The Quest for Power (Part 1)

The quest for power in the martial arts is a strange one. From an Orthodox Daoist point of view, the quest for power arises from inappropriate conduct.

Some of the most common forms of inappropriate conduct are arguing with someone who isn't interested in learning, pushing yourself to physical exhaustion, drinking too much, or over eating. All of these actions result in loss of qi, they create a deficiency. Historically, starving may have been the most common cause of qi deficiency.

Qi deficiency simply leads to conflicting emotions. Of course this is a natural process, so for instance, if you get in a bad argument and then you go home and take a bath and go straight to bed, you will completely recover. The problems arise when your conflicting emotions combine with someone else's, and it's already past midnight and you have a meeting early in the morning, so you don't have time to replenish your qi.

After a few days of this people start thinking about how they can get more power. Deep conflicting emotions probably arise from fear of death. I think the quest for power is part of our hard wiring. It is triggered when our survival feels threatened, and it arises so that we will be able to survive extreme hardship.

Butterflies or Six Inch Knives?

One of the basic ideas of internal martial arts is that joints can open and close (kaihe). I talked about this in these two posts from last September. Joint Pulsing 1 and Joint Pulsing 2.
The elbow, like all joints, opens and closes quite easily.   In order to think about something it really helps to have words and metaphors which describe it.  Since the elbow is something we rarely talk about, we also rarely think about it, and so for most people the opening and closing of the elbow joint is a completely unconscious process.

When I gained awareness of my elbows opening and closing my martial arts power tripled.  Now you might think I'm exaggerating, you wouldn't be the first, but honestly--before I had this awareness life was gray, after gaining this awareness opponents started flying off of my arms.

Here are two ways to practice that may help you gain awareness of your elbows:

First imagine that you have butterflies on your elbows, happy, light, delicate and beautiful.  Practice moving about, do the form, even gentle push-hands, with out knocking the butterflies off your elbows.

Second, imagine you have six inch long double edged knives projecting out of your elbows; happy, light, sharp, and beautiful.  Go straight to push hands and imagine you are joyfully cutting your way through your opponent.  Be generous with your cutting techniques.

Here is a link to an article I just re-wrote about wearing Compression Straps on your elbows.  

Monkey Swings

Last month I was at a family gathering and there was a five month old girl who was crying. Her aunt, who has several wild children of her own, tried rocking her and then bouncing her, but the baby was still crying. Then with a big grin she announced, "We are going to have to try Monkey Swings." I can now verify from my observations that monkey swings are an effective crying control mechanism.

The standard Taijiquan, Xingyi and Bagua zhang instructions tell us to lift up our heads from the Baihui point on the very top of the head. Some Shaolin and meditation schools say to lift from a point a little further back so that the chin comes in slightly. Further, I have heard lift from the roof of the mouth, lift from the base of the skull and even lift from a point in the air about one foot above your head.

All of these instructions are useful gates. It is vitally important to develop awareness of head position, centerline, dingjin (upward power), and zhengqi (upright, self-correcting vigor). However, I think these instructions alone will not produce a high quality final product.

I've now spent way too much time looking at baby pictures on google images, I may need some time to recover my manliness. Unfortunately I could not find a single picture of a monkey swing so I'll have to describe it. Here is how you do a Monkey Swing^TM:

While sitting down place the baby on its back in your lap with the its feet facing you. Take hold of an ankle and a wrist in each of your hands. Then lift up and swing the baby's bottom toward your face and then it's head out and away, using your forearms as the pivot. Continue swinging until the desired results are achieved.

As you are imaging this, you might think that the baby's head would flop backwards like that of the child on the swing above. But it didn't. The baby's head stayed right in line with its torso. This was a five month old I was watching, a younger baby probably would have had a floppy head. An older child would certainly be able to do this, but in most cases it would be obvious that they were using voluntary neck muscles.

The baby I watched did all this automatically. Her head was inside her dantian!

The highest level martial artists put their head inside their dantian.

Here is:
A baby development site.

Keep Your Fingers Straight

I have a friend of a friend who, last I checked, has been studying Shaolin and Taijiquan with the same teacher for nearly 20 years. This friend is convinced he is becoming the greatest of fighters. This particular teacher claims an important lineage and has both nurturing qualities and a fierce temper.

There is a shadow side to the previous discussion about metaphorically passing through difficult gates or crossing over bridges of unnecessary practice.  That shadow is the sometimes desperate pathos of the student-teacher relationship.

Perhaps if you are a teacher you've thought to yourself, "Why are so many of my students lesbian vegetarians? Is it something about me?" Perhaps if you are a student you've wondered, "Why do I keep accidentally calling my gongfu teacher MOM instead of shirfu? He doesn't look or act anything like my mom!"

When I think about it, I doubt that the younger me would have studied martial arts at all if my teachers had been the sort of people that expect me to call them "Master."

There are many teachers out there that make good second mommies or daddies. In the South Asian traditions they just go right ahead and call the teacher some version of Ma, or Dada.

I find it hard to resist having a little laugh at this phenomenon, but in all honesty I have great respect for people who provide this kind of support to the emotionally needy. I have known a great many people who have attached themselves to a teacher who really cared about them, and through that particular type of intimacy made disciplined and rewarding changes in their lives.

Some people need a fierce father figure in order to thrive. Others need a nurturing mother figure to give them the confidence to face decisions the rest of us see as routine. I'm rarely fierce or nurturing, so students that come to me looking for those qualities tend not to hang around.

But we digress. I have this friend of a friend I mentioned at the begining. The teacher he studies with has been very exacting and demanding and has truly nurtured him in a way that brings out his better qualities. As far as martial arts goes, he gets posture corrections and that is it! He has gotten one Taijiquan instruction in 20 years, the same one over and over, "Keep your fingers straight." He keeps expecting that some day he is going to get to learn push-hands, and many other secrets too.

It would all be sad and pathetic if not for two factors. The posture corrections are good, so his Shaolin and Taijiquan forms, which he practices without fail everyday, are pristine. The second factor is almost funny. The instruction, "Keep your fingers straight," is wrong by most accounts. But because he believes in it and practices it so diligently--because he uses it as a measure of everything he does-- he has actually made it mean something true. Every millimeter of his body movement is calibrated to "keep the fingers straight," what ever that even means.

He has no knowledge of functionality or applications, no subtle power or push-hands experience. But I have to admit, his form looks good!

And on that note, here is a quote from Henry David Thoreau, (from memory of course)

Why are we in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps if is because he hears the beat of a different drummer, let each step to the beat which he hears, however measured, or far away...

Journal of Asian Martial Arts

I was excited to see Douglas Wile, one of the heavies in terms of martial arts scholarship, writing an article in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts.

Fifteen years ago when this magazine first came out I was ecstatic. Imagine a martial arts magazine which insists on footnotes and bibliographies in every article! I thought it was a dream come true after years of wishing I was still 10 years old so I could appreciate martial arts writing.

The current addition has 13 contributors. There are two without degrees, two have M.A.'s, one has an M.S., one is an Acupuncturist (M.A.), and eight have Ph.D.'s. Wow, and still most of the writing leaves me wishing for younger days. To be fair, most academic writing is genetically predestined to be boring. At least this stuff is mostly written by people involved in the arts, not by "objective outsiders."

I guess I am a child of the Internet, because I'm finding it harder and harder to read full length books and articles. I still love old media, but it takes so long to get to the point. I mean this stuff should have one of those "Don't operate heavy machinery" warning labels. Again, to be fair, I'm addicted to pithy blog posts and I needed to catch up on some sleep.

Douglas Wile's article is called "Taijiquan and Daoism; From Religion to Martial Art--and Martial Art to Religion." To really do it justice I would have to read the whole thing again. Honestly, I'm in one of those deep practice phases where a few hours of profound internal training makes me want to sleep-- y'all will have to settle for my vague dream like memories.

The gist of Wile's article is that facts about Taijiquan prior to 1900 are really hard to come by but that hasn't stopped lineage holders and historians from freely making sh-t up and pretending it's factual.

One can easily understand why a lineage holder would want to make stuff up. It makes them seem like they have the only key to the chest of treasures while at the same time allowing them the (false) modesty of claiming that their teacher's teacher's teacher was like, dude, really, really good.

It's harder to understand why historians would make stuff up. In America if we catch a historian making stuff up, we use their books for compost. But then again, the various "wings" of the Communists and the Nationalists, were in a propaganda war to prove that only their (death cult) ideologies and allegiances would make Chinese people better and stronger.

Even though Wile spends a lot of time explaining what all these 20th Century scholars thought, I have the feeling he would agree with me when I say, taijiquan has picked up so much baggage we ought to throw out all the books and start over.

Wile dances around the question: Why in light of so little direct evidence for Taijiquan's Daoist roots, are there so many people trying to prove a connection? He writes about Taijiquan's "inventor," the magical dreamer Daoist immortal Zhang Sanfeng:

For sheer contentiousness, the Zhang Sanfeng case can only be compared to issues of racism, sexism, abortion and homosexuality in American culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, the pendulum has once again swung towards the myth-makers. Western practitioners of taijiquan, with their monotheistic, atheistic, or "only begotten son" backgrounds are apt to view Zhang Sanfeng as simply an historical figure with some innocent Daoist embellishments. They are not likely to understand China's culture wars, polytheism, or embodied immortality..."

In summary, his point is that Taijiquan never really had much to do with Daoism, until 20th century people started mixing in a lot of Neidan (inner alchemy), TCM jargon, some quotes from the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, and claims about health. Oh yeah, and some stories. And then a bunch of fake modern scholars said none of that is true-- but what they said wasn't true either (so there!). Now that running a business isn't banned in China, there is this new feel good, feel strong, feel Chinese, feel Taijiquan-is-part-of-Daoism, marketing ethos. No real content.

And Wile gets kind of mad about it,

"Daoist Chauvinism should never be underestimated, and we need only remind ourselves that some Daoist apologists have claimed that Buddhism sprang from seeds planted by Laozi when he rode westwards on his ox."

Them's figtin' words. Bumper stickers have all but disappeared from San Francisco (which I attribute to uniformity of thought); however, I spotted one today. It read, "Lighten Up!"

For the record, those Daoist "apologists," were not writing history, they were writing secret scripture. The name Laozi means "old seed," but if we are talking about the Santianneijing (3rd Century), then it was Laojun (the inspiration behind the Daodejing) which actually incarnated as the Buddha so that the western barbarians would have their own version of "The Way," and would thus have their own home grown basis for mutual cooperation and understanding. Never mind, that's an argument for another day.

I respect Wile's contribution to understanding the history of Taijiquan, I thank him for letting us know it's all a bunch of lies!

My argument with him is this: Orthodox Daoism never claimed Taijiquan as a Daoist art and I doubt it ever will. Monastic Daoism has of late decided that Taijiquan is part of its shtick. Since the 1980's is has also decided that gongfu movies are part of its shtick, big whoop. Monastic Daoism never really had a central authority, from the sidelines it kinda seems like Buddhism with a little inner alchemy for the "we must appear to be loyal Chinese" set. All this means very little.

If you want to know what the origins of Taijiquan are, you are going to have to soften your definitions, and blur your categories. Taijiquan only came into being because it was able to obscure it's origins in religion, popular culture, and secret societies. By the start of the 20th century participation in trance cults or exorcistic and processional dance, was considered politically dangerious and ideologically backwards. That's why they invented and then tried to tack on the suspicious label, "purely philosophical" Daoism.

Likewise, some combination of fear, modernity, and ideology led people to strip down their communal ritual performance traditions into pure "Martial Arts."

People over here were arguing about why they took the Fajing (power issuing?) out of Yang and Wu styles of Taijiquan. I'll tell you why. Fajing is a way to strike terror into your audience, a way to let people know the god has taken possession of the dancer.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put the Fajing back in my form!

Continuum

I'm old enough, and was born in the right place, to remember the real New Age. The basis of the New Age movement was the hippy idea that we could change the metaphors we live by. If we changed the games children played from competitive ones to cooperative ones, and we change the stories--the mythologies-- our society perpetuates, we could bring about a new way of being, a New Age. Frankly, it was a fun time to be a kid, even if putting my Cheerios underneath a pyramid didn't really change the taste and even the most cooperative game can be made competitive if there are enough eight-year-old-boy hormones to go around.

That experience was still not enough to stop me from cringing at the New Age bravado apparent in these videos and web-links about the bodywork system known as Continuum. (I recommend watching the "research" video first.)

Still, I think it is one of the cooler bodywork ideas out there. They take the Chinese ideas of huntun (totally undifferentiated chaos) or hunyuan (original chaos?) and really make them tangible. And while I doubt I'll ever say it quite like Emilie Conrad, I find myself agreeing with most of what she says about fear, change and the nature of human movement. (Her book.)

In the mood?

My g-friend and I were talking about going to a party tomorrow. She described her busy schedule and then said, "I want to go, but I don't know if I'll be in the mood."

A few years ago I was doing a lot of ceramics in my free time (instead of blogging). At one point I was working at a local community college with a guy that was really into Song (900-1200CE)and Ming (1300-1600CE) Dynasty glazes. These glazes are really cool, many of them were developed to represent cosmological principles and to demonstrate different stages of the elixir practice (jindan). Glowing translucent celadons, jun-ware that turns from green to purple, a transparent black that reveals hidden patterns when put in direct sunlight.

The glazes were easy to make but hard to fire. In order to get the correct reduction of oxygen, he had to get the kiln very hot over a day and then add too much gas so that it would start to smoke and the temperature would stall and after several hours start to fall. It was a really finicky process. If he didn't add enough gas, the temperature would keep climbing, and if he added too much if would fall too fast. Both scenarios would ruin the glaze. To make it work he had to watch and continually adjust the process for many hours. And it's not like he could just look at a thermostat, the critical issue was how hot the clay was. When the temperature was rising he could look at clay cones which are pre-formulated to melt at specific temperatures, but that didn't work when the temperature was falling or stalling.

Basically there was a lot of guess work, and he would get really frustrated when he guessed wrong. (It didn't help his liver or his mind-set that he had a habit of running out for fried chicken in the middle of the process.)

So I did a little reading and I realized that kiln firing in China was always done according to the Daoist Calendar. The design of the Daoist Calender makes it easy to calculate an auspicious or an inauspicious day for firing a kiln. So I said to this guy, "The people who invented these cool glazes you are into always used astrological and calendrical calculations to decide when to fire their kilns. Maybe they knew something you don't know? Maybe it would make things easier?"

His frustrated response was, "That's all hokum!"

Wouldn't it be great if you could look ahead on your calender and predict whether you would be in the mood for a hair cut? a movie? doing research? washing the car? or going out to a party? Well, you're dreaming. The future is unknowable.

The Daoist calender doesn't predict anything. It is just a bunch of time (rhythmic) cycles that overlap. Each day (or segment) of each cycle has a lists of activities which are auspicious or inauspicious. Some of these cycles or patterns have a logic to them-- not everyday is a good day to clean the house, eat vegetarian, or work in the garden, but such days should come with some rhythmic regularity.

Why should I care? There are lots of reasons to care. Every time you schedule something in your calendar or decide whether to do it or not, you have to ask your self, "Am I going to want to do that on that day?" "Why not pick the day before, or the day after?" "Will I want to rest or party?" Often there is no rational way to make such a decision. So we make the decision irrationally, or emotionally, or by some strange fleeting quirk.

The Daoist calender externalizes our irrationality. The practice of following the calendar
points out just how irrational we are, but it also allows us to distance ourselves from it so we can be more comfortable with the way we are. More self-respecting of our own rhythmically irrational nature.

If the calender says it's a good day to party, we party, if not we're in bed by 9. No more wishy-washy maybe I'll see how I feel kind of dates. From the moment you discover the Daoist calender, your commitments will be clear, strong and unselfconsciously irrational!

Of course when it comes to gongfu practice never forget, one day missed is ten days lost!

Demons with Six Packs

Why do Chinese demons have muscles?

I train a fair bit everyday, and the constant challenge for me is to not build muscle. That's because my body builds muscle very easily and quickly, and that muscle would restrict my circulation and inhibit whole-body integration.

A few winters ago I fell on the ice while trying out snow boarding for the first time. Actually, I fell four times on my back on the ice in one day. The next day my whole body was ripped. I had muscles everywhere, my arms, my neck, my butt, I even had a six-pack. Muscles hurt! Of course if you have them all the time you just become numb and insensitive, so they appear to stop hurting.

I prefer to leave my muscles in a "potencial state." They pop up if I'm in an accident or I work too hard or something but otherwise they are just relaxed and active.

Pain becomes chronic pain, then it becomes tension, then numbness, then strength and then stiffness.

Aggression and inappropriate conduct often result from trying to impose ones fear or fantasy on the situation at hand. This often leads to emotional pain which, if left unresolved, becomes chronic pain which likewise is stored in the muscles. Pent-up tension gets stored in the shape, quality, and movement patterns of the muscles.

A Chinese demon is unresolved emotional turmoil that becomes so intense, so physically overwhelming that a person no longer sees what's in front of them.  They become so inappropriate that at the moment of death they don't even notice they died, and so continue to torment the living with their unresolved emotional distress.

Check out the six-packs on these guys!  And here too! 

Empty Force, Extraordinary Powers & My Qigong Headache

I apologize for not writing more lately, I've been swamped with work, but I also promise that the next few weeks of blogging will be above average. (This is special because, as my regular readers already know, my secret to good blogging is that I make a point of shooting for just below average.)

I have a few more things to say about Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, which is now at the top of my list of recommend books about qigong. ( The two others on the list are Breathing Spaces, and The Transmission of Chinese Medicine.)

The issues raised in this book have plagued me, and most serious martial artists, since the mid 1990's when the first refugee/exiles from Qigong Fever started pouring into San Francisco and other cities all over the world. At one point local Baji master Adam Hsu got so fed up with all the wacko questions he was fielding he simply declared, "Qi doesn't exist!"

The other day I was at a college faculty meeting sitting next to Professor Yu, a TCM Dermatology teacher I hold in high regard. I showed her my copy of Qigong Fever. Just how relevant this book is, was made immediately apparent by the first thing out of Professor Yu's mouth. "My father invented qigong."

"Oh," I said," Perhaps he is mentioned in this book." As it turns out he is not mentioned in the book. Her father was You Pengxi, a xingyi teacher and early student of Wang Xiangzhai, the founder of the Yiquan system of internal martial arts. She explained that qigong came from xingyi.

As usually happens when I hear claims about qigong, I found myself trying to find what truth could possibly be behind the claim with out launching into my own agenda. After all, the book is quite clear about the process in which Communist party functionaries chose the term Qigong from a list of terms intended to frame body, breath and mind techniques under a single therapeutic category while intentionally discarding the martial, religious, and conduct transforming aspects of traditional categories.

But of course I do have my own agenda, I grew up practicing gongfu and studied under Bing Gong who was a top student of Kuo Lien-ying who also studied with Wang Xiangzhai. We did standing meditation, and various routines we called warm-ups. No one ever used the word qigong even thought that is what everybody calls it now.

Knowing that of course there could be a hidden history I don't know, I begin with an inclination to agree with Professor Yu. 90% of what I see called qigong is fallout from gongfu schools-- stuff that was taught or invented on a need-to-know basis for students that needed remedial exercises or were developing some unique quality of gongfu.

Unfortunately the profound idea that all traditional Chinese activities have a Dao-- an efficient way of working or moving that conserves qi-- is not mentioned in the book, nor was it mentioned by Professor Yu.

Professor Yu's father, You Pengxi, was invited, and the CCP gave him permission, to come to Stanford University in 1980 to demonstrate his extraordinary qigong skills. He promptly defected. He had been a wealthy and successful Western trained dermatologist before the revolution (1949). He defected from Communist China the first chance he got. I do not know the details in his case, but it would not have been unusual for a well trained doctor to be publicly tortured and shamed during the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977). As far as I can tell, nobody taught anybody anything during the Cultural Revolution. Because of his association with Wang Xiangzhai (who died in 1963), he may have attracted students shortly after it became possible to teach again, but he can't have been teaching qigong for much more that a year before he defected in 1980. So in that sense he may have indeed been the first qigong master "off the hump." Professor Yu however claimed that he developed and named qigong around 1949.

During the first 15 years of the revolution (the 50's) there was some gongfu training going on, but between fear, repression and a general lack of food, I have trouble imagining that much quality teaching was taking place. During this period fighting skills were officially scrapped away and discarded while the term gongfu (meritorious skill) was essentially replaced with the word wushu (martial art). I suspect that most of You Pengxi's teaching and martial fame was from before the Communist Revolution. To be fair, their were some gongfu classes happening in the dark, before dawn and after dusk. In my imagination, admittedly shaped by George Xu, I see these as serious fighting classes where people came home bleeding more days than not.

During the 1950's qigong as a public activity existed only in the Traditional Chinese Medical Hospitals. It was a cheap and patriotic form of therapy. Before the revolution the Communists, like their Republican and Nationalist rivals, were pro-Western science and anti-traditional (superstitious) healing of all kinds.

After the revolution, the combination of anti-Western hysteria, incompetent use of limited funds, and the obvious efficacy and availability of some traditional healing practices, led the CCP to embrace Traditional Chinese Medicine. Qigong was practiced in a very limited way during the 1950's, mainly within the hospital setting.

Professor Yu talked about her childhood memories of Wang Xiangzhai, and her father's closeness to him. She said her father gave Wang Xiangzhai a check book and told him to buy anything he wanted. Also that her father did not charge for lessons and only taught people with virtuous natures. She described her father and her mother's (Yu Ouming) ability to blast multiple attackers to the ground without actually touching them. They were using qi alone!

Magical and extraordinary powers have been around for centuries, but totalitarian Communism didn't leave any space for performance art. The book Qigong Fever explains how with the first crack of freedom in the 80's the CCP gave authority to individuals only to the extent that everything they did was in the name of Science and Chinese cultural superiority. All knowledge still belonged to the state, but performers and charismatic could claim that practicing qigong in a scientific way would give you extraordinary powers--- like seeing with your ears, reading peoples minds, or guiding missiles with your qi! A complex network developed consisting of Party officials, charismatic teachers, and researchers who were into qigong. The fact that they managed to make it illegal to criticize or be publicly skeptical of qigong, extraordinary powers, or pseudo-science, helped ignite and sustain the explosion of qigong into everyday life.

When I got home I searched for Professor Yu's father in a PFD collection of essays about Wang Xiangzhai that I downloaded from somewhere in the Internet wilderness. He is credited with being the source of all Yiquan lineages which practice empty force (gongjin), the ability to throw someone with out touching them.

If such extraordinary powers are possible (and I'm forbidden by precept from actually commenting on their veracity), I've always thought they would still waste an enormous amount of qi, and thus be in total contradiction with the whole point of daoist inspired practices; namely, to conserve jing and qi! Not to mention the temptation anyone with actual blood flowing in their veins would have to tip their opponent's hand during a poker game or to cop the occasional feel from across the room. (Yes, I know, I would never be allowed to learn such practices because I'm clearly a man of dark virtues.)

My point here is simple. If anyone from the people at New Tang Dynasty TV (Falungong) to your friendly neighborhood qi jock wishes to have the right to be taken seriously by me on the subject of qigong--then they must read Qigong Fever!

Qigong Fever

If this book I'm holding here had been published in 1997 instead of 2007, I probably wouldn't have set out to write my own book on the history and cultural origins of qigong. I also probably wouldn't have failed in that endeavor and ended up putting my collection of writings up on the Internet in the form of a blog called "Weakness with a Twist”and you wouldn't be reading it! 

Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, by David A. Palmer. Published by Columbia University Press, 356 pages.
The book is a history of Qigong, which appropriately frames the subject as a political movement built around a body technology with religious characteristics, and scientific pretensions. It is a book which resists symmetrization. Never the less I'm going down that road.

Qigong Fever tells a really shocking story of mass hysterical enthusiasm. The kind of popular insanity that can only happen in a world where 2+2=5 if the Party says it does! The state in essence banned religious devotion, magic tricks, spontaneous expression, deep emotion, and even self-respect. The Party claimed to be in favor of using science to save the world, but obviously science cannot be practiced in an environment where 2+2 might equal 5. It was from this skewed environment that qigong came to be capable of healing anything and everything. All over China otherwise ordinary people could see with their ears, control guided missiles with their minds, tell the future while balancing on eggs—qigong became the source for the development of everything weird, magical, new age, charismatic, and psychic. That all this could happen in the name of science would already be beyond normal comprehension, but the Communist Party brought what would otherwise have been just weird and wacky to a fever pitch by issuing an order essentially forbidding skepticism.

The title Qigong Fever refers to the explosion of interest and participation in qigong methods, research, charismatic religion, and a whole lot more that reached a peak in the decade from 1985 to 1996, after which the government cracked down on qigong people in general and particularly on the followers of the dangerously unbalanced Li Hongzhi, known collectively as Falungong.

Palmer tasks himself with creating a historic record for a subject that is made up of seemingly limitless false claims and (even more challenging for the historian) partially false claims about its origins and functions. In addition he tackles problems as an anthropologist carefully milking the overlapping realms of scientism, charisma, national consciousness, repression, religious impulse, and shifting political networks into a frothy qi infused tonic.

The political alliance that made the qigong movement possible eventually fell apart creating outlaws and refugees. The last chapter of the book deals specifically with the Falungong and its transformation from a qigong cult into an outlaw and exiled revolutionary utopian movement.

The book has a lot of footnotes. Palmer draws on a wide array of original Chinese sources for historical material and makes good use of the history of ideas. His writing moves easily between telling the story, putting it in context, and bringing in other peoples ideas and research to convey the depth of his analysis.

If you like this blog you'll like this book.