Zhang Sanfeng

I've been weeding around for a standard translation of the Zhang Sanfeng Taijiquan creation story. Every book or website seems to tell the tale a little bit differently.

Let's try this one:

Zhang Sanfeng's family came from Dragon Tiger Mountain (Longhushan). Sometime around the end of the Song Dynasty(960-1279 CE) he passed the Imperial exam and worked for the government. He learned some Shaolin and some jindan (meditation). The Mongols invaded, there was war and a new Yuan Dynasty(1279-1368). Side stepping the turmoil and chaos he went off to live on Wudang mountain.

One day he saw a crane and a snake fighting. Each used different natural styles of movement to yield and attack, but neither the snake nor the crane got hurt. That night he had a dream in which the deity Xuanwu appeared and taught him a way of moving. When he awoke he began practicing what Xuanwu had taught him. Sometime later he was attacked by 100 bandits and using his new practice was able to defeat them all. He lived for over 200 years and his practice eventually became known as Taijiquan.

What does this mean?

The Zhang family residence at Dragon Tiger mountain was the home of the Tianshi, the head priest of Religious Daoism. The name Sanfeng means "three mountains" and most likely means he was a member of an inner alchemy jindan lineage. Lineage names are picked from a secret poem, so people in the same lineage of the same generation sometimes have the same name. Either he really lived for 200 years or was several different people from the same generation within a Daoist lineage.

The last part of Zhang Sanfeng's life corresponds with the founding of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE). At that time the Tianshi, the most important religious leader in the country, went into a nine year retreat on Dragon Tiger mountain for the purpose of teaching the God Xuanwu, to be the head deity of the Chinese pantheon of gods. At the end of the nine years Xuanwu was promoted to the seat at the North Star and given the title Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior. This god was promoted at the request of the first Ming Emperor who had made many sacrifices to Xuanwu (Mysterious/Dark War God) during the years he battled the armies of the previous Yuan Dynasty.

The snake uses wave action, rolling from one one end to the other. The Crane uses opening and closing, drawing in toward the center and pushing out toward the periphery. Zhang lived in a natural setting and practiced Daoist Dreaming. This is the practice of weaving Night and Day seamlessly together. His experiences during the day drifted into his dreams, and his dream body became his waking body.

Infants do not know if they are awake or asleep and they can spend hours playing with their internal organs. To the infant what is inside has no name and what is outside has no name. This undifferentiated state has a name in Chinese: Taiji.

The art of Taijiquan is a guide to weaving our day into our dreams and the unbounded movement of our dream bodies into our waking bodies.

The two Zhang's (Sanfeng and the Tianshi) were on the same mountain, hanging with the same god as he went through a transformation. In Daoism they are called seed people because they carry knowledge from previous eras and make it relevant in the present.

Why Create a Martial Art?

I just wrote a long response to José de Freitas whose comment at the end of the New Students post is worth reading. It raises the very difficult and multi-layered question of why and how Chinese martial arts were created. To answer it adequately requires knowledge of Chinese history, religion, language (my weakness), and martial arts.

Here is an excerpt of my response to stimulate your appetite:

It might make more sense to argue that Chinese Martial Arts were created to promote the idea of universal responsibility. In a world with no aristocracy and no warrior class, it is the citizen-merchant-farmer who must be prepared to defend the nation, the family, and the internal social order. (Notice I did not include self-defense, which did not exist as an excuse for fighting in Chinese history.)

I absolutely love this question. If we look at all the individual and wildly diverse Chinese martial arts and all the individual and wildly diverse motivations people have for training in them--and try to work backwards to explain why they were created; it is a mighty tough task. What were the social milieus that inspired and supported the invention of Chinese martial arts? Do they exist in any form today?

I have commented in previous posts that there are quite a few books these days which assert that martial arts were created and preserved exclusively by people who had martial arts jobs. However; many martial arts creation stories talk about someone wandering out of the wilderness, or dreaming a dream, or finding a secret text. I find it hard to believe that these are just silly stories. It is more likely that they are summaries of a longer, more complex story. So in the next day or so I will take on the Taijiquan creation story.

Daoist Ritual Standing

Daoism has always maintained its roots to the shamanic and ecstatic worlds and at the same time used them do distinguish itself. Orthodox Daoist's do not practice any martial arts yet Daoists use swords in ritual dance and summon demon armies.

Ancient martial arts traditions are surely an important influence in the development of Daoism, and Daoism has continued to spin-off inspirations for martial arts. I have a bunch of posts dealing with this that I'm working on, but let me start by addressing an interesting quote that "adz" left in the comments sections of my posts on standing.

For me standing is a very active practice (as bizarre as that sounds to some folk). There are so many different aspects that can be worked, but Yao ZhongXun has already said it much better than what I ever could: Training of the mind alone is not Yiquan as is not physical practice alone. The two must be combined. The essence can only be cultivated by integration of the mind and body. Visualization or mental imagery must be employed in relaxed standing (Zhan Zhuang) to direct an integrated neuromuscular coordination that results in a whole-body response. Kinesthetic perception of the internal/external opposing force pairs (Zheng Li) and internal isometrics is developed to seek, sense, experience, cultivate, understand and master the whole-body balanced force (Hun Yuan Li).

This secular attempt to describe jindan (the golden elixir meditation) runs into the same problems Mantak Chia did.

In Taijiquan it is standard to learn "peng, ji, lu, and an" as four separate internal changes and then put them together in a seamless circular motion. The circles then become smaller and smaller. In Xingyi a very similar method is used in, for instance, the metal element to create cutting movement which resembles a forward moving skill-saw-blade.

Wang Xiangzai, the founder of the Yiquan system mentioned above in the quote, may have developed his method from Xingyi. One practice we do in Yiquan is to stand like we are holding a tree. We then move the imaginary tree imperceptibly up-down, left-right, forward-back, and inward-outward. Like taijiquan, this individual training eventually becomes a seamless movement and what starts as small circles becomes smaller and smaller until we can integrate these small circles into our larger movements. We then have power in all directions.

It is a stretch to call this meditation or standing still, no? My friend was joking that it is meditation for people with Attention Deficit Disorder (A.D.D.).

(Here I go digging myself a whole so deep I can't possibly dig myself out in one post.)

In Acupuncture we call the first needle, "calling the qi to order." In Daoist ritual the first act is also called, "calling the qi to order." To call the qi to order one must first invoke the Perfected Warrior, Zhen Wu. This is done by standing still using the physicality of the method described above. It is a totally ready stance--able to instantaneously issue force in all directions.

But Zhen Wu is not just a physicality, he is a whole way of seeing the world, and he is the first stage in the practice of jindan (golden elixir) (Daoist ritual was totally integrated into a solo meditation system during the Tang Dynasty, 600 CE.)

Zhen Wu is visualized in his armor with skin like the night sky drawing inward, chain and silk is woven into his hair. He has bare feet and he is energetically on the edge of his seat. Think of him as holding a sword in one hand, without a sheath, the tip of the blade is dragging on the ground. He is the embodiment of the taijiquan concept song (or sung, let go, sink) he is utterly fearless, the god of nothing-to-lose.

This is stage one. Don't get me wrong, stage one is cool. But these secularists have no way to deal with stage two, and no coherent explanation of fruition. (Perhaps we should have an old-folks home especially for people who can issue power in all directions at once.)

UPDATE: the quote about mentions "whole body balanced force," when I wrote this ten years ago I didn't know what that was. Now I teach it! But I call it the six dimensions and three thresholds of counterbalancing.  

Taijiquan and Death

Today is Yom Kippur.

It is traditional to greet people with the saying, "May you be sealed in the Book of Life for a Good Year."

Chinese and Jewish traditions both use the same metaphor to think about human conduct. Once a year our actions are recorded in a book and that book contains both a tali of our meritorious acts and records our fate for the up coming year. Our actions throughout our life have a cumulative effect.

In the Chinese tradition when we die our actions during our lives continue to effect the living after we have died. Ideally, we simply become a supportive ancestor for our descendants. But it is also possible that we pass on bad habits, strange quirks, or even vendettas.

The residue of our inappropriate conduct during our lives is called unresolved qi. It becomes the responsibility of our descendants to resolve this qi for us if we leave it floating around after we have died. One way this is done is by offering incense and sacrifice to ancestors. This is mandatory for Chinese people.

The resolution of unresolved qi can also be achieved through appropriate conduct. For example if we brake a bad habit like quiting smoking, or start a good one like keeping the kitchen really clean.

Taijiquan clearly falls into this category. It is a positive social practice, it keeps people in good health, and it improves the efficiency of our movement so that we aren't wasting qi. Central to the practice of taijiquan is the exploration of wuwei: variously translated--not doing, non-aggression, or "like water it does nothing, yet leaves nothing unnourished."

Taijiquan is the practice of easily bringing things to completion, it is practice for dying a complete death. A death in which the only legacy we leave behind is unconditional support for the living.

Surrender?

The Taijiquan Classics say: "The most important thing in a fight is that you win!"

Not.

What I think is most often missed about the Taijiquan classics, because it isn't explicitly stated, is that they present Taijiquan as a conduct practice.

The literary roots of these classics are pretty clearly Daoist and Confucian. The style, language and even a few quotes make this clear. The Taiji classics are syncretic, meaning they draw on several sources yet give a feeling of cohesive wholeness.

Both Daoism and Confucianism conceive human beings, or perhaps I should say humanness, in terms of commitments. It is easy to argue that a person who starts eating human flesh has lost their humanity, but what makes Daoism and Confucianism distinct from "Western culture" is the notion that humanness is a continuum.

In other words, they pose the question, "Just how human are we?" Confucians answer the question by saying there is a protocol one can follow which is based in, and renewed by, an examination of our natural relationships with other people. How well we interact with the people close to us will influence how well each of them interacts with the people they know-- thus creating interlocking chains of good conduct leading all the way from the Emperor to every person in the nation.
Daoists agreed with this assessment, but they said that if a mechanism exists by which we are all connected, than it works on the cosmic level too. Thus our conduct must be connected to animals, stars and earthquakes. Popular Chinese religion often took this idea in to the realm of "wacky." Cults regularly sprung up saying things like, "If we regularly use too much energy getting across town, we will cause the icebergs to melt, the seas to rise and soil to become parched." Oh wait, that was Al Gore--anyway, you get the idea.

Confucians and Daoists both summerized their teachings with lists of precepts. I should add that Daoist precepts often concerned the inner workings of the body itself. While it is often posited that bad digestion must somehow be connected to earthquakes, the connection is not known, and keeping in mind that the connection itself is unknown--is a Daoist precept.

Oh yeah, I was supposed to be talking about Taijiquan. Well, if you take almost any saying from the Taijiquan Classics like for instance, "One's form should have no hollows and no projections" it is easy to see that this is a suggestion about how to perfect the efficiency of one's movement. Confucians think that efficient movement rectifies the heart/mind, and thus leads to clarity in one's actions-- which makes it easier to align what one intends with what one does!

If your intention is to resolve a dispute quickly and efficiently, it is entirely possible that the easiest resolution is to just drop your guard and take the hit.

Strategy

Sun Tzu, the Art of War, is a pretty well known book. But what does it say?

You can not control the future, that is the first rule of warfare. When circumstances change, and they always do, your strategies must adapt and change too. Strategies must have built-in flexibility and a failing strategy must be dropped immediately.

Defense

If you know what type of attack is coming, and you have the time and money, you can build an effective defense. The history of warfare is simple-- a successful attack will inspire an effective defense against that sort of attack. Then comes a new type of attack, which inspires a new type of defense. Periods of good defense cover much longer periods in history than periods of new attacks. (Perhaps modern weaponry will change this, I don't know. There are now defenses for nuclear weapons, they suck, but shelters can be designed to survive an attack, and nuclear missiles can be exploded above your own cities to destroy incoming missiles.)

Not-defending

This explains why matched fighting uses so much defensive technique and real fighting doesn't. In a real fight you have no idea what type of attack is coming. This is one of the priciples that push-hands and roushou are suposed to teach. But of course if you always think and practice defensively, your push-hands will just be a waste of time.

Strategy involves intimate knowledge of everything from terrain, to psychology, to logistics. If you are more familiar with the details of warfare than your opponent, you can devise a winning strategy based on you opponent's weaknesses. Even if you are fewer in numbers or weaker in some other way, you can still win.

Losing Well

It is possible to lose well. All of these lessons are important to martial artists, but this last one is the hardest to learn. I'm reminded of the story of a group of reporters in the Congo whose jeep was stopped by a rebel road-block. The rebels, armed to the teeth with machine guns, took everyone out one by one and shot them. One guy burst into tears. The rebels laughed at him, he seemed utterly pathetic, and then they put him back in the jeep told him to drive off.

Now I'm not saying that reporter actually had a strategy, but if he did, there is no reason to believe it would work a second time. That's the nature of warfare, of fighting, and knowing how to lose well.

Although Sun Tzu doesn't say it, he fundamentally rejects the notion of honor.

Iraq "Mac"

I stay far away from politics in my blog. But yesterday's Wall Street Journal article about a self taught Tribal Warfare Expert named Iraq Mac is just too good to not submit to my readers too.

When the Mongol Armies conquered the known world they faced almost no significant opposition, they stopped for one reason and one reason only: Genghis Khan died and several of his generals felt they were in line for succession, so they returned home to "work it out." His two top generals chose not to return home, one settled permanently in Turkey, the other in Iran.

Generally speaking, when the Mongols encountered a horse riding people they offered them a choice: Join us or die. When they encountered other peoples they built pyramids with their skulls.

The Marmelukes were the only horse riding people to have success against the Mongols.

Mr. McCallister, the Marines' resident expert on tribal culture, settled on the perfect gift: a Mameluke sword. The swords, which all Marine officers carry, date back to 1804 when a Marine lieutenant led a group of Arabs in a successful attack on pirates and was awarded a sword by an Ottoman pasha.

Read the whole article. Or if that doesn't work try this Google News search.

Never Fight

There is an old Chinese proverb that I have always liked, but let me apologize in advance for any underlying misogyny or other offenses to contemporary morality.

Never fight a woman, a monk, or a sick man!

This proverb cuts to the core of Chinese martial arts thinking-- that's why I like it.

Never fight a woman because if a woman is willing to fight you, it's a sure bet that she has some surprises. Surprise is the greatest weapon of all. Women's martial arts start from the assumptions that one has:

1. A shorter reach


2. Less power


3. Less ability to use conditioning or physical integration for an effective defense. Basically, smaller bones can be made tougher but bigger bones will usually break them anyway.

Women's martial arts focus on using sudden overwhelming force on the most vulnerable areas. They often use tricks, surprises and small hidden weapons. (You have been warned.)

Never fight a monk because monks are known for their extraordinary discipline. It is likely that they have trained One Technique over and over again; and you don't know what it is.

Never fight a sick man, because he may be sick from training too much!

Rooting, the Spear, and the Phalanx

I think this picture helps explain why people developed rooting techniques. From the time of Alexander the Great until Julius Caesar this type of warfare was totally dominant.

Cavalries, when they were very large and well organized could be decisive against spear armies but in most places, most of the time, they didn't have the numbers to beat the infantries. (Later the Mongols were a big exception.)

When Julius Caesar came along he consistently defeated this type of Phalanx formation with something called a Centurion. A Centurion was 100 men divided into 20 groups of 5 which were capable of acting as a unit.

Each man carried:

• a 6 foot long javelin, which could be used for throwing or thrusting.


• a shield, which fit together with 4 other shields into a solid shape which angled up from the ground and could be used to get under the phalanx.


• a short sword.

American style football and the game of pool are both leftovers from the days of the Phalanx. Few armies have ever been as well organized as Julius Caesar's were, so the Phalanx continued to have play in the fields of battle until the gun.

Rooting techniques have some application in stand-up styles of wrestling, but their main application is being able to hold a long spear, shoulder to shoulder with other men, while you are facing a solid wall of on coming spears.

I believe one of the roots of push-hands came out of the idea of Champion Matches. These were fights held the night before a battle, where both sides put forward their greatest fighter. It was a chance for generals to meet, and sometimes find a settlement with out arms.  Failing that, if your champion won the other army was demoralized.

Three Schools of Chinese Medicine

I have said before that most medicine comes from war.

Why? because that's when famine and pestulance are most likely to happen. That's when injuries, trauma, infections and disentary can be treated on mass. Infectious diseases have a habit of spreading quickly through troops living in close proximity to each other.

Knowledge about womens health, pediatrics and degenerative illness is more likely to be advanced during times of great wealth and prosperity.

Chinese village doctors were often part of a "big family," which meant that they were treating most of the descendants of known lineages. Because of this they were likely to see all the hereditary expressions of a particular genetic line. This made it possible to accumulate great knowledge about weaknesses and diseases which are inherited.

While medical knowledge in China was often past down father to son, and too often was secret. There is also a long tradition of publishing best practices.

Starting in the Tang Dynasty (600-900 CE), Chinese governments gave exams, and officially certified competent doctors.

The two dominant metaphors of Chinese medicine are the circulation system and the digestive system.

Circulation is associated with the North and acupuncture. It conceives of health in terms of a complex plumbing system, clogs, narrowing, pooling, not enough pressure, etc....

Digestion is associated with the South and herbal formulas. It conceives of all parts of the body in terms of digestive function, assimilation, elimination, appetite, fermentation, purification, etc....

A third metaphor, which tends to be associated with martial arts, is a well integrated structure. It conceives of every part of the body as having it's own optimal shape and way of moving. Each part contributes to a complete, well integrated whole moving form. If one part of the body is not moving the way it is supposed to, it will effect all other parts of the the structure. For instance, a liver that doesn't move like a jellyfish when active, will slowly, over years, change the shape and alignment of the bones. An injury to the neck will effect the dexterity of the hand.