Origins of Qigong (part 1)

There is a common convention of Chinese culture in which the word Dao, meaning the way (or road), is applied to any field of study. The dao of archery, the dao of writing, the dao of mothering, even the dao of basketball. This expression refers to a way of knowing and embodying which is unique to each pursuit, and implies both ease and confidence. It is somewhat like saying in English, "She really has a knack for juggling." (Yet it implies that the activity itself transforms the person who does it, it is not just an act of doing. It also implies that there is a curriculum.)
For most of the last 1500 years in China (since the introduction of Kaishu style calligraphy), the first lessons one received when learning to write were instructions on how to sit with out obstructing the circulation of qi and blood, how to hold and move the brush in coordination with ones breath such that the student might start discovering the dao of writing from day one. It was a lesson in how to embody the physicality of great public officials of the past.
All traditional Chinese subjects had this "dao of" training; music, martial arts, medicine, weaving, etc….In traditional Chinese culture the physical process of acquiring knowledge is not subordinate to knowledge itself-- How one learns is, in a sense, given priority to what one learns. [Of course, the threat of violence was sometimes part of the teaching process, (I don’t want to create a fantasy playland out of Chinese history), but there was an emphasis on process nonetheless.]
The term qigong, coined in the 1950's, has come to describe the modern idea of abstracting all these varied approaches to the physical basis for learning-- and making them into a distinct subject. For instance the specific daily exercises that a blacksmith family had been passing down from generation to generation (the dao of blacksmithing) now became a type of qigong taught for general health.

Confucianism and Martial Arts

All of the major categories of Chinese religion have developed the notion of perfecting one’s self, though each in distinctly different ways. While each is a contributor, Confucianism is the obvious and most prominent origin of gongfu as a process of perfection. The Confucian approach is one of consistent vigilance in the refinement of a changing person in a changing world. The idea that one would practice the same routine everyday and thus constantly refine ones skill, while simultaneously adapting and applying that skill to ones ever changing duties, needs and circumstances is a Confucian idea. The result of such a practice would be a combination of embodied discipline, efficiency and flexibility. Confucians assert that Gongfu thus conceived does not need to be rewarded because the process of perfection is intrinsically rewarding.

Are you on a path of self-perfection?  Does this idea translate into English speaking cultures? When I searched Google images for "perfection" I mostly got images of nature, drugs, and technology.

Medicine and War

The greatest advances in medicine happen during times of war. Doctors get a lot of practice because there are ample people suffering from injuries, illnesses, pestilence, mental problems, and of course lack of nutrition. In European culture there is a custom of creating a moral separation between doctors and military personnel. There is an imaginary wall, a temporary truce where the Red Cross comes in and soldiers take a break from fighting. In China, where the word for great fighting skill literally means meritorious action --there is no such separation. Thus it was common for doctors to have extensive training in martial arts. A pharmacy would often have a gongfu school in the same building or near by. The same person treating patients often taught fighting skills on the side. "Pharmacy businesses in China customarily promote(d) martial arts to advertise medicines and tonics."(P.11, Marnix Wells, Scholar Boxer.)

The concept of "Self-defense" does not exist in China. One can say, ziwei, literally self-defense or self-guarding, but nobody does because it is a homonym for self-pleasuring (also: ziwei). The morality of fighting in China is simply different than it is in America or Europe. (More to come on the morality of fighting in the coming weeks.)

Gongfu (kungfu) and Trance

Another possible source of gongfu is as a form of physical training to survive trance. As I've already said, the trance-medium tradition was pervasive in China for most of its history. Full-on possession by a god, as happens in both African religion and Chinese religion, is extremely taxing on the body. Wild movements may toss, whip, shake and gyrate the possessed person. I suspect that at some time in the distant past, this experience was a near death one; people who were repeatedly possessed had shorted lives. Yet in Africa as in China people who become possessed have extraordinary physical training which allows them to survive, some even with radiant health. In Africa this training is dance, and in China, at least in Taiwan and the South East Asian Chinese Diaspora, it is gongfu.

This is also one of my favorate explanations for the difference between internal and external martial arts (neijia and waijia). In Africa and the African Diaspora, priests and drummers are required to be familiar with the rituals for each deity and his/her particular characteristics. For instance, a particular deity is invoked through specific rhythms, dances, songs, and sacrifices. A deity might be known for being jealous, carrying a sword, being female, being associated with the color green, having a sharp wit, and of course, wielding power in a particular realm. However, both priests and drummers are forbidden to become possessed by the deity. Should they become possessed they lose their ritual statues. They are experts in managing and differentiating the different types of human trance.

Chinese religion is very similar. Orthodox Daoist priests were forbidden to become possessed yet their training involves becoming intimate with each type of trance. Daoism is, among many things, a systematic ordering of all types of deities by the characteristics of their local or national cults--and by the specific types of trance that lead to possessions by particular deities.

Taijiquan, xingyiquan, & baguazhang each teach different types of trance. Taijiquan, for instance, teaches peng, ji, lu, and an. Xingyi teaches the five 'phases' and the various animals.

External martial arts is training to survive possession by a deity. Internal martial arts is training to become familiar with the ways in which our bodies fall into trance so that we don't become possessed. What we know in the 'West' as Chinese martial arts is actually fall out from this religious tradition.

Here is a great article about trance-mediums in China.

Update: Because the term "priest" doesn't real translate perfectly into any language, it would be more accurate for me to say about African religion that atleast one person in a given ritual has the role of not going into trance.  Sometimes the "priest" may be the only person possessed.

The origins of Gongfu (Kung-fu) (part 2)

Gongfu training has always been associated with the military, with militias, with crop guarding, with bodyguards, and with constables under the jurisdiction of a magistrate. The question anyone trying to sort out the historic origins of gongfu must ask is: Since most nations and peoples of the world trained and drilled armies, why did China alone (and later some of its neighbors: Japan, Korea, Tibet, Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia) develop martial arts? Many cultures developed matched fighting, fencing schools, technical wrestling, and warlike games and dances, but not the sets and routines characteristic of all types of gongfu.

My answers to this question are conjecture, that is, I sometimes stray from what can be supported by the available facts, but I hope my answers are interesting food for thought and perhaps future research. (In other words, I'm doing something good scholars never do but the rest of us wish they would once and a while).

During the Warring states era, as the warrior class was loosing its grip on the kingdoms of China, larger and larger groups of peasants were forced into gigantic armies. The ability to conquer huge areas and incorporate those peoples into larger and larger armies was years ahead of the state-craft necessary to maintain them. A group conquered its neighbors and a few years later another group rose up and did the same.

At this time, armies prepared for a fight by singing, dancing and drumming themselves into a blood thirsty frenzy. When Qinshi huangdi, the first Chinese emperor, established his unified state, he banned this type of music and dance because it was within the song and the dance that all of the disparate peoples he conquered stored their enmity. After the Qin fell and the Han dynasty arose, the process of incorporating neighboring clans or tribes into the army continued.

While they wanted the physicality and the energy generated by music and dance, they did not want the enmity it perpetuated. These dances were trance invocations of powerful animals like snakes or tigers and the angry spirits of the unresolved (or un-avenged) dead. By taking the music out yet keeping the dances as a source of power focused on fighting, they developed into set routines that captured the physicality of powerful animals. Later the idea of a form or a set that could be passed down through time made it possible to immortalize the movements of individual great war heroes.

Thus practicing gongfu can be understood in the context of Chinese religion as a kind of trance-medium-ship; whereby, a practitioner regularly and systematically invokes the routine's martial ancestors. Through this act the prowess of those ancestors is received and embodied. (The Chinese term for this type of 'spirit' prowess is ling, but it is taboo to talk about it.)

The origins of Gongfu (Kung-fu) (part 1)

A saying of Confucius: "never worry your parent’s unless you are sick" has been interpreted to mean that children (starting at age 7 or 8 ) should be given substantial responsibility for maintaining their own health. This often manifests through the study of gongfu.

In traditional Chinese society health is considered a kind of accumulated merit which you dedicate to others-- and to the resolution of your own unresolved ancestors. For instance, I might decide I’m going to eat only vegetarian food and dedicate that act to my mother, who is prone to illness. There is a confluence between religious Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism in which they all agree that there is a mechanism whereby the inappropriate actions of our ancestors can, to some degree, be rectified ('put right') by the upright conduct of their descendants. This notion is at odds with Western cultural distinctions but is intrinsic to the meaning of the word gongfu.
Inappropriate conduct in the Chinese context, a Chinese sin—if you will, is an action which creates ongoing problems for other people. It is an event which is unresolved. Thus appropriate conduct is action which resolves lingering problems, but it is also actions which are efficient in that they leave no need for further action—they are self resolving. The term for this process in Chinese is zhengqi. (The word means orthodox and upright, but also to rectify, resolve, or correct qi).
For example, I was teaching some Chinese elementary school students in San Francisco, and I had learned from a very smart 5 year old girl that her grandfather, a Red Army general, had come from China to live with her family and that he was very sick. After winter break I asked after his health and she stood very upright and said with a big smile, "My grandfather died two weeks ago." This was not the first time I had experienced this cultural phenomenon, but every time it happens my first reaction is shock. " She can’t be happy," I thought to myself. By smiling she was letting me know the facts, but also letting me know that I did not need to get involved emotionally in her family affairs. She was trying to limit the spread of those aspects of her grandfather’s life which were still unresolved. Her actions were zhengqi. Obviously this particular expression of cultural values doesn’t translate very well, otherwise I wouldn’t still be talking about it.
When a person dies, his inappropriate conduct, and his unfinished projects can linger. Most influence fades quickly after a persons death, but not everything. Imagine if you were to die right now? What actions would your family or friends have to take to resolve your death. If you have young children, someone is going to have to care and provide for them. This is why we write wills. But only issues of money and property get dealt with in a will. It is even possible that the will we left could create jealousy and lawsuits. If you were murdered the perpetrator would have to be found and punished. If you have a job, someone would likely have to be found and trained to replace you, or perhaps your business would close and all the people it serves would have to find that service elsewhere. Emotional conduct can linger after death too. Hatred of a particular ethnic group can be passed on to ones children, as can a habit of drinking alcohol to numb depression.
So the idea of gongfu, is to improve yourself. It is to improve your collective-family-self. It is to take actions which resolve bad habits you may have inherited, directly or indirectly.

Of course the influence of our ancestors need not be negative. Our condition and opportunities at birth are largely do to our ancestors. It is hard to say how much of the way our lives go is do to our own merit and how much we inherit. The idea of gongfu, accumulation of merit, acknowledges that the merit we eventually pass on to others is an accumulation of the merit of our ancestors, our teachers and our own upright conduct.
Gongfu means: self-improvement for the good of others.

What is gongfu (kung-fu)?

The term gongfu is commonly used today to mean fighting arts. It specifically implies a potent quality of movement which is powerful, precisely because it has been refined by years of practice. Gongfu was originally any good work done for the local community, and for this reason I have settled on the translation- meritorious action. In the Tang, dynasty where the term originates: (Quotes from Kristofer Schipper Taoism and the arts of China)

"The traditional dioceses and local communities of the Taoist ecclesia gradually transformed themselves into modern temple organizations. The new bourgeoise of the Jiangnan area organized themselves in associations, which were to dominate the social and economical life of China until modern times, were headed by laymen, but remained intrinsically Taoist in nature. They served many other purposes. Often, the most important associations were vocational groups, such as the grain traders of Nanchang, and hence comparable to Western guilds. Others were pilgrimage associations, which maintained the networks between different localities. Still others had more precise aims, such as performing deeds of merit: keeping the temple clean, reciting scriptures, caring for the old and sick, helping the disabled and the mentally unfit, liberating animals and even collecting old paper (any piece with writing on it was deemed sacred) and training in the marital arts so as to be able to protect the community if need arose. All this was gongfu , "religious merit" (a term we now associate with the Chinese martial arts of the temple associations), and because all these activities were performed as a service to the community we call these associations "liturgical organizations." P.49

[footnote: During the Ching Dynasty because these associations were suppressed, many went underground, became dedicated to the over-throw of the government, and became what we know today as the Triads. ]

The custom of publicly demonstrating one's merit is pervasive in Chinese culture. The New Year's custom in which people who prospered during the year hand out money in red envelopes is a great example of publicly demonstrating one's merit. So are the ribbon cutting ceremonies at newly built bridges or businesses. Early theater was originally the ritual performance of acts of merit, performed at these same temples, which eventually became Chinese Opera and has now morphed into the popular gongfu movie. The basic physical training for Chinese Opera is martial arts or gongfu.

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

Internal Coordination

Internal coordination is the ability to link-up the movement of one part of the body to another, it is an essential aspect of qigong and all internal arts. Another way to think about it is to say the six limbs, head, tail, arms and legs, are all connected to the movement to the lower dantian, or the belly. With practice, even very small movements will become supported by the subtle movement of the rest of the body. This is primarily accomplished through the continuous twisting and wrapping of soft tissue from one extremity to another.

In qigong as well as all the internal arts, internal coordination is achieved within the frame of the tailbone sinking, the top of the head rising and the shoulders directly aligned with the hips so that the spine itself does not twist at all. This leaves all the internal organs free to move with the twisting and wrapping of the extremities.

This is just a small piece of a very large proccess and there are many different approaches to teaching this principle. Some teachers may treat it as 'advanced' and so many qigong movements neglect this principle. This is partly because it is possible to break the over all principle of internal coordination into smaller components and develop them independently. It is also partly because once the principle is thourghly integrated into ones movement it is possible to be internally connected in any type of movement, including freely twisting the spine.

In practice, internal coordination is usually combined with other teachings; for instance, pulsing the joints, opening the qi gates, and various hydrolic processes in the body.

If you focus your training on internal coordination your movement will be come more snake-like.

Stance Training

All Chinese martial arts schools do stance training. It is often considered the most important training for developing a gongfu foundation.

I estimate that I have stood still for on the order of 6000 hours, probably more. The longest period of time I have held a single stance is 6 hours. My shaolin students learn and train the following stances: Horse, Cat, Falling stance, Bow'n'arrow, Monk, cross leg or t-stance, and natural step (ziran). Every movement in taijiquan should be held, and basically the same goes for xingyi and bagua.

Wang Xiangzhai, the highly influential 20th Century founder of Yiquan said quality stance/stillness training was what all great Chinese martial artists have in common.

My own experience is that deep stance training is more effective than stretching and high kicks for re-making young Northern Shaolin students bodies so that they have a bigger range of movement potential. This is sometimes called, "getting the qi in the channels."
While in my twenties, an hour a day of low stance training initially made my thigh muscles and shoulder muscles bigger, but as time passed and my alignment improved my muscles got smaller and smaller. This is sometimes called, "qi going into the bones."

It's true, my muscles got smaller. My alignment improved and along with it my ability to issue power, to connect (integrate), twist, and pulse (open/close). Believe it or not, I got weaker. Not lazy or deficient but muscularly weaker and functionally more sensitive.

As time has passed I feel my use of higher stance training (still an hour a day) has helped develop more freedom and naturalness in my everyday movement. This is sometimes called, "Writing the Classics (jing) on your bones."

Stances on one leg, both high and low, are essential for developing kicking power, and are of course great for balance (in a future post I'll explain the physiology as I understand it.)

There is a ton more I could say about this subject and probably will in future blogs. I encourage readers to add your comments about what role stances have played in your training. In your opinion, what does and what doesn't stance training achieve?