a person no longer sees what's in front of them.  They become so inappropriate that at the moment of death they don't even notice they died, and so continue to torment the living with their unresolved emotional distress.

Check out the six-packs on these guys!  And here too! 

Empty Force, Extraordinary Powers & My Qigong Headache

I apologize for not writing more lately, I've been swamped with work, but I also promise that the next few weeks of blogging will be above average. (This is special because, as my regular readers already know, my secret to good blogging is that I make a point of shooting for just below average.)

I have a few more things to say about Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, which is now at the top of my list of recommend books about qigong. ( The two others on the list are Breathing Spaces, and The Transmission of Chinese Medicine.)

The issues raised in this book have plagued me, and most serious martial artists, since the mid 1990's when the first refugee/exiles from Qigong Fever started pouring into San Francisco and other cities all over the world. At one point local Baji master Adam Hsu got so fed up with all the wacko questions he was fielding he simply declared, "Qi doesn't exist!"

The other day I was at a college faculty meeting sitting next to Professor Yu, a TCM Dermatology teacher I hold in high regard. I showed her my copy of Qigong Fever. Just how relevant this book is, was made immediately apparent by the first thing out of Professor Yu's mouth. "My father invented qigong."

"Oh," I said," Perhaps he is mentioned in this book." As it turns out he is not mentioned in the book. Her father was You Pengxi, a xingyi teacher and early student of Wang Xiangzhai, the founder of the Yiquan system of internal martial arts. She explained that qigong came from xingyi.

As usually happens when I hear claims about qigong, I found myself trying to find what truth could possibly be behind the claim with out launching into my own agenda. After all, the book is quite clear about the process in which Communist party functionaries chose the term Qigong from a list of terms intended to frame body, breath and mind techniques under a single therapeutic category while intentionally discarding the martial, religious, and conduct transforming aspects of traditional categories.

But of course I do have my own agenda, I grew up practicing gongfu and studied under Bing Gong who was a top student of Kuo Lien-ying who also studied with Wang Xiangzhai. We did standing meditation, and various routines we called warm-ups. No one ever used the word qigong even thought that is what everybody calls it now.

Knowing that of course there could be a hidden history I don't know, I begin with an inclination to agree with Professor Yu. 90% of what I see called qigong is fallout from gongfu schools-- stuff that was taught or invented on a need-to-know basis for students that needed remedial exercises or were developing some unique quality of gongfu.

Unfortunately the profound idea that all traditional Chinese activities have a Dao-- an efficient way of working or moving that conserves qi-- is not mentioned in the book, nor was it mentioned by Professor Yu.

Professor Yu's father, You Pengxi, was invited, and the CCP gave him permission, to come to Stanford University in 1980 to demonstrate his extraordinary qigong skills. He promptly defected. He had been a wealthy and successful Western trained dermatologist before the revolution (1949). He defected from Communist China the first chance he got. I do not know the details in his case, but it would not have been unusual for a well trained doctor to be publicly tortured and shamed during the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977). As far as I can tell, nobody taught anybody anything during the Cultural Revolution. Because of his association with Wang Xiangzhai (who died in 1963), he may have attracted students shortly after it became possible to teach again, but he can't have been teaching qigong for much more that a year before he defected in 1980. So in that sense he may have indeed been the first qigong master "off the hump." Professor Yu however claimed that he developed and named qigong around 1949.

During the first 15 years of the revolution (the 50's) there was some gongfu training going on, but between fear, repression and a general lack of food, I have trouble imagining that much quality teaching was taking place. During this period fighting skills were officially scrapped away and discarded while the term gongfu (meritorious skill) was essentially replaced with the word wushu (martial art). I suspect that most of You Pengxi's teaching and martial fame was from before the Communist Revolution. To be fair, their were some gongfu classes happening in the dark, before dawn and after dusk. In my imagination, admittedly shaped by George Xu, I see these as serious fighting classes where people came home bleeding more days than not.

During the 1950's qigong as a public activity existed only in the Traditional Chinese Medical Hospitals. It was a cheap and patriotic form of therapy. Before the revolution the Communists, like their Republican and Nationalist rivals, were pro-Western science and anti-traditional (superstitious) healing of all kinds.

After the revolution, the combination of anti-Western hysteria, incompetent use of limited funds, and the obvious efficacy and availability of some traditional healing practices, led the CCP to embrace Traditional Chinese Medicine. Qigong was practiced in a very limited way during the 1950's, mainly within the hospital setting.

Professor Yu talked about her childhood memories of Wang Xiangzhai, and her father's closeness to him. She said her father gave Wang Xiangzhai a check book and told him to buy anything he wanted. Also that her father did not charge for lessons and only taught people with virtuous natures. She described her father and her mother's (Yu Ouming) ability to blast multiple attackers to the ground without actually touching them. They were using qi alone!

Magical and extraordinary powers have been around for centuries, but totalitarian Communism didn't leave any space for performance art. The book Qigong Fever explains how with the first crack of freedom in the 80's the CCP gave authority to individuals only to the extent that everything they did was in the name of Science and Chinese cultural superiority. All knowledge still belonged to the state, but performers and charismatic could claim that practicing qigong in a scientific way would give you extraordinary powers--- like seeing with your ears, reading peoples minds, or guiding missiles with your qi! A complex network developed consisting of Party officials, charismatic teachers, and researchers who were into qigong. The fact that they managed to make it illegal to criticize or be publicly skeptical of qigong, extraordinary powers, or pseudo-science, helped ignite and sustain the explosion of qigong into everyday life.

When I got home I searched for Professor Yu's father in a PFD collection of essays about Wang Xiangzhai that I downloaded from somewhere in the Internet wilderness. He is credited with being the source of all Yiquan lineages which practice empty force (gongjin), the ability to throw someone with out touching them.

If such extraordinary powers are possible (and I'm forbidden by precept from actually commenting on their veracity), I've always thought they would still waste an enormous amount of qi, and thus be in total contradiction with the whole point of daoist inspired practices; namely, to conserve jing and qi! Not to mention the temptation anyone with actual blood flowing in their veins would have to tip their opponent's hand during a poker game or to cop the occasional feel from across the room. (Yes, I know, I would never be allowed to learn such practices because I'm clearly a man of dark virtues.)

My point here is simple. If anyone from the people at New Tang Dynasty TV (Falungong) to your friendly neighborhood qi jock wishes to have the right to be taken seriously by me on the subject of qigong--then they must read Qigong Fever!

The Return of Paulie Zink

I made a point of asking Paulie Zink and his wife to please get some stuff up on Youtube and I probably wasn't the only one. They've done it. And here too.

Even better, he is coming out of retirement to teach Monkey Kung Fu. I also talked to both of them about how extraordinarily wonderful it would be if this Monkey Daoyin was being passed on to kids. I'm thinking here of a Mr. Rogers with mad Kung Fu skills. The wild dynamic world of animation coming to life.

I've been teaching the little bits of his system that I learned to my Northern Shaolin students and they love it. I think I'm going to try to get to Southern California for the workshop.

Steps of Perfection (part 2)

Here I continue my discussion of, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, by Donald S. Sutton. (see Here for the earlier post.)

This book has implications for how we understand Martial and all other Chinese arts.  To be fare to the author, this post is more about what the book inspired me to think and less about the actual content of the book.
When Taiwan's Jiajiang martial dance troops are traveling in procession, the head of the procession is a guy carrying a board covered in miniature torture devices. His other hand can hold a whip or various other weapons. Some of the boards appear to be like sandwich boards with various traditional torture devises glued or nailed to the surface.

What's going on? Well, part of what is exciting about this book is that nobody knows exactly. That is, people have explanations but the various explanations don't always jive with each other. However, the practice and how these events should be organized and performed is an orthopraxy, it has a clear right way and a taboo wrong way. This is true even taking into consideration that what is right and what is wrong has some flexibility from troop to troop and has changed somewhat over time.

The the author tells us that during the early part of the Ching Dynasty, before people from Fuzhou came to Taiwan, local magestraites organized parades in which they exhibited the actual devices used by the courts for torturing confessions. As you probably know, all convictions in a Chinese court required a confession. Very often this required a bit of torture. (Trance-mediums were also sometimes used in courts. For instance they might be hired to channel a recently murdered person in order to ask the person, "Who killed you?")

Processions for popular Heavenly gods mimicked the parading that magistrates and other representatives of Earthly government employed. In one account, Sutton describes how a magistrate and his entourage are forced to wait for some offensive amount of time while a god (often a youth with a painted face) passes by in a sedan chair dressed in magistrate like robes with a simular but perhaps larger entourage.

In the West, for reasons I won't go into here, we gradually decided that torturing a confession was a bad idea. But in China, torture by degrees took on various meanings which where not all together bad.

At a basic level, a confession can play a role in creating a feeling of resolution. This is true for society in criminal cases, but it is also true in personal relationships. An honest reckoning is actually essential for progress in any field or practice. A martial artist that doesn't admit the mistakes they have made in training will surely fail to progress. A person filled with shame who continues to avoid a confession or an honest reckoning will continue to do shameful things. For people with pour eating habits or hygiene, an honest reckoning can extend their lives.

Thus confessions were associated with both healing and merit. The threat of torture in the near future or by ghosts and demons during the slow process of being re-assimilated by heaven and earth at the time of ones death, was and is still thought to motivate people to confess their indiscretions.

Daoists framed this discussion in terms of qi. Indiscretions could be thought of as qi crimes, which were graded from the most extreme, killing people for fun, to the most subtle, using too much effort for a simple task like opening a door.

Social reforms, from a Daoist point of view generally incorporated the idea that bad behavior, like wasting qi, has consequences for the actor that take effect very quickly after the act. In other words, humans are self-correcting entities. We torture ourselves. The problem is that people aren't always paying attention to these consequences. This is one of the reasons that Daoists developed so many methods that develop sensitivity to are own body.

Hard styles and soft styles of martial arts can be understood this way. A hard style is a form of self torture in which the pain you cause in practice acts as a corrective agent, leading you to acts of merit (which is what Kung Fu means!) A soft style like taijiquan, is based on the idea that on any given day we are committing numerous qi indiscretions (or small qi crimes if you prefer) and that we ought to dedicate an hour or two a day to practicing not wasting qi.

Aggression, of course, is a constant "cause" of qi wasting. From a Daoist point of view, if you lose your temper, you probably caused yourself a very minor internal injury, but you also caused some kind of reaction in the world around you. That reaction, like a ripple in a pond might dissipate gently, but it also might lead to a tidal wave somewhere down the line. And since we have no way of really knowing, losing your temper is seen as inappropriate. I think it is important to note, that from a Daoist point of view, well timed aggression may be worth the risk.

At the Acupuncture college where I teach it is well known that if given a choice between two treatments, most native born Chinese will choose the more painful treatment. I believe the inspirations for this, perhaps buried deep in the unconscious, is that acupuncture and moxabustion are like mini-torture sessions in which worldly and other worldly "causes" of pain and illness are forced to confess and correct their ways!

Two Talismanic Questons

I started a new Northern Shaolin teaching gig today, three classes of 1st graders. Yes they are sweet and cute and enthusiastic. That brings my weekly teaching total to 11 kids classes and 9 adult classes. Which leaves me just enough time to write one weakness inspired blog post every day.

I have more to say on yesterday's post but it will have to wait until tomorrow when I have more time to think.

Six months ago I wrote down two questions which I posted on the cork board above my desk. Besides being talismanic, the questions have functioned as a daily mini-mantra check-in.

My practice has seen more positive change in the last six months than it did in the previous two years. I, of course, credit you all, my virtual audience, because writing and exchanging has forced me to re-think and unravel all the metaphors and methods I employ in my practice. So thanks!

But then again, maybe it was those questions. So here they are. And feel free to make them into a talisman or a mantra.

Do you own your legs?

Do you trust your arms?

Steps of Perfection (part 1)

Before our former vice president invented the internet I had a habit of reading thick scholarly books. Now, I have to go hide out in the mountains for a few days or feign illness if I want to get through something really erudite.

While I love these books they are the opposite of juicy. That being said, if you have the discipline or isolation to really read a book, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, by Donald S. Sutton, is an impressive work.

This book falls in the the category of books which are so scholarly they hint at the juicy ground breaking ideas rather than say them outright. With a book like this you have to read the footnotes or you might miss the best part of the argument.

The book is about a type of Chinese martial dance called Jiajiang which runs roughshod over all Western categories of conceptualization to such an extent that it takes a whole book just to say what the dance is. Sutton took a lot of video in 1993 while researching this book, and I would give one of my best swords to see the best of that tape. The book should have a DVD, but I guess the author didn't have proper releases or something (he hasn't answered my emails on this question so I don't know.)

(Here is a google video search for Jiajiang, someone with better Chinese language skills can probably find some better stuff, wink, wink? )

The scope of this book appears on the face of it to be narrow, but the implications of the book for conceptualizing Chinese martial arts, medicine and religion are huge. I'm going to spend a few days talking about this book so let me spin off for a minute to get you oriented.

The long history of the survival of various civilizations could be viewed as the project of getting nice people to fight. There are now and there have always been, humans who love killing. The duty of the civilized and the free is to see to it that people who love killing do not get into positions of power; and that in the event that such people do get into positions of power, they get taken out.

How that happens in each and every civilization or era is different. Historically in China there were several layers of organized armed groups which shared the duty of keeping power civil: Standing armies, militias, small professional forces maintained by a magistrate, and local family protection societies.

How do you get people to support the common good in an environment in which there are competing interests. Part of what this book deals with is how people are connected through ritual, and how various needs of the different layers of society find their way into ritual expression. Yikes that's a mouthful.

The jiajiang martial dancers share some of the important roots of modern martial arts. Sutton maps a spacial environment in which different ways of organizing reality overlap and interact.

In one corner you have Daoist ritual which is done in private. Orthodox Daoists by definition do not subordinate to deities. They perform rituals with cosmological forces that go unseen by the general public, but exist in peoples' imaginations. People know about them, even if they don't see them. Daoists are part of a bigger landscape of ritual relationships, and they represent a particular approach to life.

In another corner are the representatives of a government which has its own rituals. Historically, for instance, magistrates would arrive in an area with a sedan chair and an entourage, sometimes huge processions demonstrating real power.

In another corner there are the trance-mediums who publicly speak for and with the gods, controlling and healing people with other worldly powers, spells, and self-mortification.

Then there is the corner of medicine and elite scholarly exchange which merges in to the much larger realm of commerce.

And then there is the popular realm where local elites interact with the guy who drives the gravel truck. Where martial artists train and perform gongfu, where school kids learn martial dance routines for a two day festival procession that twists around visiting local temples and homes. Where the presence of the dead is felt in places people frequent and exorcism is a regular occurrence. A place where gods and demons possess not just mediums, but the guy you went to high school with.

The fighting dream dances of Taijiquan and Baguazhang came out of this world, and like everything else that grew up in Chinese society, these arts have a limb in each corner.