Monkey View

Monkey sees the peach and up the tree he goes. He doesn't think about climbing the tree, he thinks about the peach.

If he wants the peach badly enough, he may completely bypass the difficulty of climbing, but he may also miss the subtlety of the bark or the softness of the leaves. The peach may even be part of a trap set to capture him.

If you want to make a movement you are doing more difficult-- think about it. If you think too much about running while you are running, you are likely to trip over your own feet.

Many martial artists are motivated by fear or insecurity. Of course, if those were your only motivations, you wouldn't be human, you'd be a ghost. But it is worth thinking about. If you're training for self-defense, it is likely that you are afraid of being attacked. If you are training to look attractive to potencial mates, it is likely that you feel insecure about your current appearance.

The fruition, the peach if you will, of pursuing training motivated by fear, is of course, more fear. Likewise, the peach of training to look more attractive is more insecurity. Fear and insecurity have no end.

A lot of people train because they believe they are likely to be the victims of violence and it often turns out to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Your view, your default understanding of why you practice, is more important than any other factor in martial arts or qigong type training. If your view is narrow, like that of the monkey going after the peach, you may indeed have very clear fruition. You may get what you want, provided what you want is not a fantasy. A very narrow focus is useful for bypassing obstacles and difficulties, but you will also bypass all the other potencial types of fruition. The narrowness of your view may turn out to be its own trap.

I suggest students practice with the widest most open ended view possible. The term view as a metaphor for motivation, understanding, orientation, and purpose is particularly brilliant because it parallels how the eyes should be used in training. Don't lock your eyes on a point, take the widest possible view.

If you practice with a broad view, you will love forms.  Set routines, or forms, are great because they teach you to forget.  When you practice a form over and over and over, it becomes automatic.  You can completely forget the movement, in fact you should. Once a form becomes automatic you can do all sorts of experiments.  You can make an infinite number of subtle or dramatic changes to the quality of the form.  You can also do an infinite number of experiments with your mind.

Accidents (part 2)

Why are accidents so potent? Have you ever seen that style of both Chinese and Japanese painting which begins by spilling the ink on the paper?

I've seen it done a few times. For instance, a blotch of wet black ink still creeping is led out into the branches of a plum blossom branch. As the ink sinks into the paper, the peddles are added.

I was with George Xu the other day and he mentioned a Chinese Idiom which I didn't quite catch in Chinese. He said it meant, "A Wild Man Beats the Master." In other words, for some reason a completely wild man with terrible technique, who kicks in the wrong place and loses his balance...can beat the trained master of martial arts. It is as if the wild man beats the master because he does everything so wrong, he is unpredictable and unselfconscious. (He is not in his own way--he is not his own obstacle.)

Does this suggest a way to practice? Can you find a martial arts way to spill the ink?

(I accidentally got the cool photo of the ceramic cup/cans from a google search for "spilled ink demo" but the site itself (geekologie.com) was too big for my computer so I don't know the back story, still it is a cool picture. If anyone figures it out please add the artist's name to the comments.)

Ritual Blogging

Religious Daoism recognizes ritual as a something essentially human.

Earlier this year I sat next to a Nigerian named Obi while traveling by plane. We were discussion ritual and commitment. He invoked the metaphor of expectation being a piece of yarn. When you think of it as an infinite piece of yarn, expectation is less of a burden.

He objected to my use of the word commitment because he said commitment is work, effort. And he is right, not all of our commitments require work, in fact most commitments probably come to us quite easily.

Daoists created book length lists of all the various types of entities one could make a covenant with. They viewed the ability to make commitments as part of the definition of humanness. A covenant is a type of commitment.

Ritual is time. I think I read something like that in Lagerwey.

All human conduct can be viewed as ritual. This leads to a social thought perspective because it recognizes the non-spontainious, gigantic group action of millions of people bathing or drinking coffee, or practicing gongfu. Describing human conduct as ritual exposes that all types of action can be divided into smaller units of action, or time (perhaps measured by ritual itself), and linked to other simular actions by other people.

Obi is really optimistic. He said that his optimism comes his world view.

I ask the question: which is the more important enlightenment institution, the coffee shop or the University? And why? The accumulation of knowlede verses It’s free exchange. The predictable environment verses the spontainious one.
I use the term coffee shop in its historical sense, the current institution where ideas are exchanged freely and spontaneously is the internet.

Why Ritual?

Sometimes we have very rational explanations for our actions which later turn out to be dubious. The human mind likes to believe it is taking a particular action because it is right or justifiable or natural or smart. We have the ability to think up strategies for gaining advantage. We can manipulate our environment. But we also seem to have the ability to get "stuck" in "mind-sets" and to repeat strategies which have worked before but which no longer are very effective.

Occasionally I get a student who has a strong reason for wanting to study gongfu or qigong who sticks with it for a few months or a year and then forgets why they are studying. Perhaps that is because their relationship to movement and body image has changed and they simply don't have the same problems they used to have.

Sometimes that forgetful student who used to have strong motivations will quit practicing for a time until they come up with a new reason for studying. Then they will start the cycle over again, eventually they forget why they came to practice and they quit again.

There are hundreds of great, mediocre, and rather weak reasons for practicing gongfu or qigong. Just because you are able to remember your "strong" reason for practicing doesn't make it true. In actuality our reasons for practicing are changing continuously. From era to era, from year to year, from day to day, from hour to hour.

The ability to use reason effectively means understanding both how easily it can change within a complex or dynamic context and how easily we can fall prey to dogma or a mind-set or a "strong reason."

Ritual; whether it is doing a gongfu practice everyday, or performing a Daoist ceremony on a particular day of the calendar, is done regardless of the immediate reasons one may have or not have. Ritual is action taken with out consistent meaning. Ritual practice itself is not a defense against dogma; however, the practice of ritual has the capacity to reveal the way or mind seeks to lock on to a particular way of perceiving our world.

For heaven's sake, ritual is not a discarding of reason. It is a good thing we use reason to manipulate our environments for pleasure and power. But reason is a form of aggression which itself can cloud our vision. Ritual has the capacity to re-pose the question: How important is reason?

If you don't practice ritual from this point of view, you will occasionally have a crisis of meaning.

Are Some Ideas About the Heart Trash?

In chapter eight of the Neijing Suwen we have the saying:

The heart holds the office of lord and sovereign.

The radiance of the spirits stems from it.

That translation is from Claude Larre and Elisabeth Rochat, The Secret of the Spiritual Orchid. Often called the Inner Classic of Chinese Medicine, this 2000 year old text is referenced occasionally in the modern teaching of Chinese Medicine. It is used more often when teaching esoterica because it isn't all that specific.

The expression translated above as "radiance of the spirits," is actually a common martial arts term--mingshen.

Mingshen is mentioned in the taijiquan classics as the fruition of practice. I think it is what I see in a young student's eyes when they are ready and eager to learn. It is also that quality you see in a great fighter's eyes which is capable of ending the fight before it has even started.

Mencius said: If a ruler has mingshen, when he and his army invade a country, its people will lay down their arms and join him. Now that sounds like either a really good reputation or very potent shamanic prowess.

Descriptions of mingshen in the martial arts deal with perception, consciousness, proprioception, and kinesthetic awareness. These descriptions often sound mystical. Mingshen is the ability to wield forces that seem to be outside your body, outside your opponent's body too. This "space power" gives liveliness and dimensionality to our movement, it is the main subject of the highest level martial arts.

You can't really be a "modern" person and not ask the questions with regard to pre-20th century ideas, "What should I keep and what should I discard?" "What can I use, and what will just hold me back?"

Everyone has to answer these questions for themselves. Are useless acts good for the heart? Does extraordinary martial prowess have any real utility?
Hardly any country in the world has done as much discarding in the 20th century as China has. But it hasn't always been honest or well considered discarding. Now they are looking through the trash to see what can be salvaged.

Fight to the Death

Is push-hands a fight to the death or an intimate bonding experience where you try to get your partner to blush?

That depends on what rule set you are using. The rule set you choose will be determined by your view-- that base or root which orients you towards experience.

People whose primary orientation is health, are often worriers. Push-hands is just not self-centered enough for them. Put in a push-hands situation, they will be flimsy and blasé. They'll be thinking, "Why would I want to puuuush you?"

People who see life as a struggle will be looking for an advantage because "Baby, if you aren't on top, you're on the bottom!"

Nobody holds on to the same view all the time, it would be too exhausting. I often teach push-hands from the view that aggression is a naturally occurring process which obscures subtlety. Aggression makes it more difficult to see or feel what is happening. At the same time, this view is not a rejection of aggression, after all who wants to live in a world where everything is subtle? A world without sci-fi or punk rock? (OK, I know the answer, Buddhists right?)

So from this view, the rule set should be designed to bring out an aggressive intent which consistantly loses to a less aggressive intent.

I know some of you are reading this and thinking, "Come on, how is that going to train killers?" or "How could we apply that idea to produce the worlds greatest fighter?"

Is it possible that the weakest approach is destine to prevail? This is not about me claiming to know.  It's about having fun trying.

But let's return to the beginning and look at the question of how people determine their rule sets for push-hands.

I was one of several people teaching at a retreat and after class a guy wanted to push-hands with me. He was strong and thin, about 5 inches taller than me and about 30 lbs heavier. He had been practicing martial arts all his life. We agreed on fixed foot rules. As I filled in his empty spaces, he would duck and twist rather than lose his footing. This is what my students and I call, "losing your frame." If I want to win in such a situation (at least at the jin level of practice) I have to apply either shoulder attack, elbow attack, or split. All three types of techniques could be considered an increase in aggression because they have a high probability of producing an injury in the opponent. Since I didn't want to hurt him, I didn't apply those techniques and I didn't win. But he really wanted to win and so after one of these duck-twists his stiff hand came up and hit me in the jaw chipping my tooth.

Afterwards he told me that he usually practices push-hands with a mouth piece. Later he told one of my students that all of his teeth were knocked out, he had false teeth.

Over the years I've had many push-hands matches which I lost because I would not up the aggression when the other person did. In all cases, at the point in which we were playing by the same set of rules, I was winning, but as the rules changed I accepted the loss.

Kuo-lien Ying said, "You can't convince someone that martial arts works if they don't want to be convinced." They will always have a reason why that wasn't the "real thing."

When I'm teaching I give myself handicaps. I create rule sets which allow the student to win if they catch me being aggressive. For instance, rather than trying to sink below my student, I may sink my qi to exactly the level they are sinking to. I'll take out all the tricks I know and try to use the simplest clearest techniques. If I win, the student has a better chance of understanding why. If I lose, the student should be able to show where my defect was.

If my students start to win by aggression I'll change the rule set and my handicap so that they are always looking for the less aggressive way to win.  (People are often so in love with their aggressive strategies, they have so much fun losing, that it takes a long time to get them to progress. )
Unfortunately you can't do that with a friendly challenger from another school, you have to work with whatever rule set you have in common and hope they don't try to change the rules halfway through.

Again, it is not that winning by aggression is bad, we are always winning by aggression even if that aggression is really really subtle.

What is the fruition of this practice? Is it a skill? Do you get really really good at it? The answer to those questions will depend on your view (that which orients you towards experience).

Clearly a fruition for me has been that I have a choice about whether to react aggressively. That choice may have always been there, but I doubt I would have taken it if I hadn't done the practice. Another fruition is that I welcome aggression rather than rejecting it or attempting to flee it or dominate it. Students are free to explore aggression in my classes, if it comes up we play with it.  And that's true in my daily life too.

Is that a skill?  Am I good at it?  The thing about push-hands is that the moment you kinesthetically understand a skill, it becomes a form of aggression--such that-- if you recognize that skill  in your opponent, you can use it to defeat him/her.  If you catch your opponent using a skill you understand, you can easily defeat them in push-hands.  So skill accumulation is not personal, you don't own it, it is something you are learning to recognize.  A skill is something which will cause you to blush if you get caught using it.  Like an old cheesy pick-up line you thought was original.

Prowess

I've been thinking a lot about prowess lately. The dissertation Martial Gods and Magic Swords, by Avron Boretz got me going on it. This is a difficult work to review, especially since I had to return it to inter-library loan a few days ago.

The classical explanation of the basic gongfu bow or greeting is that you are covering your right fist, which represents maximum explosive power, with your left hand, which represents the commitment and ability to control that power.

Wen, the left hand, culture, writing, government, civility; juxtaposed with Wu, the right hand, raw power, martial, chaotic, military.

Historically governments, and scholars generally had an interest in having us believe that Wen naturally dominates Wu, and that we should fear the opposite situation. Certainly, the Daoist pantheon gives hierarchical precedent to gods in civil roles and lower status to gods in military or punishment roles, and even lower status to demons and chaotic forces.

But reality on earth is not always so simple, nor should it be. There are no true earthly hierarchies.

Avron Boretz is, I think, the first martial artist to really dive into the blended subject of ethnology and history. As a martial artist and a scholar, he managed to get himself joined up with a cult dedicated to The Dark Lord (I kid you not, but in Chinese it would be Xuandi) in a small town in Northern Taiwan. All the inner cult members were martial artists and many of them were involved in crime, like smuggling and prostitution, fringe of society stuff. They were a brotherhood of sworn allegiance, prone to occasional fighting with other brotherhoods.  In other words, small time gangsters.
The book takes a hard look at the role of rituals in creating feelings of prowess in men who are otherwise kind of marginal. Because he got quite close to these guys, he writes about many different aspects of the cult. They all go out together to do exorcisms dressed up in costumes as demon generals. Sometimes they get possessed by the demon general they are representing. They all wear thick make-up and go into trance, but they only occasionally become possessed.

One of the ways they determine if a possession is authentic is that the person who was possessed has no memory of it.

The second to last chapter kind of surprised me. It is all about partying with the boys. Heavy drinking nearly every night, women, money, status-- all ways that men demonstrate their prowess.

The only time I have done things I have no memory of was after drinking large amounts of alcohol. I wonder if that is what it is like to be possessed. My experience of it was just the opposite of prowess, it was extreme embarrassment. But I have met people who are proud of their black-out moments, perhaps for some rather desperate people, blacking out could be a form of prowess.

Martial arts and alcohol, seems like a bad combo, but so do sports and alcohol and we all know those games used to be played by very drunk individuals.

These martial dances are not martial arts, but they are displays of prowess and they do have many similarities to the martial arts I practice.

One interesting example is the Big Dipper step, or Seven Star step. When a group of demon generals approaches a house or a business they are about to do an exorcism on, they approach it doing the Seven Star step (chixing bu). They then stamp on the ground and run across the threshold into the building.

I realized that everyone of my Northern Shaolin forms begins with a Seven Star step.  In Northern Shaolin, first we stamp on the ground and sink into cat stance, which is like stepping over a threshold. Then our hands shoot out and break apart, as if we were breaking through double doors or the opening in a curtain, and we run three steps, as if we were running into a building or onto a stage, and we do the "monk clears his sleeves" action. I counted it out and it is exactly seven steps. Cool huh?

UPDATE: This is now a book! Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters!

Homeless Shelter for Impotent Deities

The flexibility of Chinese religious convictions is food for thought. This story suggests an interesting blend of confidence and reluctance.

YILAN, Taiwan -- Bulletins are going up in the western part of Suao, a fishing port near Yilan on northeast Taiwan. Put up by a temple of land gods or tu-di-gong, they complain it now has been burdened with too many unwanted images of local deities, including the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy.

"Please take them back," the bulletins urge.

Too Many Unwanted Deities

And on a different note, here is a link about a Daoist Dancer:

Dance of a Sage.

And since I mentioned it yesterday, here is an article about Japanese Tea Ceremony that at leasts credits Daoism, even if it fails to explain that connection.   Briefly, Japanese Tea Ceremony claims roots in Chan Buddhism and the particular way that Chan was adopted by the Samurai warrior class.  Chan Buddhism, in its competition with Daoism for patronage, developed a simplified version of a Daoist ritual in which local officials were asked to received a bowl of tea as representatives of all human life.

Orange Juice and Hermits

I grew up arguing every night at the dinner table. For the most part it was an edifying and respectful experience. This kind of intensive educational model is pretty rare world-wide (except in Israel where it is the norm).

We also drank orange juice with our dinner which is a real "no-no" in Chinese medicine, mainly because your spleen will reject all the highest quality nutrients in favor of the simple sugars. The rejected foods still get digested but your body needs to create more heat to digest these higher quality nutrients once they have been passed on to the large intestine. The result is that your body takes on fluids in order to insulate the other organs from all the heat. Orange juice makes most people gain body weight in water, edema. (After years it becomes the syndrome known as "damp heat.")

However; I don't think drinking orange juice had a negative effect on my health, most kids are pretty resilient as long as they are getting enough food.

But there was one strange effect. Now if I drink orange juice with a meal, even breakfast, I'll get in an argument. I become completely posessed by my ancestors. Generally I believe things like this can be overcome with will power, but in this case I have no control. If I'm alone, I'll argue with a chair.

One of my students sent me this email:

I wrote down what we just talked about because I didn't want to forget it. Then I wondered if I'd really understood correctly. So if this does not look like what you meant, could you let me know.
-H

My Question: Should one practice differently on different days? For example should some days be longer, more in-depth etc?

Your Answer: There are two Wuwei approaches:

1) Practice at the same time, same place, same duration, same stuff. The difference will still be there; it will be made apparent with a backdrop of sameness.
2) Hermit method: move with the qi of the moment. Practices will vary significantly.

There are also two De or "virtuous perfection" approaches:

1) Urban – Do many discrete experiments with one's practice so that you will achieve certain and specific fruitions. This could include the calendar (tongshu), food, intensity, etc. But it will include record keeping of some sort, as experiments involve constant evaluation and recalibration to produce fruition.
2)Hermit method: Could involve calendar, detailed seasonal correspondence. Embodying and exploring the qi of various events (like grass sprouting or mushrooms coming up). Records will also be kept for the same purpose.

Follow up question: Is the difference between the hermit and urban methods, the level of detail and in-depth relation with natural environment?

Now in my family, if after a long discussion someone were to restate my argument in crystal clear and respectful terms, there is a good chance that they would be on the verge of delivering a fatal blow.

But putting that possibility aside, this question shows the difficulty of communicating Daoist view and practice with words.

The key thing to digest here is that the wuwei view does not require analysis. By asking the question you are already in the de (perfection, integration, improvement) camp. [note: De is often translated "virtue," it is the de used in the title of the Dao De Jing.]

The wuwei hermit method is called "The Wandering of the Mare." Living around other people means having to coordinate with their schedules and that is antithetical to constant spontaneity.

The wuwei view suggests that practice is self-revealing, it doesn't require any discipline other than trusting your appetites.

Yes, the difference between the urban and the hermit models of de (perfection) is one of detail and depth. But it is also a difference of scale.

The urban perfection seeker is very playful and creative. The fact that I spent many years doing a 20 minute Japanese Tea Ceremony in my elevated gold-painted elixir-dedicated Quiet Room before leaving the house, means that now when I walk into Starbucks I'm getting an enormous hit of mythic transcendence--office furniture and paper cups are not obstacles.

The hermit version of perfection studies is so big, complex, and refined that I'll have to save it for another post. (That's a joke.)

Liver Cleanse?

It seems like I'm surrounded by people doing various things they call a seasonal liver cleanse. Inevitably these people are thin. The project varies from simply taking a purgative every other day for a week, to not eating for 10 days.

As winter turns to spring we become more active. There is more sunlight and more qi available for getting things done (whether we exercise more or not). As the weather warms we also eat less. The combination of eating less and being more active actually slows down our digestion/metabolism.

Thus, toward the end of spring people start feeling overworked and stagnant, they want to "detox."

The Daoist approach to Spring is to conserve while simultaneously taking advantage of the extra qi available. Ones diet should have lots of watery soup, lots of liquid, fresh greens. Less grain, smaller portions of meat, fruit only between meals. But it is still important to eat enough food for the type of activity you are doing. Then go to bed early.

It's not the season's fault that people have problems, and it is not really the type of food or how much. The problem is that people want to stay up late, they skip their afternoon naps and party right on through.

What most of these fasters and liver cleansers have is a miniature version of anorexia. But don't get exited. To paraphrase the Daodejing: It's not that people get dealt a bad hand, it's that they take a situation of excess and make it more excessive; they take a deficient situation and make it more deficient.

Already strong vigorous athletes, sign up for Iron Man Triathlons. Skinny people who aren't hungry, decide to fast.

There is nothing new here. Spring festivals everywhere are some version of dancing and drinking all night and waking up in the bushes with somebody else's partner.

After a night like that, purification is sure to keep you on the roller coaster road to redemption.

When you fast for 10 days you may drift in and out of transcendent bliss, wandering, day dreaming your way through conversations. By the end of 10 days your sense of smell will be heightened as will your sensitivity to breezes and changes in light. You will be prepped for doing exorcisms. Even the subtlest ghosts will be brought out of hiding--by your acute weakness--where they can be captured or transformed. (Ghosts are unresolved commitments which linger because they don't have enough qi to move on.)

Kids this time of year scream more. They also beg for food. They can't seem to stop talking and they "accidentally" chop, punch, and crash into each other. So that's my seasonal advice to all of you.

Cleanse your liver with loud sounds, laugh, sing, grunt.

Make yourself eat enough. Of course, don't over eat! But don't try to get through the day on a granola bar and a cup of coffee just because there seems to be enough qi "in the air."

And if you practice gongfu, get a little rougher. Make those "accidental" slaps sting. Then take a bath and go to bed early.

After thought: Sometimes people who are overweight from too much rich food in the winter, try to lose weight with a "liver cleanse." If you are really taking off a significant portion of weight through purging and fasting, you are also putting your heart at risk. This kind of up and down with your weight every year will likely shorten your life. Do it once; then use extraordinary discipline throughout the year to make sure you don't gain the weight back again.