Marrow of the Nation

I just finished reading Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation, A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, UC Press 2004.

Before I tell you about that I just want to say I've got a lot on my plate before I leave for Taiwan and so I apologize if my blogging seems rushed and...

My advanced students from ER Taylor Elementary School are performing again, Saturday May 16th, this time at San Francisco's beautiful new De Young Museum.  They'll be on the Outdoor Cafe Stage at 1:45 PM, it's free.

Marrow of the Nation contributes an important piece of history to our understanding of why Chinese Martial Arts History is such a madhouse of unsupportable fiction (and also why, as Chris at Martial Development pointed out, some comic fictional films are closer to the truth than the books historians have written).

In the early 20th Century Chinese people, particularly urban people, were deeply humiliated.  For 300 years they had been under foreign Manchu rulers, forced to wear their hair in a queue as symbolic slaves.  The Chinese people saw themselves as collaborators in their own oppression.  They were unable to work together to overthrow a weak corrupt government until a group of 9 foreign powers allied to bring China to it's knees.  All the foreign powers were Christian, except Japan, and all were promoters of Modernity.

Scientism, Rationalist extremism, absolutist truths, and the relentless quests for purity of form, and transparent clarity--swept the country like wild fire.  China turned on itself.  Anything old which required oral transmission, anything mysterious, secret, difficult to learn, or regionally particular, was viciously attacked as the cause of China's past failures and humiliations.  Thus it was claimed, Martial arts were practiced by dirty herbalists, religious nuts, and desperate performers who gather up ignorant crowds and block traffic.

Martial Arts were to be replaced by tiyu, Physical Culture.  By that they meant Western Sports fitness and Olympic style competitions.  Physical Education Departments opened up in schools all over the country.

Huges swaths of Martial Arts culture were wiped out, never to be seen again.  Imagine having spent your life developing an extraordinary "spirit fist" only to be surrounded by ridicule on a national scale.  Most chose to take their secrets with them to their graves, many probably committed suicide.

Those martial artist activists who resisted the onslaught of hysteria did so in the name of Modernity!  The first powerful voice for making Kungfu part of Modernity was called The Pure Martial Society (Jingwu Hui).  They argued that martial arts could be a sport like any other sport.  All the other sports came from the West, having a Sport with Chinese roots would be a great source of pride which would help build the nation.   For Kungfu to be a sport it had to be totally open, accessible to women, have a clear standard curriculum, have a health and fitness component free of terms like jing, qi or shen, and be competition oriented.  Jingwu swept the country and Chinese communities in South East Asia.   As political fortunes changed it was surpassed by the Guoshu (National Art) movement.   The Kuomintang Government of Chang Kai-Shek (he was a Methodist Christian) implemented Guoshu schools all over the country, at least where he was in power, and used the competitions along with academic testing to pick officers in his government and armies.  But everybody who taught martial arts started calling it Guoshu, meaning that they agreed with the modernizing, scienticization project.

They tended to argue that in the past there was a pure fighting art that had been corrupted and could now be extricated from the mildew of history by being simplified and mixed with fitness training.  But there were lots of arguments.  Some argued that martial virtues had been lost.  This was the period when people started making up lineages and publishing teaching manuals.

The lineages allowed people to pretend they came from a great and pure martial line of masters dedicated to nothing but martial virtue and pure technique.  Inventing the lineages allowed people to write religion, rebellion and performance out of history. Some of the lineages may have been real, but they were not pure.  By claiming a lineage people were also renouncing the past, both real and imagined, they were saying in effect,  'Now THIS art, which was unfortunately secret for many generations is now totally clear and open!  Anyone with four limbs and two ears can learn it!'

There was a guy named Chu Minyi who served as a minister for the Kuomintang.  He invented something called Taijicao (Tai Chi Calisthenics) and in 1933 wrote a book called Tai Chi Calisthenics Instructions and Commands.  "Whereas traditional tai chi was simply too difficult for any but the most dedicated martial artist to master, tai chi calisthenics were pleasingly easy to learn and practice."  They could be done in a few minutes and they used a counting formula like jumping jacks.  He also gets credit in the book for inventing the Tai Chi Ball practices.  (Hey, I didn't write the book, but those tai chi ball exercises always looked a little too much like rhythmic gymnastics for my taste.)

Chu's Tai Chi Calisthenics were performed on stage at the 1936 Olympics.  Fortunately or unfortunately he was a peace activist and so naturally supported the Japanese when they invaded and was later executed for treason.  But not before performing one last taijquan set in front of the firing squad.

Check out the book.  All the good stuff is in Chapter 7, "From Martial Arts to National Skills."

This is all great background for understanding Wang Xiangzai's challenge to every martial artist in the country to either fight him or sit down and explain their art in plain language.  It explains why he wanted to to throw out forms, shaolin, performance, philosophy, theory, religion, etc...  It also helps explain why his students were confused enough to go in three different directions; 1) standing still as a pure health practice, 2) fighting is everything, and 3) knocking people over by blasting them with qi from a distance.

(hat tip to:  Daniel)

UPDATE: Here is a video of Chu Minyi! Yeah!

Haramaki

Haramaki

I've been wearing a haramaki everyday for two months.  The fashionistas among my readers already know that this ancient Samurai undergarment is fast becoming a must have.  Here is the Wiki page.

I can think of no other article of clothing more likely to improve your gongfu than a haramaki.  They help you establish a "frame" and relax the dantian.  My advice, toss in the towel with all that core strengthening gobbly gook and just get yourself a haramaki!

I have one wool and two stretch cotton haramakis.  This is the type I have, (Item No. mn-1002, mn-1003) scroll down...find the products second from the bottom!

You can read more about fashion and health benefits here, and here, and then there is Haramaki Love.

In China the generals used to wear a very heavy tiger skin attached where the haramaki is, it would hang down to their knees and probably felt something like an x-ray apron.  A softer lighter version was worn by children and used by women for the month after pregnancy, when they were most vulnerable to spirit invasion.  The tangki, or spirit mediums of Singapore and other places where Hokkien culture is strong, wear this kind of bib (tou-ioe) when they are possessed by war gods and when they are possessed by baby or child gods.  The tiger skin is worn ritually in Tibet and of course Shiva wears one too.

For internal martial artists the image of the heavy tiger skin apron is a reminder to first let the muscle mass of the lower body hang heavily before the mind moves the qi (and the mass follows the qi, of course).

Tibetan Ritual Tiger

Red Haramaki

Dangerous Women

Courtesy of San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum

Dangerous Women, Warriors, Grannies and Geishas of the Ming, by Victoria Cass came out in 1999, but I just finished reading it.  It doesn't have a lot of information about martial arts during the Ming Dynasty but it does a great job of describing what life was like.  I highly recommend it.

Cass divides the Ming Dynasty into three realms of action.

The first was the fanatical cult of the family.  40,000 suicidal mothers were officially recognized as martyr goddesses by the Ming governments (1350-1650).  Conforming to this cult was a way for women to gain power.  I love that she takes the subject most often referred to as "ancestor worship" under a "Confucian" doctrine--and labels it fanatical.

The second realm was Urbanity.  China under the Ming Dynasty was the wealthiest country in the world and it had a lavish vibrant urban culture, particularly in the south east.  The so called "Education District," was the center of theater and art in every city.  Female artists and entertainers of every imaginable sort were not only able to make a living, some got wealthy enough to retire to a country garden with a couple of servants.

The third realm was Solitude.  There was the option of being an eccentric outsider.  On the one hand there were female bandit leaders who lived in mountain strongholds, Daoist hermits, and hairy recluses who ate only insects.  And on the other hand there was an idealized worship of solitude which found expression in private urban retreats, islands of tranquility with perfect artistic wives (Cass uses the Japanese term geisha, the Chinese term is ji, an artist) in grass huts and rock gardens with poetry and exquisite incense.  There was a whole milieu of artistically inclined people who competed to see who could be the most reclusive with out leaving the city.  Eccentric hermits could tour the urban scene as guests of the well-to-do.

From her description of the three realms, Cass sets off to describe the different types of lives women made from themselves with in those three realms.  I was surprised by how common female doctors were.  There were also thousands of female spiritual leaders and teachers of every sort.  Women could be painters, writers, and actors.  There was only one female general, but women were often referred to as "Warrior types."  These warrior women for instance would dress up in beautiful armor and tour around the city doing martial performances on horseback.  She points out that some of these women were just artists and some were known for sexual prowess.  Most no doubt started from desperate circumstances, but Cass points out that most women artists in America have sex with multiple partners too.

The section on Grannies is great too.  Older women had hundreds of ways of making independent income; as fortune tellers, as nannies, as sales reps, dealers, matchmaking, connecting people, organizing, curing illness, consoling.  They were uniquely  un-threatening experts in many realms, especially dark realms, and they had the ability to get intimately close to the workings of everything. Ironically, for this they were also feared! and blamed!  The a-moral, strategic, sexual, articulate, trickster granny was among the most popular of literary heroes.

Hey!  It's a google book, you can search the whole thing!

Baguazhang's Contentious Beginnings

Wang Shujin

Kent Howard has translated a book by the famous Baguazhang teacher from Taiwan, Wang Shujin.  He has also started a blog to promote it where he has written a number of short essays about the origins of Baguazhang. It is wonderful that someone is taking martial arts history seriously. In the most receint post he takes some time to debunk some of the conjecture out there.  Then he says this:

The Story of Dong Haiquan being taught Bagua Zhang as a fully developed martial art by two mountain-dwelling Daoist recluses has all of the basic elements of many a martial art legend in China. All you need to do is change the names, and a few circumstances, and you have Zhang Sanfong creating Taiji Quan from a dream or Shaolin priests learning their art from an Indian monk. Chinese love to shroud their origin myths in the mists of antiquity. It lends them a certain air of distinction and provides an unassailable historical precedent.

There are several elements of this legend, however, that do not stand up well in the face of modern research. First, there has been no discoverable trace in history or literature of two Daoists named, Gu Jici and Shang Daoyuan in the Mount Ermei region of Szechuan Province. Researchers who combed those fabled mountains interviewing present day Daoist adepts found no temple records containing either name, nor of any Daoist recluses of that time who were known to teach martial arts. Second, facts point to Dong learning martial arts in his youth that contained many elements found in modern Bagua Zhang. Third, Dong was a member of the Quan Zhen sect of Daoism and learned a method of walking meditation that resembles Bagua Zhang circle walking patterns and stepping. Finally, Dong Haiquan seemed quite happy to allow the origins of Bagua Zhang to be obscured by legend rather than have contemporaries believe that he had synthesized it whole cloth from elemental skills derived from previous training.

....The last question to take up in our quest for the real Dong Haiquan is whether he popularized an art that had existed previously, or if he invented his own style by marrying disparate methodologies into one cohesive system. This task is made more difficult when you consider that Dong, when asked by his disciples where he learned Bagua Zhang, would comment that he received his art from “a man who lived in the mountains.” If the system existed before Dong Haiquan, we know it was not called Bagua Zhang. That name was unknown before his time. In fact, Dong’s first generation students stated the original name for the system was Zhuan Zhang (Rotating palms). Later it was expanded to Bagua Zhuan Zhang. Finally, probably near the end of Dong’s life, or perhaps even posthumously, it was shorted to Bagua Zhang.

....We can probably never say with absolute certainty if Dong Haiquan learned his art from another source, and merely popularized it, or whether he synthesized techniques learned from several sources and created an entirely new martial system. In any event, Dong was certainly good at marketing his product and keeping the source, as he played his cards, very close to the vest. As Lao Tzu once said, “The Sage wears rough clothing and embraces the jewel within!”

Here is the comment I left on his blog (not approved yet):

Thanks for putting this together.

I would ask the question: What reasons did he have for keeping Baguazhang's origins a secret?

As a marketing strategy it did work, so it is possible that marketing was his reason, but it's not a very good reason considering his main marketing strategy was being the best around.  Perhaps his secretiveness was a personality quirk, but that isn't very convincing either. What isn't being said?

1. The southern and western half of the country was rebel territory for from 1853-1870.  What was he doing during the Taiping rebellion and the many other smaller rebellions during that time?


2. What is the evidence that he was a Longmen Daoshi?  It is problematic to say that Quanzhen is a "sect," it is a teaching lineage. He could have received "registers," jing (texts), transmissions, etc...from any lineage including Tibetan Banpo--it's all secret under penalty of death.  If he had the title Daoshi, then legally speaking he had the rank of an imperial prince.  All that stuff about being a eunuch could be discarded that way (see original essay).  But the word "Daoshi" could have simply meant magician or wandering recluse.


3. For most of the Ching Dynasty and much of the Ming Dynasty as well, Zhengyi Daoism was practiced in secret.  It still is.  When I visited Chengdu in 2001 I talked to a Chinese Anthropologist who told me that Zhengyi priests managed to hide amongst the poorest villages.  He said they have found them, but they disappear by the next day and can not be found again.  Daoists often change their names.  There is NO reason to believe we could find two "mountain Daoshi" by their names.


4. The Quanzhen walking "technique," like everything Quanzhen, is a simplification/purification of older ritual practices.  The possibility of Daoist ritual origins for Baguazhang has barely even been scratched.


5. Has anyone considered that the name Baguazhang may have been the original name of the art, but it was a secret name, only revealed when the political climate had changed?  Rebel-heterodox "meditation" sects often practiced martial arts and named themselves after the trigrams! (See Esherick's "Origins of the Boxer Rebellion.")


6. If there ever was anyone else in the early 1800's who practiced this kind of art, perhaps they were in the western part of the country, and perhaps they were wiped out--20 Million people died during the Taiping Rebellion.  It kind of makes sense that he wouldn't want to talk about that in Beijing, there were still rebels fighting in 1870 when he started teaching.

Thanks for considering these ideas. ------ The daoist origins of Baguazhang is a repeating theme for me.  If readers search the bagua category on the side  they'll find a lot of material.  People often say that internal martial arts were combined with internal alchemy.  Some scholars may argue that ritual, alchemy and martial arts all have separate origins.  That may be true, but for the last 2000 years they have been influencing each other.  Ritual is the bigger, more encompassing, subject of the three.  If you want to understand the origins of martial arts and alchemy, ritual is the place to start.

Dichotomies of Chinese History

There are a number of dichotomies which must be taken into account anytime we say anything about Chinese history.  Without an understanding of these dichotomies our understanding of martial arts history is simply floundering in the dark:

1. What is legal vs. what is illegal.


2. What was written or talked about vs. what was not written or talked about.  (Either secret, implicit, too obvious, or too embarrassing. )


3. Official religion vs. Unofficial religion.


4. Performance vs. religion.


5. Martial arts vs. martial cult.


6. Bandit vs. villager.


7. Training vs. Organization (spread, hierarchy, transmission).


8. Charismatic hierarchies vs. Circles of competing power alliances.

When I studied Budo (sword focused aikido) in Japan at Oomoto, the martial arts training was simply presented as religion.  We chanted scripture at the beginning and end of class, we bowed to the spirits in the garden.  Oomoto beliefs could be described as traditional animist, post-millennialist, and universalist, but this religion was something we did, not something we believed.  Likewise, Religion in China was never something you believed, never.  It was always something you did.  Often religion could be defined as a group of people you practiced with.

Plum Flower Fist (Quan) for instance, gets its name from the seasonal gatherings in early spring to celebrate the plum blossoms.  At these gatherings people would share food, perform their martial arts, have friendly matches, watch musical theater and practice story telling.  Here is a quote from The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, by Joseph W. Esherick:

As the conflict escalated in 1897-98, and the pendulum swung from boxer to Christian ascendancy, important changes were occurring in the Plum Flower Boxers.  For one thing, Zhao Sanduo was joined by a certain Yao Wenqi, a native of Guangping in Zhili and something of a drifter.  He had worked as a potter in a village just west of Linqing, and had taught boxing in the town of Liushangu, southwest of Liyuantun on the Shandong-Zhili border, before moving to Shaliushai where he lived for about a year.  Though Yao was apparently senior to Zhao in the Plum Flower school, and thus officially Zhao's "teacher," his influence could not match that of his "student."  Yao did, however, serve to radicalize the struggle, and even introduce some new recruits with a reputation for anti-Manchu-ism.  This began to bother some of the leaders of the Plum Flower Boxers: "Other teachers often came to urge Zhao not to listen to Yao:  'He is ambitious. Don't make trouble.  Since our patriarch began teaching in the late Ming and early Qing there have been sixteen or seventeen generations.  The civil adherents read [sacred] books and cure illness, the martial artists practice boxing and strengthening their bodies.  None has spoken of causing disturbances.'" For a long time, Zhao seemed inclined to listen to such advice, but as the conflict intensified, he found that he could not extricate himself.  In the end the other Plum Flower leaders agreed to let Zhao go his own way--but not in the name of the society.  He was, accordingly, forced to adopt a new name for the anti-Christian boxers, the Yihequan [United Righteous Fist, know to history as "The Boxers"].

The Plum Flower School of Boxing (Meihuaquan) always had a civil (wen --as opposed to the wu, martial) component, a wing of the school which read scripture and cured illness using religious means like exorcism and talisman. The concern of the person being quoted in bold lettering above is that the whole organization was rolling down the slope toward illegal, heterodox cult.

The purpose of an organization could be multiple; banditry, rebellion, training, health, crop guarding, military prep-school, village defence, religion, fundraising, alliance building, inter-village conflict, and/or entertainment.

The Origins of the Boxer Uprising

The more I think about it, the more I like Joseph W. Eshrick's The Origins of the Boxing Uprising.  He published this book in 1987 (UC Berkeley Press) and the fact that I hadn't read it before now, shows where the holes in my (self) education are.  (Please feel free to suggest related books in the comments, even if you think I have read them, I'm sure my readers will be appreciative too.)

I suspect by now my regular readers join me in being easily offended by the lack of scholarship and basic questioning in the history sections of most martial arts books.  While we are justified in finding this failure inexcusable, we must answer this question:  Why would 20th Century martial artists deliberately obscure their history?

In the process of explaining the origins of the Boxer Uprising of 1899-1900, Eshrick gives us many clues which will help us understand what martial arts were in the 1800's.  Let's first imagine that the same individual people took on at least three of the following if not all of the following roles:

• Performing Chinese Opera


• Practicing Martial Arts


• Devotees of Martial Deities or other heterodox (fanatic) cults


• Bandits (Rarely robbed their own villages, which meant that in places like Western Shandong province people often thought of their neighboring villages as being full of thieves.)


• Officially organized volunteer militias


• Anti-bandit gangs (These were created because official militias couldn't cross provincial boundaries, much like American Sheriffs can't cross state lines.)


• Political Rebels and Revolutionaries

20th Century people who wanted to create revolution, preserve religion, train martial arts, or perform opera, all had incentives to cover up the connectedness of these historic endeavors; to claim they were always separate and to attempt to reform traditional practices so that they would appear to have always been separate.

Everyone wants to say that their system of martial arts was used exclusively by bodyguards.  No one wants to say their martial art was developed by a group of Opera performers who practiced in secret over generations in order to train groups of rebels which were consistantly put down by the central government.

Modern people tend to think of stage performing as a non-religious practice.  But Chinese Opera was performed for the Gods.  The statues of Gods were carried out of the temples and set up facing the stage before performances.  That's the meaning of Ying shen sai hui, one of the names given to Chinese Opera.  In fact, attending the Opera was probably the most widespread collective religious act in China.

People who got part time work as bodyguards had reasons to be great showman.  Anything which would spread your reputation or demonstrate your prowess served duel purposes, it could get you new business and it could disuade criminals from challenging you.

The standard way for martial artists to attract new students was to give public performances with acrobatics and other feats of prowess. (What? you knew that?)

So called, "Meditation Sects," often practiced martial arts along with popular ethics (keeping precepts), healing trance (qigong) rituals, and talisman making.  Performances of quan (boxing) were often used to recruit new members.

All rebellions in China were religiously inspired to some degree.  "Meditation" sects were generally more rebellious than the other popular "Sutra" chanting sects.  The lines (or slopes) between illegal and legal were different from village to village, province to province, and year to year, depending on how much civil unrest and civil war there was.  [During the 1800's each "Meditation" sect associated itself with a particular trigram from the Bagua, like Kan (water), Li (fire), Xun (wind) etc... The trigram they chose likely represented the category of deity they were devoted to (through sacrifice, invocation, possession, channeling etc...).  This practice gives some credence to my theory that Baguazhang was given its name because it emerged from a Daoist lineage which performed secret ceremonies which ritually included all known religious traditions and experiences. Each type of experience was cataloged in the performers body and remembered as belonging to one of the the eight trigrams (bagua).  There were many large and small rebellions by these groups, one in the early 1800's was actually called the Bagua Rebellion and had troops separated into trigrams.]

In 1728, "...the Yong Zheng Emperor issued the only imperial prohibition of boxing per se that I have seen.  He condemned boxing teachers as 'drifters and idlers who refuse to work at their proper occupations,' who gather with their disciples all day, leading to 'gambling, drinking and brawls.'"(Esherick p. 48)

According  Avron Albert Boretz’s 1996 dissertation: Martial Gods and Magic Swords: The Ritual Production of Manhood in Taiwanese Popular Religion, the devotees of martial deities in Taiwan train martial arts and are heavily involved with smuggling, drinking and petty crime.  So it seems reasonable to assume that some of the boxing teachers the Emperor is condemning are leaders of small religious cults, and some are just Dojo Rats.

Quan, boxing groups which trained in public squares and performed and competed at festivals, were quasi legal because they promoted martial virtue (wude) and actively prepared young men to take the military entrance exam.  Boxing groups could be non-religious; However, it is hard to know because they were mainly reported in official documents only when they were part of "meditation" cults.  Heterodox religion was more illegal than boxing by itself, even if the sect didn't practice boxing.  Still sects were very popular and wide spread.

Most of the time when martial arts are reported in the official histories it is because they were involved in an unorthodox cult.  So most of what we know supports the idea that martial arts and religion were intimately connected, we simply don't have much information about non-sectarian martial arts.  It is probably true that there were individuals who practiced only forms, applications and sparring like the our modern day stereotypes, but it is very unlikely that "a pure martial arts" lineage or family ever existed.  Everybody had a gongfu brother, uncle, or great uncle who crossed over into performance, ritual, religion, banditry or rebellion.

Boxers captured by the Americans

Esherick gives a lot of attention to the overlap between martial conditioning practices like iron t-shirt or golden bell, and invulnerability rituals which incorporate magic, talisman, trance, and possession by local deities and heroic characters from popular opera.  There is a continuum from, "Go ahead, hit me, I can take it!" passing through, "Blades always miss me" moving toward,  "Due to my amazing qigong, blades can not cut me," and finally ending up with, "Bullets can't harm me, I am a god."   Setting aside the question of how well any of these techniques work, it isn't hard to see why 20th Century martial artists, opera performers, religious devotees, and revolutionaries would all want to disassociate themselves from these practices.

In the scramble to invent history, dotted lines have been drawn between "real iron t-shirt" for "real" martial artists, "tricks" used by street performers, "qi illusions" used by magicians and charlatans, and suicidal devotion to a cause--like standing in front of a tank.

It is time to admit that in the 20th Century, embarrassment has been a driving force in the creation and reformulation of martial arts, especial where history is concerned.

It's Good for Your Internal Organs

The idea that something is good for your internal organs gets thrown around Chinese culture all the time.  Usually it is done with little understanding.  For instance I heard the other day that Eight Silken Brocade Qigong is good for your internal organs.

Putting aside for the moment that qigong, as a category, was invented in the 20th Century, Eight Silken Brocade is obviously a muscle tendon style of martial arts warm up of great antiquity (possibly 800 years old).  It involves stretching, twisting, sinking and lengthening.  One of the "Eight" is standing in a horse stance while pulling an imaginary bow.  It is clearly a form of gongfu.

None of this precludes it being good for your organs, as I will explain, but categorizing it as "Qigong for the Organs" is going too far.

Traditionally in China, and by that I mean anywhere from one hundred years ago to 1200 years ago, if you learned how to write you were first taught how to sit and hold the brush for proper circulation of qi and alignment, and how to breathe while you were writing.  Everyone copied the calligraphy of the same master from the Fifth Century in the hope that by writing the way he did, you would become like him.  His writing was his movement, his gongfu, and by copying his movement you would be invoking his upright (cheng) character (Cheng is also the name of that official style of writing).

So calligraphy could be good for your organs too, right?  The dao of Calligraphy was working with qi, it was what we now call qigong.  As was playing a musical instrument, and a hundred other activities which someone might "master."

But is it good for your internal organs?  In Chinese culture it is possible to divide up any event or object into it's component parts.  In English we usually call this "coorispondences" which is an academic way of saying linked-up catigories.  So I can take a muscle tendon style of Qigong and tell you which part is good for your kidneys and which part is good for your lungs.  But I can also do that with a the parts of a car.

The fuel is the qi.  The engine is the jing.  The fuel filter, the oil, the power steering fluid, and the coolent are all associated with the kidneys.  The air intake manifold, the fan, and the exaust are associated with the lungs.  The Heart is the battery, the distrubutor cap, and the spark plugs (the alternator is the paracardium).  Do you see where this is going? Because I can do this all day long.

It is highly likely that the associations of Eight Silken Brochade with healing the various organs were invent long after the fact, just like I made up associations for the car.  They are not meant to be REMEDIAL CURES!

So what is all this organ associations stuff?  What is it's value?  It is a tool for observing, remembering and possibly thinking.  By dividing something which is ostensibly already whole (like a person or a car) into separate categories it allows for novel observations.

Here is an example from Chinese Medicine.  People with "liver deficiency" tend to stand on straitend knees.  The main job of the liver is destributing blood.  Yes, I know the heart pumps blood but the liver is responsible for the surge of blood around the body which gives us the energy to get things done.  With a deficient liver it's hard to get up enough energy to get mad or to defend your positions-- and you will tend to stand on straightend knees.  Liver deficiancy will eventually lead to lethargy.  An early sign is the habit of lazily standing on straightened knees.

What I call the "Structure" school of Chinese Medicine posits that any problem one has will show up all over the body, including in the skeletal structure.  The reverse may also be true, that postural skeletal problems will eventually find their way into the internal organs.  For instance, I child with a perfectly healthy liver may imitate the posture of a liver deficiant parent over many years and eventually give themselves a liver problem.

The solution?  Bend your knees.  And practicing Eight Silken Bochade should teach you to keep your knees bent.  Atleast with practice you should notice that you are always getting tired and standing around on straightened knees...leading you to get some traditional Chinese medical advice.

So, in summary, if someone tells you a type of qigong is good for lungs, don't assume they mean that in a remedial way.  Try to find out exactly what they mean.  It is quite possible there is some useful or interesting information there, perhaps some complex and intreging notions burried in that simple statement--but you are going to have to seek it out.  Saying that such and such qigong is good for the liver, doesn't make it so.

Secret note for experts: Almost all exercise is good for the liver!