Gangster Gongfu

I've been reading Avron Albert Boretz's 1996 dissertation: Martial Gods and Magic Swords: The Ritual Production of Manhood in Taiwanese Popular Religion. I got it through Inter-Library Loan, but it looks like it can be purchased on-line here.
It is really good, and I really hope it gets published someday. I just finished it, so I'm not quite ready for a review. This I'll say, it makes an enormous number of connections between gongfu and popular Daoist ritual cults to various martial deities.

Just briefly, the inner circle of these exorcistic cults are sworn brotherhoods, gangsters if you will. They are all into gongfu, and gongfu deeply informs their trance/possession routines. Some of them claim historic roots in local militias too.

One cool part of the book deals with a particular ritual called Handan Ye. In this ritual a prominent gangster is carried around on a sedan chair by other gangsters. The locals line the streets and throw firecrackers at them. The gangster is allowed to wear goggles and shorts, but that is it. He is in trance the whole time, possessed by a god. When it is over he is covered from head to foot in burns.

It seems like this it a chance for the locals to help him clean up his demerits in the Book of Life, while getting even with him for terrorizing the community. This raises a lot of questions, which I shall go into later, but I think it is worth saying that this is an extreme form of martial conditioning. It demonstrates actual prowess and creates a theatrical performance image of extraordinary potency and danger.

Watch it on Youtube!

Journal of Daoist Studies

There is a new publication coming out in June called the Journal of Daoist Studies, it looks really good, and I'm really excited, and that's not just because my 17 page essay is in the first edition!

The editorial board is a list of very respectable Daoist Scholars:

Shawn Arthur, Stephan-Peter Bumbacher, Yi Hsiang Chang, Shinyi Chao, Chen Xia, Donald Davis, Catherine Despeux, Jeffrey Dippmann, Ute Engelhardt, Stephen Eskildsen, Norman Girardot, Jonathan Herman, Adeline Herrou, Jiang Sheng, Paul Katz, Sung-Hae Kim, Russell Kirkland, Louis Komjathy, Liu Xun, Lu Xichen, Victor Mair, Mei Li, James Miller, David Palmer, Fabrizio Pregadio, Michael Puett, Robert Santee, Elijah Siegler, Julius Tsai, Robin Wang, Michael Winn, Yang Lizhi, Zhang Guangbao

As it happens, and as I'm told happens to writers all the time, they are not using my title. I'm so spoiled by the independence of blogging. My title (which I submitted late, after the first edit) was a hip reference to the 3rd century Daoist alchemist Ge Hong's writings: "To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth, or Not." Pretty catchy huh?

The title I ended up with is, "Portrait of an American Daoist." That's Life! Order your subscription today!

Jade Maiden

Jade Maiden Works the Shuttles is the name of a taijiquan movement/posture. What does it mean?

The full title is a constellation in the night sky. Like all stars, they are connected metaphorically to fate, in this case we have the image of a maiden weaving the fabric of fate.

A Shuttle is the part of a loom that scoots back and forth as the warp and weft are opened and closed. It is like a card or a stick that you throw. It is wrapped in yarn symbolizing, I believe, infinite time.

So each time you do the form you are weaving another thread in the fabric of time.

But what is a jade maiden?

By definition they resists being defined. Even the gender of a jade maiden can be hard to pin down, they are sometimes called jade lads. By the time I finish explaining this, the meaning may have changed.

A jade maiden is like a muse, because it comes to you bringing inspiration. It is also a type of intermediary. Unlike a Chinese god or a ghost, they no birth.  They can deliver messages back and forth from the gods, even take you to visit other realms. The Queen Mother of the West (Xiguanmu) has and entourage of jade maidens pulled by dragon chariots.

Jade maidens also play the role of intermediaries in the Daoist elixir practice known as jindan. They are simular to dakinis in Tantric Buddhism in that they only show up if you are completely and utterly desireless and free of aggressive intent. However, if you get even a flicker of desire, a dakini will go from being the hottest, most intelligent babe-olla you have ever seen in your life, to being a scary filthy hag with sharpened teeth. Jade maidens, in contrast, simply disappear. (Which tells you something about the difference between Buddhism and Daoism.)
Jade maidens are in one sense the opposite of ghosts. Instead of being lured in by dangerious, violent, chaotic, energy draining or destructive behavior; they are attracted to those people who are pure of heart--people whose living hearts have become like cold dead ashes. They are attracted by non-aggression.

Daoist poets like Li Bai (Lipo) would sit perfectly still in meditation with a brush, ink, and paper for hours waiting for a jade maiden to show up. When they come, they come to tease and test, whisper and giggle. They never stop moving and they dance the most alluring and inspiring dance there is. They are beauty itself. They peer around corners and then suddenly disappear.

They sometimes carry copies of the books which hang from the trees on the moon. These sacred texts known as jing, are true for all time, they can appear in any language in any era. Occasionally a jade maiden will hold one of these books and turn the pages for you as you read. This, of course, can only happen if you are completely open to experiencing things the way they actually are, without preconception or agenda.

(The term jing, so often translated "classic," actually means weft, as in warp and weft! In that sense it is a distant cousin of jin and jing, power and essence, because all of them refer to some underlying structure.)

Is Taijiquan a jing?  Was it originally taught by jade maidens?  If we truly let go, and practice the form without any preconceptions or aggression will a jade maiden show up to dance with us, or whisper instructions in our ear and correct our postures?  Are we the "shuttles" being worked?

Taijiquan's Language of Exorcism

Long time readers know that the relationship of martial arts to exorcistic rituals is a pet topic of mine.

Wayne Hansen who comments at the Formosa Neijia site offered this wonderful linguistic explanation of peng, the most basic and pervasive form of taijiquan power (jin).

Peng is the lid on a quiver.
Imagine a cane laundry basket with the lid just caught in the lip at the top,by pressing the two sides the lid springs open. I am told this is how the Chinese quiver worked. With a press of the back muscles the top, which was covering the feathers from the rain, sprung open.
Peng jin works like that and so the name.

Archery competition now a days is mostly about accuracy at hitting a static target. But great archers had to be able to hit deadly moving targets and hit static targets while galloping on horseback. And perhaps even more importantly, they had to be able shoot arrows in rapid succession-- One arrow per second.

So popping the lid off of your quiver with a little rounding motion would have been a very threatening act. In fact you might translate it into words by saying, "Back off!" The standard translation of peng is "Ward-off."

To explain this difference, I imagine I'm riding along on a mountain path and I sense something threatening. My first instinct is to pop my quiver lid, which would in fact make a "pop" sound if it were water tight. Even if I haven't seen the actual threat, I can prepare myself, and I can let who ever is lurking know that I'm aware of them. This sort of communication could easily be translated as "ward-off."

Hold on because it gets better.

Common exorcist rituals begin with fire-crackers. The purpose? To ward-off ghosts. Ghosts and demons who are strong enough to need an exorcism, don't usually leave when they hear fire-crackers, but their groveling sidekicks and entourages do take to the hills. The fire-crackers are meant to give mediocre ghosts who are just lost a chance to get away. But particularly malicious demons, the ones that feed on chaos, will actually be attracted to explosive sounds in hope that they will find suffering and death.

The next ritual action would be the "offering of spirits." In both Chinese and African traditions this is done by drinking from a bowl of strong alcohol and then suddenly forcing it back through pursed lips to create a spraying effect which turns into a mist. The mist attracts mischievous spirits. Alcohol is spilled on the ground too.
In the beginning of the taijiquan form, peng leads directly into ji. Ji is a small quick burst of force, sometimes described metaphorically as liquid spraying out of the fingers. Ji by itself doesn't do much-- it can be used for a throw only if your attacker has uprooted themselves by first pushing against your peng. (Of course ji directly in the eye would hurt!) I was taught to project ji into the opponents "empty" spots, those places where they are unaware, because it will stir them to attack and thereby make themselves more vulnerable!

The opponent's attack naturally leads into lu, the next move in the taijiquan form. Lu is a gathering and a drawing-in of your opponent (usually translated "rollback"). Lu defuses the attacker's force.

After the "offering of spirits," the next ritual act is the drawing in and capturing of demonic forces. Offending demons are drawn into a pickle jar and then trapped there.

The final movement in the taijiquan beginning sequence is an. An is usually translated "press," or even "press down." It is very much like resting your hands on a rounded pickle jar lid and weighting them so that whatever is inside won't get out!

The final ritual act is called "Applying the Seal." The seal is like a piece of tape that holds the lid on the jar and records the date the spirit was trapped, what type of spirit it is, and when it can be released. (It is considered ritually irresponsible to just leave them there. Some are starved to death, some are transformed in bi-annual rituals, others are freed after "serving time.") Michael also posted in the same thread I linked to above. He quoted the fabulous Louis Swaim:

If the opponent wants to change hands in order to apply Push (an), I then extend and open my right hand, pulling it toward my thorax to the point where the two palms are facing in and diagonally intersect like an oblique cross-shaped sealing tape (fengtiao), preventing the opponent's hands from getting in. It is just like closing the door against a robber. This is why it is called 'like sealing'....The image used of sealing tape refers to fengtiao, which were strips of red paper pasted across parcels, doors, crime scenes etc..., as seals.

All those other uses of "seals" are historically derived from the exorcist's seal.

That ought to liven up your form!

Here is the best site on Chinese Archery

The Sound of Wen and Wu

I woke up this morning with my arms crossed.  Actually more than crossed, knotted-up would be a better description.  One hand jutting past my armpit, the other arm wrapped around it twice and dangling between my ear and my shoulder.  It took a minute to figure out which arm was which.  My honey says I do gongfu in my sleep.

Anyway I've been reading a wonderful dissertation, which I will review when I finish reading it, called "Martial Gods and Magic Swords," by Avron Boretz.  The Daoist scholar Paul Katz recommended it.

Today I just want to talk about one of his footnotes.  In a discussion about the relationship between wen (civil, scholarly, cultural) and wu (military, martial) he mentions that the drum is wen and the cymbal is wu.  That really got me thinking.

The drum establishes order, it is steady and precise.  The cymbal is an explosion of sound, it breaks the air and shatters the peace.  When I teach kids or perform, I use the drum for stepping, and the cymbal for sudden kicks.

The large gong is, of course, used for bowing, but it is also good for transitions or even moments of transcendence.

The wood-block (called a fish in Chinese) is used for accenting orders or commands, it is often answered by the performer with a stomp of the foot (leading into cat stance or monk stance).  It is a high sharp sound.  Wood-blocks are used for chanting invocations, and by Buddhists for chanting sutras.  The same wood-block sound was traditionally used in formal arguments and teachings to accent an important point that had just been made.

"The Dao which can be named is not the true Dao!" "PAAHK."

The flutes and reed instruments mimic the human voice.

Troops

It is not a great idea to let your muscles lead. When muscles get tired they are like vampires craving blood! Like hormone enhanced teenagers looking for trouble. Hungry muscles will take what ever they can get, they want slow-food, fast-food, sugar, even beer--anything that can be turned into blood.

Thus the metaphor used in Daoism and Chinese medicine is that the muscles are the troops, soldiers. They need to be well trained and well cared for.

If the muscles are making decisions, you will have mob rule. Alternately, the internal organs can function as a government, the heart/mind is the Emperor, the lungs are the chief ministers, the spleen is in charge of ordering, logistics, "ways & means", and the liver is the general, in charge of delivering blood to the troops and mustering them to action.

Well trained troops certainly can take some personal initiative. If it is truly in support of the larger cause, personal initiative can make or break a campaign, still the troops are rarely in a position to make good independent decisions so most of the time it is imperative that they simply follow orders.

For an army to function well, every stage of leadership must be clearly delegated and the chain of command exact.

Our body has things called proprioceptors which tell the brain where we are in space, where we are moving, and how fast. Most people's armies are in disarray because their proproceptors --scouts, spies, and communications networks-- are poorly trained. I don't know for sure, but my experience tells me that large numbers of proprioceptors live in the ligaments.

The muscles can move without consulting the ligaments but it is clumsy, the ligaments should lead--calling the troops, the muscles, to order. Once that mechanism is in place and scenarios have been set up and drilled, then the troops can be commanded.

Happy Ching Ming Day

Here is a good article about religion in Hong Kong:

This long weekend marks Ching Ming, a significant Chinese festival, but one that few tourists would notice unless they happened to see people burning offerings on the sidewalk. It is a private observance held mostly at home shrines, ancestral villages or cemeteries, as the living give gifts of food and fresh flowers to the dead, and sweep and clean their graves. You may also see stands selling paper replicas of everything from yachts and cars to mobiles and MP3 players. In modern, materialistic Hong Kong, these can be burned as offerings, too, in case your ancestor would like having a new Mercedes or Motorola in the afterlife. A traditionalist would warn you against buying one as a kitsch souvenir, though.

[Ching Ming means Clear Bright, it is also the name of the Qi Node for the next two weeks. Qi Nodes divide the solar calendar into 24- two week segments. The Western banking calendar divides the solar calendar into 4 segments (solstice/equinox).]

According to The South China Morning Post, the temple will spend H.K. $140 million, or about U.S. $18 million, on building what they say will be the largest worship hall of its kind in China, plus an LED-lit glass dome filled with Taoist entities. That sounds about as modern as burning an i-Pod offering for your late grandma.

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And here is an article about a new approach to Daoism I would call "stuttering and embarrassed." Looking beyond the Chinglish writing style, and the picture of the "empty suits," the Research Association of Laozi Taoist Culture (CRALTC) looks like it was invented to kill off anything ziran, spontaneous or naturally beautiful.

China has started to invest more money and attention into Taoism after it has successfully exported Confucianism to the world by establishing hundreds of Confucian institutes and schools around the world. China.org.cn reporters witnessed the largest ever International Daodejing Forum held in Xi'an and Hong Kong last year. Daodejing, the Taoist bible, is one of the most widely published books on the planet, only second to the Christian Bible.

And then there is this event last year which I found by following the link in the above paragraph.  (I'm speechless.)

As the prelude of the forum, a total of 13,839 citizens recited Daodejing together at Hong Kong Stadium on April 21, setting a new Guinness record for "most people reading aloud simultaneously in one location."

Yoga is not what it seems

Charles Weidman --Photo by Barbara Morgan (1944). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David C. Ruttenberg, 1987 

I admit that I've had it out for yoga for years. It is not the fact that people are getting to know themselves by practicing something physical with discipline, that part I find beautiful. My problem has always been that yoga seemed so "in the box" when compared to dance and martial arts. To put it bluntly, if your "downward dog" doesn't eventually scamper around the room and chase its tail, what is the point?

Years ago I had a dance teacher who trained with one of the early moderns,

Charles Weidman. Incidentally, his stuff rocked. Anyway she said to the class one day, "You know at some point during the late 70's people started saying that the way I start my class is like yoga. It wasn't until years later that I took a yoga class and saw what they meant. I wonder where those early modern dancers learned it?" Hmmm....

I was at a party a couple of years ago and spoke with a woman who made a lot of dough in the first internet explosion. She has been a Zen practitioner for 30 years and has practiced yoga for the last 20. She told me that when she first started practicing yoga, the meditation component was entirely Vippassina oriented. Meaning that it was a process of examining and transcending the body. Now yoga classes are almost all Zen (what she referred to as the "Insight" tradition) oriented meditation, meaning they see the precision of the posture as the method and the result, non-conceptual, non-transcendent, emptiness without a goal.

She wasn't really taking sides as to which type of meditation goes better with yoga, and neither am I, she was just saying it is an unacknowledged innovation.

Well, maybe this article from Yoga Journal will shed some light, as the yoga crew are fond of saying. The article is partly a review of The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by N. E. Sjoman, as this quote shows:

Modern hatha yoga draws on British gymnastics? The yoga of Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and Krishnamacharya influenced by a potpourri that included Indian wrestlers? These are claims guaranteed to send a frisson of horror up the limber spine of any yoga fundamentalist. But according to Sjoman, his book is meant not to debunk yoga, but to pay tribute to it as a dynamic, growing, and ever-changing art.

Here is a quick quote from an Amazon review:

The core of the book is a translation of a text from the 1800s from the private library of the Mysore palace which is the only textual documentation of an extended asana practice - asanas being the yoga positions that form the core of yoga practice today.

I haven't read the book but it purportedly explains that the standing and inverted posses in yoga come from western gymnastics and the ubiquitous "sun salutations" come from Indian wrestling!

Is it true? I don't know, but you gotta love this stuff.

Oh, and just in case anybody is wondering (or listening) all that health stuff about how this or that posture is good for this or that organ, this or that problem...that all happened in the last ten years! --Intelligent people combining personal experience with wishful thinking and a little (Martha Steward inspired) "distressing" the surface to give it that antique feel!

Check out this wonderful list of all the things people are doing with Yoga these days over at Jen's Reviews. 18 Amazing Benefits of Yoga, According to Science.

Bones

There is a Chinese expression that goes, "You know it so well it is written on your bones." First I should explain where this expression comes from.

In Daoism the quest for immortality is extremely varied and so quite difficult to define; however, a significant factor in immortality is that other people recognize you have become an immortal at the time of your death or sometime after your death. The so called "highest" way to demonstrate becoming an immortal at the moment of death is to "Rise up in broad daylight with your dogs and chicken." Zhang Daoling (the founder of Religious Daoism) did this, as did his wife, his 3 sons and their wives.

Dao Hongjing and Ge Hong, the two most famous alchemists, became immortals simply by hiring a carriage (you know, a taxi) taking a trip out into the wilderness and then "Sending the Carriage Back Empty." There are hundreds of unique (loosely) documented ways of demonstrating the transition to being an immortal. Often when Chinese people died they were put into big ceramic jars in a squatting position. Then, after their skin and organs had fully decomposed their bones were transfered to a smaller jar. It turns out that some immortals were recognized during this transfer of bones because Daoist sacred texts (like the Daodejing for instance) were written on their bones!

You can tell an enormous amount about how someone lived by studying their bones. The shape, density, places of wear, and chemical composition of a persons bones tell a real story. This is the premise of the wonderful Fox T.V. show Bones where a forensic anthropologist and an FBI agent team up to solve crimes by looking at bones. Since my sister is an Archaeologist I sometimes call her up after watching the show to find out if what they did on the show could really happen. Often it can! My sister says she can often tell what kinds of work a person did, or what kind of weapons a person used by looking at their bones.

This got me thinking. It must be possible to tell what kind of martial arts a person was doing by looking at their bones. I want to know if there are people with Taijiquan type bones or Shaolin type bones a thousand years ago. This could be done, and eventually it could be done so well that we could see the entire history of martial arts by region over 3 thousand years!!!

So little is known about our physiology. It is hard to put a percentage on, but if we know more than 10% of what there is to know about physiology I would be surprised. Here is some very cool new research about bones, here too.

...(N)ew research shows that bones release a protein called osteocalcin involved in controlling sugar and fat absorption, thus acting like a hormone....

"Because osteocalcin is secreted by one organ and acts on others, it fits the definition of a hormone, making bones part of the endocrine system..."

What do you have written on your bones?

The Quest for Power (Part 3)

In the two previous posts, I wrote that the quest for power is born when our survival feels threatened and arises from qi deficiency which creates conflicting emotions. I also wrote about how the quest for power begets sacrifice.

In the Chinese martial arts we have the expression "Ox power" to describe simple muscular strength. Generally speaking, the first stage of martial training is to get rid of ox power and replace it with "muscle tendon lengthening power" and (depending on the focus of the school) fighting technique.

This process can be generalized for all pursuits of power. All power is preliminary. Give up a low position in the government in order to take on a higher one. If your climb up the corporate ladder is obstructed it may be time to start your own company.
We don't get new power without letting go of old ideas about power. Following this observation to its logical conclusion or extreme, letting go of all ideas of power will open up the biggest possibilities. All the Daoist classics say in one way or another, if you want strength cultivate weakness.

The quest for power is a natural out growth of fear. Fear can arise with or without apparent cause. The brilliance of Daoist thought in this regard is the recognition that there are physiological processes which bring about the experience of fear and the feeling that our survival is threatened.

Daoist practices often explore power from the point of view of what is being sacrificed. Instead of seeking to harness fear for the accumulation of power, these practices teach our bodies how fear arises and how it takes hold. These practices do not eliminate fear. They simply teach our bodies that there is an option to let go of fear when it does arise.

For instance, the Daoist Calendar can be understood as a tool for observing and resolving the fear that arises from not being able to control or predict the future.

Obviously there is no 'One Right Way' of dealing with the fear of not knowing what is coming next! The term "Orthodox Daoism" Zhengyidao- literally means: The One True Way; however, what the term really refers to is an orthodox set of experiments that have been tried and tested over many years. Just because they are orthodox, doesn't mean they will work for you, but the only way to know for sure is to test them yourself.

Internal martial arts clearly have some Daoist origins. It is fair to say they are Daoist inspired to the extent that they treat power as a physiological experiment which over time exchanges power for casual potency and transforms fear into naturalness (ziran). That being said, Martial Arts are not Orthodox Daoist practices because they contain so many potencial pitfalls. Once you have accumulated power, it is often hard to give it up because it seems like you have a "leg up" on everyone around you.


What makes a specific approach to meditation or ritual Zhengyi (Orthodox) is that it has proven over the centuries to be a more direct route to simplicity.

Teaching 6 and 7 year olds is a process of getting them to give up screaming and crying for more sophisticated forms of power, like carefully chosen words. Of course they could learn to use their crying in increasingly more manipulative ways, or they could just keep developing their screaming power and it might someday become formidable. One of the nice things about teaching kids is that they haven't developed Ox Power yet, so I don't have to un-teach it. That step can be skipped.

Acquiring each new type of power requires letting go of the previous type of power that worked for you. The type of power we use is part of our story. It is wrapped up in our identity and our body image. In a sense, our Power Body, is our system for storing fear. Letting go of a big fear requires a big commitment, but letting go of a small fear can be more difficult because it isn't obvious what triggers it, how it is stored, or where it came from in the first place.

This is how it works: Bad choices can be overcome by new better choices. Old ghostly decisions, the ones you aren't even aware you made a commitment too, are much harder to change.

Where does the quest for power ultimately lead? Death. People often set up their deaths so that they will continue to accumulate power after they are dead. (The biggest part of Fengshui is not how to arrange your freaking living room! It is trying to limit the negative influences your ancestors have already put in motion!)

The idea behind using Eunuchs in the royal courts was that they wouldn't be constantly using their position to try and install their offspring into positions of power. The irony is that having no balls turned them into ego maniacs that wanted power just for themselves.

As far as accumulating power while we are still alive, the Chinese pinnacle of power has always been to become the emperor. The job of emperor is considered the most potent job there is. The traditional Chinese ideal is that the country is being well run when the emperor has nothing to do. Similarly in Chinese medicine, the heart only has a job when the other organs are out of whack. If the emperor or the heart is actively trying to accomplish something, everybody is in trouble.