Walking #3 (Story)

In the religious Daoist tradition stories are considered qi transmissions. To study personally with a great bagua or qigong teacher is of immeasurable value but we can receive qi transmissions in many different ways.

Once during the Qing dynasty in China the Emperor and his courtiers decided to make a sport out of all the outrageous claims martial artist were making. They had many martial artists brought one by one to the palace and asked them to perform many feats, after which they were usually put to death.

The Emperor heard about a bagua master who people claimed could move any stone. So the Emperor had a huge stone brought into the courtyard using long levers and pulleys. He then had the famed martial artist brought to the palace. Upon seeing the challenge he asked to be given 24 hours and some torches to see by. Amused, the Emperor granted the request. The martial artist began crawling all over the of the stone, looking and feeling everywhere. 24 hours later the Emperor and his courtiers returned and demanded to see the stone moved. The martial artist then put one finger on one particular spot and using just that finger succeeded in pushing the huge stone all around the courtyard. The Emperor and his courtiers were so impressed that they granted him his life.

It seems that even stones have acupuncture meridians.

It is said that a bagua practitioner who has reached the height of mastery can step on a solid cobble stone and turn it to dust. I imagine that such steps are extremely light.
The adepts experience of the world is recreated in each step or gesture we make. Qi gong practitioners don't just re-learn how to walk, we are continuously re-learning how to walk. We are demonstrating true openness to the possibilities. The fruit of practice is that walking itself becomes unconditioned.

Walking #2 (Toddlers')

Watching toddlers' movement can be really instructive.  Toddlers are unstable and actually rely not on strength or righting reactions (both of which develop and integrate with time) but on the softness of their bones and the fluidity of their joints.  They can make great errors in stepping and stumbling because they have a large range of motion in their joints.  They easily recover from falls.  Their bodies are buoyant and adaptable.  Their joints acutually pulse, or open and close, as they walk or reach out for something they want and draw it back toward their center (or their mouth.)

"...it's bones are soft, it's muscles are weak, and yet it's grip is very strong,"

(Daode jing Chapter 55, Liu ming)

Qi gong and internal martial arts combine these two approaches to movement, that of the very young and that of the very old. Both approaches can be considered weak.

From doing these practices, as we age, our joints have more space and we use the space that we have more efficiently. We return to balance without much strain or effort.

Somewhere I picked up the saying:  "Walk with your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds."

Walking #1 (Older people)

What is it like watching most older people move? Is it a source of pity or sympathy, or perhaps a foreboding omen of what we can some day expect ourselves? If we were to study older peoples' movements with respectful inquisitiveness what might we learn?

Young people walk by falling slightly forward to create momentum and continuously catching themselves with their front foot as they stride forward. This type of movement requires:

1. The ability to suddenly contract muscles should we mis-step or slip.

2. Well integrated reflexes, righting reactions, and equilibrium responses so we can stop abruptly.

3. Buoyancy in the joints(space/fluidity) and a fairly wide range of motion to account for sudden variation.

As people age it becomes more difficult to maintain the muscle tissue sufficient to catch oneself, right oneself and return to balance. As people age they often develop a reduced range of motion do to repeated injuries, including what we tend to call normal wear and tear. Even small injuries often leave scar tissue which reduces pliancy and range of motion. This along with a general loss of fluids in the joints leaves less space in the joints for movement. This not only makes large steps difficult or painful, but the righting reactions needed to re-balance are often out of ones range of motion or would themselves cause re-injury in the joints.

Big steps, or any type of reckless movement, brings the risk of falling and breaking already deficient bones. Thus how do older people walk? Hesitant little steps. They test the ground with each step and find their balance with each weight shift, doing their best to maintain their balance all the time.

Eventually, everyone's muscles and reactions degenerate and we are all, in a sense, forced to except the sensitivity that comes with weakness (in Daoism this process is called return).

When older people walk they draw on all the resources they have, (they'll take your arm if you offer it.)

Those in the past, who cultivated the Way,
Were subtle,mysterious, abstruse, penetrating,
Unfathomable, and so too deep to describe.
Because of this,
I can only tell you how they seemed.
They were cautious, as if crossing a river in winter.
Always watchful of danger on all four sides.
They were ceremonious and polite, like being a guest.
Yielding, like ice beginning to melt.
Plain and unconditioned, like an uncarved block of wood.
As open, as a valley.
Murky, like turbid water.
Who among you can be so murky and yet know
Quiet and Clarity within?
Which of you can enter stillness only to return to movement?
Those who keep this Dao,
Avoid fullness.
Because they are not full,
they can renew themselves and not be worn out.
Daode jing Chapter 15 (Liu ming)

This quality of movement, testing the ground before a weight shift, avoiding muscle contractions, essentially seeking depth and ease, are all things we do when we practice qi gong, taiji, or bagua. Aging may actually make them easier to do!

The Chinese Calendar/Almanac

Some guy named Jerome Weng in Singapore responded to my Youtube video African Bagua #1 with the following comment:

Bagua is a sequence of pairs to form 64 possible comination. That is related to I -Ching. SO what is it that all these matters swayed to African dance or Chinese Music. Please read and find out more of Ganzhi system found in Bagua. Basically the Ganzhi system, composing of the Ten Celestial Stems and Twelve Terrestrial Branches. The truth is the China has a strong link to Middle East, not Africa.

Ganzhi is part of the Chinese Calendar-Almanac which is the oldest continuously published book on earth. I have followed it closely for about 10 years. A closer look at the Tongshu (another of the many names for the whole calendar) will strongly support my case. One way to understand it is as a composite/synchronization of all the calendars used by all the different ethnic and regional religous cults of China and it's neighbors. It is a collection of all religions perceptions of time, (really!). So baguazhang is in a sense like the Calendar, a collection of all the different physiologies of trance practiced in China.
Within the Tongshu there are two time cycles that follow the Yijing (I-Ching). One takes a different hexagram each six days and goes through each line in sequence with the moon. Because the moon “math� doesn’t quite add up, some of the hexagrams are only five lines/days instead of six- the top line gets dropped.
The second cycle is not actually a 64 day cycle, it is a 72 day cycle which is tied to the sun and thus reverses the counting sequence on the solstices. It is a 72 day cycle because every eighth day is a divination day, 64+8=72.
For years I used my baguazhang practice to embody the hexagram for that day. If you know eight palm changes which correspond to the eight trigrams, you can practice each hexagram too. Think of each hexagram as a transition between two trigrams and practice that transition. (So for example, hexagram 63 is li [fire] transitioning into kan [water].) On divination days, improvise!

And I wasn't going to point to a direct African or Middle-Eastern connection but Julie Lee Wei will! Correspondences Between the Chinese Calendar Signs and the Phoenecian Alphabet.

The Kinesthetic nature of Internal Arts

There is a convention of dividing gongfu into internal and external, and following that logic qigong is also sometimes divided this way. When we refer to qi, we often mean the animation of the interior world, the felt world. This is meant to be distinct from the seen world, how our bodies look, our form, the external shell. The traditional way to learn something is to begin with the external, and gradually become more internal. As the internal develops there is a movement outward toward refining the external, and then back toward the internal again; a circular process. The real distinction is that ‘internal arts’ put more emphasis on the internal, and do it sooner, almost from the beginning.

Taijiquan is the most well know internal art, but baguazhang and xingyiquan along with hundreds of qigong exercises (many of them abstracted from one of those three arts) have been steadily gaining in popularity. The following is meant to be helpful in understanding the term, 'internal.'
If you move your tongue around in your mouth and then do the same thing looking in the mirror it will appear that your tongue is moving differently than it feels. The tongue tends to exaggerate the size of objects it touches. This becomes really obvious when you have a cut on your tongue. Similarly, the back of the palms and the front of the wrists perceive heat and moisture quite differently. (You can try it right now.)
The internal organs move around like the tongue and each has it's own very specialized sensory and motor nerves, as well as its own intelligence. The feeling of lifting up your right kidney feels very different than the feeling of lifting up your right shoulder, but both can be felt. Rotating your liver feels very different than rotating your head, but both move independently. Our internal organs move around semi-consciously most of the time, completing specialized functions automatically.
This 'internal' movement necessarily supports all our other movements. This is experience is the basis for Structure school of Chinese medicine. The premise of which is that chronic illness, injury, "deficiency" or "excess" will have a physical impact on the underlying structure of our bodies. It will eventually reshape even our bones.
All our 'external' movements like waving our hands or wiggling our toes are interdependent with internal movements for support. This is part of the function of our organs, our vessels, glands etc…, form is inseparable from more obvious function( their form shape and movement have a function in addition there systemic functions). When that support is partial, inhibited or too abrupt we say qi flow is inhibited or restricted. Over time these qi restrictions may become imbalances, stiffness, collapsing, or pain, in both 'internal' and 'external' movement.
Qi gong teachers have many devices for developing students' sense of the internal. Remember that the concept that qi itself is not restricted to or limited by ideas of internal or external personal space, it's bigger than that. Working with the concept of qi means not restricting our view to just organs, or even the limits of the physical body, it would suggest an expansive view, and a softened focus. [Where you practice matters!]
Thus it follows that this seemingly infinite movement inwards also continues as our gestures, movements, and our senses move out into space. Tying the internal to our conduct and to the shape of the environment we live in.
Imagination is a necessary component of feeling. Most people feel their liver moving, they just haven’t named it and thus, in not naming it, they have not differentiated it. (is it still part of undifferentiated chaos?) Feeling is a type of distinction which requires some imagination and some practice.

Therefore I’m dubious of distinctions between mental and physical.

Traditional Chinese Subjects

All Traditional Chinese subjects have three types of teaching:
A.  Outer: can be memorized, learned by watching, holds to a standard
B.  Inner: must be taught, transmitted-- requires sufficient qi (time) and jing (distillation) in order to learn.
C.  Secret: That which reveals view, inspiration, and manifests fruition.

For instance, the study of Poetry:
A.  Committed to memory (jing)
B.  Explored, investigated, animated (qi)
C.  Found, through experience or intimacy: Embodied (shen)

In lineage and classical traditions (think classical music or dance), curriculum is understood as the "outer" standard which is committed to memory.  From there with the expertise of a mentor and plenty of time that curriculum becomes animated and skillful, but it does not yet an artist make.  To be an artist means to truly be at play with inspiration, manifestation, and vision.

Martial Arts Training Manuals

Someone else who believes that gongfu is entirely about fighting are Brian Kennedy and Elizabeth Guo, authors of Chinese Martial Arts Training Manuals, A Historical Survey. I read the whole book, it's got lots of great pictures and historical information. It's easy to summarize their view: Martial Arts is a job. Whatever, it's still a great idea for a book. They summarize about 30 different historic training manuals. One of my favorite facts from the book is that it was illegal to publish martial arts books for most of the Ching Dynasty (1650 to 1900~).

How to use Taijiquan in a Fight

Here is my latest video offering, enjoy.

Play the Pipa

Making fun of the traditional names of various Taijiquan movements is pretty common. Many of the names sound weird to an English speaking ear. The poetry and metaphors are mostly obscure.
Recently a Taiwanese student of mine suggested a really great explanation for the name playing the Pipa (sometimes translated as playing the guitar). The pipa, as everyone knows, is a stringed instrument but pipa also means scapula. Breaking the scapula was a traditional punishment for fighting. The official administering the punishment would restrain the "fighter" and then slip one of his hands behind the scapula and use the other to chop, breaking it in half. This is just how the movement is done in Yang style taijiquan. Two broken scapulas would damage any fighting career for sometime, possibly forever.
Chinese law or jurisprudence, differs from jurisprudence in English speaking countries. An important difference is that they use different underlying metaphors for what constitutes a violation. In English speaking countries our metaphor is a line or a wall. If you cross this line, you have broken the law. The Chinese metaphor is more like a downward slope. For instance, if you have young children under you care and you are dueling, the punishment is likely to be much worse, because you are really risking other peoples lives. Fighting in this context can be more or less legal, depending on what the longer term outcomes could be. It is, of course, traditional to punish ones whole family because it is assumed that they must have seen you acting badly, bit by bit over time and done nothing to stop it.

African Bagua #1

The first in a series of lectures I am producing about the origins of Chinese martial arts is up on Youtube. Check it out