The Glorious Kidneys

Autumn is the season for clearing heat from the lungs and refining technique.  One of the best foods for clearing heat from the lungs is the pear. The skin of the pear is used if the condition is medical.  So eat pears raw or lightly stewed with a dribble of honey.  The Classic of Medicine (Neijing) says clearing heat from the lungs protects against fevers in Winter.  Not sure what the mechanism is there, but I love pears so I'm sharing.  The suggestion to refine technique is a message about efficiency, the Autumn is about toning it down and taking time to integrate all the wild experimentation of the past two seasons.

And if you've been doing that, in about four weeks you will be ready to start transitioning into Winter practice.  In Winter we store Qi, water the root, and nourish the kidneys. So what does this mean?  In the days before industrial commerce made food cheap and plentiful, to the average peasant it probably meant eat whatever rich foods you can find.  The best way to do that in our era is with nutrient rich bone stock that you make yourself.  If you want organic stock bones, in my part of the country, you are in direct competition with the massive pampered dog population.  However, if you buy bones in bulk it's a little more reasonable.  We filled up our freezer with bones for the Winter for about $60.  'Watering the root' basically means drinking nutrient rich broth the way most of our ancestors did.  Think stews.

The Daodejing says, "to be full, hollow out," thus in order to store Qi one must first cultivate emptiness.  Once emptiness is established, storing Qi is automatic.

Well, not totally automatic.  You must also nourish the kidneys.  How does one do that?  Hold that thought.

Hopefully none of my readers were paying attention last year when I had an argument on the insane internal martial arts discussion website Rum Soaked Fist about whether the terms jin 勁 and jing 精 actually mean the same thing.  As my Indian Dance teacher used to say, "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

Jin is translated by Louis Swaim (I'm doing this from memory) as 'power which resembles the flowing of underground streams.'  Jin is an expression used in compound forms like pengjin (wardoff), mingjin (obvious power), or tingjin (skillful sensitivity), to mean a specific type of power which requires skill and time to develop.

Jing on the other hand is a much bigger and harder to explain key concept in Chinese cosmology.  It is usually translated 'essence,' because of it's association with purification.  But it generally refers to stuff that reproduces itself.  In quasi-medical terms it is sperm and eggs, scabs, what clots the blood, and when it is strong in the body--a full head of hair and strong finger nails.  In Daoism Jing is the most solid and substantial form of Qi. If we posit that the entire cosmos is one giant mind form, then jing is its memory function.  Stay with me...

Any first year Chinese Medicine student will tell you that Jing is stored in the kidneys.  They will also tell you that sex, drugs and rock'n'roll will deplete it.  Daoism has a precept against wasting jing or qi.  The term is pretty amorphous as you may have deduced by now.  In is particular Daoist precept the distinction is that qi wasting is unnecessary effort, while jing wasting is depletion to the point of injury.  So to damage ones body is to damage ones jing.  Why? because the moment injury happens, the kidneys start to release jing-- jing is released from the kidneys because it is what repairs us.

Obviously, jing is one of those concepts which, as Roger T. Ames might put it, offends against the most basic  notions of Western categorical thinking--it is simultaneously an event, a substance, a trend, and an action.  Jing repairs (verb), it is what repairs (noun), it is visible only indirectly and is measured by that which it repairs so to some degree it is the substantive aspect of our bodies.  Jing is the shape of our eye, and the dark circles that accumulate around them after years of not enough sleep.  Jing is the markings of age.  Jing as a substance decreases in either quantity or quality as we age.  But as a substance it remains pure.

Tension in our bodies is simply qi concentrated by the mind.  Disperse the qi and the tension will be gone.  But chronic tension is qi concentrated in the same location day after day.  Qi is pure and has no memory function, the tension's location is remembered by jing.  So chronic tension is regularly drawing jing out of the kidneys where the mind mixes it with qi.  Because jing and qi are both pure, they naturally separate, like oil and water.  For chronic tension to happen at all takes considerable and regular effort.

I would never have gotten into the argument at Rum Soaked Fist if I hadn't been repeating what I heard from George Xu: "Jing and jin are the same."

"What?" I asked, "How could that be, they are different characters in Chinese?"  (精 and 勁)

"It doesn't matter," he said, "They were once the same term and the same character."

Remember way up at the top of this post I asked the question, "How does one nourish the kidneys?"  We're getting there.  The kidneys love sleep.  They love sleep because they love stillness.  The kidneys are like a very fine instrument measuring vibration, shock, tension and fatigue.  If we can feel our kidneys they will indicate when we are exerting effort or experiencing strain.  And...They will tell us when we are using power. Ah hah! You say, power, you mean jin right?  Yes, young Skywalker, any trained or refined gathering of power or release of force is called jin, in Modern Chinese.  The kidneys experience all jin as stress, as a loss of jing.

Thus pure internal (martial arts) should be defined as not using jin/jing.  If an art uses jin, then it is mixing jing and qi.  It is exerting some strain on the kidneys.  The basic Tai Chi adage goes:  "The body follows the qi and the qi follows the mind."  If the mind causes jing to be released from the kidneys, qi will mix with jing in the body, and the mind will move the three all at once--thus destroying the mind-then-qi-then-body order of movement.  On the other hand, if the body is totally quiet, as measured by no loss of jing from the kidneys, then the qi will automatically float off of the body and the mind will easily lead it.  If the whole torso is also empty, it will naturally fill with qi.

And that is what it means to nourish the glorious kidneys.

Tibetan Yogis

I enjoyed this short 3 part video series on Tibetan Yogis. Watch when the guys jump down into lotus position and then bounce out of it. Daoyin has these same moves. Also notice that they are on a deer skin. Keep it wild.

Head is Spinning!

After you watch the video, check this guy's channel there's all kinds of crazy hip hop on the international scene.  The influence of African dance and music on the world stage is profound.  As martial artists we should at least consider that this evolved from a form of head and neck conditioning used for head attacks.  We might even speculate that if the event of being killed, or defeated in a duel, by a head attack had particular significance socially--perhaps causing a loss of status, rank, or inclusion in a group-- or even changed ones status after death, then perhaps the spectacle of spinning on the head was an extraordinary display of martial prowess.  In the book Fighting For Honor, which I reviewed a few days ago, the author Obi explains that in certain parts of Zaire-Angola the religious cosmology posits that the ancestors live on the other side of a great body of water and that everything there happens upside down, and so those ritual specialists capable of communicating with the ancestors do that by dancing upside down.  Wow! Take it away Aichi, Boom and Lazer!

While Singing and Dancing

While teaching class the other day, George Xu said, "I am totally relaxed.  Fighting puts no strain on my internal organs and there is no effect on my breathing.  My legs are effortless, I have no root.  My jing and qi are completely distilled, I am fighting only with spirit.  Because of this I can beat you while singing and dancing!"

Then he started doing a rather strange Texas Two Step and singing what might perhaps be characterized as a guttural dirge, while knocking the student he was working with off his feet, as well as the two students who rushed him.

Naturally, me being me, I posited that perhaps George Xu had reverse engineered this notion from the deep past.  That 250 years ago it was common to associate martial arts with singing and dancing, and that of course the great masters could do all three at once.

Acupuncture Meridians

For a hundred or so years people enamored by acupuncture have put forward theories about how acupuncture works. A few of these theories have made the stretch from possibility to plausibility.  (See here for a partial list.) For the most part they rely on endocrinology and the chemistry of the brain.  No theory, until now has been put forward which explains why the meridians are where they are and simultaneously offers a plausible explanation of how the work.

The new theory offers that meridians are "emergent lines of shape control," which effect the body through overlapping "contractile fields."  (Wooh!)  It is put forward in a book called Muscles and Meridians, the Manipulation of Shape, by Phillip Beach.  While reading this rather long and dry text, something shocking occurred to my fragile mind.  For someone steeped in Western Civilization, to even entertain the possibility that acupuncture is efficacious we have had to ignore an enormous affront to our sensibilities.  The affront is that knowledge of the precise lines of the meridians could have been discovered and mapped and then passed down for 2000 years of recorded history as a form of applied medicine without anyone ever learning how the meridians were originally mapped!  Oh, you might hear people say, they were just felt.  But come on, that is so easy to test.  You just find a barbarian who hasn't memorized the locations of the meridians and teach him to feel!  Zhen Da!  He will draw them for you!  But if this ever happened, there are no records of it.  One would think this would be a priority no?  I am of course willing to believe that people have mapped and re-mapped the meridians many times over, and then then just kept their methods a secret.  That's cool, but even if that were true, (and we don't have any evidence that it is) it's still a huge affront to my Western Civilization sensibilities.

Anyway, I sense that Phillip Beach felt the affront and was motivated to do something about it.  Internet hero, Elisabeth Hsu has explained that the meridians were developed on the surface of the body and only later were connected to the internal organs.  Beach leverages this clue well.  It is also likely that many of the "points" were developed independently from the meridians.  Some points are easy to explain simply in terms of trail and error as the best spots to manipulate and maneuver a person passively receiving a massage, or actively resisting a martial arts technique.  Beach also leverages this point in his theory.  Another clue is the widespread idea in Traditional Chinese Medicine that only a few of the meridians develop in utero, some appear at the moment of birth, and the rest develop slowly over the first 5 or so years of human activity.  He uses this information in his theory as well, but if I wasn't already familiar with the idea I doubt I would have understood what he was talking about.  Unfortunately the book needs another edit.

Never the less, its a great theory.  He draws extensively on developmental embryology to show how different regions of the body are related and belong to the same contractile field.  A contractile field is pretty easy to understand.  If I poke you with something sharp, you will move away from the point in a very specific way by contracting certain parts of your body.  If I poke you in a different place, you will contract differently only if I have poked you in a different contractile field.  If I poked you on the same contractile field, but in a different spot than the first time, you will still respond pretty much the same way you did the first time.  But if I cross an invisible line suddenly your contractile reaction will be different.  This idea has been studied extensively in leeches!  Leaches have only 4 contractile fields but because the fields overlap, you can get 8 different contractile responses from a leach.  But only 8, no matter where you poke.  However if you poke a leach with two needles you can get some composite reactions.  Anyway that's the basic theory, the meridians aren't necessarily the boarder between two contractile fields, they are lines on the body which strengthen, weaken, or resolve the relationships between contractile fields.

Now that seems testable, as long as you have enough of a military attachment to deter lawsuits.

That probably should have been the whole book, but I suspect Beach wanted to demonstrate how overall shape changing or perhaps shape re-ordering relates to medicine.  I mean, I suppose at this point someone could try to argue that posture and alignment play only a small role in over all health, illness and disease, because methods focused singularly on posture have not passed muster (ie. randomized, peer reviewed fights to the death).  But the reality is that almost any chronic problem will eventually show up in the bones.  Archeologists have taught us that.

Seiza

Beach continues his argument by discussing his own idiosyncratic clinical experience, and makes some interesting points.  He describes 8 basic sitting postures, squatting, seiza, kneeling on the heels with the toes curled forward, seiza on one foot while squatting on the other, pike, on the butt with legs crossed, and on the butt with soles of the feet together.  He says that these ways of sitting are all good indicators of the proper functioning or integration of contractile fields.  When a patient presents with X problem and has trouble getting into one of these "shapes," it becomes part of their prescription to practice trying to get into it.  Not hugely convincing, but it did make me think that these seated postures ought to be part of a routine check-up.  If you had to demonstrate your ability to sit in all these positions when the doctor was listening to your breathing and tapping on your knee, it would eventually become part of peoples self-health evaluations.  That would be a mighty good thing.  I can just see all the mothers fretting that their teen-aged sons have flunked "squatting."

Lastly, Beach spins some fun stuff about the feet.  He calls shoes, "sensory deprivation chambers."  Who knew?  Honestly, this part of the book excellent.  He suggests that the vast majority of lower back problems can be fixed by walking barefoot in an uneven rock garden for 20 minutes a day.  The feet are very sensitive, they have the capasity to resolve and change complex structures in the lower back.  In my own experience many people are suffering needlessly because they never walk on uneven ground.  I don't just mean hills or groomed paths.  I mean really uneven rocky ground.  Scrambling and scurring over rough terrain resets all the components of locomotion--balance, spacial awareness, rhythm, shrinking, expanding, alignment, liquid mass manipulation, and force transmission through the bones.

Having pondered this book for about two months, I have two objections.  The first is that he just dodges the "What is Qi" problem.  This must have kept him up at nights, finally deciding that the theory stood up better without any explanation of qi.  But this leads to the second objection, how do we explain the direction of qi flow in the meridians?  If Beach's theory gets traction, and I think it should, we will likely see the notion of qi flow broken down in to different types of flow, each with distinct properties.

Block Prints of the Unseen World

I'm going to a lecture on Wednesday at 4 PM, with a slide show by David Johnson the author of Spectacle and Sacrifice, The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China.  He is speaking about the following exhibit.  Check it out.

Speak of Good Things: Nianhua and Chinese Folk Tradition

Exhibit - Artifacts: Center for Chinese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies | June 22 – September 28, 2011 every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday with exceptions | 9 a.m.-5 p.m. |  Institute of East Asian Studies (2223 Fulton, 6th Floor)

And...happy Moon Cake Festival!  Just ate mine.

New Bagua Class in Berkeley, October 7th

I've been asked to teach a class at a Shadow Yoga studio in Berkeley. Shadow yoga is the most open to martial arts influences. Here is some info about the founder Zhander Remete, and Here is the scoop on my new class?

Contraband

Here is a nice video about the dance scene I was part of in the late 80's early 90's.  Those friends and that work had a profound effect on my notions of art.  Watching this made me feel artistically close to Sarah Shelton Mann again.  It also provokes me to think that some of the work I do today is in reaction to the imprint of excitement, the false promises and illusions, that we were all caught up in.

Wrestling

Like I keep saying, all martial arts "work."