Where and When to Practice

When training in traditional Chinese arts, finding the time to practice consistently, actually setting time aside everyday, is most peoples biggest obstacle. The second biggest obstacle is trying to find a safe comfortable place to practice undisturbed.

Some people begin with a more flexible fate then others. Changing ones schedule around or going to bed an hour earlier are possible solutions. Beginners can try setting aside a consistent amount of time everyday at the same time of day and following through even if they don't feel like it. The commitment itself actually makes things easier. The best qi of the day for practice is early morning, between 3am and 8am, but other times are also okay.

Then there is the topic of where to practice. Some knowledge of fengshui is helpful here. The basic idea of fengshui is that the site itself is the most important consideration. Since you will be taking qi(inspiration) from the environment, the best location is a place you want to be, and that you can come to consistently. A place where you feel safe comfortable and can be alone. It should be a place where the air is fresh(free to circulate) yet still (absence of wind).

If your practice location is too cold your circulation may slow down, but it can also be drawn in to a deeper level. Cold places can be fine if they are not damp or wet and you are bundled up and out of the wind. Wind easily disrupts weiqi, the qi on the surface of our waking body. A healthy person will develop weiqi which complements the environment they practice in. The human body is adaptable; however, the effect a particular environment is having on ones practice is of vital importance and requires regular reassessment.
The classical ideal of the perfect place to practice is in a southward facing valley surrounded by gently slopping hills on three sides with the highest point to the north. A traditional Chinese walled garden attempts to replicate this environment in an urban area. The light well in the center of traditional Chinese architecture also tries to reproduce this qi experience.

Considering the totality of your experience over time, you may want to avoid the following:
Cluttered rooms
Open corridors, or pathways where people or animals are likely to walk by.
Standing in direct sunlight in mid-day
Stagnant water, mosquitoes
Things that look like they could fall
Sharp projections.
Where people are sick.

Even expert knowledge of fengshui can not overcome a 'bad' site, the first consideration should be the quality of the site. People who find a great place to practice dramatically increase the likelihood of bringing their practice to fruition.

Wang Xiangzhai

Wang Xiangzhai, the founder of the Yiquan gongfu system is a huge figure in 20th Century Chinese martial arts. He is perhaps best known for saying traditional teachers are too secretive, and that students should attempt to circumvent them so that the arts are not lost.

He himself studied with many teachers. He assumed that each teacher was keeping secrets but that if he studied with enough of them he would get the secrets. This is because each individual teacher wouldn't know which secrets his other various teachers were keeping, and so there would be an overlap of material. Since what one teacher taught openly another teacher kept secret, he would eventually capture all the secrets in the overlap of material-- and this would be faster than waiting in subordination for one teacher to give up all his secrets.
I guess it worked.

I have heard that he summed up his martial arts knowledge into just a few phrases. One of them is: Xing bu po ti, li bu chu jian

神�外溢，��露形，形�破体，力�出尖。
Is anybody willing to venture a translation?

Update: the Chinese is now correct.

Kuo Lien-ying

My first teaches teacher was Kuo Lien-ying. He was born in Tibet, and move to Beijing as a small boy at the beginning of the 20th Century. He was one of the first Chinese martial artists to teach in the West, beginning in the 1960's.

He had a long life and there are lots of great stories about him. Everybody and there uncle tells stories about how beyond great their teacher's teacher was, so I'm not going to do that even though I think it's true.

He was a performer of Beijing Opera in his early days, playing the lead roll of Monkey King. He was also a serious contender in matched fights and as the story goes, he quit because people were sneaking up to him in the middle of crowds trying to get close enough to slice one of his tendons with a razor blade.

He studied baguazhang with the second generation. He also studied with Wang Shengzhai during his early days. After the war he fled with the Kuomintang. He taught Northern Shaolin, Yiquan, Xingyi, Guanping Yang Taijiquan, lots of weapons, a little Bagua, and one person learned a little monkey gongfu, but he has since forgotten it.

He work as a bodyguard in Shanghai, and had extraordinary skills with a rope dart. He kept the rope tied around his body and was capable of throwing it without the use of his hands. Several of his students have described being quickly tied up against their will. I ran into Kimo the other day, one of his students from 40 years ago, and he told the story of how he, Kuo and my teacher Bing Gong, were performing at the old Emporium in San Francisco, which had high cavernous ceilings with wooden beams. Apparently he laid his rope dart on the ground (the dart was made out of a piece of a tire iron) and then kicked it straight up in to one of the high beams, where it stuck.

It seems he taught less than half of what he knew. Why?

He clearly had something of the secrecy that verges on paranoia common to many "masters." When he began his studies it was still illegal to publish a book on martial arts; the Boxer Rebellion, the civil war in the 1880's, the collapse of an empire, these all may have played a part in his thinking.

But he was ahead of his time in deciding to teach Westerners, so he was also open to new ideas. It is possible that he simply felt he had no qualified students; that even his Chinese students had not even a glimpse of what it required to learn gongfu in his day.

If his students had been only interested in fighting he would have taught them even less.

What does "Song" Mean?

The term song (the "o" is pronounced like the "o" in soot) is most often translated sink or relax. It is for sure the most common thing that Taijiquan teachers say to their students.
Louis Swaim has this to say about it:

Etymologically the term song is base on the character for "long hair that hangs down"--that is, hair that is loosened and expanded, not "drawn up." Therefore, "loosened" and "loosen" are more accurate renderings for song and fang song. The phonetic element that gives the character song its pronunciation means, by itself, "a pine tree," which carries an associated imagery of "longevity," much as evergreens are associated with ongoing vitality in the West. This may provide a clue to the Taijiquan usage of this term, which must not be confused with total relaxation, but it closer to an optimal state of the condition referred to as tonus in English anatomical parlance; that is, the partial contraction of the musculature, which allows one to maintain equilibrium and upright posture. The aligned equilibrium that is prescribed in Taijiquan is associated with imagery of being "suspended" from the crown of the head. One can, therefore, draw upon the available imagery of both something that is loosened and hangs down, and that of the upright pine, whose limbs do not droop down, but are buoyant and lively.

Understanding the cultural and historic significance of hair in China will really help give meaning to the underlying metaphors of song.

Even going quite far back in Chinese history, hair styles were always regulated by the government. The way you wore your hair told everyone your status and rank. Hair was worn in a top knot with a pin. The Chinese concept of "pulling the pin" has some resenance in English because it is like our concept of "letting your hair down."

To "pull out the pin" meant to 'drop out,' to resign, to retire, it meant to give up your status and rank, thus dropping in status. Thus by inference, song means to sink. But it also means to discard worrying about what you think you should be doing- or even what other people think of you.
Another important reference comes from the fact that from 1644-to 1911 China was ruled by the Manchu, an eastern Mongolian ethnic group called Jurchen allied with other Mongolian and Tibetan groups. All Han (ethnic Chinese) males were forced to wear their hair in a cue as a form of national humiliation. If you cut your cue the penalty was death. Historically the cue was used at night by the Jurchen people to tie their slaves to a post. So the term song could easily be understood as harboring some revolutionary bravado.

Gods also have hair styles. Zhenwu, or Ziwei, is the Chinese god of fate and the central deity of the Chinese pantheon. He is the North Star, the point on the top of your head, and the perfected warrior. He represents the physicality of fearlessness, the perfect mix of pure discipline and extraordinary spontaneity that is the basis for Daoist meditation. In his iconography his hair is song, part of it is tied back in a loose braid with silk and chain to protect his neck from sharp blades, the rest is long and hanging loosely about his shoulders. His hair is a throwback (I couldn't resist) to ancient shaman-warriors who showed their utter lack of concern for status by letting their hair go wild.

Does this sound like what you're doing?

UPDATE: George Xu and I were talking about "song" and he said it is like a pine cone opening. A simultaneous spreading out into space and letting go.

Belief

If you get a chance to read this article about my trip to China in 2001 you'll see I ask people lots of questions about religion. At that time, if the subject of religion, TCM, or qi was raised, 95% of the time I would be asked, "Xin bu xin?" Xin is one of those Chinese words that means lots of things. Here it means, "do you believe or do you not believe (in qi, TCM, or religion)?" But the word xin, like our word faith, could also mean trust. (It's a little creepy being ask this all the time.)

This pervasive question is new to Chinese culture. As far as I know, it does not get asked in Taiwan. Where did it come from?

Marxism, since Raymond Aron first pointed it out, has been exposed as having the trappings of a religion. One of the characteristics of Marxism is that it takes its definition of religion from Christianity. Thus despite the fact that Marxism claims to be anti-religion, it defines religion only in Christian terms.

"Do you believe in God? and that...." is a Christian question. Jews, for instance, do not frame religion this way (to Jews it is a series of laws). Neither do Muslims (to Muslims it is an act of submission). Certainly the world's Animists don't focus on this question either.

Chinese Communists use this "do you believe...?" question to subvert all other forms of authority. Chinese religious traditions do not require belief. Use of the term qi does not require belief. The practice and efficacy of any type of medicine does not require belief.

The practice of martial arts, particularly, has absolutely nothing to do with belief. I'll even go further. There is really no such thing as theory. All we have are lists of experiments and protocols for achieving results. The best that can be said about theory is that it is a tool for inventing new experiments. It doesn't have any real world existance.

By the way, everything I have just said is completely compatible with Orthodox Daoism, except that perhaps I've violated the precept "be uncontentious," or another one, "do not comment on the veracity of claims made by (other) cults."

The Chinese world view was first articulated by the founder of Religious Daoism, Zhang Daoling. A thousand years later, during the Song Dynasty it was adopted by the Chinese Government as Orthodoxy. This world view posits that all things and events are mutually self-recreating, there is no external agency. The source of all inspiration and the process by which all inspiration comes into being, is constantly available.

The role of belief in such a world view does not survive Occam's Razor. I bring all this up because it is a constantly reoccurring issue. People often think that belief in qi will somehow improve their Acupuncture treatments. If it works on animals and small children, I think it is fair to say, belief is not a factor.

Warriors, Artists and Technicians #2

What is the difference between warriors, martial artists, and skilled fighters? (Continued)

The time when Confucius lived and taught in China was just before the Warring States Era. It seems likely that his codes of conduct and visions of social order were inspired by an earlier era when wars were fought by a class of warriors. The story goes that Confucius was born into a warrior class but his group or lineage was defeated before he came of age. So he had the warrior training (he was the greatest archer of his time), and the warriorcode (extraordinary discipline), but he no longer had the status of a warrior. The warrior era was waning.

During the Warring States Era, hundreds of thousands of people were brought on to the fields of battle. These were not warriors; they were farmers, artisans, and convicts given weapons and conscripted to fight for generals, princes and kings.

At the end of the Warring States Era the first Emperor of the Qin (Qinshihuangdi), mostly finished off the warrior class. By the time of Han Wudi, there was none left in China.

In Ancient Greece warriors invented democracy. The recent movie "300" is about a last stand of a group of warriors against a conscript army. Alexander the Great and later the Romans, fielded huge well-disciplined armies, but when not at war, men were considered "citizens" not warriors.

In Europe around 1000 years ago, various kings called together every man who had a horse and sent them into battle. They carved up the land in to kingdoms. Those men, whose contribution was their horse and their bravado, were made noble. They became "gentlemen" "landlords," and "knights." They developed a very strict warrior code, which we have come to think of as Honor. With in this code, if someone called you a liar, or insulted someone beneath you in the hierarchy, you had to fight them. If the offender was also a gentleman, you had to duel with them. In this world, people were not free to disagree. The expression "I beg to differ," is a holdover from these times. If you opened a shop and started selling stuff, you lost your status as a gentleman.

Fortunately this code of honor is mostly gone today. But it does linger. This aristocracy was very weak at the beginning of the 20th Century, and they died in disproportionate numbers during WWI.

A very tough form of Warrior Honor developed on the border between England and Scotland. These two countries were at war for 1000 years, so long that the landlords in the borderlands collected their taxes by something they called Blackmail. They lived in small rough houses, abducted their wives, and sharpened their thumbs for plucking out eyes. In 1650 or so, when England and Scotland made peace, better-organized landlords came in and slaughtered the boarder people. The survivors fled briefly to Northern Ireland and then came to America. They are known formally as the Scots-Irish, but they have always called themselves 'rednecks.'

So it is fair to say that tiny hints of Warrior Honor exist in the US Military today, but it is a volunteer army most citizens (and some non-citizens) can qualify to join.

In Japan, to be a warrior, you had to be born into the Samurai class. (I believe a Samurai could also adopt you at any age.) Only Samurai were allowed to own swords, on penalty of death. Before Musashi, there was some training, mostly match fighting, grappling, throwing and wrestling. The code of a Samurai was very strict. It emphasized fearlessness and a willingness to die with out hesitation. Musashi was a real man, but as a myth he is credited with destroying the Warrior Code by using and teaching technique to win. Like the Europeans who considered it a violation of the code to practice shooting or fencing before a duel, the Samurai code valued pure fearlessness, pure willingness to die, not skill.

Part 3: Art vs. Skill

Interesting Historical Document

Here is a link to an ebook about an Australian man's journey through China in the 1890's:
AN AUSTRALIAN IN CHINA, BEING THE NARRATIVE OF A QUIET JOURNEY ACROSS CHINA TO BURMA, by GEORGE ERNEST MORRISON M.B., C.M. Edin., F.R.G. First published in 1895.

Warriors, Artists, and Technicians #1

What is the difference between a warrior, a martial artist, and a skilled expert?

A warrior is a member of a class, generally it is a privilege of birth. The warrior is not a universal concept but variants of it exist world wide. The first warriors could also be called shaman-kings. Most likely they developed from hunter-gather groups that occupied mountains, jungles or dry plains. These hunter-groups, often at war with each other, were in the habit of raiding the first agricultural settlements. At some point, these settlements probably got the idea that they could offer the hunter-groups ruler-ship in exchange for protection. They thus became the first warrior classes.

These warrior shaman's most powerful weapon was inspiring fear. Chinese historians record this kind of shaman-commander charging off into battle with a poisonous snake in each hand, wild hair, animal skins, horns and a terrifying mask. After countless generations, these shaman-warriors morphed into warriors with a strict code. The warriors of neighboring kingdoms fought each other on designatied fields of battle, with codes of conduct and rules about how to kill, whom to kill, and what to do with captured enemies.

In China, this was the time when the Zhouyi was written. The Zhouyi eventual developed into the Yijing (I Ching) or the book of changes. Richard Rutt's translation and commentary sheds really interesting light on this era of warrior inspired codes that used divination and both mass animal and human sacrifice as a tools for staying in power.

This is not just history. The warrior-shaman-kings are still around in isolated parts of Indonesia. (See Don F. Draeger's beautiful book the The Weapons & Fighting Arts of Indonesia.) The Lords Army in the Congo, would also qualify. As would The Terror Twins in the Burma-Thai boarder region.

Part two: Warrior Codes

Shoot first. Ask Questions Later.

This is pretty much my approach to teaching martial arts.

"Shoot first. Ask Questions later." It is description of American pragmatism. We get the job done, and then we figure out how to explain it.

I've been listening to woefully inadequate explanations of the origins of Chinese Martial Arts all of my life. I started this blog largely to express what half a lifetime of study has revealed about those origins, so I'm not surprised that I've got people saying I'm wrong.

The first question that has to be answered is a tough one and will probably take me at least 10 postings:  Why did Chinese culture create Martial Arts, when no other culture did this? (I plan to stand by this outrageous statement and I will deal with the exceptions in  in a future posting--they are Indonesia, Cochin-India, Muay-Thai, Korea and Japan.  I've already dealt with Africa in my videos.)
The term "cultivate qi" is used in Daoism a lot, to some extent in martial arts, less so in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), and for practically everything in qigong.

I asked my future wife(?) who is an Acupuncturist, what she thought "cultivating qi" meant? Her answer, "Live Free, or Die Hard!" Which we both saw and loved.

To 'cultivate qi' means to do experiments which reveal your true nature (de). This of course can be contrasted with experiments which obscure your true nature.

But this poses the question, what is your true nature? The Chinese term 'true nature' is de, which has many different translations because it actually means a whole bunch of really different things. For instance, in Confucius Analect's, it is usually translated "virtue." It was on the basis of this translation that European Enlightenment thinkers were able to argue that a non-Christian could be virtuous, and thus fully human.

Understanding Lineage

How does the process of resolving ones ancestors through the practice of gongfu manifest within the lineage of a particular practice?

From within a Chinese cosmological world view--when we practice qigong which has been passed down to us through many generations of adepts, we are receiving the collective "perfected" form of all the people in the lineage receding back through time. This practice resolves us (zheng). It resolves our fate (ming). It gives us a way to literally embody resolved action. If we remain sensitive to this process, the result --the fruition of practice -- is appropriate conduct in our daily lives.

This also works in the other direction. Imagine for a moment that the qigong we are doing seems to overwork our liver. Perhaps it is because someone in our lineage drank to much alcohol and her conduct is manifesting itself in the qigong we were taught and practice. If we keep precepts and practice appropriate action, our own healthy liver and our own healthy habits will eventually change the qigong practice itself, thus resolving the past and passing on to our students a healthier qigong practice. So the practice of qigong not only influences our ancestors and the lineage of our teachers, but also influences our students and our decedents.

Now I'm not a lineage fundamentalist, and I'm not a puritan either. But I think it is a little sad that just because Westerners don't understand Chinese cosmology, they toss it out like so much flotsam and jetsam.
In response to all the hucksterism and Qijocks in the qigong and yiquan worlds we are seeing more and more American qigongers and marital artists who reject any traditional Chinese ideas about how studying a martial art could improve your humanity or your health.

We now have qigong Atheists with a puritanical edge.