Daoist Conference • 2014 • Boston

I'm returning to Boulder today after a week in Boston.  I have been attending an International conference at Boston University about Daoism.  

I owe my readers a full report, but there are two obstacles.  One, I'm tired. Very.  Two, in general I'm not supposed to talk too much about papers that haven't been published yet.  

Here is the abstract of my paper:  Cracking the Code: Taijiquan as Enlightenment Theater
This paper presents three interrelated ideas using historic, experiential and visual contextualization: 1) Image mime within the Chen Style Taijiquan Form (taolu) can be understood as a form of theater presenting the story of Zhang Sanfeng becoming an immortal (xian). 2) Taijiquan as the integration of embodied theatricality with deity visualization as daily ritual and alchemy. 3) Framing violence as a transgressive path to becoming an immortal.

The paper was too long for me to deliver in the 20 minutes they allow for such things, so I danced and performed it instead.  It was a huge success.  Lots of interest and excitement, good questions too, which I knocked out of the park.  In a way it isn't fair to 'perform' a paper because it tends to be much more interesting than even the really good papers, so I apologize for that.  

The next project, as soon as I finish up the footnotes and stuff, is to perform the paper on Youtube, 20 minutes with five minutes of questions.

I also taught a class: Conditioning Emptiness: Where Martial Arts Meet Spontaneous Luminosity
The presumption of this workshop is that freedom can not be learned but the habits of freedom can be conditioned through play.  Daoyin in martial arts, theater, and hermit yogas, all posit that emptiness can be discovered and verified in the “pull” between wildness and stillness. In this workshop we will deploy daoyin as twelve animals each with five elements in continuous expression and transition. This form of Operatic Daoyin comes from the animal stage roles of southern China, it is interactive and involves lots of rolling around and movement on all fours. This workshop is open to all levels of experience, loose clothing and a sense of humor will be helpful.

Several very experienced people told me this was the funnest Daoyin/Qigong class they had ever taken.  It was a good hour and a half with 15 minutes for questions.  I had them on the ground rolling around like dogs and pigs.  I've got to video that class too.  

Mostly I just loved meeting everyone there.  This is the third conference I've been to in 12 years and this one was incredibly optimistic.  12 years ago we worried that we were dealing with the survival of a frayed and fragmented tradition, or darker, that there were only a few threads left of this fine fabric.  In Los Angels five years ago there were a few anthropologists who brought a lot of hope by explaining that they were finding people who had been Daoists all their lives and had managed to find ways to sneak around the horrors if the 20th Century.  At this conference it was evident that religious creativity is thriving in China and Daoism in general.  There is interest, and excitement, the texts survived, the impulse for theatricality survived, the rituals that didn't make it are being re-invented from the ones that did survive.  There is sharing. There is rebuilding and pilgrims have never been so rich or so free.  

I owe my readers a lot more, but for the moment, the cat that is now out of the bag is that Daoism is a living creative force that is packed with martial arts and theater and fiction and all kinds of other cool stuff.  I think there was another level of excitement too.  A lot of us who started studying Daoism 20 years ago stepped into an unknown dark realm and now suddenly it is exploding with curiosity and invention.  It is the excitement of having wandered into something that was small and is about to get much bigger--effortlessly.  

Laozi said:  Beautiful music and delicious food, cause the traveler to stop;  Words about the Dao are insipid and bland.  

What I realized at this conference is that line can be very funny if delivered with the proper vocalizations and dancing.

Teaching and Enlightenment

There are three basic approaches to teaching that match the basic approaches to enlightenment.

I use the term enlightenment loosely, because I think people ought to lighten up about it.  (That is a joke, sort of.)

These approaches to enlightenment could also be understood as the orthodox daoist framing of religious expression.  This framing has a universal quality to it because it is easily re-discoverable, not because it is an absolute truth.  It is not religion specific but refers more generally to three views of what the human relationship to nature is.  None of these three views are exclusive either, in fact there is an experientially based/tested assumption that humans inherently have access to all three.  

They are:

1) Wuwei.  A non conceptual experience of being/emptiness.  Without preference, progress, hierarchy, equality, individuality or community.  It can not be framed or limited by words, images, names, or descriptions.  

2) Perfection.  Tantric enlightenment.  Becoming a god.  Perfect body mechanics.  Superior anything.  Sudden enlightenment.  Games.  Glowing health.  Accumulating qi.  Perfect circulation.  The achievement of effortless skill and technique.

3) Subordination.  Making alliances with any form or embodiment of power.  Shamanism.  Survival strategies.  Devotion.  Discipline.  The gradual approach.  Contracts.  

__________

This formula is in many of the chapters of the Daodejing.  Laozi the author of the Daodejing, keeps coming back to the first one as a natural process of return, like water returning to the sea.  

I don't know anyone who has gotten good at martial arts without taking the third view.  But I also don't know anyone who has gotten good by exclusive fidelity to the third view.  In that sense, I understand practice as a conversation between these three views.  They have a way of refreshing each other.  

With regard to teaching children I start with the third view because it creates a container for experiencing the first view.  Children find it deeply relaxing and satisfying to be given tightly channelled directions, to be surrounded by percussive order and explosive command, to be welcomed into a safe guided challenging total environment.  That relaxation leads directly to self-respect and self-acceptance.  From that base, they then have the option of choosing the second view, self-directed, self-gratifying, self-disciplined self-improvement.

Adults present a different challenge.  My preference is to initiate adults into the first view via a year of standing still practice supplemented by hanging out time.  But everyone is different.  And more importantly everyone has a unique way of relating to me.   So it is my goal as a teacher to re-invent a kind of theatrical temple culture.  I want to offer an environment or milieu that students can enter where all three views are available.  An environment where dance, games, techniques, solo discipline, learning through doing, immediate feed back, edge experiences, identity challenges, deeply comforting personal retreat technologies, awareness expanding experiences, chaotic containers, and ordered experiments are all simultaneously available.  A space where failure is fun.  Where performance is a direct way to access the capaciousness of beauty.  A space emotionally big enough for both gentle healing and the serious experiential examination of human violence and aggression.

One of the problems I face is the culturally static model of a class and a teacher that we are all accustomed to.  For the theatrical temple model to work, individuals have to feel free to experiment and get support for changes in their entire lives.  

The hobbiest model is actually fine.  It is just that my challenge is to get students to understand that the subject we are working with is the alchemy of all their appetites: sleep, work, play, nutrition, intimacy, social life, risk taking, heroism, reclusiveness, etc. etc. etc....

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Here is my attempt at one of the Daodejing Chapters that presents the three views, Chapter 23:

To seldom speak is to follow the Dao.

A gust of wind can not last all morning,

A downpour can not last all day.

What causes these?  Heaven and Earth.

If the actions of Heaven and Earth do not last long, how much less the actions of human beings.

One who cultivates Dao, will experience Dao.

One who cultivates perfection, will experience perfection.

One who cultivates need, will experience need.  

Dao, Perfection, and need all have their own fruition.  

Trust without a basis is simply faith.

Misdirection and Sleight of Hand

I’ve been having an awful lot of fun.  I’m in the coastal mountains of Northern California clearing brush in the afternoon and using the mornings for my practice and writing.  I just got an amazon shipment of books, which I will probably review.  One of the books I got was more for entertainment but it is turning out to be thought provoking.  It is about magic. (see bottom of the post)

There is a quote in there that goes something like, a magician should be so good at misdirection that he doesn’t need sleight of hand, and he should be so good at sleight of hand that he doesn’t need misdirection.  

In the modern era, there are two basic types of magician.  The ones who tell you there is a supernatural force at work.  And the ones who tell you it is a trick.  

Within the worldview of modernity, supernatural forces do not exist, so a person claiming them is just seen as a joker.  However, most people have a hint of superstition in their worldview and many people have a large heap of it.  Others have a romantic desire to believe in the supernatural and so oscillate between world views as a harmless diversion.  

Even those who know it is a trick, enjoy being fooled.  And that is why the other type of magician has become so popular.  If I tell you I’m going to show you a trick and I even tell you how it is done, and yet, you still can’t either see it, or comprehend it, you are left with a feeling of awe.  

Daoism both as internal and external alchemy and as ritual has long been associated with magic.  Within a worldview where supernatural forces are real, misdirection and sleight of hand often play a role in social harmony.  This brings to mind a talisman I read about for attracting women.  The Daoist gave the young man a secret talisman to put inside his clothes and explained that the power of the talisman would be activated by the young man’s own emptiness (xu) and non-action (wuwei).  The reality is that most young men find it difficult to attract young women for two simple reasons; firstly, they actually are attracting young woman but they don’t notice because they are too excited, and secondly, because they are too aggressive and scare young women away.  Thus, the Daoist uses sleight of hand in his explanation, and misdirection in the form of the talisman.  All’s well that ends well.

A great ritualist can do this for a whole family after a tragic death, or for a whole community, or even a nation.  I’m not trying to say that all religion is misdirection and sleight of hand, I’m just saying that we can use this lens to examine a wide range of human culture.  

Of course misdirection and sleight of hand are the tools of pickpockets and politicians too.

I do not gamble at all.  The reason is simple.  Guilt.  When I was about 13 me and a friend set up mirrors around a room each covered with a picture or a calendar with a piece of fishing line attached for the purpose of moving the picture aside leading to a central control on the wall and reachable from under the table.  We then invited my friends older bother and his brother’s friends to play poker with us.  It was such a stupid trick and it worked so well.  We hog whipped them.  We cleaned them out.  And we didn’t get caught. They were rednecks, so had they caught us, they would surely have beaten us up and taken our money.  I don’t gamble because I know how easy it is to cheat, I still feel guilty about how easy it is to cheat.

And that friend actually died in a fist fight.

The magic in Daoism and medicine is mostly used to create tangible benefits for the person seeking help.  When someone is cured of a chronic illness by being tricked into changing their diet and lifestyle, the results are still tangible!  They are still good.  Okay, we of the Modern world view would prefer that the Daoist or Doctor explain why we need to change our diet and lifestyle in bio-medical terms, we want them to level with us, but the simple reality is some of us only change our behavior when we are tricked into it.  Others can only see the reality after they have been tricked, and still others, actually prefer being tricked!  Sometimes doctors even trick themselves!

Still, Modernity stigmatizes magical claims of supernatural powers as immoral to the degree that people believe in them.  I can claim magical powers all day but it isn’t until someone believes me that I have crossed that line leading into the evils of the o’cult. 

Theater is all illusion.  A person on stage is pretending to be someone they are not.  Sleight of hand and misdirection are the tools of the actor too.  What if the audience believes?  What if, as seems to be true with really good horror, people can’t seem to stop themselves from believing.  I hear famous actors are often shocked by how average people think they know them because they’ve watched them play a character on stage.  People very easily confuse certain aspects of acting and theater with reality.  

When someone uses the tools of acting outside the liminal space known as the theater, we often call that fraud.  There are other words for it, impersonation, misrepresentation, identity theft, a con artist.  

Martial arts as stage combat is best when the fighting looks so real we believe it.  When the pain and the momentum are visceral.  That happens when the sleight of hand is so good you don’t need the misdirection, and when the misdirection is so good you don’t need the sleight of hand.

This brings us to a discussing we had at George Xu’s Summer Camp.  There is a woman on Youtube who can throw off attackers without even touching them.  This is called kongjin or empty force and we have talked about it before on this blog and no doubt most readers have seen these videos on Youtube already (I would link to one but I don’t have a great internet connection so just search those terms and you will see a bunch of it.)  This particular woman was the source of outrage both at camp and in the community of martial artists in Beijing who had expelled her from the national Tai Chi association.  She was getting some grief from the government too.  Now this woman was in her 60’s and she could actually fight, but no one was suggesting she needed to prove herself by entering a Mixed Martial Arts competition.  They were just mad because she was saying that it was her supernatural qi powers which were responsible for her martial prowess.  Yet, she was actually fooling people.  Mainly students and audience members, but if someone got too close she would actually hit them too.  The thing is, students want this power, they are studying with her hoping to figure it out.  And they believe they are being thrown by her incredible qi.

Now I’m a Modern man.  I don’t believe in supernatural powers.  So I look at this empty force woman and I think, where is the misdirection happening and what is the sleight of hand doing?  I’m not bothered by this kind of thing at all.  The antidote is Modernity, not freaking out, not ridicule.  What are all these people afraid of?

Oh. I think I know.

There really isn’t that much difference between magicians who claim supernatural powers and the ones who say, “It’s a trick!”  

And what of the martial artists who say, “it’s real in every way.”  Are we supposed to ignore their misdirections and sleights of hand?  

Is there really all that much difference between a martial artist who claims she is doing real martial arts but is in fact using a trick, and a martial artist who admits to using a trick and yet claims his martial arts are real?

Well, yes, there is a difference actually.  One is in effect demonstrating that her misdirection is so good she doesn’t need sleight of hand, and the other is demonstrating that his sleight of hand is so good he doesn’t need misdirection.

What I’m about to describe didn’t actually happen in the language I’m describing it.  The following few paragraphs is me putting George Xu’s lessons through the filter of misdirection and sleight of hand.  It is an illusion.

George Xu is one of those magicians who will show you exactly what he is doing. He shows just the misdirection and gets you to work on just that, explaining that if the misdirection part of your trick is really good you barely need the other part.  We call this part emptying. If you touch me, you should not be able to sense any intent.  Your sense of touch should go right thru to the ground without gathering any information.  He’ll spend hours trying to explain how it works, testing you, letting you test him.  Still, misdirection at this level is extraordinary mastery.

And George will show you the sleight of hand too.  As fast, and with as much force as you want.  And then as slowly and as obviously as you want, as many times as you want to see it or feel it.  He puts it right in your face.  In your hands.  Then he explains that what we call internal is actually a misdirection, that the real effect is happening outside the body.  At least it feels that way.  

And yet, test him, test yourself, over and over, it still doesn’t work for you.  It’s a trick and nobody is getting it.

He says if we get it he will be very happy, but he will have moved on to a more difficult trick by then.

I had two break throughs at the Camp.  

One was when I asked him if he could do the trick with his eyes closed.  No, he said, with my eyes closed I have to rely entirely on sleight of hand.  My sleight of hand has to be perfect, like this feel (ow, that hurt!), the trick will look and feel differently when it is pure sleight of hand.  

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This form of analysis is very useful for martial arts in general.  Forms are misdirection.  Power and usage are sleight of hand.  Apparent effort is misdirection, position is sleight of hand.  Social skills, awareness of human nature, and how to use one’s environment are all misdirection; power, targeting, structure, and techniques are all sleight of hand.  Which leads to this fun little maxim: You should be so good at misdirection that you never need to be in a fight; and you should be so good at sleight of hand that you never need to avoid one.  

Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions

Dantian Disease

One of the most interesting discussions from Internal Martial Arts Summer Camp was about Dantian* Disease.  Now, at first blush one is likely to surmise this is a euphemism for being fat.  But actually it was about the specific types of work related injuries internal martial artists get.  

Some weird image from the internet demonstrating a bulging dantianFirst we need to put aside the over eating issue.  Any athlete who trains very hard when they are young is going to consume large amounts of food.  Most athletes who fail to improve the efficiency of their movement before age 30, get too injured to continue.  An athlete who succeeds at improving the efficiency of his movement, must significantly reduce the amount of food he eats by the age of 35 or he will begin gaining a lot of weight.  While reducing food intake is certainly an act of will, it does not require an act of will power.  As movement becomes more efficient, appetite naturally diminishes.  It is quite simply the result of paying attention.

We are also not discussing body type here.  All the various body types have intrinsic beauty.

As a person develops internal power (neijin), several changes take place in the body.  First of all, the legs do more of the work and the arms do less.  Secondly the muscles that run up and down the back closest to the spine become stronger.  These muscles are balanced by the iliopsoas muscles which travel in front of the pelvis from the mid- and lower back to the insides of the legs. The softer, and more relaxed one is in the upper body the more efficiently, and effectively internal power is expressed through these muscles and other adjacent muscles as well.  

The problem arises because the particular quality of muscle that develops is very dense, it becomes progressively more tendon like.  The thicker and denser a tendon is, the more elastic power it stores.  Like a strong bow that is very difficult to draw, once it is fully drawn it has immense shooting power.  His type of muscle must be lengthened everyday otherwise it will put pressure on the lower back.

Of course the lower back can actually handle an enormous amount of pressure.  But over long periods of time, or after some minor injury temporarily makes whole body lengthening difficult, the spinal discs can become compressed.  This compression causes the belly, casually referred to as “the lower dantian,” to stick out!

Compression almost always produces some pain, but we have wildly different sensitivities to pain, as well as mechanisms for coping with it.  Most people can ignore minor pain for years on end with out any trouble at all.  Especially in a case like this where there can be substantial benefits in the way of power.

So, how does one fix this problem? this internal occupational hazard? How does one reduce a bulging dantian?  By simply and completely conforming to Daoist precepts; cultivate weakness and emptiness. 

*Note: The term dantian, is literally cinnabar field.  It refers simultaneously to a long list of concepts.  In external alchemy (early chemistry), the composite substance cinnabar was supposed to be refined into mercury and then into gold and other rare elements.  In internal alchemy, mixed qi and jing are distilled and then refined into shen (spirit?) which is then refined into xu (emptiness).  The term could metaphorically refer simply to a place where change takes place.  Tian by itself simply means a field, but the pairing of cinnabar with a field implies a large outdoor space where ritual transformation or rectification takes place.  In martial arts the dantian most often refers to the lower third of the torso simultaneously as a location and a function of centralized organization or coordination for the storing and releasing of force.  There are other areas occasionally referred to as dantians, for instance the head is sometimes called the upper dantian in reference to its role in inner alchemy.  Three dantians an upper lower and middle is also conventional, and some would even venture that the whole body is a dantian.

Failing at the Beginning and the End

International living treasure, Keith Johnstone.  

If you haven't read his book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre  ...well, you're missing out on one of the best books ever written.  But then maybe I'm biased.  I'm not a freaking robot, automaton, empty shirt!  Then again, how would I know if I was one?  

When I finally got Sgt. Rory Miller to read Johnstone, he wrote back to me, "Martial arts are to fighting as acting is to improvisation."

There is a little bit of new material in these videos, stuff that isn't in Impro.  I only know that because I've read the book countless times.  One thing that is new, is that he defines trance simply as the absence of a little voice in the back of our heads analyzing, strategizing, calculating and attempting to steer our actions.  

Having had a bit of time on my trip to read some Buddhist texts with my wife, I realized that I reached enlightenment. My wife says that regardless of this achievement, I'm still responsible for washing the dishes. Unfortunately, being an unlicensed immortal, there has been no one around to give me a certificate of completion.  Buddhists and Daoists alike, use various description to describe the same experience.  One calls it a view, another calls it a base, and another calls it a pervasive awareness, complete emptiness, a limitless release of the spatial mind.  The Zen tradition, Dzogchen (Tibetan Buddhism), Zuowang (Daoism), all refer to transcending duality via a non-conceptual method.  

I hear it reported that some people have trouble getting non-conceptual methods to work, so they try other stuff.  It is really out of all this other stuff that someone came up with the term 'enlightened,' because if you just do the non-conceptual thing, well...it doesn't lead to that kind of naming.

If I were to get up on a stage and start explicitly teaching non-conceptuality, I would use the stage itself as my metaphor.  The experience is like an empty stage.  You can put anything on it.  It doesn't change the stage or make it go away.  You can easily be so involved in what is on the stage that you forget there is a stage there.

So I would hazard that everything on the stage is a sort of trance.  I haven't squared this with Keith Johnstone's explanation.  But I'm working on it.

Something he says in the 6th video in this series is that movement experts as they age can get really grumpy and crotchety in general and tend to have a hard time improvising.  This is because their bodies know what to do.  That's a bit close to home.

I mean, I'm tapped into the flow and all, but the process of teaching what is right, what is correct movement-wise, is a double edged spear.  It is imperative for us as teachers that we let go of knowing.  It is imperative that we keep returning to 'beginner's body;' to uncoordinated, clumsy, wild and empty.

As a student, I have mostly held improvisation as the fruition of practice.  I studied with Johnstone when I was 15 and the damage was permanent.  

It is dreadfully important for teachers to create situations where they themselves fail. Otherwise we condition ourselves to believe we are correct.  If we are conditioned to a belief, we will be insulated from reality.  We have to keep creating new tests.  And if we want to condition our students to be free fighters, then they also need to experience us, their teachers, failing miserably.  Did you know that if coffee makes you sleepy, it is diagnostic for ADHD?

Probably not great business advice huh?  Still, I'm going to get yinyang t-shirts printed that say 'Sometimes I'm a Loser,' and make a go of it.  I heard that the Italians named weak coffee Americano, because they wanted to make fun of us weak Americans.  Like taking on the insult Yankee, which meant one who masturbates a lot, I think we as teachers can try to find some actual humility.  Like the stage, it's always there, it's always available...

There is an imperative for us to figure out how to put improvisation at the very beginning and keep it at the center of martial arts training at every level.  

_________________

Johnstone says we are a culture that fears trance.  Perhaps we could say, wherever modernity arises trance goes into hiding.  When we talk about the art of improvisational movement we are talking about going into different types of trance.  There are many, many way to do this, setting a rhythm, catching a feeling, imagining a scene.  

Isn't it interesting that there is a parallel between Johnstone talking about the central challenge of knowing what the person we are on stage with wants, and the Taijiquan classics (Sunzi too) talking about knowing your adversary better than she knows herself?  

Martial Arts forms and stances are really like scripts that we extemporize off of, we use them to spin off into chaos and then we fight our way back to them.   In a pure improvisation we wouldn't know them, we might not even remember them.  

This body forgetting is a great challenge.  Are tension and remembering one and the same?

It's Tuesday, What Religion Are You?

Travel Update: I’m in a cafe in Bozeman Montana.  There are more older people here than I expected, having been told in Boulder that Boulder, Bozeman and Bend are the three towns in America with good food and lots of very physically active people in their twenties.  After a few beers at a bar called Bacchus, I learned that the older people leave as soon as the summer is over.  Rents here are very cheap, so it is full of young people who went to college in order to get into debt.  The slacker ethic is strong, in the sense that all the people I have met work odd jobs with low pay so they have tons of time to ski, climb, mountain bike, sit in hot springs and party.  I think some guys we crossed after leaving the bar last night were trying to see if I would fight them, “Hey, look at his Captain America t-shirt, is he going to kick all of our asses?”  Sarah wisely retorted, “Only if you want him too.”  But that was the end of it.  Martial arts classes here are dirt cheap, $7 for a drop in, $40 for a month.  It is a beautiful town, the houses all have new paint jobs and maintained gardens.  Lot’s of dogs, good food, whiskey and wilderness.  I want to find people who have the time to dedicate to learning martial arts for hours everyday.  This might be the place.  But I also want some intellectual stimulation and a jumping off place for a Daoist inspired milieu to arise.  It would be nice to see a few people with thick glasses carrying around doorstop sized books.  Ah, what I would sacrifice for a land full of 20 year old librarians with an insatiable appetite for dancing and fighting.  

_____________

In the historic Chinese past, the question “what religion are you?” was not a question about ones beliefs.  It was likely to be phrased more like this, “to whom do you make sacrifice?”  Or, “what rituals are you committed to performing?”

Statements about origins of Martial Arts should perhaps begin the question, “why don’t we know the exact origins of Chinese martial arts?”  “What forces in society have made the past difficult to see? especially in a culture like China has recorded so much about the past and has so many rituals designed to create common dreams and common memories?”

It seems that historically there were many systems of Martial Arts named after people.  To the extent that these people or historic figures are too distantly in the past to have direct lineages or historic connections to present day arts, I think it is safe to posit that they were characters of the theater.  After all, that was how the vast majority  of people learned about history.  They learned it from watching history plays, usually called wu (martial) plays.

Let me pose it another way.  From what source could a man in 17th Century China have gotten an inkling about how a man from the 15th Century moved, other than through watching him in a historical performance or ritual?

The actors would have made sacrifice to specific deities like this one described by Daoist priest Jave Wu (hat tip to Julianne Zhou).  This is an example of the integration of theater and Daoism in the Hokkien speaking Southern parts of China, but also remember that the most prominent deity that actors made sacrifice to was one of the Eight Immortals, the theatrical mythic founders of Quan Zhen (Complete Reality) Daoism! Actors were obligated to sacrifice to Immortal Cao Guojiu

In the previous post I discussed martial arts as a social institutions for the transmission of values.  In the case of ritual "Chinese Opera" theater, we have values being transmitted through both fictional storytelling and the teaching of history on the stage, as well as the direct representation of gods, and ancestors.  In some contexts the actual gods and ancestors were channelled directly onto the stage through the actors as empty vessels.

Amateur martial theater arts embodying both theatrical and real fighting skills, and combining emotional, intellectual, historical and physical elements, may be the most comprehensive institution created for the transmission of cultural values anywhere.  I haven’t compiled a list, but the other top contenders have their origins in Africa and Polynesia.  In Europe the closest thing I can come up with is Italian Folk dance used as training for knife fighting.  

To properly follow this line of reasoning we should ask the question, what constituted an amateur martial artist?  Simply, anyone who wasn’t born into or adopted into an actor family.  I suspect that many people who performed forms (taolu) at public markets as a way to sell medicines would be considered amateur, as would anyone in the military who practiced forms, and anyone considered a local or family expert.  Professional ritual theater was the model for a vast array of martial arts training as a method for transmitting values within families, villages, regions, and language groups.

Significant parts of the Chinese theater tradition were improvisational, but since the 20th Century trend has been away from this sort of freedom of expression, and because actor training was a form of ritual transmission without any written manuals, the extent of improvisation is hard to prove.  But I will hazard that-- where there is improvisation, there is a rebellious spirit.  (see Improvisation in A Ritual Context : The Music of Cantonese Opera, By Shouren Chen)

What were the values being transmitted to a kid learning Monkey Kungfu?  Or other comic roles?  There are so many martial heros and anti-heros in the theater traditions!  The walls of temples in Taiwan are covered in them literally floor to ceiling!  It is as if value systems were modular!  Pick a role, learn that body art (shenfa), and then be it, model it, profess it.  

Avrom Boretz deserves credit for much of this idea.  He explores the transmission of prowess and other martial values through martial rituals in his book Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts, and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society .

 Again, if you follow this logic, we have to explain what happened to the martial arts in the early part of the 20th Century that obscured these origins even while they were being preserved in a new form in Hong Kong action film.

Andrew Morris, in Marrow of the Nation explains how martial arts were used to promote nationalism (it used to be called fascism) and to some extent how the arts were changed by that process.   Karate in Japan and Taekwondo in Korea also need to be understood in this context.

If we think about martial arts not just as the transmission of values and character and skills, but as the transmission of specific character types we get some shocking results.  The character types promoted by the Chinese Nationalists are mostly angry generals and cruel judges, along with some self-sacrificing young passionate heros.  That's it.  The survival of the mystical Tai Chi Daoist character role, the world transcending Buddhist monk character role, and Sun Wukong the Monkey King role, are testaments to the strength and pervasiveness of these roles as institutions for the transmission of cultural values!  They survived dispite the movement to suppress them.  (Note: more serious work needs to be done on female and gender bender roles in the history of martial arts! I still have too many unanswered questions to discuss them here.)

Since the revolution the Chinese government has been promoting “Wushu,” a from of competitive martial dance largely devoid of martial skill or character training.  Serious martial artists have been laughing at Wushu for 60 years and yet the Communist Party is still trying to get it into the Olympics.  If seen as a character type Wushu is like a lingering ghost possessed by conflicting emotions, too weak to resolve itself through a complete death!

Karate in Imperialist Nationalist Fascist Japan took on a single character type, that of a disciplined angry kamikaze!   Okay, maybe that is too harsh.  But clearly it is a character type of limited theatrical depth.  It has some of the rigid qualities of a death mask. Nationalist Korea developed Taekwondo mostly from karate and kept the same character type.  I suspect there was a reformation process after the war which changed elements of Karate.  Certainly the spread of Karate in countries all over the world has had profound effects on the values being transmitted through this particular body art.  The Karate character has proven very dynamic.  But I think that if an understanding of its origins were more widespread we would see an explosion of new styles, and cooperation between styles.  We would see an opening to character types outside the box!  Comic, crazy, loving, tricky, motherly, vixen, Mormon, etc, etc... Stoner Karate anyone?

One of the reasons I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that I think Buffy was the spontaneous arising of a new American martial arts character role.  Did you know that I teach Buffy Style Kungfu?

Are Martial Arts Taoist?

One of the reasons I started this blog was to answer the question, how can a martial art be Taoist?  Over the six years I’ve been writing I’ve attempted to answer that question. The question actually comes in many different forms.  For instance: Are some martial arts part of Taoism?  How did martial arts influence Taoism? Is there a reason why a Taoist can not practice martial arts?  Are there specific Taoist practices which are embedded in the martial arts?

In this post I will attempt to offer a grand summary of the issue.

First off, let us look at Daoism* on a 3D grid.  John Lagerwey went to Taiwan in the early 1970’s where he became a Daoist priest and wrote a book called, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History, in it he describes Daoist Orthodoxy as a continuity of “view” passing back in time for 2000 years and permeating music, movement, mythology, individual conduct, life, death and social institutions.  At the same time, Michael Saso, and Kristofer Schipper  did the same thing.  They each went to different communities in Taiwan and became Daoist priests and they each wrote books making the same point about Orthodoxy and continuity.  Except the content of those books is actually quite different.  The expression of that “view” in each community was profoundly unique.  In one community the main job of Daoist priests is to perform funerals, and in another community Daoist priests performed many different rituals but were forbidden to perform funerals.  Was Orthodoxy an illusion?

John Lagerwey went on to publish in Chinese, a thirty volume encyclopedic record of the incredible variety of Orthodox Daoist traditions concentrated exclusively among the Hakka ethnic group in Northern Taiwan.  In his most recent book in English, China: A Religious State, “Daoism” is conspicuously left out of the title.  That is because it puts Daoism in a historic context where it played many different roles over a long period of time within a much larger culture of state ritual.  And then in the second half of the book he looks at the role of Daoism in local ritual culture as an ethnologist and finds enormous diversity of expression.  This diversity had elements of continuity like the use of talisman or the Daodejing, but single defining signifiers are almost meaningless because talisman and the Daodejing are not exclusive to Daoism.

So that is the first axis of our 3D grid, call it infinite orthodox diversity.  

Many books and articles on Daoism start out by explaining that the English term “Daoism” doesn’t actually exist in Chinese, that there are three or more terms which are conflated:  Daoshi (official of the Dao), Daojiao (religion of the dao), and Daoren (a person of the Dao).  But these terms are themselves quite mushy.  Daoshi most often means “priest” but it can mean “monk” or “hermit” and in some regions it is more likely to be understood as “traveling magician.”  Daojiao, is mainly used to distinguish other religions like Buddhism, state ritual, or Islam--it seems to have developed as a default category rather than a self-identifier.

Daoren has come to mean a person who tries to live a life consistent with the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, which, because of those book’s centrality in Chinese culture have remained readable and in print for 2300 years.  But Daoren can be used more generally to mean an artist or artisan whose work is modeled on the natural world.  Or even someone who appears to accomplish tasks in an effortless way.  

So that is the next axis of our 3D grid, the infinite influence of the Laozi and Zhuangzi spreading out into every aspect of “normal” peoples lives.  We’ll call it the Daoren axis.

The third axis of our grid is equally difficult to pin down, it concerns the identity of the practitioner.  Because of things like political intrigue and ethnic conflict, at various points in history, people practicing Daoism suddenly decided to start calling what they do Buddhism.  And likewise various sorts of shaman, trance-mediums or Buddhists decided to call themselves Daoists.  

The same goes for magicians, hermits, poets, artists, performers, and urban eccentrics, sometimes they decided to call themselves Daoist when they really weren’t, and other times they decided to hide the fact that they were Daoist by calling themselves something else.  So this category is all the different ways one can be a Daoist, including the better known categories of priests, hermits, and monastics, but also including poets (the most famous poet in Chinese history Li Po, was a Daoist initiate), performers and the super unique like urban-hermit-insect-eating-exorcists.    

As you can see, Daoist 3D space is a little bent.  With one end of the Daoren axis meeting up with the identity of practitioner axis.  And just to show how outside the box one needs to be to even have this discussion, our 3D grid actually has a 4th axis!  A fourth dimension we will call the Methods axis.

At one time I would have simply defined methods as either orthodox or unorthodox, with the orthodox methods being zouwang (sitting and forgetting), jindan (the elixir practice), ritual/liturgy, dream practice, and daoyin (exploring the outer limits of movement and stillness); with the unorthodox encompassing all other methods. But now I’m more likely to avoid the orthodox category and think in terms of the transmission or discovery of daoist “view.”  I want to avoid sounding cryptic so let me offer some examples.  Someone who practices Buddhist meditation can discover the kinesthetic experience of stillness being infinitely and constantly available everywhere.  A person practicing the zouwang method of sitting could just as likely not have that experience.  The transmission of the experience from teacher to student also does not guarantee that the student has the experience.  Even the experience itself does not guarantee that it will be valued or cultivated in different contexts.  

So this 4th axis is made up of any method which attempts to transmit or accidentally transmits daoist “view.”  This axis is also infinite and simply bends down as the ‘view’ within the method becomes more defuse.  Take for example this website explaining daoist talisman.  Go ahead and read about the talisman which attracts beautiful women to you.  It transmits Daoist “view” in a sneaky way.  While most young men want to have the power to attract women to them, this talisman works in the opposite way, it gives the power to the women to see you as attractive.  All you have to do is wear the talisman and wait.  It doesn’t require any male assertive action.  You don’t even have to believe in it!  If you see a beautiful woman you can just stop and see if it works.  No crude one liners, no posturing, you don’t need to offer to buy her a drink, nothing.  Just wait and see what happens!  This talisman tricks guys into not doing!  Also known as wuwei or non-aggression, the most central of all daoist precepts.  

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Alright, now that we have a 3D grid for Daoism, let's make a grid for martial arts. On the first axis we have all the possible reasons and ways someone might optimize training the skill of fighting.  This axis includes dueling, banditry, militia, assistants of the courts (police, bailiff, guard etc..), body guard, crop guarding, home defense, child self-defense, rebellion, military weapons, drilling with gong and drum, competitions, merchant escort services, etc... 

The second axis of the martial arts grid is all the ways we can optimize training for performance, display and ritual.  Think everything from staged fights, to martial opera, to exorcism, to games, to militia displays, to self-mortification performances, to shows put on for the gods, to trance possession by fighting gods.

The third axis of the martial arts grid is self-cultivation.  This includes all types of personal ritual, the most common being health, fitness and prowess.  But it also includes practices for the purpose of instilling virtue, naturalness, kindness, or any of the darker types of attributes like cruelty, invincibility, or to see the future.  This particular axis can easily be applied directly to daoism because it can incorporate daoists methods or daoist precepts.  For example here are the Xiang’er Daoist precepts from the 200 CE:

Lack falseness or pretense (be honest)

Cultivate weakness and flexibility

Practice being like the feminine

Do not seek fame

Participate in meritorious actions

Cultivate clarity and stillness

Cultivate emptiness and desirelessness

Practice stopping when a thing is complete

Discover wuwei, yield to others

Any activity, including martial arts, can be practiced to express or nurture one or all of these precepts.  Would that make a martial art daoist?  Hold on, you don’t need to answer that question, we’ll get to it in a minute.  But consider here that if following these precepts were the only measure of whether or not a martial artist is Daoist, then not many martial artist would fit the bill.  

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So now we have a 4 dimensional grid encompassing Daoism, and a 3 dimensional grid encompassing martial arts.  All we have to do is put them together and see what lights up!  Wherever there is an overlap we have a magical confluence of Daoism and Martial Arts!  

We can also look at the spots that don’t light up, like Daoist priests that have specifically taken a precept to never practice martial arts.  Or women who read the Daodejing and like to knit.  Or hermits who never leave their cave. Oh, but we have a problem there.  See there are hermit practices of internal ritual alchemy that involve kinesthetically visualizing demon troops doing battle, or martial deities dancing with a sword.  

See the academic question we posed, “Is a given martial art Daoist?” is tied up in answering questions of authenticity and authority.  So take note if you are academically inclined, I have just answered all the questions about authenticity and authority for the general case of the question.  It is one gigantic infinite multi-dimensional light show.  Now the question remains, how do we deal with authenticity and authority in any individual or particular case?

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My own experience is that the apophatic kinesthetic revelations of practicing daoyin are totally integrated into my martial arts practice, both internal (Tai Chi, xinyi, bagua) and external (Northern Shaolin, Lanshou).  Then again, integration is the name of the game.  Jindan, the differentiation of jing, qi and shen in stillness is practiced inside of zouwang, sitting and forgetting, and daoyin.  The words of the Daodejing are the source of Daoist precepts, years of chanting them has embedded them in my movement and my dreams.  It is as if the sacred texts of Daoism are written on my bones.  

The ritual practice of visualizing a deity and his attributes before me, and then floating him up and around and then inside of me, and then moving him to a specific location in my body and then inviting him into action while leaving emptiness behind--this practice is to me the same as practicing taijiquan or baguazhang or xinyiquan.  The visualization part of the method itself is not essential, but the changes in perception are how the internal martial arts function.  There is an order of action.  A procession of jing, qi and shen.  

Even the external arts, when practiced as empty forms, are identical to the effortless intrinsic tonifying structural flow of daoyin.

This is true whether the art is "identified" as a Muslim art, like Liuhe Xinyiquan, or a Buddhist art, like Shaolin Quan. 

Another way one could ask the question is, can martial arts have daoist fruition?  Does practice result in spontaneity (ziran)? effortlessness? healing? a return to baby-like simplicity? potency? awareness? 

Lastly, as a teacher looking at what I teach, if I am encouraging students to hold a specific type of intent or intention then I am teaching trance, not wuwei.  Likewise, if I am teaching students to assert themselves or improve themselves, then I am teaching pretense; not things as they actually are, not the discovery of constant virtue (daode). 

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*Note: I inelegantly use Taoism in the title and in the first paragraph to be searchable on Google and then I use Daoism in the rest of the article to be consistent with contemporary scholarly standards.  

Invest in Loss

I've written about this topic before, Not Your Grandmother’s Tai Chi and here too.  And I recommend you go over to the Yang Family Tai Chi forum and read what the expert translators say "Invest in Loss" means.

Here is the question:  

I am told of a quote from Cheng Man-ching, "Moreover, a beginner cannot possibly avoid losing and defeat, so if you fear defeat you may as well not even begin. If you want to study, begin by investing in loss. An investment in loss eliminates any greed for superficial advantages... Concentrating your ch'i to become soft is the only proper method to invest in loss." translation by Mark Hennessy.

"Invest in loss" is an expression which has become very widespread as a part of any English language explanation of tai chi push-hands.  As Louis Swaim explains in the link above, it is actually two characters, eat and loss (chi kui).  And that any fluent Chinese speaker would hear it as closely related to the ubiquitous phrase, eat bitter (chi ku).  

The problem is to make it apply to tai chi practice.  As I said in my first link above, I believe the phrase implies willingly losing as a method of learning better ways of moving and fighting.

For example, take a better position by moving your foot, without letting your opponent know that is what you are doing.  Use your mind in tricky ways.  Plan, not to win but to cheat.  

I also like thinking that Cheng Man-Ching knew he was in New York City and knew what a bear market strategy was.  He was aware that he was talking to Americans and liked a translation that had the term 'invest' in it.  Invest in loss sounds like a short sale on the stock options market.  Why not make money while you're losing?  Americans will understand that.

But I also had the great fortune to read Paul A. Cohen's book Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China , which explains the origin of "eat bitter."  The premise of the book is that the Goujian story is as well known to all Chinese as Cinderella is to Americans.  And yet, most foreigners who become fluent in Chinese never have an opportunity to learn the story or to contemplate it's meaning.  The expression "eat bitter" is often explained as a rough equivalent of "pay your dues," or Muhammad Ali's "Don't quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion" or "misery has its merits."  Except that it is often explained that Chinese people kind of expect to suffer and don't necessarily expect a reward later on, although they may hope for one.  I have often heard that in the context of learning, "eating bitter" is a byproduct of dedication and subordination to a worthy teacher.  

But Paul Cohen turns all that on its head because the story of Goujian is very straight forward.  He was conquered and he totally accepted the most humiliating subordination for years before getting his kingdom back by trickery.  Then he secretly plotted a strategy of total revenge over 20 years.  The way he kept himself focussed on the task of revenge was by wearing furs in summer and going bare chested in winter, and by hanging an extremely bitter gallbladder from his doorway which he would lick every time he walked under it.  So eating bitter, or eating loss, means to accept defeat publicly while secretly planning totally revenge.  

That fits very nicely with my understanding of "invest in loss."  Let your opponent think he won, but position yourself to break his legs.  

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As an aside, I am very sympathetic to those who wish to see push-hands as a way to transmit non-aggression or even non-intention, giving up control and letting go of self-assertion.  But I think the "game of push-hands" is at best a tool, if people are using it to improve skill or attain attributes they are likely to charge right past such open ended forms of daoist fruition.  The dao of wuwei has no method, no requirements and no form.

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Irony Alert!  After having written the above text, I spent about two hours editing it and added another section.  The stuff I said was totally awesome, like the best writing I’ve ever done, and it was full of secrets too.  And then I hit the cancel button by mistake...I guess that’s what happens when you title a post “invest in loss.”  

I’ll just tag a few more lines on here but I just don’t have the time to re-do it.

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As another aside, (and I've written about this a bit in the first link up top)  Dominance is in our genetic code.  A two week old goat has good rooting and uprooting skills because they use those skills to establish social dominance.  We are the same except we also establish dominance verbally, spatially, with money, with knowledge, with mates, etc....  So when people set out to learn martial arts they naturally frame it as a dominance exercise.  Complicating things, self-defense is not about dominance, but violence professionals like prison guards, bouncers, and police are often required by their job to assert dominance so a lot of dominance training gets totally mixed up with the larger subject of martial arts.  

Push hands can be a fun dominance and submission game.  I concede that.  It is dominance by either superior skill, sensitivity or mysterious qi cultivation. The Cheng Man-Ching school, the school most responsible for popularizing the expression "Invest in Loss," tends to teach push hands as a dominance game.  They are often so hell bent on not losing that they collapse their chests in a desperate effort to evade.  This is a tragedy because with the loss of upright posture there is a profound loss of fruition.  

When people practice push hands with perfect upright they completely discard pushing!  From there effortlessness and stillness are revealed.  Non-aggression, wuwei, our true nature (de), all manifest spontaneously. 

Identity and Cosmology

From about the age of two, we start carrying things around.  These are our things.  These things are somewhat like the 150 or so people we recognize as our group, and the much smaller bunch of people we call family and friends.  Belonging is not the same thing as owning, but it takes up space in our body memory in a similar way.  We carry these identity objects around with us.  I know what books I have on my shelf even when I’m a thousand miles away.  When I go backpacking I know that I’m carrying 42 things and I know exactly where each of them is.  

This stuff we carry around is the stuff of our identity.  Likewise we learn ways of walking that match up with the groups we belong to.  We learn ways of holding our head that communicate who we are and our status within these groups.  Identity changes when it is confronted by reality.  Sometimes it changes fluidly, sometimes it is very resistant to change.

Our place in a family seems stable, and may in fact be stable for a very long time, but it is what it is because we agree that it is.  It can be disturbed.  Certainly the things we own can come and go, some things much more easily than others.

Identity floats on the edge of the unconscious.

Cosmology is similar to identity.  In its simplest form it is just the world around us.  In reality we only see a very small field of our vision in focus, we only feel contact on our skin, but our mind imagines a much bigger field in focus and sensory awareness all of the time.  The feeling of the world around us is a very strong feeling.  

I’m sitting in a cafe right now looking out the window, but I have a strong feeling sense of where the espresso machine is behind me, also where the bathroom door is and how many tables are in the corner.  Now it is entirely possible that someone just moved the tables (I’m wearing ear plugs) or stole the espresso machine, and if I were to turn around right now and see those things gone it would be a shock (Don’t worry, I just checked and they are all still there.)  This kind of cosmological presence is entirely in my mind, yet it is somehow stored in my body.  I can very clearly imagine the feeling in my body of walking up the carpeted stairs in the three story house I grew up in, I can even remember the feeling of wrestling on and rolling down those stairs.  If I were to go visit that house and find that it had been torn down I would still have these feelings.  

The sun and the moon both move “across” the sky.  Our feeling of the sky is the beginnings of cosmological awareness.  The word “across” is in fact a pretty vague concept, but we all know what it means.  That’s cosmology.  At some point we learn or we envision that the sun and the moon go around the earth.  And then we learn that the earth is actually spinning and that while it is spinning around itself it is also spinning around the sun, and that the sun is spinning around the universe and that the universe is expanding.  

Cosmology also floats on the edge of the unconscious.

Identity and cosmology often overlap.  For instance, part of what we think we know about muscles is cosmology, part of it is identity.  Part of the concept “muscles” is found in how our body feels, part of it is the way we feel emotionally about our bodies, and part of it is how we understand muscles to function in relationship to movement.  Each of these experiences has a kind of built on top of, interwoven layered quality.  It is part identity, and part cosmology.  We pick up part of this “muscles” concept and carry it around as an aspect of identity, it has changed a few times since we first picked it up at around age four.  Our cosmological notion of muscle functionality has also been changing with the accumulation of knowledge and experience.  

Identity and cosmology are both vulnerable to reality.  They can be altered, torn down, shocked, disturbed, wrangled, bolstered, tested, and abandoned.  

I bring all this to my reader’s attention because I want to say something about the roles of teacher and student.  

In the professional dance world, a complement teachers would bandy about fairly regularly was, “I like the way you take correction.”  This complement signified that the dance student was receptive to changes.  Perhaps it also signified a degree of fluidity in identity and cosmology.

My job as a martial arts teacher is to identify the student’s problem, and then to state, demonstrate, or show him or her what is right and what is wrong.  9 times out of 10 this will challenge the identity of the student to some degree.

The student’s job in this identity challenging situation is to understand why a particular attribute or action is correct and why another is incorrect.  It is not usually the student’s responsibility to fix the problem on the spot, but rather to recognize the quality or attribute in question.  

Another part of my job as a teacher is to keep changing metaphors, descriptions and activities until the student sees or feels something new.  9 times out of 10 this is a challenge to cosmology.

The student’s job is to appropriate this new cosmological “idea” or “experience” into his or her daily practice.  That generally involves some kind of perceptual shift, which, with practice, becomes a new way of being.

Change can be fun and/or scary or subtle and/or unconscious.  I suppose that sometimes identity and cosmology shift in gradual ways and other times they make quantum leaps.  I suspect that it is a teacher’s sensitivity to the process of these changes that makes him or her a good teacher.  As Keith Johnstone  put it:  Teaching is not a substance, of which a little bit is good and a lot is better--bad teaching is deeply harmful!

Identity and cosmology (this is from Daoism now) are illusions maintained by effort.  That effort requires energy from food and the (original qi) stuff we have stored deep in our kidneys.  When we weaken ourselves carefully, we automatically put less effort into identity and cosmology making them slightly more vulnerable to softening and flexibility.  But of course becoming too weak too suddenly can cause a sudden collapse of identity or cosmology leading to a kind of snap back, effectively strengthening our perceptions of self and world.   We evolved this way because it was good for survival.  For instance, when we have a close shave with death, the moment we are safe our bodies release hormones in our blood which cause us to feel strong family-like bonds with whoever we happens to be with, changing our identity to improve our survival.   

In case you are wondering, there is a short cut to all of this.  It is to become completely empty in totally undifferentiated chaos.  That, by the way, is what the name Tai Chi actually means.