Sucker Punch, A film about self-defense

I am a collector of arguments. I would much rather hear a finely crafted argument than sip a glass of fine wine. A year or so ago I got myself in an argument about whether Chinese culture had the notion of self-defense 500 years ago. My contention is that self-defense is a new idea that has been developing very slowly since the American revolution (and other "Enlightenment" events) proposed that social order could be rooted in individual freedom. (I tentatively conceded the argument after my primary contender presented a translation of a 16th Century Chinese Encyclopedia which I'll include at the end of this post.)

Certainly there have always been people who found ways to practice fighting and reasons for claiming their actions were righteous. But that is not the same as claiming self-defense. For instance, in China it was common to claim that one had to fight to protect ones honor or property. But what if you had no property or no honor? Theater professionals were the lowest social caste, below even thieves, clearly they had no honor to defend. Similarly Biblical justice, an eye for an eye, is framed as the settling of a score, it is not an argument for self-defense.

This is why I was so taken by Sgt. Rory Miller's arguments in Meditations on Violence. He explained that very few forms of social violence justify an act of self-defense. With a few exceptions social violence is avoidable and deterrable. Social violence is the form of violence that most people have experience with, consequently they tend to confuse it with asocial violence which is a much rarer form of violence. Asocial violence almost always requires an act of self-defense. For instance, in the international arena we hear the absurd and incomprehensible argument that Israel responds to attacks against it's civilian population with disproportionate force. This type of argument only makes sense if you believe this is a social conflict. In an asocial conflict one is expected to use the minimum amount of force necessary to neutralize the threat. In the case of Israel, it has yet to neutralize the threat, up until the threat is neutralized any level of violence is justified.  Likewise in a social conflict, if we can easily retreat we are expected to do so. But you don't retreat once someone has broken into your house. Retreating from asocial violence tends to leave a trail of blood. The 1948 declaration of Jewish autonomy will continue to be an offense to all those who consider Jews less than fully human.

Bernard Lewis recently explained that there is no word for 'Freedom' in Arabic, the closest term is something a kin to 'justice.'  In the recent demonstrations in Egypt people were chanting "Freedom" in English.  As hopeless as it may sounds to say it, autonomy and self-defense are concepts which require novel and complex arguments to comprehend.

The arguments explaining when and how self-defense is justified are actually new. The argument for women's self-defense may have gotten some inspiration from great figures of the past like Harriet Tubman, but the moral arguments which justify it are still being articulated. The same is true for children's self-defense; witness the national "bullying" debate, and the ever growing number of films and TV shows about girls who fight back.

Self-defense is in the air.

The new film Sucker Punch, by the same guy who made 300, is about justifiable self-defense. Freedom, all freedom, is predicated on our notions of self-defense. Most people reviewing this movie don't seem to understand that. For instance I've read about 30 reviews criticizing the shortness of the plot--not incoherence mind you--shortness. As if the length of the plot matters. The film explores the relationship between the power of dance and the power of the mind to fight for freedom and autonomy.  It's a sublimely beautiful film.  Check it out.



If you want see the Ming Dynasty Encyclopedia entry about martial arts, make the jump below!

The following is a quote from Josh, a scholar of Buddhist studies who was posting on Rum Soaked Fist last year.  Later in the argument he acknowledged that for the most part these texts don't explain why people are practicing martial arts.  The arguments below fall under defense of property and defense of honor which are weak arguments for self-defense unless you are in Texas.  Being a master of ones body does imply some notion of autonomy in the same way a dance style like Flamenco does.  The 'self-protection' quoted below does imply self-defense, however in my recent readings of Historical Chinese plays about the justice system the actors are surprisingly inarticulate about why they were justified in fighting.  Also note the theatrical nature of some of the pictures and challenge match nature of others:

"In the Ming and Qing periods, it became popular to print large encyclopedic collections of commonplace knowledge, which are generally known as riyong leishu "encyclopedias for daily use." Endymion Wilkinson says of these that "These riyong leishu "encyclopedias for daily use" form an important source on popular religion and everyday attitudes, social practices, law, and the economy not found in other extant sources." (Chinese History: A Manual, p. 608). In other words, these writings were intended for a broad (but literate) audience. Among the variety of topics they present, several of these collections include chapters that briefly cover martial arts. I'll provide a few examples. The first of these collections, Wanbao quanshu, is generally considered to be a 16th century compilation. In fascicle 19, there is the chapter called "Wubei men" ("Skills of Martial Readiness") which offers a number of excerpts on martial arts practice. The chapter begins with a short verse extolling the virtues of practicing boxing. One of the lines states that after learning boxing, "During the daytime you will not have to worry about people coming to borrow from you, and at nighttime you will have no fear of thieves coming to steal from you."
In another collection from roughly the same time period, the Wanyong zhengzong, the introduction states that the one who studies boxing "will master his body, and will not be bullied by villains... [boxing] is the basis for self-protection.... The gentleman who does not practice this art will be bullied, cursed, have his possessions seized, and will unknowingly be subjected to worry and harm."
I think that these quotes and their presence in works intended for a general audience speak for themselves, and very much contradict the statements that you have made above regarding the perceived function of CMA in pre-modern Chinese society, at least at this particular time."

What's New!

Twisting and spiraling has gone mainstream!  I win!  Here is a fun article from Men's Health about twisting--  inspired by Tai Chi and Bagua and even cloud hands style Qigong-- to make people run faster.

Also, here is a cool new blog about what isn't new...ancient Tibet-o-civilization:  Early Tibet.

And here is my friend Maija's fun Blog: Sword and Circle.

I don't know the story behind this blog but I like it, maybe you will too.  Dark Wingchun.

I found that last blog because Maija published the following article on it (and Facebook), looking around the web she has written on this theme a few times but this is the newest incarnation:  Random Flow.

I like her ideas a lot.  My view of two person set flow routines (in reference to her random flow routines) is that if they are taught as techniques the purpose is lost.  Knowing where the force is going to come from is what makes this type of practice safe even with momentum and power in the mix.  Maija quotes her teacher Sonny, “If I know what you are going to do and where you are going to be next,  I can beat you no problem!”  That would be true if a person could truly know.  But to me what exemplifies the great tradition of gongfu is movement which can not be stopped by any technique.  It is an incredible presence.  This means training two person flow drills until they have no gaps, until one is defended on all four sides while simultaneously attacking.  The purpose of two person flow drills is to be able to beat an opponent even when he knows exactly what I am going to do.  So in the end we must be talking about an identical experience, we train the form to get as close to totally undifferentiated chaos as is humanly possible.  Which also happens to be my definition of the term Tai Chi.

Here is a video of some of my students doing a set flow drill (starts at 44 seconds in).



You also might want to check out this at Daoist Studies.org

And Livia Kohn has a new blog!
Here is the link to her Three Pines Press, and an interesting book on Sex in the Suwen.

Stevo

Wrestling this much as a little kid might stunt his growth, but still, he looks mighty good.  The Yahoo write up is just silly, it's clearly trained skill, not strength.  It's also impossible to tell if there is talent here unless you know more about how he trains and who trains him.



Which reminds me.  At a Rory Miller workshop the other day there was a guy who trains a lot of martial arts... but mostly with weapons.  He said that when he does train open-hand he usually focuses on striking.  This guy expressed a lack of confidence with ground fighting and even stand up grappling.  He said something like, "I haven't really wrestled since I was a little kid."  I was like, don't dismiss that. If you wrestled as a little kid that's the best possible training there is.  As it turned out, when I grappled with him standing up he had a tendency to want to use jumping action in his legs to get control, but he quickly noticed that didn't work.  When we went to the ground, he was as good as anyone.  It's like riding a bike.

Structure Vs. Momentum

Two posts back I was discussing the perfect curriculum.  Part of that discussion, which got a lot of comments on Facebook (can we fix the code so they show up here too?), is about the pros and cons of breaking an enormous corpus of ever receding revelations into bite sized ideas.  While the pros and cons are still being weighed, I have a little something to say about Structure vs. Momentum.

Structure training has many facets and side trajectories.  The most significant in no particular order are, center-line awareness and control, power investigation and development, and  creating potent default stances you can fight your way to when you are loosing in a self-defense situation.

But all that aside, the main purpose of structure training is to learn how to give up control of a fight in exchange for taking a dominant position. This is more or less what I was getting at when I named this blog "weakness with a twist." If you can reposition yourself with a structural advantage, having control over the fight isn't that important.  You can effectively let your opponent buck and roll while you tap them on the shoulder from behind.  It isn't usually that easy to pull off, but it is that simple.

Structure training isn't the whole fight by a long shot, but it is a very important piece.

Electric Volcano

Contrast this with momentum training.  Learning good structure usually involves a substantial loss of power do to the loss of natural momentum.  For instance untrained people often throw their shoulder and head into a punch because they intuitively know that it will increase the momentum of their strike.  We martial artists often un-teach this inclination right at the beginning because throwing your shoulder and head into a strike will likely land you in a worse position, especially if the punch misses it's target.

Again, the order in which this unwieldy mass of teachings are learned is up in the air, but there is some logic to teaching Momentum after Structure is established.

If structure training is about giving up control to gain position, then momentum training is about giving up both control and position in exchange for adding chaos.  The more mass there is barreling through space along spiral trajectories, the more inherent danger.  The less momentum there is in a fight the safer it is.  If the person you are fighting is focused on defense, he is less focused on hurting you.  If your opponent is trying to control or dominate you, adding momentum will likely shift him into a defensive mode.  The more defensive he is, the more rigid and predictable he will become.  The more experienced you are with the chaos of added momentum, the more likely you are to prevail.

Momentum training increases the power of strikes dramatically, but that's a side benefit.  The main purpose of momentum training is to get you to drop the wasted effort of trying to dominate and control.   Tigers fighting other animals don't waste effort trying to dominate and control.  Those are social concerns.  Drop them and you will experience greater freedom of action.

The will to dominate and control arises from the fear of chaos (huntun).  That doesn't necessarily make it good or bad, it just limits our ability to see things as they actually are.

Xu - Fake - False

The term xu is a key concept which ties together daoyin, the ritual body, trance, and all types of martial arts.  The first definition my dictionary gives of xu is “empty” or “hollow” but this is misleading as the term kong is generally used to describe emptiness in martial arts, meditation or ritual.

The second definition in my dictionary is more helpful, “fake;” interestingly, the fourth definition is “virtual.”

The radical for the character xu, is hu (tiger).  When a tiger stalks, he forgets his body, he thinks only of the prey.  Xu is the character used by Chinese Medicine in the expression shenxu (kidney depletion). When we go without food or sleep our bodies often become deficient and depleted, we lose fine motor control, the ability to focus, and concern for the flesh.

In the context of internal martial arts, xu is the fruition of the whole body moving as a single liquid unit.  Xu is a description of the physicality of an “I can sense what you are doing, you can not sense what I am doing” situation.  A body which is xu is unstoppable because it doesn’t apparently respond to resistance.

I know what you are thinking, zombies are xu. That’s right, if zombies could talk they would be like, “Yo, I don’t care if you chop off my arm, I’ll still eat you.  Shoot off my leg, no problem, I’m still coming...” I hesitate to say that xu is a form of disassociation because it is not necessarily a psychological problem.  However, the first time I bang my body or my leg against the ground teaching daoyin, people wince.  They think, “Are you crazy?”

Xu is external martial conditioning.  Xu is the result of pounding and slapping the outside of ones body as a way to be comfortable with heavy contact.

It is also what allows self-mortifiers to pierce and pummel themselves.  There is a long history in China of using a ritual trance initiation to induce xu.  Often it involves a ritual emptying, as in nuo theatrical exorcism where the hun and pö spirits are removed from the performer’s body and placed in jars using talisman and mantras.  But it is also a quick way of training troops.  During the Boxer Rebellion (1900) each boxer went through an initiation process which made him immune to pain and of course (he believed) bullets.

In trance the mind is totally preoccupied.  The boxers would invoke their personal deity and they would become, for instance, the Monkey King.  By preoccupying the mind with all the attributes of the Monkey King the individual boxer must have been able to disassociate from any injury to his own body.  He may also have been hungry and been entranced by the idea that he was purifying the country of evil Christians.

Other examples of training troops quickly involve group chanting.  Qawwali music from Pakistan, for instance, is all about invoking love.  It is the idea that while you are butchering your enemy you feel intense love for them, as you send them to god, you also make them one with god.  Because you are so focused on love, you disassociate from your own body.  Intense anger, revenge, and envy work too.  As Laozi says, “When we are possessed by desire, we experience only the yearned for manifest.”

Many spiritual traditions think of xu as a form of transcendence.  Putting on my rational 20th Century hat, I’d say that xu is the result of two forces; hormones (probably adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, epinephrine) and mental focus.

(While mentally focusing on an idea, a goal, or an object outside the body can create an experience of xu, "focus" is a really bad word choice because the more spatially expansive (capacious) ones awareness is, the more xu the body can become.)

For those who practice internal martial arts xu comes about simply through relaxation.  In fact I would tentatively say xu is relaxation. When every sand sized particle that makes up your entire body is relaxed it is xu.  (Xu is used in the Chinese character for atom.) A body which is xu does not intentionally respond to resistance.  It is heavy, liquid and unified.  Actually it does respond to resistance, but it does so in an unconditioned, unconscious, uncontrolled automatic way.

Everywhere I look these days people are abusing the poor word “embodied.” Everything needs to be “embodied” these days, if you want to sell it--it better be embodied with some awesomeness.  Exercise, politics, education, shampoo, coffee, even the truth is supposed to be embodied.  But I’m telling you people, if you take this ride to the top of the hill, it ends with a totally disembodied experience.  But words are misleading, truly internal martial xu should be both embodied and disembodied at the same time.  When all the controlling, micro-structural, 'I own this body,' 'this is me,' 'this is me-ness,' voices get turned off what is left is xu.  Xu and emptiness (kong), of course.

I’m not exactly describing an ego-free experience here.  The ego just becomes bigger, it lifts off of the body and becomes spacial.  One experiences a lively, dynamic form of perceptual-motor spacial awareness.

Everyone is at least a little bit xu all the time.  And everyone is capable of getting really xu in short order.  Most of the drugs you can name off of the top of your head increase ones experience of xu.

What inhibits the experience of xu? Only one thing: Feeling in possession of your own body--believing that what defines you is limited to this empty bag of flesh.

National Living Treasures

I really don't know what to do.  Paulie Zink has another video up on Youtube.  His Daoyin is the link between Daoist hermit rituals, Shaolin, the martial theater tradition, and internal martial arts.  I don't know of anyone else that has even come close to receiving the complete transmission of this knowledge.  Paulie Zink has it, yet hardly anyone appreciates that fact, even worse, I don't think he appreciates it!  For crying out loud, why call it Yin Yoga?  You're killing me.

For those who have missed this story, here are some of the details.  Paulie Zink learned Daoyin and Monkey Kungfu in Los Angels in the late '70's early 80's from a guy, Cho Chat Ling who learned it from his father and taught no one else.  The Monkey Kungfu is made up of 5 different Monkey forms and qualities all of which Paulie then taught to his close friend Michael Matsuda.  I interviewed Michael last year in Santa Clarita and he told me that he never learned any of the Daoyin and that Monkey Kungfu and Daoyin were completely different systems.  It's my opinion that Monkey is one of about 20 Daoyin animal movements, but it happens to be by far the most developed of the animals because Monkey was such a popular stage role in every part of China.  Michael dismissed this notion by saying that it was purely a martial arts system.  He backed up this statement by telling me that a group of Paulie Zink's teacher's father's Kungfu cousin's  disciples (got that?) came to visit Los Angels from Hong Kong twice in the 1980's to compete in tournaments and Michael got to travel with them.  He said they were superb fighters, unlike Paulie Zink who never had an interest in fighting.  But Michael also said that none of the visiting group knew Daoyin, and none of them knew all 5 monkey forms either.  That means Michael is also a National Living Treasure and more people need to get down there and study with him.  I took his class-- that's some serious gongfu!  (Buy a video!) (There is more of Michael's argument here, but the idea that there was some wall of separation between fighting skill and performing skill does not stand up to historical scrutiny.)

The purpose of Daoyin is very simply to reveal the freedom of our true nature.  That's the purpose, or I could say the fruition.  One of the reasons this thing has gotten so screwed up is that people are always confusing the method with the fruition.  They think that physical looseness and flexibility is the fruition, when in fact it is only the method, and only a small part of the method at that.

The method of Daoyin is very simply to distill what is inside from what is outside so that we might become aware of this other thing, call it emptiness, call it freedom, call it original qi, call immortality, call it whatever you want.  The world outside of us is always pushing or pulling, and the world inside of us is always pushing or pulling.  The premise of Daoyin is that there is a place in between inside and outside which is always pure and always free.

Thinking back to how Daoyin was created, there were two ways in.  One way was to cultivate extraordinarily plain stillness and emptiness, and from that experience begin moving.  The other way was to tap into the spontaneity of the animal mind, to move, think and feel like a wild animal.  In order to have the complete Daoyin 'experience' you would have to go in one way and find your way out the other!  So in a sense, Daoyin can't really be taught, it has to be found.

One of the many differences between Yoga and Daoyin is that Daoyin has what we call in the martial arts world, "external conditioning."  Somewhere in the middle (1:26) you see Paulie putting his legs together and flopping them side to side, whacking them on the ground.  His torso becomes like water and his legs like someone else's legs.  Who cares?  Just throw them around.  This is one of the doorways in.

Later, when he does the pig, he is banging his knees on the ground in a rapid fire vibration.  Then near the end he does the caterpillar (changing into a butterfly) which looks totally smooth, but I've taught it to kids a lot and I always have to explain that "gongfu teachers like me are the model of toughness and dispassion!" and "I don't care if you get little purple bruises--the cure is more practice!"

In the video he starts with the frog, then the stump, the tree, then the crab, the transition to lotus sitting, then the pig (at 1:59, I've never seen that before!), then the caterpillar into the butterfly.

The music is barely survivable.  It should really be done on a hard, unforgiving surface.  The production quality is even lower than the stuff I do.  I'm pretty sure that most people will look at this video and say, it doesn't measure up to this or that standard--but that's partly because people don't know what they are looking at.

He is doing only a tiny fraction of each animal. Viewers should know that all the animals have meditation postures, and they all come totally to life, like the pig did for about one second (1:59).  The pig is particularly interesting because like the dog, it was the lowest status role there was in the Chinese theater tradition.  Think about it, to be an actor was lower status than a prostitute or a thief!  Playing the role of a dog or a pig was really low.  The animal role specialists would draw straws to see who the unlucky guy was who would have to play the pig!

Given that Paulie's teacher probably inherited a really low social status, it isn't all that surprising that he would want to abandon it himself and go into the import-export business (no one actually knows where he is now), but he obviously valued it enough to believe that it should be passed on to someone in it's complete form.  I can even understand wanting to free it from it's original Daoist/Theater context, even if I think that was short sited and highly problematic given that Paulie does not seem to understand what a treasure he is or has.

The Greatest Self Defense System Ever - Northern Shaolin

The first movements in the Northern Shaolin I teach are superbly designed for responding to the way actual bad guys attack, especially considering that Northern Shaolin is traditionally taught to children.  In fact I would say it is the greatest self-defense system ever invented.  I know that sounds pompous or something but I was surprised, I mean, I didn't show up to Rory Miller's workshop on real world violence thinking or believing that.  My teachers were all too modest to ever say anything like that either.  I have only come too realize this through testing and reflecting on the forms that I teach after having taken Rory's workshop.

Frankly this is totally counter intuitive because the style of Northern Shaolin I teach begins in a very theatrical way, with a stamp and a quick parting of the curtains followed immediately by a special run where the feet kick backwards, which is followed by the 'monk clears his sleaves' movement which ends in a stamp balanced on one foot with the other knee up at chest level and with a fist high in the air.

I have long been an advocate for teaching Chinese martial arts as a performing art.  I have also argued extensively that historically these arts were understood as performing arts with real life applications.  You could really fight with these arts, you could also put them on a stage or in a parade.  In many parts of the world you can find some type of amateur theater, or folk dance, which has very real and important therapeutic and social purposes.  In traditional Chinese culture, martial arts were woven into everything.  Depending on who you talk to this is either extreme heresy or so obvious it doesn't need to be said.

I've been teaching these opening Shaolin movements as self-defense for twenty years.  I've always taken the martial component seriously, meaning I've always been frank and open about what I know and don't know and given students an opportunity to practice these movements with a partner who attacks them in a whole bunch of different ways at different speeds from different angles.  But because self-defense was of limited interest to me my perspective was limited.

One of Rory Miller's big challenges is to analyze martial arts by asking questions like, "How do bad guys really attack?"  And "Would this work against a really bad guy."  Rory obviously has a lot of material in this area that he didn't have time to cover in the workshop, but a couple of things really got me thinking.

According to Tony Bauer, it is important to choose a single action which your body can go to in a surprise attack.  It should be a position from which you can fight which defends your head and neck and is itself a return attack.  This wasn't hard for me to do, I have at least 20 of these and picking a favorite was easy. (Watch a Tony Bauer video)

We practiced this by doing the same movement while three people took turns (spontaneously) attacking us from the front and the left and right.  (This made it obvious how important it is to train side power, but more on that another day.)  Everyone's movement involved putting their hands up in one way or another.

After this Rory took the women aside (I decide to pretend I was a woman) and told us that there are two common ways women and children are attacked which require a different type of response.  The first is being grabbed from behind by the neck and pulled backwards.  The necessary response to this attack is an elbow strike backwards and it should be practiced.  The second is a bear hug from behind which traps your arms and lifts you off of the ground so that you can be carried away and thrown in a car or something.  Most self-defense classes teach that at the moment you are being grabbed you should suddenly sink your weight straight down.  This could potentially work if the person attacking was just grabbing you.  But as Rory pointed out, they don't do that, they grab you as they are running.

This Summer George Xu was showing us how effectively he can sink making himself impossible to lift.  A strong healthy student offered to help with his demonstration and promptly came up behind and lifted George into the air.  To his great credit George immediately admitted that his method had completely failed and we went on to analyze why.  It turned out that his attacker was charging forward before lifting.  When George added turning to defuse the forward motion and sinking at the same time, it worked, he couldn't be lifted.  But heavens, if it didn't work for George Xu the first time, do you think it will work for you?

So that's what Rory said too.  If you are still on the ground being bear hugged you can try the sinking thing, but if you are already in the air you need a different strategy.  He suggested using your hands to trap you attackers hands and leaning forward.  If the attacker is moving they will likely stumble forward and as you have their hands they are very likely to fall forward and to the side, shattering their collar bone on the ground.  Great stuff.  (He cautioned  that practicing this, even on a mat, has a high probability of leaving the attacker with broken bones.)

The Northern Shaolin opening movements follows this exact logic and take it a step further.  Rather than try to get this all in a writing, here is a video I just made!

Women's Self-Defense

In the 680 or so posts on this blog I have not had all that much to say about self-defense in general.  (It's not even on my "Category" list in the side bar.) Of all the things which interest me about martial arts, self-defense has rarely risen to the top.  But lately I have found myself thinking, reading, and teaching about it more and more.  Most people think of martial arts and self-defense as synonyms.  That leads to a lot of confusion.

Devi Protective Offense is a site dedicated to clearing up the confusions.  It is specifically designed by women, for women.  Teja is selling a product and a service which looks great.

You can watch a few of her videos for free, and she has this overview (click to enlarge).



She isn't dealing with historical development however, which in my opinion means she is too quick to discard traditional methods and forms.   In the video below she says that men have created unrealistic strategies for self-defense because they have trouble comprehending what it is like to be small and weak.  She is correct, but to me that is an argument for preserving traditional arts not discarding them.  Women were involved in the creation of many traditional martial arts particularly those related to performance and hospitality.  But even more importantly, I was a kid once.  I know exactly what it is like to fight someone three times my size.  Northern Shaolin was designed specifically for kids and it is extraordinarily well designed for kid's self-defense.  The internal arts take a long time to learn and require adoption levels of intimacy, but all the techniques I teach do assume that you are fighting a much stronger opponent (weakness with a twist is my motto).  Everything else she says is spot on. (hat tip: Chiron)

Monga

Monga is the latest blockbuster movie from Taiwan and it is playing twice on opening night of the Taiwan Film Days festival put on by the San Francisco Film Society.  This gangster movie by Niu Doze has several male heart throbs in the lead roles and tons of hand to hand group fight scenes--Thus making it a great date movie!  But maybe not a first-date because it is actually quite complex.

The fight scenes are a lot of fun.  The choreographic style is not classic kungfu, it is loose and even sloppy.  But that's a good thing because the characters doing the fighting are talented fighters, not skilled fighters.  The free-ness of the choreography tells us the protagonists are young, a bit crazy and that they clearly love fighting.

The plot basically follows the emotional development of a few young men-of-prowess, a band of brothers, as they deal with more and more confining choices and harsh fates.  The plot has some twists in it, some are fun, and some are brutal.

But what is really important about this film is that it attempts to deal with the historic role men-of-prowess played in maintaining a social order outside of government control. This is what makes the movie special.  The action is centered around a temple.  The temple itself is martial, and the lead characters are all devoted to a martial god.  The film beautifully illustrates the thesis of the scholarly work Bandits, Eunichs and the Son of Heaven:  In order to keep commerce safe enough to keep thriving in such a vast country, Chinese civilization has depended on complex sometimes haphazard alliances between men-of-prowess.  The central government was never strong enough to control banditry or rebellion on it's own.  Magistrates were spread thinly throughout the country but righteous heroes, often centered around a temple to a martial god, were easy to come by.  These rough independent men tended to walk a fine line between community service and community extortion.  (More posts on this idea are here, there, over here and here too.)

The film can also probably be viewed as an allegory for the conflicts between native Taiwanese and the Mainlanders who came with the Guomindang in 1949.  It can also probably be read as an allegory for the influence the current Mainland Chinese have on Taiwanese politics, specifically the conflicts over independence between the KMT and the DPP.  But honestly I probably missed most of the nuances of these allegories, you'd have to be steeped in Taiwanese politics to get them.  Hopefully one of my readers is steeped and will enlighten us in the comments below.

The film Monga (Taiwan, 2010) is showing a 6:15 PM and 9:40 PM this Friday, October 22nd, 2010. It's at the New People theater which is a fantastic new theater in Japan Town.  Check it out!

Power Generation

Since you axed me, I'm gonna essplain it to you.

--Rush Limbaugh

A small part of the Rory Miller workshop a few weeks ago was dedicated to power generation. The simple reason for this is that striking a violent threat without doing damage is a waste of time. If you are already receiving damage, your ability to fight is diminishing as time passes.
Rory is able to pass on some very useful material about power generation in a very short time.
Let me start out by saying I think he did a great job of getting people to think about the importance of power generation to self-defense, and how to improve ones power in a short period of time. Tasked with the same goals I would not have done things much differently. However, I’m dedicated to discovering the highest level of martial arts theory available, so we have some taking apart to do.

Here is what he taught.

The drop step is the most immediate way to generate power.
Press the back heel.
Twist suddenly at the hip (kua).
Keep the whole arm and back loose like throwing a baseball.

These all increase power. When put together they dramatically increase power.
I realized a long time ago that I have way more power than I actually need to fight, from a self-defense point of view what I have to say about power generation is trivial. I suppose the charge of esoteric is a fair description of my opinion.
Rory himself raised the issue of why each of these work. With a better understanding of theory we can improve our results. So here are my explanations.

The drop step is used extensively in African dance and many dance systems, it is also the main strategy taught for punching in Northern Shaolin. It works primarily because it adds the force of falling mass. Rolling an elbow forward on the opponent’s arm while doing a drop step puts at least 100 pounds of force, multiplied by a few inches of gravity, onto the opponent. If the opponent’s structure is compromised already, the movement will likely cause damage. It can also shake up a person who has good structure. The flaw of this technique (all techniques have flaws) is that it is vulnerable to a sweep (or a rotation) while in the air, and tends to be over committed at the moment when it lands, particularly if it misses its target.
The same technique can be done internally, without leaving the ground or committing to one foot, but it takes a long time to train.

Pressing the back heel is also a major part of Northern Shaolin training. It’s main value is that it backs up projections-- it is what most people do when they jab with a spear to stop from being thrown back by the forward motion of the wild thing they are jabbing. It is not actually a power generating technique. A foot pushing off the ground (whether with the heel or the toe) generates momentum; however, once the momentum is achieved the foot can leave the ground without any loss of force. Pressing the back heel can have another purpose, which is to uproot. In tai chi, we teach people to uproot off of either foot and generally it is the foot which is weighted over the toe which does the uprooting. So even if your back heel is down to root against the forward motion of your opponent, your front foot can still be used to uproot.
Perhaps the full extension of the back heel adds a little momentum (as compared to leaving it up), but that isn’t its main function. No doubt everyone who studies martial arts should learn this technique and build on it, but eventually it should be abandoned. Its flaw is that it combines with the drop step to create an on/off switch. The drop step entails a loss of stability, the pressing of the heel is an attempt to regain it. A superior theory of fighting seeks to eliminate the gap in power created by this transition between “on” and “off.” Some stability is gained in the front/back plane from pressing the heel, but it is lost in the other planes, making the striker vulnerable to rotational force or up/down force. A superior theory of fighting would never strike in a way that sacrifices the six dimensions of power: up/down, left/right, front/back (called liuhe in Chinese). It is preferable to keep the body moving like a rolling, spinning, expanding/shrinking ball which never comes out to a point. Lot’s of Tai Chi guys take this to mean don’t punch, but that isn’t correct, it just means that when you punch, the punch has to be part of a rolling ball.

“Keep the whole arm and back loose, like throwing a baseball” is correct and needs no amending. The more relaxed and empty the movement, the more whole body integration and weight are available for generating force. In class I actually interjected that some people may experience shoulder injuries if they lack protective shoulder muscle. The injury can happen when a person throws the arm with a lot of force while only relaxing halfway. It’s probably best to work this idea gradually. Eventually ones entire body weight can be added to the force through the sequence relax, empty, unify.

Rory actually told us he was uncertain why “Twist the hip suddenly” helps increase power. Here is my explanation. First, rotation in the hip, what in Chinese martial arts we call 'turning the kua,' adds some rotational force so it makes forward force more difficult to stop, deflect or neutralize. Second, the suddenness of the technique is akin to shaking. It loosens the ‘meat’ from the bones and automatically adds fluid weight to the strike. Third, it cuts the body at the waist. This is actually a flaw, but it works! It diminishes structural force from the feet to the hands, however, it increases the moving mass available for the punch. It basically sacrifices the structure of the legs for the weight of the torso. No doubt many people will think I’m crazy for suggesting that loss of structure is a good thing.
Structure can be broken or uprooted-- fluid, dynamic mass can not.

So to summarize: The drop step can be hidden. The heel press isn’t necessary for power but can help with rooting against an on coming force or uprooting a threat’s structure; however a superior fighter will use your structure against you so eventually heel pressing should be discarded. A loose arm increases power if it integrates with the relaxed emptiness of the whole body. The sudden twist of the hip is a flawed technique but has positive effects on power generation anyway.

The big problem with martial arts is that they work. Since most of us will never need to cause massive damage to another person, if we measure martial arts by “effectiveness” they are all a massive waste of time. Most martial arts training will effectively increase power generation as long as you don’t train yourself to pull punches with free sparing, or subordination to the teacher.
While power for power’s sake is a fools errand, the martial arts I teach should give the student more than enough power to overpower a much larger person, or multiple people. But hopefully that will never need to happen. For me, the never ending search for power is just like a dance-- it is simply a happy consequence of freedom-- it is a unique expression of real joy.