Top Predators Practice Internal Martial Arts

I’ve been working with the “ball” material I wrote about in the last post and I’ve decided that there is an other way to explain it.

The top predators I’m likely to see in San Francisco on any given day are falcons, hawks, cats, and raccoons.  Occasionally I see a coyote or a heron too.

All of these predators are able to fluff up their bodies.  We tend to think of these moments of fluffing up as autonomic responses to fear because they parallel the goose bumps we get when we are watching a horror movie.  We also learn in school that some animals fluff up so that they will look really big to an attacker or a competitor,  and that has a parallel in the expression “I feel pumped up” which athletes sometimes use.
But of course we don’t know for sure why these predators fluff up and we definitely don’t know whether or not they consciously control it.

I used the term autonomic above.  The nervous system is divided into two types of nerves, the ones that control obviously voluntary actions (yes that would include ear wiggling even if you aren’t very good at it yet); and nerves that control much less voluntary things like pupil size and heart rate.  The less voluntary system is called the autonomic nervous system and it is also divided into two parts. One part that is active when you take a deep relaxing breath while sitting in a hot tub, and another part that is active when you hold your breath, tense up your muscles, pull back your lips and grit your teeth.  The relaxing nervous system is called para-sympathetic, the stressed out nervous system is called sympathetic.  (I know the names are ridiculous, they refer to anatomy you only see when you are doing a dissections.)

The ball practice that I wrote about yesterday is the practice of making your whole body fluff up and its opposite, shrink-condense.  This happens at the most outer layer of the physical body, between the muscles and the hair follicles.

In this practice it is key that you keep your breathing relaxed, that you do not activate the stressed out nervous system even a little bit.  Through this practice you will eventually be able to do more than just fluff up and shrink-condense.  You will be able to spontaneously change the entire surface of your body in any way you want.

I suspect that the top predators are able to do this without becoming stressed out, while prey, like bunny rabbits, only do it when they are stressed out.

This kind of practice has lots of health benefits but the fighters out there may be thinking, “How could I possibly fight using such a subtle mechanism?”  The answer is that the practice trains your body to not get stuck, to keep changing even in a situation of stress.  It will increase your power too, because there will be less inhibition in your body.

And of course when the predator ball becomes second nature, you don’t think about it, it just becomes part of everything you do.

The following Hagiography is from To Live As Long As Heaven and Earth:

"During the reign of Emperor Cheng of the Han, hunters in the Zhongnan Mountains saw a person who wore no clothes, his body covered with black hair. Upon seeing this person, the hunters wanted to pursue and capture him, but the person leapt over gullies and valleys as if in flight, and so could not be overtaken. [But after being surrounded and captured, it was discovered this person was a 200 plus year old woman, who had once been a concubine of Qin Emperor Ziying. When he had surrendered to the 'invaders of the east', she fled into the mountains where she learned to subside on 'the resin and nuts of pines' from an old man. Afterwards, this diet 'enabled [her] to feel neither hunger nor thirst; in winter [she] was not cold, in summer [she] was not hot.']
The hunters took the woman back in. They offered her grain to eat. When she first smelled the stink of grain, she vomited, and only after several days could she tolerate it. After little more than two years of this [diet], her body hair fell out; she turned old and died. Had she not been caught by men, she would have become an [immortal]." (Campany 2002:22–23)

"The earliest representations of Chinese immortals, xian (?), dating from the Han Dynasty, portray them flying with feathery wings (the word yuren ?? "feathered person" later meant "Daoist") or riding dragons."

[Thanks Wikipedia, for saving me from having to type these two quotes in myself!]

Albion's Seed

Sgt. Rory Miller wrote a nice piece recently comparing pacifists to violence groupies, and saying they are both living in a fantasy world.  As clear eyed as his take on the two groups is, it is missing a historical perspective.

My half-wife likes to point out that I’m driven by intense passions.  I get hooked on something and I think about it all the time.
I can hang with one powerful idea for a few years.  I was actually passionate about pacifism for at least a year as a teenager.
For about two years in my early twenties I saw every single dance performance that played in San Francisco.  I didn’t have any money, but everyone knew me as the guy who would fold programs or help move equipment before the show, or help clean up after the show.  So I saw all the shows for free.

For a few years I was so passionate about tea, I would bring my tea equipment with me even when I went rock climbing.
I’m always passionate about martial arts.

I’m often passionate about a thinker or a book.  I’ve been known to talk about an idea over and over for years.  On reflection it can seem kind of creepy, but that kind of passion changes a person.

Anyway, about 10 years ago I read Albion's Seed, Four British Folkways in America, and I became obsessed with how powerful the theory was at explaining American behavior.

In the book David Hackett Fischer describes the first four American settler groups, Southern Cavaliers, Puritans, Quakers, and Backcountry.  For each group he makes a long list of what he calls folkways.  For instance he mentions eating & drinking habits, reactions to strangers, housing, medicine, education, clothing, liberty, child rearing, marriage, death, and many other folkways.  When you read the book you start to realize that the views of each of these ‘cultures’ have been static for four hundred years!  In America today, an individual is free to pick and choose, or change, their views on any subject.  So individuals are often composites, for instance one may hold a Quaker view of guns (no one should have them), but a Backcountry view of Whisky (it should be served with breakfast).

Of course there is such a thing as a new idea, but most of the time when an American opens her mouth, she is going to present an idea from one of the Four British Folkways.

Since I’m writing this in response to Sgt Rory Miller’s piece, I’ll just recite the Four Folkways as they pertain to violence.

Southern Cavaliers: Respect and deference should guide all behavior.  Violence is the prerogative of some people and not others.  Everyone must know their place.  Servants learn their place by being beaten or put to work on a chain-gang.  Others are destine to lead troops. Propriety dictates that each class of people rise to their specific responsibilities with in a given hierarchy. If an equal dares to insult my integrity or the integrity of a lady under my care, we will fight a duel-- a fair fight with ‘seconds’ to judge.  The weaker sex should never fight.  The purpose of violence is to expand and hold power.  A man’s home is his castle.  And as Thomas Jefferson put it, “There is no greater form of exercise than hunting.”

Puritan: Do the crime, serve the time.  The Puritans invented police.  The early Colonies elected a constable whose job it was to search or inspect everyone’s home at some regular interval like every six months.  We must have uniform standards and respect for elders.  Weapons are for the collective defense and to protect Liberty.  Liberty  here means a proud community standard.  So constables have a stick to beat non-conformists and other disturbers of “the peace.”  The more grievous the offence, the more severe the punishment.  (In the early days Quakers were burned at the stake.)

Quakers: Everyone has pure light in their hearts.  What do we need guns for?

Backcountry: Who you looking at?  Yep, I’m a redneck, but if you call me that to my face you’d better be prepared to die (or be sleeping with my sister).  Weapons are an integral part of my circulatory system.

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Warning Politics Ahead.  Skip the last paragraph if you are easily impassioned.
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Now as powerful as this theory is, and it is one heck of a powerful theory, it doesn’t explain everything.  There are ideas outside the 4 boxes.  So as I was doing the dishes this evening I was trying to think of an idea about violence which is outside of the Four Folkways.  I didn’t come up with anything, but it did occur to me that all Four Folkways approve of Missionaries.  Which reminded me of Michael B. Oren’s book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. In it he explains that for the last 150 years, every time Americans go to the Middle East we build a school or a hospital.

Think about that.  That is something all Americans seem to agree is a good idea, a nice thing to do.  In the Middle East, Americans have started nearly every University, and we have built Hospitals in every region.

But think about it again.  What kind of message does that send to the people of the Middle East?  They are getting the message that we must believe they are ignorant and incapable of caring for themselves.  How humiliating.

(Israelis offer free organ transplants for Palestinian children.  They have found a way to stop suicide bombings using only collaborators, check points, and fences.  Humiliating.)

AlQeda is crystal clear:  Stop humiliating us!  Show us some dignity and just start Killing Us!  Please!  Death!
How do we respond?  Ideally we will capture them, take them water boarding, and build more schools and hospitals.

The author teaching at the Arab Sports Center in East Jerusalem.

Pure Internal Power

I'm hoping to create a little controversy with this video as I get the hang of my new editing software.

The first part is an attack on application demo's we see all the time on Youtube-- without shaking power most of them are useless.

The second part is a challenge to all the people who make a distinction between long power and short power.  The issue came up in Taiwan talking to Marcus Brinkman and Formosa Neijia, and it is in Nam Park's bagua books too.  It's a pretty common way of talking about internal power.  The distinction between long power and short power certainly is effective for fighting, there is no conflict here.  My challenge is for them to explain how they can do it without creating an on-off switch in their power.  I argue that short power needs a root and is thus vulnerable to uprooting.  In short, the theory of long and short power does not conform to the Internal Classics idea that, "I know you, but you don't know me."

In putting out this challenge it is my hope that I can learn more about my own limitations, no doubt they are legion.  Let the sparks fly.

Matching Punches

I just wanted to describe a method of fighting.  It’s called matching.  Whatever my opponent does I do exactly the same technique. However, I vary the timing and the distance. If my  opponent throws a hook punch, I throw one also, but I adjust the distance and angles so that I strike while my opponent misses.  I don’t know how well it works in “real life” but in training drills it seems effective.  It is particularly good for practicing a single technique over and over again with a partner doing the same thing.

I bring this up just to tell a story about my father.  He has been going to Japan every year since the 1970’s and at one point he decided to learn Go, the famously difficult strategy game.
So he made some inquiries and he found a Go master who spoke no English but was willing to teach a foreigner.  The lesson took place at the master’s house and he began by simply setting up a board and beginning a game.*  My father got no instructions.  Not being able to ask questions in Japanese and not knowing anything about how to play the game he simply looked at what the master did and tried to match it.  He played exactly the same moves as the master.

At the end of the game (or perhaps near the end because I’m not sure my father knew enough to identify the end) the master sat there just staring at the board.  Then he got really angry!  Obviously my father had been playing Go for many years and was trying to humiliate the master by playing dumb.  Raging in Japanese, he threw my father out.  And that was the last time my father tried to learn Go.

In martial arts we have another name for this.  It’s called Wild Man Beats the Master.  Sometimes an opponent can be totally unpredictable because he actually makes the worst possible choices.  This is perhaps related to Isiah Berlin’s problem of the Fox and the Hedgehog.  The fox knows a little about many things and the hedgehog knows a lot about one thing.  Foxes are better at making predictions.  Too much expertise may not be such a good thing.

This is one of the things that I’ve always found troubling about careers in general.  Once someone finds their niche, it’s very hard to change.  Am I heading down a dangerous road?  Have I become an expert at weakness?

*(My father never actually learned how to play Go, so he probably wouldn’t have noticed if the master gave him a 9 stone advantage at the beginning; however, that wouldn’t have made as good a story--and frankly it shouldn’t matter-- when I tried to learn Go, I lost for two months straight, even with a 9 stone advantage.  I finally won a game when the guy who was teaching me said if I didn’t win that one, I was going to have to buy everyone in the club a beer [about 20 people].  I’m pretty sure he let me win because he felt sorry for me.  I found another hobby.)

Fighting in Space

I recently heard that some astronauts spent 6 hours trying to loosen a bolt on a space station.  It’s extremely hard to get leverage in space.  This led me to asking, just how much fighting is gravity dependent?

The answer is, almost all of it.  In space if you try to poke someone in the eye, you will both spin away from each other.  However I think you could poke a persons eye if you were simultaneously pulling them towards you by the neck.  Anyway nearly all strikes, kicks and throws are gravity dependent.  Probably about 70% of joint locks are too.  Most of them would be impossible to get on a resisting partner in space.  Even hair pulling is out.  We are left with squeezing grabs to the groin and neck--and head locks.

Since everyone knows, space is the next wild, wild west (Firefly fans?), I think we should start training for zero gravity fighting.

It’s also a good way to explain why relaxation is superior to tension in a fight.  Almost everything we do in a fight is gravity dependent.  The best fighting methods force an opponent to carry not only their own weight but your weight too, at the worst possible angles. Even with throws in which the opponent is picked up into the air, momentum is used in combination with a destabilized base to create a circular force around a center of gravity and a gravity dependent still point--ending of course with a smack down.  (I just wanted to say smack down.)
So start analyzing fighting methods in terms of gravity and they will become more effective.     As long as you are controlling the exchanges of momentum, your opponent should be carrying as much of your mass as possible.  So, for example, if you punch someone you want all of your weight to hit them with momentum.  If you do it right, strength is completely irrelevant.

A Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Gods do not teach people to fight.


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


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


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

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

Some New Leads

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

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

Taiwan Project

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

Baguazhang's Contentious Beginnings

Wang Shujin

Kent Howard has translated a book by the famous Baguazhang teacher from Taiwan, Wang Shujin.  He has also started a blog to promote it where he has written a number of short essays about the origins of Baguazhang. It is wonderful that someone is taking martial arts history seriously. In the most receint post he takes some time to debunk some of the conjecture out there.  Then he says this:

The Story of Dong Haiquan being taught Bagua Zhang as a fully developed martial art by two mountain-dwelling Daoist recluses has all of the basic elements of many a martial art legend in China. All you need to do is change the names, and a few circumstances, and you have Zhang Sanfong creating Taiji Quan from a dream or Shaolin priests learning their art from an Indian monk. Chinese love to shroud their origin myths in the mists of antiquity. It lends them a certain air of distinction and provides an unassailable historical precedent.

There are several elements of this legend, however, that do not stand up well in the face of modern research. First, there has been no discoverable trace in history or literature of two Daoists named, Gu Jici and Shang Daoyuan in the Mount Ermei region of Szechuan Province. Researchers who combed those fabled mountains interviewing present day Daoist adepts found no temple records containing either name, nor of any Daoist recluses of that time who were known to teach martial arts. Second, facts point to Dong learning martial arts in his youth that contained many elements found in modern Bagua Zhang. Third, Dong was a member of the Quan Zhen sect of Daoism and learned a method of walking meditation that resembles Bagua Zhang circle walking patterns and stepping. Finally, Dong Haiquan seemed quite happy to allow the origins of Bagua Zhang to be obscured by legend rather than have contemporaries believe that he had synthesized it whole cloth from elemental skills derived from previous training.

....The last question to take up in our quest for the real Dong Haiquan is whether he popularized an art that had existed previously, or if he invented his own style by marrying disparate methodologies into one cohesive system. This task is made more difficult when you consider that Dong, when asked by his disciples where he learned Bagua Zhang, would comment that he received his art from “a man who lived in the mountains.” If the system existed before Dong Haiquan, we know it was not called Bagua Zhang. That name was unknown before his time. In fact, Dong’s first generation students stated the original name for the system was Zhuan Zhang (Rotating palms). Later it was expanded to Bagua Zhuan Zhang. Finally, probably near the end of Dong’s life, or perhaps even posthumously, it was shorted to Bagua Zhang.

....We can probably never say with absolute certainty if Dong Haiquan learned his art from another source, and merely popularized it, or whether he synthesized techniques learned from several sources and created an entirely new martial system. In any event, Dong was certainly good at marketing his product and keeping the source, as he played his cards, very close to the vest. As Lao Tzu once said, “The Sage wears rough clothing and embraces the jewel within!”

Here is the comment I left on his blog (not approved yet):

Thanks for putting this together.

I would ask the question: What reasons did he have for keeping Baguazhang's origins a secret?

As a marketing strategy it did work, so it is possible that marketing was his reason, but it's not a very good reason considering his main marketing strategy was being the best around.  Perhaps his secretiveness was a personality quirk, but that isn't very convincing either. What isn't being said?

1. The southern and western half of the country was rebel territory for from 1853-1870.  What was he doing during the Taiping rebellion and the many other smaller rebellions during that time?


2. What is the evidence that he was a Longmen Daoshi?  It is problematic to say that Quanzhen is a "sect," it is a teaching lineage. He could have received "registers," jing (texts), transmissions, etc...from any lineage including Tibetan Banpo--it's all secret under penalty of death.  If he had the title Daoshi, then legally speaking he had the rank of an imperial prince.  All that stuff about being a eunuch could be discarded that way (see original essay).  But the word "Daoshi" could have simply meant magician or wandering recluse.


3. For most of the Ching Dynasty and much of the Ming Dynasty as well, Zhengyi Daoism was practiced in secret.  It still is.  When I visited Chengdu in 2001 I talked to a Chinese Anthropologist who told me that Zhengyi priests managed to hide amongst the poorest villages.  He said they have found them, but they disappear by the next day and can not be found again.  Daoists often change their names.  There is NO reason to believe we could find two "mountain Daoshi" by their names.


4. The Quanzhen walking "technique," like everything Quanzhen, is a simplification/purification of older ritual practices.  The possibility of Daoist ritual origins for Baguazhang has barely even been scratched.


5. Has anyone considered that the name Baguazhang may have been the original name of the art, but it was a secret name, only revealed when the political climate had changed?  Rebel-heterodox "meditation" sects often practiced martial arts and named themselves after the trigrams! (See Esherick's "Origins of the Boxer Rebellion.")


6. If there ever was anyone else in the early 1800's who practiced this kind of art, perhaps they were in the western part of the country, and perhaps they were wiped out--20 Million people died during the Taiping Rebellion.  It kind of makes sense that he wouldn't want to talk about that in Beijing, there were still rebels fighting in 1870 when he started teaching.

Thanks for considering these ideas. ------ The daoist origins of Baguazhang is a repeating theme for me.  If readers search the bagua category on the side  they'll find a lot of material.  People often say that internal martial arts were combined with internal alchemy.  Some scholars may argue that ritual, alchemy and martial arts all have separate origins.  That may be true, but for the last 2000 years they have been influencing each other.  Ritual is the bigger, more encompassing, subject of the three.  If you want to understand the origins of martial arts and alchemy, ritual is the place to start.