Prowess

I've been thinking a lot about prowess lately. The dissertation Martial Gods and Magic Swords, by Avron Boretz got me going on it. This is a difficult work to review, especially since I had to return it to inter-library loan a few days ago.

The classical explanation of the basic gongfu bow or greeting is that you are covering your right fist, which represents maximum explosive power, with your left hand, which represents the commitment and ability to control that power.

Wen, the left hand, culture, writing, government, civility; juxtaposed with Wu, the right hand, raw power, martial, chaotic, military.

Historically governments, and scholars generally had an interest in having us believe that Wen naturally dominates Wu, and that we should fear the opposite situation. Certainly, the Daoist pantheon gives hierarchical precedent to gods in civil roles and lower status to gods in military or punishment roles, and even lower status to demons and chaotic forces.

But reality on earth is not always so simple, nor should it be. There are no true earthly hierarchies.

Avron Boretz is, I think, the first martial artist to really dive into the blended subject of ethnology and history. As a martial artist and a scholar, he managed to get himself joined up with a cult dedicated to The Dark Lord (I kid you not, but in Chinese it would be Xuandi) in a small town in Northern Taiwan. All the inner cult members were martial artists and many of them were involved in crime, like smuggling and prostitution, fringe of society stuff. They were a brotherhood of sworn allegiance, prone to occasional fighting with other brotherhoods.  In other words, small time gangsters.
The book takes a hard look at the role of rituals in creating feelings of prowess in men who are otherwise kind of marginal. Because he got quite close to these guys, he writes about many different aspects of the cult. They all go out together to do exorcisms dressed up in costumes as demon generals. Sometimes they get possessed by the demon general they are representing. They all wear thick make-up and go into trance, but they only occasionally become possessed.

One of the ways they determine if a possession is authentic is that the person who was possessed has no memory of it.

The second to last chapter kind of surprised me. It is all about partying with the boys. Heavy drinking nearly every night, women, money, status-- all ways that men demonstrate their prowess.

The only time I have done things I have no memory of was after drinking large amounts of alcohol. I wonder if that is what it is like to be possessed. My experience of it was just the opposite of prowess, it was extreme embarrassment. But I have met people who are proud of their black-out moments, perhaps for some rather desperate people, blacking out could be a form of prowess.

Martial arts and alcohol, seems like a bad combo, but so do sports and alcohol and we all know those games used to be played by very drunk individuals.

These martial dances are not martial arts, but they are displays of prowess and they do have many similarities to the martial arts I practice.

One interesting example is the Big Dipper step, or Seven Star step. When a group of demon generals approaches a house or a business they are about to do an exorcism on, they approach it doing the Seven Star step (chixing bu). They then stamp on the ground and run across the threshold into the building.

I realized that everyone of my Northern Shaolin forms begins with a Seven Star step.  In Northern Shaolin, first we stamp on the ground and sink into cat stance, which is like stepping over a threshold. Then our hands shoot out and break apart, as if we were breaking through double doors or the opening in a curtain, and we run three steps, as if we were running into a building or onto a stage, and we do the "monk clears his sleeves" action. I counted it out and it is exactly seven steps. Cool huh?

UPDATE: This is now a book! Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters!

Gangster Gongfu

I've been reading Avron Albert Boretz's 1996 dissertation: Martial Gods and Magic Swords: The Ritual Production of Manhood in Taiwanese Popular Religion. I got it through Inter-Library Loan, but it looks like it can be purchased on-line here.
It is really good, and I really hope it gets published someday. I just finished it, so I'm not quite ready for a review. This I'll say, it makes an enormous number of connections between gongfu and popular Daoist ritual cults to various martial deities.

Just briefly, the inner circle of these exorcistic cults are sworn brotherhoods, gangsters if you will. They are all into gongfu, and gongfu deeply informs their trance/possession routines. Some of them claim historic roots in local militias too.

One cool part of the book deals with a particular ritual called Handan Ye. In this ritual a prominent gangster is carried around on a sedan chair by other gangsters. The locals line the streets and throw firecrackers at them. The gangster is allowed to wear goggles and shorts, but that is it. He is in trance the whole time, possessed by a god. When it is over he is covered from head to foot in burns.

It seems like this it a chance for the locals to help him clean up his demerits in the Book of Life, while getting even with him for terrorizing the community. This raises a lot of questions, which I shall go into later, but I think it is worth saying that this is an extreme form of martial conditioning. It demonstrates actual prowess and creates a theatrical performance image of extraordinary potency and danger.

Watch it on Youtube!

Taijiquan's Language of Exorcism

Long time readers know that the relationship of martial arts to exorcistic rituals is a pet topic of mine.

Wayne Hansen who comments at the Formosa Neijia site offered this wonderful linguistic explanation of peng, the most basic and pervasive form of taijiquan power (jin).

Peng is the lid on a quiver.
Imagine a cane laundry basket with the lid just caught in the lip at the top,by pressing the two sides the lid springs open. I am told this is how the Chinese quiver worked. With a press of the back muscles the top, which was covering the feathers from the rain, sprung open.
Peng jin works like that and so the name.

Archery competition now a days is mostly about accuracy at hitting a static target. But great archers had to be able to hit deadly moving targets and hit static targets while galloping on horseback. And perhaps even more importantly, they had to be able shoot arrows in rapid succession-- One arrow per second.

So popping the lid off of your quiver with a little rounding motion would have been a very threatening act. In fact you might translate it into words by saying, "Back off!" The standard translation of peng is "Ward-off."

To explain this difference, I imagine I'm riding along on a mountain path and I sense something threatening. My first instinct is to pop my quiver lid, which would in fact make a "pop" sound if it were water tight. Even if I haven't seen the actual threat, I can prepare myself, and I can let who ever is lurking know that I'm aware of them. This sort of communication could easily be translated as "ward-off."

Hold on because it gets better.

Common exorcist rituals begin with fire-crackers. The purpose? To ward-off ghosts. Ghosts and demons who are strong enough to need an exorcism, don't usually leave when they hear fire-crackers, but their groveling sidekicks and entourages do take to the hills. The fire-crackers are meant to give mediocre ghosts who are just lost a chance to get away. But particularly malicious demons, the ones that feed on chaos, will actually be attracted to explosive sounds in hope that they will find suffering and death.

The next ritual action would be the "offering of spirits." In both Chinese and African traditions this is done by drinking from a bowl of strong alcohol and then suddenly forcing it back through pursed lips to create a spraying effect which turns into a mist. The mist attracts mischievous spirits. Alcohol is spilled on the ground too.
In the beginning of the taijiquan form, peng leads directly into ji. Ji is a small quick burst of force, sometimes described metaphorically as liquid spraying out of the fingers. Ji by itself doesn't do much-- it can be used for a throw only if your attacker has uprooted themselves by first pushing against your peng. (Of course ji directly in the eye would hurt!) I was taught to project ji into the opponents "empty" spots, those places where they are unaware, because it will stir them to attack and thereby make themselves more vulnerable!

The opponent's attack naturally leads into lu, the next move in the taijiquan form. Lu is a gathering and a drawing-in of your opponent (usually translated "rollback"). Lu defuses the attacker's force.

After the "offering of spirits," the next ritual act is the drawing in and capturing of demonic forces. Offending demons are drawn into a pickle jar and then trapped there.

The final movement in the taijiquan beginning sequence is an. An is usually translated "press," or even "press down." It is very much like resting your hands on a rounded pickle jar lid and weighting them so that whatever is inside won't get out!

The final ritual act is called "Applying the Seal." The seal is like a piece of tape that holds the lid on the jar and records the date the spirit was trapped, what type of spirit it is, and when it can be released. (It is considered ritually irresponsible to just leave them there. Some are starved to death, some are transformed in bi-annual rituals, others are freed after "serving time.") Michael also posted in the same thread I linked to above. He quoted the fabulous Louis Swaim:

If the opponent wants to change hands in order to apply Push (an), I then extend and open my right hand, pulling it toward my thorax to the point where the two palms are facing in and diagonally intersect like an oblique cross-shaped sealing tape (fengtiao), preventing the opponent's hands from getting in. It is just like closing the door against a robber. This is why it is called 'like sealing'....The image used of sealing tape refers to fengtiao, which were strips of red paper pasted across parcels, doors, crime scenes etc..., as seals.

All those other uses of "seals" are historically derived from the exorcist's seal.

That ought to liven up your form!

Here is the best site on Chinese Archery

The Sound of Wen and Wu

I woke up this morning with my arms crossed.  Actually more than crossed, knotted-up would be a better description.  One hand jutting past my armpit, the other arm wrapped around it twice and dangling between my ear and my shoulder.  It took a minute to figure out which arm was which.  My honey says I do gongfu in my sleep.

Anyway I've been reading a wonderful dissertation, which I will review when I finish reading it, called "Martial Gods and Magic Swords," by Avron Boretz.  The Daoist scholar Paul Katz recommended it.

Today I just want to talk about one of his footnotes.  In a discussion about the relationship between wen (civil, scholarly, cultural) and wu (military, martial) he mentions that the drum is wen and the cymbal is wu.  That really got me thinking.

The drum establishes order, it is steady and precise.  The cymbal is an explosion of sound, it breaks the air and shatters the peace.  When I teach kids or perform, I use the drum for stepping, and the cymbal for sudden kicks.

The large gong is, of course, used for bowing, but it is also good for transitions or even moments of transcendence.

The wood-block (called a fish in Chinese) is used for accenting orders or commands, it is often answered by the performer with a stomp of the foot (leading into cat stance or monk stance).  It is a high sharp sound.  Wood-blocks are used for chanting invocations, and by Buddhists for chanting sutras.  The same wood-block sound was traditionally used in formal arguments and teachings to accent an important point that had just been made.

"The Dao which can be named is not the true Dao!" "PAAHK."

The flutes and reed instruments mimic the human voice.

Confucius

Confucius said, "If I show the student(s) one corner of the square and he doesn't show me the other three, I change the subject."

There are some scholars who believe that this quote from Confucius is about taxes. They believe this because taxes were paid in grain which was grown on square plots made up of nine sections. Eight families would work together on all nine sections and the center section would be collected by the government.

Ahhh taxes, well at least we don't have to pay them in grain anymore...

Anyway... I don't think Confucius was talking about taxes.

What I love about this quote is it really shows the reciprocity that is key to understanding Confucius. It even implies cosmology--a cosmology where everything is mutually self-re-creating.

If I show the student one corner of the square, it is the student's job to show me the other three. That is not my job. It is the student's job to bring significant energy and commitment to the lesson.

One the other hand, if the student doesn't respond to my lesson I don't look to criticise the student. I first reflect and then acknowledge that I'm not offering a teaching which meets the student where they are, at their learning level or interest. A good teacher will move on to a new subject or try a new approach.

Yoga is not what it seems

Charles Weidman --Photo by Barbara Morgan (1944). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David C. Ruttenberg, 1987 

I admit that I've had it out for yoga for years. It is not the fact that people are getting to know themselves by practicing something physical with discipline, that part I find beautiful. My problem has always been that yoga seemed so "in the box" when compared to dance and martial arts. To put it bluntly, if your "downward dog" doesn't eventually scamper around the room and chase its tail, what is the point?

Years ago I had a dance teacher who trained with one of the early moderns,

Charles Weidman. Incidentally, his stuff rocked. Anyway she said to the class one day, "You know at some point during the late 70's people started saying that the way I start my class is like yoga. It wasn't until years later that I took a yoga class and saw what they meant. I wonder where those early modern dancers learned it?" Hmmm....

I was at a party a couple of years ago and spoke with a woman who made a lot of dough in the first internet explosion. She has been a Zen practitioner for 30 years and has practiced yoga for the last 20. She told me that when she first started practicing yoga, the meditation component was entirely Vippassina oriented. Meaning that it was a process of examining and transcending the body. Now yoga classes are almost all Zen (what she referred to as the "Insight" tradition) oriented meditation, meaning they see the precision of the posture as the method and the result, non-conceptual, non-transcendent, emptiness without a goal.

She wasn't really taking sides as to which type of meditation goes better with yoga, and neither am I, she was just saying it is an unacknowledged innovation.

Well, maybe this article from Yoga Journal will shed some light, as the yoga crew are fond of saying. The article is partly a review of The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by N. E. Sjoman, as this quote shows:

Modern hatha yoga draws on British gymnastics? The yoga of Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and Krishnamacharya influenced by a potpourri that included Indian wrestlers? These are claims guaranteed to send a frisson of horror up the limber spine of any yoga fundamentalist. But according to Sjoman, his book is meant not to debunk yoga, but to pay tribute to it as a dynamic, growing, and ever-changing art.

Here is a quick quote from an Amazon review:

The core of the book is a translation of a text from the 1800s from the private library of the Mysore palace which is the only textual documentation of an extended asana practice - asanas being the yoga positions that form the core of yoga practice today.

I haven't read the book but it purportedly explains that the standing and inverted posses in yoga come from western gymnastics and the ubiquitous "sun salutations" come from Indian wrestling!

Is it true? I don't know, but you gotta love this stuff.

Oh, and just in case anybody is wondering (or listening) all that health stuff about how this or that posture is good for this or that organ, this or that problem...that all happened in the last ten years! --Intelligent people combining personal experience with wishful thinking and a little (Martha Steward inspired) "distressing" the surface to give it that antique feel!

Check out this wonderful list of all the things people are doing with Yoga these days over at Jen's Reviews. 18 Amazing Benefits of Yoga, According to Science.

Does intent matter?

Up until I was in my late twenties in San Francisco, there were many places where I could practice gongfu outside, even when it was raining. Sheltered areas in parks, tunnels, the overhangs of buildings, even thick tree canopies were available as public space. Now there are almost no public sheltered spaces because bums were using them for sleeping.

Our legal system is based on assessing a persons moral intent to do harm. A bum sleeping in the park is intending to sleep. They don't intend to make our quality of life worse, so we don't feel morally right punishing them for the destruction of public space.

Japanese society has no such problem because they don't care about moral intent. They treat crime as a problem of impulse control. This point is beautifully and brilliantly illustrated in the film Doing Time by Sai Yoichi. A guy goes to prison for the crime of wanting to feel the power of firing a pistol. He shoots into a bucket of water alone in a rural area but he gets caught anyway and sent to prison.

Almost all Japanese convictions come with a confession. (Historically in China, all convictions required a confession.) Prison in Japan is not a place to punish, it is an isolated environment where people with weak impulse control get an opportunity to develop it.

If I ever teach high school students again, I think I'll make this film required viewing.

This is important in the realm of martial arts because the pivotal term here, the operative word, is intent or yi in Chinese. Many internal and external martial artists claim that intent is the most important part of practice.



You can have a really clear and strong intent and still not get the results you want. Our good intentions do not necessarily produce good results. Intent can actually be a type of aggression that stops us from experiencing subtlety. Highly focused intent can even make us blind to what is right in front our our faces.

In our legal system we also make a distinction between pre-meditated intent and spontaneous intent.

I'm honestly not sure how to explain the difference between the Chinese term yi and the English term intent, but I thought this little discussion about impulse control might generate some insights.

Note: Yoyogi park, in central Tokyo, has a designated area for people to permanantly camp-out. It is clean and safe, and kind of edgy weird experimental.

Bones

There is a Chinese expression that goes, "You know it so well it is written on your bones." First I should explain where this expression comes from.

In Daoism the quest for immortality is extremely varied and so quite difficult to define; however, a significant factor in immortality is that other people recognize you have become an immortal at the time of your death or sometime after your death. The so called "highest" way to demonstrate becoming an immortal at the moment of death is to "Rise up in broad daylight with your dogs and chicken." Zhang Daoling (the founder of Religious Daoism) did this, as did his wife, his 3 sons and their wives.

Dao Hongjing and Ge Hong, the two most famous alchemists, became immortals simply by hiring a carriage (you know, a taxi) taking a trip out into the wilderness and then "Sending the Carriage Back Empty." There are hundreds of unique (loosely) documented ways of demonstrating the transition to being an immortal. Often when Chinese people died they were put into big ceramic jars in a squatting position. Then, after their skin and organs had fully decomposed their bones were transfered to a smaller jar. It turns out that some immortals were recognized during this transfer of bones because Daoist sacred texts (like the Daodejing for instance) were written on their bones!

You can tell an enormous amount about how someone lived by studying their bones. The shape, density, places of wear, and chemical composition of a persons bones tell a real story. This is the premise of the wonderful Fox T.V. show Bones where a forensic anthropologist and an FBI agent team up to solve crimes by looking at bones. Since my sister is an Archaeologist I sometimes call her up after watching the show to find out if what they did on the show could really happen. Often it can! My sister says she can often tell what kinds of work a person did, or what kind of weapons a person used by looking at their bones.

This got me thinking. It must be possible to tell what kind of martial arts a person was doing by looking at their bones. I want to know if there are people with Taijiquan type bones or Shaolin type bones a thousand years ago. This could be done, and eventually it could be done so well that we could see the entire history of martial arts by region over 3 thousand years!!!

So little is known about our physiology. It is hard to put a percentage on, but if we know more than 10% of what there is to know about physiology I would be surprised. Here is some very cool new research about bones, here too.

...(N)ew research shows that bones release a protein called osteocalcin involved in controlling sugar and fat absorption, thus acting like a hormone....

"Because osteocalcin is secreted by one organ and acts on others, it fits the definition of a hormone, making bones part of the endocrine system..."

What do you have written on your bones?

Master Cat

A long time ago Tiger was awkward and clumsy. Lacking skill he found a great gongfu master and begged him to accept him as a student. This is how he came to study with Master Cat.

Tiger studied and practiced Master Cat's lessons with great diligence until one day, after many years, he believed he was more powerful and more skillful than Master Cat.

Tiger said to Master Cat, "Thank you Shifu, you have taught me all your greatest secrets and now my gongfu is superior to yours, now I'm going to eat you!"

In the time it took Tiger to say these words, Master Cat had scaled a tree and walked out on a branch, "Oh," said Master Cat, "There was one thing I forgot to teach you."

--------------------

I like this story for its cuteness and because it plays on what we think we know about natural ability. Did the tiger really learn all his gongfu from a cat? It makes sense to me.

But the story also takes for granted the paranoid old master. I have felt that fear of giving away gongfu secrets lurking there in even the most open and generous masters.

Even as we can feel Daoist inspiration surging through the internal martial arts, nudging us to let go of fear as a driving force in our quest for power--the lingering mythic fear of the Mongols, the Qing Dynasty, the Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, WWII, the Purges, the Great Leap, the Re-education camps....haunts our movements and our practice.

The Quest for Power (Part 2)

The Orthodox Daoist take on the quest for power that I related in the previous post likely grew out of a context in which Shamanic and Trance-medium practices were the dominant form of religious expression.

Shaman and mediums use a long list of techniques to reach an altered state which takes them on a journey, or entices a deity to take over their body. Dancing frenetically or for a very long time, altered breathing patterns, chanting and singing, drinking or taking drugs, fasting or eating extreme foods, staying outdoors in bad weather; these are all used by Shaman and Mediums to enter altered states of consciousness, often to the point of passing out.

Shaman and Mediums come back from these performance "trips" with special knowledge, and often special powers which appear to be conferred on them through these experiences.

Orthodox Daoists came to view these practices as journeys toward death. These practices deplete qi, and tend to dramatically shorten life-span. The quest for this type of power entails giving up a part of yourself, a self-sacrifice in exchange for power.

Orthodox Daoists then began to see parallel characteristics in all quests for power. Power begets sacrifice.

A great deal of exercise is framed as a quest for power, they tell you to give up something now for a super body in the future. Push yourself through the difficulty and the pain, put your money down, and you will be rewarded with beauty, recovered youth, or superior abilities.

Often times, quests for power are remedies for the side effects of other quests for power. Working too hard at a job 60 hours a week? Try yoga! That back hurting from the long commute and the all the time in front of the computer? Join our fitness club and we'll not only fix your back, we'll even improve your sex life!

This happens to be the way people are, so the first covenant of Orthodox Daoism is to not get in the way of peoples pursuit of power unless it involves the direct taking of life (blood sacrifice).

Daoism does not reject the pursuit of power. The first line of the Daodejing, (sometimes translated "The Way of Power") suggests that we can have an experience which is unmediated by words, ideas, images, or metaphors. Like power, words are not rejected.

Recognition of the mechanism by which words define and limit our experience does not stop us from appreciating them. The mechanism by which we accumulate power is a fascinating part of human experience, even though it limits our experience and has a tendency to shorten our lives. We have the option of putting on those "power" shoes or going barefoot.