Double Leg Fajing

I have more video of Lin Miaohua but I'm going to save the editing for later.  His specialty, besides being able to be very hard and very soft, is double leg fajing (explosive release of force).  You can't miss it in this clip (thanks again Sharon).



UPDATE: Sorry, my default upload makes the videos private, I'm just getting used to it. IT WORKS NOW!

Hot Springs in the City

I  visited Xinbeitou yesterday.  This is a hot spring in the city limits of Taipei.  In fact it’s on the the Subway line, about 30 minutes max from anywhere else in the city, it took me about 20 minutes to get there from Central Taipei.
Walking out of the subway you see a park with a steaming river running through it.  The park has a beautiful new library made of wood and stone, warmly lit with views of the park.  I was there at night so I didn’t get to visit the hot springs museum.
There are lots of hotels around the area and I guess some of them have their own hot springs tubs.  But on the advise of Lonely Planet I went to the outdoor public bath.

It cost 1$ US.  There are booths to change and shower in and a place to leave your shoes.  There are also lockers with keys for your stuff but everyone just puts their stuff on top of the lockers, there is very little theft in Taiwan.

There are four large beautiful stone pools in a hillside.  Each is fed by a water fall and the two on top are 40 and 41 degrees celsius, Hot!  There are also two cold pools, where I spent more than half my time because I was already too hot when I got there.

In a Japanese public bath men and women are separate and naked.  Here men and women mingle together and wear bathing suits.  I remember a public bath in Japan where I watched a guy scrub his body 8 times in between soaks.  These were vigorous scrubs, enough to take off skin.  Either he was scraping off layers of skin or his skin was very tough from years of scrubbing.  Anyway, scrubbing is against the rules in this Taiwanese hot spring.  Any scrubbing you want to do happens in your private booth while you are changing and showering.

The mood is very relaxed and friendly, a couple of young women who were with their mothers decided to talk to me.  (Wow, the sexy hairy monkey talks!)  The waterfalls are the dominant sound especially in the hotter tubs where people are ‘cooking.’  But this is no new-age hang-up keep-your-voices-down kind of place.  It’s all flirting and catching up on gossip.  About equal numbers of men and women but no children.

Really worth a visit...perhaps every other day.  I saw no evidence of religion, or stretching, but one guy was doing arm exercises while standing up in the corner.  They close for 45 minutes of cleaning every 2 hours, so it’s clean.

Cane Fighting Master

Baguazhang Demo in Tainan

Here is some more video of Lin Miaohau. Notice at the end he briefly does double leg fajing (explosive power). For a 71 year old man, the openness of his upper torso is remarkable. I also wanted to thank Sharon Lee for arranging this introduction.

Wood Carving and Food

The carving of wooden Deities is extraordinary and the carvings are everywhere.  I think there are more wood carvings than there are people.  I watched several carvers working with very sharp hand chisels in Tainan.  This kind of art is usually called craft because the basic content of the work is almost totally fixed.  But there is artistry in every detail.  I couldn’t help thinking that if a craftsman of this caliber where to go “conceptual” or to fall in with some other contemporary art movement, he would be a sensation.

This guy appears to be carving Zhenwu (Perfected Warrior) or perhaps Xuande (Mysterious Virtue).  He has the wide braid down his back, incredible armor with animals at the joints and bare feet, with the left foot sticking out to the side showing that you don't need to be perfect to be "Perfected."
I also saw a guy making a giant puppet. After being in Taiwan for a few weeks I finally gave in and started carrying my video camera around.  Check it out.



Then I had a Gebao.  A simple steamed wheat bun sliced in half with tongue, pickled vegetables, and sesame sauce, served with broth on the side.  The tongue was in honor of my late grandfather (it being father’s day) who could never pass up an opportunity to eat tongue.

The other night I slept through dinner so I was walking around looking for a late night place to eat.  A lot of restaurants are actually storefronts in which everyone sits out on the sidewalk.  I found one with pictures of goats everywhere.  I asked for some noodle soup and he boiled me up some vegetables and some lamb which he put on top of some fine rice noodles.  Then he was like what else do you want?  So I said stock.  There were two stocks boiling away, a dark one and a light one.  I pointed to the dark one but he was like,  "No way I’m giving that one to you."  I asked what the name of each stock was and he said the dark one was Dangui.  He insisted I take the other one.  Which he called Ji, which means chicken but I must have that wrong because it was really good lamb stock.   When I finished the delicious meal, I pleaded with him to just give me a taste of the Dangui, he relented.  Dangui is a potent herb that I know makes qi rise up to my head so I avoid it, but it was great tasting stock.

Coffee Cerimony

On my first day in Kaohsiung when I was nearly dying of heat stroke, before thick rains drenched me, I was walking along a bicycle path and noticed a guy making coffee out of a two wheeled cart.  At the moment he was making a cup of coffee for a woman on a bicycle who had a very cute dog in her basket. The feeling was almost yuppie, but the guy making coffee was more urban cool.  Anyway he had an elaborate ritual, clearly influenced by tea ceremony.  He was using an Yixing pot to adjust the water temperature.  His implements were urban rustic, for the most part plastic, his coffee filter holder was even chipped.  He had a pot of continuously boiling water.  First he would have you pick your selection of beans from down below and then he would grind them, while he was doing that he would clean everything with hot water rinsing and re-rinsing each implement.  Then he put a coffee filter in the filter holder and rinsed it so that it was wet.  Then he poured the ground coffee in the filter and moved and shifted it around in there.  He did several more pourings before rinsing the ground coffee itself, obviously following tea theory that the very first bit of water which touches the thing to be brewed will be 'dusty.'  After cleaning the grounds he then put them over a plastic container and added water to the grounds in a circular motion.  He really got the grounds to bubble up high!  Then he poured the coffee into a paper cup and gave it to me.  It was about 75 cents.

I suppose you are wondering how the coffee tasted, or felt in my stomach or smelled or something.  Unfortunately I was to overwhelmed to remember these details.

Matching Punches

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead Martial Artists Society

I recently saw the film "The Dead Poets Society."  The story is about being a romantic, and the good romantic teacher tells his students to rip up the school's standard introduction to poetry which explains that poetry can be understood by plotting it on a graph where one axis is musicality, and the other axis is the importance of it's content.

I believe I have said elsewhere that we can graph trance on a continuum from:

An image in the mind ---------to------- Total possession by a deity

With language, dance, music, routine, altered states of consciousness, and perhaps emotions; all falling somewhere on this line.

(Perhaps we could say trance is the physicality of desire.  A terrified or enraged fighter is likely to be possessed by her desires--in a very physical way.  While we may have evolved this way through random selection because it improved our ability to survive, it seems illogical for us to fall deeper into trance the more we desire something.  That's why Vulcans are so cool, they are an intelligent design.)

If we want to add another axis to our graph we could add will power:

Autonomic Nervious System------to-------  Fine motor control.

Gross motor control would be somewhere in the middle, with panic, involuntary, and reflexive movement all falling somewhere near the beginning.

(Of course there is the notion from Mencius that the will of Heaven and the will of Man can be aligned.  And a saying from the Daodejing, "If heaven has a reason, nobody knows it.")

And if we want to add a third axis to this graph we could add awareness:

Unconsciousness------to------ Seeing things as they actually are.

I suspect an increase in ones ability to remember could almost run parallel to this last axis.  Which is interesting mainly because the inability to remember is often cited as a marker of a true deity possession.

I've been thinking using these three continuum's for years, and I sometimes forget that most people don't think this way.  Perhaps even farther afield is the Daoist idea that our humanness can be defined by our appetites.  This can also be viewed as a continuum from:

Spontaneous adaptable human-----to---- Blood thirsty demonic vampire-zombie-king.

With predictable vanilla ice cream humans and robots falling somewhere in the middle.

NOW, in keeping with the Dead Poets movie, if you don't think these graphs can help you understand martial arts, or history, or human nature you can now rip up this page...oops, I guess you can't, this is the internet.

Ali Shan

I'm writing from Alishan, a mountain retreat in the southern part of Taiwan.  I spent a few days in Kaohsiung and it was just too hot.  I don't see how anyone can do a gongfu workout in that weather, or any other workout for that matter.  I did see people riding bicycles, they were sweating buckets just riding on the flat with no headwind.  And believe it or not the World Games will be in Kaohsiung next month.  I just don't understand hot weather.

Alishan is cool.  There is actually a justification for wearing clothes up here at 7000 feet.  Alishan is a tourist park by-the-way, but I climbed up to the top of Tashan this morning after having my first decent workout in a week and I didn't run into anyone.  And for future reference, if global warming turns out to be real, I'm moving to Antarctica.

Now that I'm out of the hot weather I can think and meditate again.  I find it hard to believe thinking or meditating have ever been done in hot climates.  It occurred to me that perhaps the reason it is often hard to get students to practice is that they actually experience practice as difficult.  I know duh, right?  But that never occurs to me because practice is just really easy for me.  It is just my nature.  Experiencing practice as ones true nature is considered one of the fruitions of practice.  But honestly, I don't remember ever experiencing gongfu practice as difficult.  Until I landed in hot humid weather, that is.  The god of air conditioning needs to be promoted to a higher office!

I went to a lot of temples in Kaohsiung but surprisingly the first temple I visited here on Alishan is a temple to Zhen Wu (the Perfected Warrior) the highest Daoist Icon.  Zhen Wu is on the top floor.  Before being promoted to the highest position in the pantheon at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, Zhen Wu was called XuanDe (dark mysterious natural virtue).  The icon on the ground floor of the temple was called Xuan Tian (dark mysterious sky).  He is black and made of wood. They are all the same deity fulfilling different functions.  Ritual implements used in trance dance were laid out in front of the downstairs altar.  The Zhen Wu statue was beautiful and made of bronze.  I recognized him immediately because of his hair, his armor and his bare feet.  A separate statue of a turtle and snake intertwined (the symbol of the North Star where Zhen Wu sits in meditation) was just below his feet.

There was a large carved wooden sign in a side room that said Chang De Yun Ren (Constant nature cloud person) below it was a framed chart of the "60 talisman of cloud fates."  That is, a talismanic piece of writing for each of 60 different ways one can become an immortal.

The temple is modern and yet has fantastic wood carving everywhere.  At least some of the carvings depict scenes from the History-Legend of the Three kingdoms and the Outlaws of the Marsh.  In one of the carved scenes on a ceiling partition I noticed that one of the carved figures was wearing glasses.  Cute!

I asked a resident guide/interpreter if there was a Daoshi maintaining the altars.  She said no there was a Miao Gong.  I've never heard of a Miao Gong before.

Flexibility Routines

I'm here in Taiwan where it is way too hot to stretch, but I wrote the notes for this blog in cold and foggy San Francisco.  I spent many many years stretching.  As I age I'm in danger of over-stretching my ligaments, once ligaments over-stretch there isn't a whole lot one can do, the joints just become too loose.  Of course most people have the opposite problem, they never stretch.  So take what I'm saying with plenty of salt.

Flexibility routines in kungfu are to make sure you don't stretch.  They are feedback!  The purpose of daily flexibility routines is not to create flexibility.  The purpose of these routines is to let you know you went too far in your practice the day before.  When you stretch too far you'll know it because the next day, or sometimes the day after that, you will feel pain where you over stretched.  The lower back and the sacrum are common places people feel this pain.  I've known dancers that lived with pain from over-stretching everyday of their careers.

If you go through a flexibility routine pain-free, you are doing it correctly.  If you feel stress in you're joints you are not.

When we sleep well, our bodies naturally draw in towards the center.  If we don't sleep well the whole body is looser.  In general people are looser at night-time classes and tighter in the morning.  Sleep is an extremely important factor in flexibility.

The story goes that my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying would reach over to put his chin on his toes every morning before getting out of bed.  Toward the end of his life, he cried when he wasn't able to get his chin on his toe.