Why Create a Martial Art?

I just wrote a long response to José de Freitas whose comment at the end of the New Students post is worth reading. It raises the very difficult and multi-layered question of why and how Chinese martial arts were created. To answer it adequately requires knowledge of Chinese history, religion, language (my weakness), and martial arts.

Here is an excerpt of my response to stimulate your appetite:

It might make more sense to argue that Chinese Martial Arts were created to promote the idea of universal responsibility. In a world with no aristocracy and no warrior class, it is the citizen-merchant-farmer who must be prepared to defend the nation, the family, and the internal social order. (Notice I did not include self-defense, which did not exist as an excuse for fighting in Chinese history.)

I absolutely love this question. If we look at all the individual and wildly diverse Chinese martial arts and all the individual and wildly diverse motivations people have for training in them--and try to work backwards to explain why they were created; it is a mighty tough task. What were the social milieus that inspired and supported the invention of Chinese martial arts? Do they exist in any form today?

I have commented in previous posts that there are quite a few books these days which assert that martial arts were created and preserved exclusively by people who had martial arts jobs. However; many martial arts creation stories talk about someone wandering out of the wilderness, or dreaming a dream, or finding a secret text. I find it hard to believe that these are just silly stories. It is more likely that they are summaries of a longer, more complex story. So in the next day or so I will take on the Taijiquan creation story.

Cotton Fist

Back in the day, George Xu told me a story about a Cotton Fist (Mianquan) master in Shanghai who was pretty tough. He used to carry a short 10 inch long staff, maybe two inches thick with metal at one end.  Whenever he was challenged or about to get in a fight he would pull the staff out of his belt loop and use it to hit himself very quickly all over the surface of his body.  His challengers always backed down, ran away or apologized.  No one ever believed they could hit him as hard as he had just hit himself!

Now my readers know that I'm not a big fan of conditioning, but heck, that's just cool.

I've never studied this system but my understanding is that they cultivate cotton on the outside, steel on the inside.  However, that doesn't really explain the incredible conditioning does it?

Eastern Promises

I just saw the new David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises and it's good.

I live in a Russian Mafia neighborhood in San Francisco so it felt like home.

The Bathhouse fight is great. Two hefty wrestler types wearing full body leather armor and carrying carpet knives take on a naked man on hot slippery ceramic tile.  The choreography is based on Mixed Martial Arts moves.

He gets cut right away and yet fights on, no defensive maneuvers here.

Standing for Weakness

Is standing meditation practice good for posture and alignment?

Here are the two main theories:

1. As soon as we attempt to hold still tension begins arising in locations where our alignment is inefficient.  If we can apply that information, we can improve our alignment.
2. Circulation does not stop when we hold still so locations with poor circulation quickly become apparent.  Slight changes in alignment at these locations may improve circulation, which could be considered an improvement in alignment.

If you do standing practice without correcting your alignment, your muscle tension will actually increase.  It is a slow and painful way to build muscle, and not very effective I might add. However if you are constantly fiddling with your alignment you will become more and more contorted and unstable, that's a big mistake.

Practicing internal martial arts correctly means accepting our natural weakness.  Being weak is okay.  It certainly doesn't inhibit fighting if that is what you like to do. Most fighting systems agree that the ability to relax is valuable because if you are relaxed it's easy to change. Generally fighting systems prefer strength and conditioning with their relaxation. The influence of Daoist precepts and conduct practices on the internal martial arts is most apparent in their rejection of strength and conditioning.

Correct standing practice makes us weak and sensitive and thus more prone to injury.  The type of rest that we get from standing meditation has some healing effects. Most likely those effects are do to the improvement in circulation which supplies nutrients and replaces damaged tissues.  Standing heals the little tiny injuries which otherwise would restrict our breathing and degrade our alignment.  But honestly, slow gentle practice and plenty of sleep will do the same thing.

But...if you like to play rough on a regular basis, (and many of us do) standing will repair those little injuries that would otherwise tend to pile up.  Any improvement in alignment also improves power. But from a Daoist point of view all you are doing is re-establishing what is normal.  It is normal to play rough.  It is normal to heal.  It is normal to have access to highly efficient movement. It is normal to just stand still and do nothing.  It is normal to be weak.

Strategy

Sun Tzu, the Art of War, is a pretty well known book. But what does it say?

You can not control the future, that is the first rule of warfare. When circumstances change, and they always do, your strategies must adapt and change too. Strategies must have built-in flexibility and a failing strategy must be dropped immediately.

Defense

If you know what type of attack is coming, and you have the time and money, you can build an effective defense. The history of warfare is simple-- a successful attack will inspire an effective defense against that sort of attack. Then comes a new type of attack, which inspires a new type of defense. Periods of good defense cover much longer periods in history than periods of new attacks. (Perhaps modern weaponry will change this, I don't know. There are now defenses for nuclear weapons, they suck, but shelters can be designed to survive an attack, and nuclear missiles can be exploded above your own cities to destroy incoming missiles.)

Not-defending

This explains why matched fighting uses so much defensive technique and real fighting doesn't. In a real fight you have no idea what type of attack is coming. This is one of the priciples that push-hands and roushou are suposed to teach. But of course if you always think and practice defensively, your push-hands will just be a waste of time.

Strategy involves intimate knowledge of everything from terrain, to psychology, to logistics. If you are more familiar with the details of warfare than your opponent, you can devise a winning strategy based on you opponent's weaknesses. Even if you are fewer in numbers or weaker in some other way, you can still win.

Losing Well

It is possible to lose well. All of these lessons are important to martial artists, but this last one is the hardest to learn. I'm reminded of the story of a group of reporters in the Congo whose jeep was stopped by a rebel road-block. The rebels, armed to the teeth with machine guns, took everyone out one by one and shot them. One guy burst into tears. The rebels laughed at him, he seemed utterly pathetic, and then they put him back in the jeep told him to drive off.

Now I'm not saying that reporter actually had a strategy, but if he did, there is no reason to believe it would work a second time. That's the nature of warfare, of fighting, and knowing how to lose well.

Although Sun Tzu doesn't say it, he fundamentally rejects the notion of honor.

Iraq "Mac"

I stay far away from politics in my blog. But yesterday's Wall Street Journal article about a self taught Tribal Warfare Expert named Iraq Mac is just too good to not submit to my readers too.

When the Mongol Armies conquered the known world they faced almost no significant opposition, they stopped for one reason and one reason only: Genghis Khan died and several of his generals felt they were in line for succession, so they returned home to "work it out." His two top generals chose not to return home, one settled permanently in Turkey, the other in Iran.

Generally speaking, when the Mongols encountered a horse riding people they offered them a choice: Join us or die. When they encountered other peoples they built pyramids with their skulls.

The Marmelukes were the only horse riding people to have success against the Mongols.

Mr. McCallister, the Marines' resident expert on tribal culture, settled on the perfect gift: a Mameluke sword. The swords, which all Marine officers carry, date back to 1804 when a Marine lieutenant led a group of Arabs in a successful attack on pirates and was awarded a sword by an Ottoman pasha.

Read the whole article. Or if that doesn't work try this Google News search.

Never Fight

There is an old Chinese proverb that I have always liked, but let me apologize in advance for any underlying misogyny or other offenses to contemporary morality.

Never fight a woman, a monk, or a sick man!

This proverb cuts to the core of Chinese martial arts thinking-- that's why I like it.

Never fight a woman because if a woman is willing to fight you, it's a sure bet that she has some surprises. Surprise is the greatest weapon of all. Women's martial arts start from the assumptions that one has:

1. A shorter reach


2. Less power


3. Less ability to use conditioning or physical integration for an effective defense. Basically, smaller bones can be made tougher but bigger bones will usually break them anyway.

Women's martial arts focus on using sudden overwhelming force on the most vulnerable areas. They often use tricks, surprises and small hidden weapons. (You have been warned.)

Never fight a monk because monks are known for their extraordinary discipline. It is likely that they have trained One Technique over and over again; and you don't know what it is.

Never fight a sick man, because he may be sick from training too much!

Rooting, the Spear, and the Phalanx

I think this picture helps explain why people developed rooting techniques. From the time of Alexander the Great until Julius Caesar this type of warfare was totally dominant.

Cavalries, when they were very large and well organized could be decisive against spear armies but in most places, most of the time, they didn't have the numbers to beat the infantries. (Later the Mongols were a big exception.)

When Julius Caesar came along he consistently defeated this type of Phalanx formation with something called a Centurion. A Centurion was 100 men divided into 20 groups of 5 which were capable of acting as a unit.

Each man carried:

• a 6 foot long javelin, which could be used for throwing or thrusting.


• a shield, which fit together with 4 other shields into a solid shape which angled up from the ground and could be used to get under the phalanx.


• a short sword.

American style football and the game of pool are both leftovers from the days of the Phalanx. Few armies have ever been as well organized as Julius Caesar's were, so the Phalanx continued to have play in the fields of battle until the gun.

Rooting techniques have some application in stand-up styles of wrestling, but their main application is being able to hold a long spear, shoulder to shoulder with other men, while you are facing a solid wall of on coming spears.

I believe one of the roots of push-hands came out of the idea of Champion Matches. These were fights held the night before a battle, where both sides put forward their greatest fighter. It was a chance for generals to meet, and sometimes find a settlement with out arms.  Failing that, if your champion won the other army was demoralized.

Tendon Twisting

This is a continuation of the series on jin, that started below with a discussion of pulsing.

Twisting integrates the body and is essential to make the mechanics of Taijiquan operative. Most sports, and even most martial arts, do not emphasis twisting enough. Twisting integrates the body because as you twist you take the slack out of tendons; if all the tendons throughout the body have an equal amount of twisting, the movement of the hand will be simultaneous with the movement of the foot.

This principle can be simply illustrated by stepping on one end of a towel and twisting the other end until it is like a thick rope. Movement at one end of the towel while it is slack at best sends a wave through the towel. After you have twisted it the whole thing moves as one flexible hunk.

Twisting unevenly will cause lots of damage. That's how joint locks and breaks work. Practice on a chicken if you want. For instance, to bust the wrist, just twist it while immobilizing the elbow.

This practice is the main reason that Chinese martial artists do not have or need big bulging arm or leg muscles.

Again, twisting is part of jin, it creates underlying dynamic structure. It is not itself a source of power, it does make the use of power more efficient.

Image: I got the image of the towel from this Heller Bodywork site, they are making a different but related point about the process of balancing.

Labor Day Weekend

I'm working on some posts about fear, but they aren't finished yet.

I'm being pulled away to go play, so no blog today, but I have been leaving comments on the last few post of FormosaNeijia that readers may find interesting, like this one below:

Well, yes, you should know and train every technique in the form with an active partner, preferably one that is better than you and starts nice but gets rougher. I was taking that for granted.
Still, I’m starting to think the Bridge idea is in conflict with Taijiquan theory. My training in Chinese martial arts, in general (Northern Shaolin, Lan Shou, Xingyi, Bagua) taught me not to defend. In taiji theory every centimeter of your being is in the fight, if you dedicate some part of your body to defense at the moment of contact you might as well put your neck out and offer it to your opponent as a snack.