Flowers

Lantern Flowers

Every altar has two candles, an incense burner and two vases full of flowers.

Last time I was in Japan I was talking to my Japanese friend about flowers.  Consider these three contexts:

1.  There is a lantern flower day in Tokyo in which on an annual basis people gather around a specific temple and party while buying, carrying and displaying orange lantern flowers.  These flowers have some medicinal function and it appears that they are being displayed for or offered to the Gods of the temple.

2.  At funerals and a few other solemn occasions, big colorful bouquets of mixed flowers are displayed in large vases on tables.  Are these for the ancestors? For the newly dead?  For the living families of the dead? (To cheer them up?)  For the gods of the underworld in hope that they will be lenient with the newly dead?

3.  The art of Ikebana is a profoundly aesthetic presence in Japan.  It is taught more or less as a pure exploration of aesthetics of seasonal change, space, spontaneity and craft.  I might even venture that it is a ‘high art’ with Modern notions of universality.

My friend insisted that these are fundamentally different categories.  The only commonality being flowers.  Coming from my knowledge of Daoism, which uses flowers on every altar, and sometimes uses a specific species of flowers as an offering to a specific deity (like Purple Myrtle for Ziwei); the difference between the first two contexts seemed to be simply a temple altar to a god, verses a family altar to the dead.  The context of the example of Ikebana seemed like an attempt to take the experience of the reciprocity between the living and the dead,* characteristic of ritual altars, and apply it in an abstract cosmology.  In other words it’s the same thing without any mention of the gods or the underworld; the cosmology is the same but abstract.  (Like with Aikido, in Ikebana they think of squares, circles and triangles; as categories of information about esthetic uses of space, color, shape, texture, etc...)

Well, my Japanese friend said I was wrong, these categories have nothing to do with each other.

It seems I may be up against the same thing in Taiwan with the relationship between martial arts and the dance performances of the demon generals who escort gods on procession.  (Bajiajiang I have been mentioning is just one type of escort used here.)  They are thought of as distinctly different categories.  However, it is obvious to someone like me who has studied marital arts all his life, that they are doing martial arts.  Which presents the question, does experience trump culture?  In any event, it’s not so simple, most people will admit they don’t really know what happened in the past.  They have no way of knowing if martial arts and dance performances were the same thing at some time in the past.

At least I now have loads of video and images to demonstrate my various points.  More posts to come.

(*Gods are the dead in Asia. I wonder if that would have exploded Nietzsche’s mind.
We are, in fact, our ancestors.  Offerings to ancestors must be done by a relative, because we access our ancestors through ourselves.)

Tangki

In Tainan I saw a Tangki (Mandarin: Jitong) at the Tian Tan Gong (Alter to Heaven Temple).  He was wearing shoes, and all yellow cotton clothing.  He was doing a treatment/exorcism on a man in a wheel chair whose legs looked a little swollen, they both looked to be in their late 40’s.  They were directly in front of the gods, in the center of the temple in a small space between a giant incense burning and an altar table.  For the Tangki to dance around the man he had to wheel himself forward and backwards about a foot, which kept him involved while he sat there.

I don’t know what God was possessing the Tangki, or even if he was possessed, perhaps not, or only a little bit (I did not see him “fall” out of trance at the end).  He did a martial arts like dance holding a bunch of incense in one hand.  It was already going when I entered the temple and continued for about 10 minutes.  Using the incense, at times he appeared to be writing Chinese characters in the air around the body of the guy in the wheelchair while making sword fingers with the other hand.  Sometimes he held a posture while pointing his sword fingers at his own abdomen.  Sometimes he touched the man, at one point he pushed vigorously on the back of his head.  He shook and did fajing (explosive power release) a lot.  His breathing was somewhat erratic and audible.

Toward the end, the Tangki had someone bring him a paper cup of something, probably water, and he pointed  at it (concentrating his qi into it?) and danced with it for a while before giving it to the guy and having him spill it and spread it around on his legs.

When he was done he went over to the side and sat down on a bench, he was pouring sweat.  Then the guy in the wheelchair jumped up and started dancing.  Just kidding.  During the ritual I talked to one of several people who were watching, a young man who seemed upset and said the man in the wheelchair was his uncle.

There are many similarities between the Qigong master I saw the other night and the Tangki.  Both are self taught.  Both are called.  Both discover their gift.  Both poke and prod.  Both are doing mysterious healing on someone else.  I believe Tangki’s will accept trivial donations of money, but they essentially, accept a life of poverty along with the job/role of being Tangki, they both express the importance of keeping money out of the ritual.

Frankly, the gongfu performance I saw in the park the morning in between the two had some similarities to the Tangki exorcism too.  The dancing around in martial postures, the importance given to breathing, and the fajing.

The blended ritual I saw is not in these two videos, but a lot of other Tangki stuff is, and Youtube is amazing:





Also, to continue with my stating the obvious jag; There is an enormous wealth of video about Chinese ritual on youtube or google video search if you use Chinese Characters. ?? (Tangki)

Burning Money

The word-processing icon on my laptop is a pen with a cup of coffee.  Do you really think the archaeologists and historians are going to be able to figure that one out in 800 years?

In many ways my project is about stating the obvious.  Obvious to me that is.  Unfortunately what is obvious to me is sometimes my imagination.  And sometimes, it’s just hard to know.

In my first week here, late at night across the street form my hostel, I saw a group of well dressed women standing out on the sidewalk burning large amounts of hell money in a big metal burner that looked a bit like a burned out trash can with holes.  I asked what was going on and a woman said, “ We are burning money so that we will do well in business, we always do this at the end of the day.  We want to make a lot of money!”  I noticed that their business was a beauty parlor.

I thought to myself, they are ritually and symbolically paying off emotional “debts” they have accumulated from dealing all day with people who vainly wish they looked better that they do.  That night I saw a few other small groups of people burning stuff in front of their businesses, and evidence of many others.

I brought this up with a local in Kaohsiung and she said, “No, no, they don’t do it all the time, only on the new moon and the full moon.”  “Why are they doing it,” I asked.  “Every business does it.”  “Really?”  “Yes,they do it twice a month at the end of the work day, and they put out offerings on a table too.”

So I had to throw out my perfectly elegant theory about emotional baggage and vanity, and look for another one.  I theorized that this was some kind of deception meant to take place in the unseen world, in hell perhaps, where it would appear that the business was loosing money hand over fist.  Demonic forces hate commerce and are trying to destroy successful businesses using underworld bureaucratic tyranny at every chance they get; however, when they see that this business is already losing money, they don’t bother with it.

Alternately we could see this ritual as paying bribes to smooth the business through that bureaucratic hell realm; or as extortion payments, again with the goal of getting local demon elites off your back.

This created several questions.  What do 24 hour stores like 7/11 do?  Do foreign owned operations like Starbucks also burn hell money?  Since I’m not in Kaohsiung anymore I don’t know if my informant was correct about what happens there, but here in Taipei only about 15% of businesses are visibly participating in the New moon ritual.  7/11 and Starbucks did not put on a show.  Still 15% means there are altar tables on every block.  The increase in smog may effect the ability of demons to see and breathe.



(How come Youtube doesn't have a Business or a Religion category?  I filed this under "How To.")

Professor Yeh met with me again last night along with one of his graduate students in anthropology, Yves  from Holland.  Yeh seemed stunned by my knowledge of Daoism, even though he disagreed with half of what I said.   During dinner he started badgering me to explain the mechanism by which talisman are efficacious.  After that he had me work on the translations into English of the museum’s Daoist artifacts.

So, if burning hell money twice a month is good for business, what is the mechanism?  Perhaps it is somehow linked to cleaning? or accounting? or community expectations of what a good business does?  Perhaps it is like moon rituals of an earlier era in which everyone participated in the public renewal of precepts and commitments.  I think this is likely.  Standing around a pot of burning money with your business colleges must imprint the metaphor in language and image.  If you don’t do your part and consistently look for ways to improve the business, you will find yourself staring into a pot of burning money (real money this time).

What do you think?

Who can do Daoism?

I wrote earlier about a lunch I had with He Jing-Han, the Baguaquan Master.  It was a lively lunch.  At one point he challenged me to give a definition of jing.  I probably gave him 12 definitions which he rejected before I got around to the standard medical definition:  An essence which is extracted from fresh air and food which is then distilled and stored through rest, sleep and stillness.  He Jing-Han believes that storing enough jing to do Daoist practices requires extraordinary discipline and solitude.  Thus it is impossible to cultivate Dao in the city with a family and a job.  So he says we should just focus on being good people.

Most Taiwanese have little idea where they would get knowledge about Daoism if they wanted it.  He Jing-Han's sources like writer Nan Huai Jin have put a filter on access to that knowledge.  In effect they appear to stop most people from further inquiry.

Daoism does not have an open door.  But that doesn't mean no one ever comes in or out of the door.  If He would have accepted some of my earlier definitions of Jing he might have accepted my declaration that the story of the Eight Immortals (Ba Xian) is precisely to let people know that there are as many ways to cultivate Dao as there are people.  The point of the Talisman (fu) of the 60 Cloud Fates is the same, that there are many ways to become an immortal.  Everyone has Jing.  Every being's jing is already pure and perfect.  It is reproduced by our healthy habits, and it also reproduces us.  The differentiation of Jing and Qi happens in stillness, it has no special requirements, it requires no effort.

Han Wudi, was known as the Martial Emperor and he lived during the last part of the first half of the Han Dynasty (2000 years ago).  He was said to have a solid gold practice room, and Xiguanmu (The Queen Mother of the West) as his private tutor.  Yet he was unable to cultivate Dao because he was haunted by the ghosts of all the people he had killed in the process of expanding and then consolidating the Empire.

The point?  If you deal with your ghosts you can cultivate Dao.  If you don't, even a solid gold practice room and Xiguanmu as a teacher will not be enough.  Conflating the process of Cultivating Dao with Purification leads to elitism, an Earthly Hierarchy--and there are no true earthly hierarchies.  Hierarchy is a process of imagination--thus the only true hierarchies are of Heaven.

I know this can sound obscure, but it's not that hard to get.  The most basic act of Chinese religion is to make sacrifice.  The sacrifice to Heaven, as a totality, was always performed by the emperor.  Everyone else sacrified to their little piece of heaven, that is, their ancestors and their local gods.  Hierarchies are maintained by acts of subordination and dominance, which are made real through ritual.

Daoist Priests are forbiden by precept to subordinate.  Every other choice will eventually lead to freedom, it just takes longer.  Daoism is a short cut.  Freedom has a physiology.  That physiology is our true nature and it is revealed through the cultivation of weakness, stillness, openness, and lacking pretence.

Between Theorizing and Storytelling

I've got 45 Million blogs to write and only a limited amount of time.

I'm in Tainan, which is the old capital of Taiwan, meaning it was a place of early settlement. I get the sense that governance was not universal until about halfway into the Japanese occupation, say 1920.

My first night here I met up with a friend of Professor Hsieh named Sharon Lee, who generously offered to translate for me.  We went to Luzhu to meet a Qigong master who was treating people for free at a steel bolt factory.  Sharon is getting regular treatments from him.  I watched him treat several people with a minute long vigorous painful massage which was heavy on the vibratory poking side of things.  We then sat in an office and drank tea for over an hour.  The tea was good.  I got to ask a lot of questions, but there were about 10 people in the room and most of them were asking questions too.

If I got the story right, he did begin studying with a Daoist teacher in the forest but he then went on to do his own practice which is a sitting still practice of some sort.  At a certain point he realized he could heal people and so naturally he started studying Buddhism as that is the biggest cult here which has a doctrine of compassion that involves fixing/curing people.

However, he side stepped Buddhism too, after realized that he found it impossible to memorize Sutras.  At some point after he had been treating people he looked into Chinese Herbal medicine and found it easy to understand.  He soon began writing long herbal prescriptions.  Interestingly he doesn't actually write the prescriptions himself, he channels Yao Wang (Medicine King) a Tang Dynasty God who does the prescriptions for him.

A Standard "Nuggie"

But besides this, he said no gods are involved in his healing ceremonies.  He is a vegetarian and encourages others to be also, he often tells people to skip dinner, and he does not allow payment for healings.  He does drive a fancy German car however, so he has some big donors.  While he says he can not teach what he does, he holds ceremonies for an inner circle at his home, which has some sort of altar.  At these ceremonies he has other people read the Heart Sutra.

He said I have a kidney problem which is manifesting in my chest.  He is clearly from what I would call the "Structure School" of Chinese medicine.  I don't know if he thought my problem was acute or chronic, but that's how he operates.  The heat in Southern Taiwan undoubtedly has given me an acute kidney problem, but I recover instantly in the presence of air conditioning, which by the way he says is bad for everyone's health.  He didn't give me a full one minute treatment, I got only the 15 second version on my sternum, but that was three days ago and I can still feel it.  Last time I had a treatment like this I think I was 13.  Back then we called in a chest "nuggie."

My long time readers know that I call this kind of guy a Qi Jock, and I'm generally not impressed.  But as a student of religion I think he has an interesting take on what a body is.  He refused to be pinned down on any definitions of things like jing, qi and shen.  He does have the idea that in stillness jing and qi differentiate and that leads to an extraordinary type of freedom.  I think he is fulfilling a real need in people's lives.

The orthodox Daoist in me says don't get in the way of other people subordinating themselves with the idea that they need extraordinary powers of healing.  I can make this point very simple.  At the end of the day, after violating the most basic of Daoist precepts--"don't waste jing and qi"--a person wants to give in to something.  Some people rent "Die Hard 3" and fantasize about being Bruce Willis, others go and get a Qigong treatment.  Which is more effective is a question of perspective and circumstance.

UPDATE: I must have temporarily blocked this out. In addition to saying I had a kidney problem he said, "Ni shi tai peng." (You're too fat.)

A Challenge

I recently met with professor Yeh Chuen-Rong, an Ethnologist at the Academia Sinica who is a big fan of Clifford Geertz.  I was meeting with professor Chang Hsun and she suggested that I meet her colleague next door because he had a collection of video of folk rituals.  But I misunderstood her, and I thought she was introducing me to the librarian of the multimedia center. (He is the curator of the museum too, so that's how the misunderstanding happened.)

So, I immediately tried to describe what I wanted to see, at his convenience of course-I was expecting to come back another day.  What I didn't realize was that he had something on the order of a thousand videos of folk rituals in his personal collection.  He took me into another room to show me the scale of what he had, and perhaps to make it clear I didn't have any idea how to ask for something specific.

Anyway, we got off to a bad start.  While I was talking to him there was an American graduate student in Green Engineering sitting in, he was there to get some directions actually but he stayed for the first part of our talk.  After about 20 minutes, Professor Yeh looked over at the other students and said he could tell I didn't know the field and he called me Carlos Castaneda.  I retorted that Castaneda was insane.  But Yeh said, no, he was just a practitioner--who lacked rigor and perspective--he just wanted to tell his own story.

He said there is another writer he could compare me to if I didn't like Castaneda.  I wouldn't have heard of her because her book was published in Hong Kong or something...HAh, he turned out to be talking about Margret Chen!  He called her work worthless to scholars like himself, shallow! a nice coffee table picture book perhaps.  I read her book in the two months before coming to Taiwan.  For me it was a marvelous source of information on Tangki Spirit Mediums in Singapore.  But one of the reasons I didn't review it was that her comments about Daoism and the early history of Chinese religion where poorly informed.

Yeh seemed momentarily charmed by knowledge of the book and by my assertion that I also abhor shallowness.  But he quickly went back on the attack.  If I wanted to do this kind of research I would have to know Chinese cosmology really well.  My reaction was, go ahead, test me!  He started listing cosmological ideas, and then we got stuck on a translation.  He was saying ganzhi (stem and branch) which is a way of calculating auspices, so when I figured out what he meant I said, of course I am familiar with the tongshu (the complete almanac of cosmological calculations, also the oldest continuously published book on earth.)

So he pulled one out, then he showed me a drawer full of tongshu from previous years.  As I flipped through the tongshu, I had to admit that although I had spent 7 years following various indicators from the tongshu and observing a few dozen commemorative days each year, most of the tongshu was totally over my head and outside my ability to comprehend.

Having made his point, he gestured toward his collection of Clifford Geertz books.  Did I know of him?  Yes, actually, I've read a few of his books (later I revealed that my father had interviewed him on the radio).  OK, he said, have you eaten?  I don't think the kind of work you are proposing is of any use, but lets continue this conversation over some dumplings.

Over the next four hours we argued.  At one point I fired back that perhaps his work wasn't of much use because as a non-practitioner, he lacked fundamental experience!  I think he liked that. He offered many challenges.  Here are some of them:

• Gods do not teach people to fight.


• When people in trance possession cults fight, they are not possessed, they are just fighting.


• The Chinese literature on the subject does not use the term trance in a continuum the way I do.  Generally trance means a specific deity is present.


• No one else has proposed that there are different types of trance for different types of deities (Professor Chang also said this).  In other words it could be good that I'm proposing a new direction of thought but the people who belong to these cults don't make such distinctions.  So I'm dangerously close to making stuff up. (My argument is that it is implicit in the different ways trance is invoked and in the different types of movement deities use.  Also, in Daoist ritual all the deities are invoked through the visualization/embodiment of the eight generals.)

By the time I left four hours later, I had learned a lot, and he had conceded a few points too.  I also got asked to help him with a letter to the Louvre (you know that museum in Paris) and he showed me a bunch of videos!  I'll be back!

Some New Leads

In my conversation with Professor Hsieh Shi-Wei, which I mentioned briefly in an earlier post, he suggested that I try to see a type of ritual performance warfare called Song Jiang Zhen.  Unfortunately the season for these performances ended just before I got here, but I'm going to try to meet some people involved with this tradition this weekend near Tainan.  Here is breif article about this art.  He said one of Kristofer Schipper's students has done work on the many types of Song Jiang Zhen, but I believe the work is published in French (Daniel, want some homework?).

Everyday there is more Daoist Ritual and other Taiwanese ritual performance finding its way onto youtube.  I found this one just surfing around.  The first part appears to be a Daoist priest (Daoshi) doing a public ritual.  For some Zhengyi (orthodox) Daoshi this would be a violation of precepts but as I learned from reading an article by Daoist expert Lee Fong-Mao, the various communities of people who are served by Daoshi have different expectations of them, and some Zhengyi Daoshi do public ritual previously associated with "red hat"  Daoists.  Just to make it more confusing I don't know where the video is actually from or if every thing is from the same ritual.  However, the beginning "dance" does look martial and the martial art it looks the most like it Baguazhang.  The second part of the video shows too Tangki.  I'm not sure what deities they are possessed by but be careful you don't fall into trance watching this one.  They appear to be possessed by different deities.  Check out the movment they use for hitting their own back...it looks a lot like a Tongbei gongfu move to me.

Taiwan Project

This is the first day since I arrived in Taipei that I’ve really rested.  It was raining the day I arrived but it’s been clear all week until today and I must say the rain cooled things down a bit.  Air conditioning is necessary for thought, I actually feel my brain turning off and on as I walk in and out of the heat.

I went on a reading frenzy in the two months before I came and it has continued since I arrived.  On Friday I met with professor Paul Katz in his office at the Academia Sinica and he gave me three papers to read and made a number of further suggestions for future reading.  Two of the papers were on the organization of martial cults, dance procession groups dedicated to martial deities and exorcistic rites.  The third paper was on the roll of justice and judicial thinking in Daoist ritual and its relationship to a wide range of social institutions including martial cults. He has been very helpful in introducing me to other scholars here too.  Our talk was less than an hour but it gave me a lot to think about and helped me organize my ideas from the point of view of a research project which is turning out to be essential for speaking with other scholars.

The next day I met with Dave Chesser of the blog Formosa Neijia.  We had a wide ranging talk about life in Taiwan, martial arts gossip, and business.  As readers of his blog know, he has a real talent for encouraging friendly open debate and we talked about how he can use that skill and experience to build a school integrating kettle ball training and martial arts skills.  He has read all my father’s books on business so we really got into how to translate my father’s ideas about what makes a business flourish into the Taiwanese context.  As all business people know, being in business means constantly refining and adapting what you do through trial and error.  And that takes time.  In my opinion he has what it takes to be successful and he’s off to a good start.

Dave convinced me to take a class with He Jing-Han (his blog is:  http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/hejinghan-bagua).  Master He taught a three hour class in the park behind the big public library (where students on the weekend line up 2 hours before opening time, just to make sure they have an air conditioned place to study).  The class was focused on a linear form of baguazhang he calls baguaquan, the form can be seen on his Youtube channel.  This form is just a small part of what he teaches year round and I got the impression that his style of baguazhang is organized very differently than mine.  In fact, of all the things I’ve studied it most resembled the mixed internal/external Lanshou system I originally learned from George Xu 20 years ago.  I would love to come back and get a sense of the full scope of what he teaches, this guy is a living treasure.



Shirfu He is a warm and gracious guy.  After class we went to lunch for two hours and had a wonderful talk about Daoism and the history of internal martial arts.  When I told him about my project He suggested that martial cults were created for group fighting while martial arts are focused on individual fighting, but he conceded that it was quite possible that historically people practiced and taught both together.  He also made the important point that what he teaches has changed dramatically from what his teacher, born in 1906, taught.  He suggested it was nearly possible to comprehend how his teacher thought about the arts, considering he lived through such different and turbulent times.  Going back 5 or 6 generations is really stretching credulity.  I know he is right and yet the project seems important anyway.  I think it is worth while trying to understand not only what teachings have been discarded or changed, but why.

I also had the opportunity to meet twice with Marcus Brinkman.  Once for a Chinese Medical Cupping treatment (my whole back got cupped with more suction than I’ve felt before!) and once for a Baguazhang lesson on his roof.  He is a fun guy with an in depth knowledge of Chinese medicine and substantial martial prowess.  He gave me some really good theoretical explanations about the relationship of internal martial arts and medicine, but I’ll save them for some future blogs. (I need time to digest them!)



Yesterday I met with a Professor of Daoism named Hsieh Shi-Wei.  I honestly believe he is the first person to really understand the full scope of my project and he was very encouraging!  More on that later.

Other highlights--
People are warm, kind and helpful.  The subway and bus system in Taipei works like a charm. I don’t even have to pull my pass out of my wallet because it has a radio chip in it, I don’t even have to slow my stride when entering and exiting the subway!  Taipei is much cleaner than I imagined it would be, public bathrooms are much cleaner here than they are in America.  I went drinking at an outdoor beer factory and a dinosaur bone covered bar.  I’ve enjoyed asparagus juice, salt-coffee, a mug-bean smoothie, tons of interesting street food, seaweed chips, a harrowing scooter ride, and I stubbed my middle toe black and blue hiking in the mountains.

I have one more meeting here in Taipei tomorrow and then I think I’m headed for the south.

Real Lineages

One of my students pointed out that in the previous post on the early 20th Century I asserted that lineages were invented to defend gongfu against attacks by Modernity, claiming that there was continuity between an older pure martial tradition and certain contemporary styles. They were all trying to avoid associations with performance, ritual, religion, or failed rebellion.  Where as in the book Qigong Fever, we see that after the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977) lineages were invented to make qigong appear ancient and mysterious, pre-Modern claims of authority.

Still, in both eras movement artists desired to have the authority of some all powerful "science" on their side; a desire which seems absurd now, in a time when no one is contesting my right or my duty to practice and teach gongfu.  Politics is not a rational process.   Lineages are a political tool, not a rational one, and certainly not scientific.

Perhaps I accidentally implied that no lineages are real.  Shaman, Wu, Tangki, magicians, even puppeteers pick disciples to whom they give the responsibility of passing on a classical art or ritual tradition.  In India, Japan and China the disciple is often a family member, but if the extended family hasn't produced any suitable offspring, a disciple will be adopted.

The more illegal (remember legal/illegal is a continum in China) an art is, the more likely it is to be secretive.   Also, magicians, martial arts and ritual experts usually had good reasons to keep trade secrets close to their chests.  Lineages served this political purpose well.  The early 20th century ridiculed secretive behavior none the less, and people at least pretended that all their secrets had been revealed. (I believe Cheng Man Ch'ing wrote a book on  Tai Chi book called, "There Are No Secrets.")

I don't believe there are real historical martial arts lineages which were devoid of performance, ritual, religion, or rebellion.  But lineage, by its nature, is a changing thing and could certainly purge itself of these aspects and remain a lineage.  But be suspicious, a martial art that has had a lot of purging will also have a lot of inexplicable baggage.  It's a lot easier to assess the value of an art when you have the whole thing intact, and NOBODY seems to have that!

I suspect there was some previous era where martial arts were shared freely.  Buddhist temples had open courtyards where locals could get together and practice.  Villages had clan halls where people could get together and practice.  I think there was always some paranoia, but it may have been more like basketball secrets.  Every village and every temple sponsored a team, and everyone wanted the quality of their competing teams to be high--so after dominating for a few seasons-- you traded coaches.

I'm optimistic that the commercial world is leading us into an era of great sharing.

If there was a "how to" martial arts literature prior to the Ching Dynasty, it seems lost to us now.  Martial arts have come down to us primarily as the arts of the illiterate.  I do believe at one time martial arts were "high-culture." The evidence for that is in the philosophical literature of the Waring States Era.  It is entirely possible that the Tang and Song Era had these too,  but perhaps they were destroyed during the years of Mongol rule.

The other group of people who have lineages are Daoist Priests, Daoshi.  Daoism is a lineage tradition, everyone given the title Daoshi was included in a lineage and each individual teaching or text had its own lineage.  In the event that someone set off on their own and created some new supportive practice or teaching, after a generation or so it/they would be incorporated/adopted into existing lineages.  Scholars have their doubts about just how far back some of these lineages go, but no one doubts that they do go way back.  But it is also true that most of these lineages are secret. The ones we know about are the ones that stopped being secret to some extent.  I suspect that martial artists, beginning in the Ching Dynasty, started imitating Daoist (and Buddhist) ideas of lineages.  Martial arts may not have had lineages before that.

Then again their may have been secret Daoist lineages of martial arts.  As Shahar points out in his book Shaolin Temple, the popular literature of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties grew out of theater and is perpetually making fun of Daoists, Buddhist, officials, and martial heroes (xia) with their secret techniques.

I've been looking through the index to the Ming Dynasty Daoist Cannon (Daozang) which was just published last year.  There are a lot of texts which describe physical practices in conjunction with ritual, purification, astrology, meditation etc... There may even be a few texts which are primarily movement oriented (requiring lineage transmission, of course), but I see nothing resembling martial arts.  If such texts ever existed they are either still hidden, or they were destroyed 900 years ago a long with thousands of other texts during the Yuan Dynasty.

3-D Feeling

The first chapter of the Daodejing (Laozi) begins;

The Dao that can be spoken is not the constant Dao,

The names that can be named are not the true name,

(Dao ke dao fei chang Dao, ming ke ming fei chang ming)

Generally, "names" is understood to mean four things: actual words, images, concepts, and metaphors.

This is not an outright rejection of these four types of "names."  The chapter deals with how "naming" functions in relationship to experience.  (See this previous post on the Quest for Power.)

In order for a human body to function it must have a mind.  Minds move bodies.  How do minds do this?  I'm not seeking a "scientific" explaination here.  I'm asking, how do we experience the process?

Can a human be still?  The answer is no, it is not possible to be still (even in death).  Only relative stillness is possible.  In relative stillness, the mind continues to move the body.  It is fair to say mind and body are inseparable, and for this reason Orthodox Daoism teaches that in stillness practices the mind should be given no more attention than a toe or a rib.  Every square millimeter of the body is a cherished blessing.

However, Daoism and Tantric Buddhism sometimes use "visualizations" within their stillness practices; and they certainly use "visualizations" when practicing ritual.  The beginning visualizations are often military, generals or characters known for extraordinary discipline.  The images then transition towards subtler, softer, and lighter images.

Infinite architectural design

But the terms "visualization," "images," or "picturing" are not adequate terms to describe this process of mind.  It might be better to think of them as 3 dimensional feelings.   For a human to function we need to feel.  We need to feel in 3 dimensions.  Any movement we do is organized by a 3 dimensional feeling.  It is as if this 3dFeeling holds us together and gives us order.

When we are walking down the street, we have a particular 3dFeeling.  We need this feeling to function, without it we wouldn't be able to stand, walk, or look around.  These 3dFeelings are infinite, even this particular 3dFeeling we use for walking is infinite. But it is the kind of infinite that happens within boundaries.  That particular 3dFeeling is very stable, it is changeable, but it doesn't change very much.  However, when we were children learning to walk, that particular 3dFeeling was very unstable.  Each time we tried to find it, it was a little different, we had to learn to replicate the same 3dFeeling day after day in order to walk like the adults around us.  As a teenager, I decided my walk wasn't cool enough and I actively changed this 3dFeeling, which in turn changed my walk to the degree that my new cooler walk became automatic and unconscious.

The affects of a particular 3dFeeling are sometimes noticed by other people.  We say, "That guy looks like he has a dark cloud over his head," or, "She looks like she is about ready to break out in song!"

These Daoist and Tantric Buddhist 3dFeeling-stillness-ritual-practices free us from the 3dFeeling habits we have developed through our lives.  They un-lock the absolutely normal everyday 3dFeelings which order our movements, giving us the ability to be at play with 3dFeelings.

This is what we call an adept.  This is what we call the earthly immortal "dancing with qi."  Internal martial arts  are simply not internal if they lack this type of freedom.  And it is freedom, not power.   It is potency, not a tool.  Yes, applied to fighting, it can unleash unstoppable power.  Yes, applied to healing, it seems to produce amazing results.  But to use it as a tool is to limit it.  The adept cherishes freedom, accepts fate, and leaves his/her potency unexpressed.  But even this freedom is not the Constant Dao, it is only a "name."