Monga

Monga is the latest blockbuster movie from Taiwan and it is playing twice on opening night of the Taiwan Film Days festival put on by the San Francisco Film Society.  This gangster movie by Niu Doze has several male heart throbs in the lead roles and tons of hand to hand group fight scenes--Thus making it a great date movie!  But maybe not a first-date because it is actually quite complex.

The fight scenes are a lot of fun.  The choreographic style is not classic kungfu, it is loose and even sloppy.  But that's a good thing because the characters doing the fighting are talented fighters, not skilled fighters.  The free-ness of the choreography tells us the protagonists are young, a bit crazy and that they clearly love fighting.

The plot basically follows the emotional development of a few young men-of-prowess, a band of brothers, as they deal with more and more confining choices and harsh fates.  The plot has some twists in it, some are fun, and some are brutal.

But what is really important about this film is that it attempts to deal with the historic role men-of-prowess played in maintaining a social order outside of government control. This is what makes the movie special.  The action is centered around a temple.  The temple itself is martial, and the lead characters are all devoted to a martial god.  The film beautifully illustrates the thesis of the scholarly work Bandits, Eunichs and the Son of Heaven:  In order to keep commerce safe enough to keep thriving in such a vast country, Chinese civilization has depended on complex sometimes haphazard alliances between men-of-prowess.  The central government was never strong enough to control banditry or rebellion on it's own.  Magistrates were spread thinly throughout the country but righteous heroes, often centered around a temple to a martial god, were easy to come by.  These rough independent men tended to walk a fine line between community service and community extortion.  (More posts on this idea are here, there, over here and here too.)

The film can also probably be viewed as an allegory for the conflicts between native Taiwanese and the Mainlanders who came with the Guomindang in 1949.  It can also probably be read as an allegory for the influence the current Mainland Chinese have on Taiwanese politics, specifically the conflicts over independence between the KMT and the DPP.  But honestly I probably missed most of the nuances of these allegories, you'd have to be steeped in Taiwanese politics to get them.  Hopefully one of my readers is steeped and will enlighten us in the comments below.

The film Monga (Taiwan, 2010) is showing a 6:15 PM and 9:40 PM this Friday, October 22nd, 2010. It's at the New People theater which is a fantastic new theater in Japan Town.  Check it out!

A Piece of the Puzzle

Long time readers know that I've written a fair amount about the origins of Chinese martial arts and how they changed during the 20th Century.  I reviewed the landmark book Marrow of the Nation by Andrew D. Morris back in May of 2009.  Here is a little excerpt of what I wrote:

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.

Before reading Marrow of the Nation I had not heard of Chu Minyi.  But low and behold he has appeared on Youtube!  This stuff is mind blowing. 



His form and the push-hands are good, 'though I think it gets less lively in the later part of the form.  But the outfit is awesome!  Make sure you watch the whole thing because you see him doing Taiji ball and "stick" exercises on some weird apparatuses he invented.  This was before the invention of bungee cords or even dynamic rope so he must have done this with natural rubber.  Great stuff.  Then we see him playing tai chi hacky-sack! wow.  But what is he doing in his undies?  Grilling hotdogs maybe?

Tragic, weird and wonderful all at the same time.

Ling

The top Character is Ling

It is with trepidation and excitement that I begin this post. The Chinese term ling is a pivotal taboo concept in North Asian cosmology.  Ling can be translated very roughly as power harnessed from the unseen world.  The character is made by writing rain yu above the character wu, which has three trance-mediums with their mouths open.  Like many taboo subjects it is not the actual word which is taboo, it is the context which matters.  For comparison, the word money by itself is not taboo in English, but discussing personal financial data and decisions is.  Talking about sex is very taboo, but it’s OK to do it with your therapist and it is expected that you will do it in a socially approved way with your children.
Ling has many common usages and I believe it would be easy for a non-native yet fluent speaker of Chinese to miss their origins-- which are in the fear of unseen forces.  Ling is a common word.  In popular usage ling means agile or dexterous and potent or effective.  It can also mean intelligent, clever or tricky.  It means spirit, spiritual, mysterious, elf, and it means a coffin with a person in it.

No two languages or societies have exactly the same taboos but there are enough overlaps that English can be helpful here.  We have the expressions ‘a smooth talker,’ ‘slippery fingers,’ or ‘nimble fingers,’ all of which describe someone who is good at stealing but can also be used to describe admirable qualities in a person.  Someone who makes a ‘killing’ on the stock market can be described as intelligent, agile or ‘sharp as a tack’ because we see him as wielding and manipulating forces other people don’t see or understand.   If you get in trouble with the law you may need a lawyer representing you who is both clever and tricky, perhaps one who can call in favors from other attorneys or officials.  All of these qualities in Chinese can be described as ling, the ability to harness powers from the unseen world.

My dictionary also has this sweetness which will appeal to horror film fans everywhere, “when a television remote control fails it is do to ling.”  The entry does not state to whom this ling is assigned, but presumably it does not belong to the person who is failing to operate the remote.  It is a mysterious unseen force.

Talking about ghosts is taboo in China, rather then say “ghosts” people often refer to them as “our good brothers.”  A ghost (see this article on ghosts) is an intention which is too weak to resolve itself.  These unresolved intentions linger about the living looking for enough qi to complete themselves.  When a person dies, most of what she wants, her will, dies with her.  But obviously some of it lingers on.  That’s why we write a last will and testament, we want to avoid having our intentions distorted after we die.  After we die our will lingers in things we have said to others, in things we have written and in how our actions are remembered by the living.  Without the ‘help’ of the living our intentions would of course disappear.  Certain types of intentions can be passed on to others as strange or negative behavior or personality traits.  For instance a parent who has a traumatic experience with a dog can easily pass on that fear to a child who has had no such experience.  Sometimes quirks are passed on without any obvious content.  In the graphic novel Maus, the son of a Holocaust survivor is obsessive about collecting matches. Even after he learns that his father’s habit of collecting matches developed because matches were a traded commodity in the death camps the son still can’t stop himself. His kitchen drawers are full of match books.  This is a ghost, in the form of a behavior.  These ghosts are often surrounded by intensely conflicting emotions and strange behavior.  Not knowing the reason behind a strange behavior can make it even harder to stop.  Lingering conflicting emotions which have no apparent explanation are often passed on to our children.  Humans are full of weird quirks we inherit from our families.

If I understand it correctly, Chinese religious custom thinks of negative influences from the dead as ghosts, and positive influences as ancestors.  But the principle is the same, and if we could transcend the taboo I suspect it would also be obvious that some positive lingering influence comes from outside the family and some negative influence comes from our direct ancestors.
Most of what I’ve said about ghosts or ancestors up to this point can easily be re-worded into psychological language:  Ghosts are unresolved conflicting emotions which linger on after whatever caused them is no longer there.

However, to understand the concept of ling we must remember that Chinese cosmology does not posit a separation between spirit and substance.  There are no outside agents, all things and events are mutually self-re-creating.  Chinese cosmology understands all thought, for instance, as having some substance tied to it.  Heaven is tied to earth, the living are tied to the dead.  Imagination needs a body to birth it.  When you leave your heart with someone, it’s not just a promise without substance, there is a component of it which is biological-- even if we may not be able to see it with a microscope or a blood test yet.

The substance people leave behind when they die is ling.  Intense commitments, pledges, and contracts are often sealed with blood.  When I was a kid and we played “Cowboys and Indians” we would sometimes make cuts on our wrists and squeeze the wounds together pledging, “We are now Indian blood brothers forever.”  A traditional Chinese contract between sworn brothers requires a smear of deer's blood across the upper lip of each brother.  There is a brilliant depiction of this in the movie “Temptation of a Monk,” about a general who is betrayed during the Tang Dynasty and has to go on the run.  The blood in all these cases is ling.

If you want to make a love potion in Africa, Europe, Asia or America, you need a locket of the persons hair for the spell.  The hair is ling.  Voodoo dolls are ling, so are animal sacrifices and collections of scalps captured in battle.

Every culture has notions of pollution and most cultures have the idea that certain professions are polluting not just to the person doing the job but to his or her decendents as well.  In India, Japan, and Korea butchers and people who worked with leather, and people who worked with human waste belonged to hated outsider castes.  They were pariahs. The word pariah is a South Asian word for a drummer.  (It’s not clear whether this is because drummers played on goat skin drums or because they were musicians.)  In China, leather, human waste, and meat processing were all polluting and the people who worked with these substances were degraded, but they were not pariahs.  They were socially above professional musicians and actors who were truly pariah outsiders, literally “mean people.”  No one seems to know exactly what was polluting about actors, my best guess after reading Chinese outcasts: discrimination and emancipation in late imperial China by Anders Hansson, and everything else I could get my hands on, is that it was a combination of two types of pollution.  First, actors had a degree of sexual freedom and probably took money for sex some of the time.  Second, they were obligated to perform certain expert ritual functions such as exorcisms.

Lingering ghosts are attracted to sexual activity just like they are attracted to fighting.  Lingering ghosts need sustenance to keep on lingering and the possibility of spilled blood is a bit like food for ‘hungry’ conflicting emotions.  I may be walking out on a dangerous limb here but it seems like the strong moods associated with menstruation are traditionally framed as the spirits of ancestors showing up once a month with a longing to continue their unresolved ambitions through a new birth.  “Wasted” semen probably had a similar association.  Sex has the potential to produce abortions or illegitimate children.  It was of course common for women to die in childbirth and common for children to die before the age of 5.  And venereal disease may have contributed something too.  All that pleasure we associate with sex mixes in a potent way with all that conflicting emotion and sucks in ghosts like nobodies business.

Musicians and actors, as far as I can tell, were viewed as having a certain amount of sexual freedom, which made them popular and admired, but also contributed to their status as outcasts.  It appears that they were often involved in sex for money or sex by obligation as an aspect of entertainment services required of them by regional authorities or powers.  Musicians and actors are masters of creating and manipulating mood.  In an animist worldview mood is sometimes viewed as the presence of gods--and the opposite is also true--the presence of the gods is sometimes reified by the acknowledgement of particular moods ("We're all crying, the gods must be here!").  All of this infuses the most potent tools of an actor with ling, masks come immediately to mind, but I suspect that many implements of the profession had some taint of this ling.

So ling is the polluted substance itself, the ability to control unseen forces associated with it, and the power which that ability confers. A powerful Daoist priest is said to have ling.  I suspect ritual implements also contain ling, but can be cleaned.  Both purification and emptying practices presumably would remove ling.  Ritual action, be it for exorcism, a funeral or some other purpose, can be understood as the manipulation of ling.  There are at least two ways of looking at.  Ling, as spiritual power, can be accumulated to wield against weaker ling.  Or apophatically by completely emptying oneself of ling, the conflicting emotions and deranged powers of ghosts and demons have no place to sink their tentacles and there for they can be controlled.  My understanding is that control is not a goal unto itself. The ritual helps ghosts and demonic forces come to completely resolved deaths--or helps them find their way to a realm of safety where they will no longer cause harm to humans.

One of the mechanisms of exorcism is to either destroy ling, render it neutral or brake its link to the living.  It is ling which is sealed inside pickle jars during exorcisms.

In the realm of martial arts I’ve heard George Xu talk about the importance of fighting with ling, which he translates as intelligence.  He describes this intelligence as instantaneous, spontaneously expressed knowledge about the best way to fight.  It is fighting with the mind but it is not a thought process.  It is the ability to wield all available factors like the direction of the sun, variations in the surface of the ground, changing perceptions, leverage, momentum, gravity, sound, emotion, etc...  If you saw the recent Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. he fights entirely with “intelligence,” 007 does it, and so does the character Michael in the TV series “Burn Notice.”  Of course, on the silver screen we see it in slow motion with narration, in real life it happens faster than the human mind can comprehend.  So ling means potency and prowess too.

Gangsters acquire wealth and power by killing, stealing and subordinating people to them.  The unseen forces they manipulate are all tainted with ling.  Con-men manipulate by tapping into our conflicting emotions and our unfulfilled desires, both of which are traditionally framed as the influence of lingering ghosts.  I’ve recently been reading Actors Are Madmen by A.C Scott.  Traditionally whoever was in power had a close relationship with the great performers of their region because performers were necessary for ritual and they provided entertainment for all those important banquets which seal agreements between men of prowess and power (Ling again).  Scott describes Tu Yueh-Sheng a gangster who practically ran Shanghai and controlled all the theaters too.  He was a master at manipulating ling.  Such people are also often known for being extremely generous protectors of those who subordinate to them.  Scott says it was known in Shanghai that if your watch was stolen in the morning you could have it back by evening if you went to the right people, Tu tolerated no competition.  But of course getting your watch back would taint you with a little bit of his ling.  When a person like this dies, people make shrines to him.  At first it is to placate his ghost, but over time people will come to the shrine to ask for favors, a new bicycle, a laptop, a raise.  The ling of a gangster takes a particularly long time to resolve because people don’t forget them, we still talk about Al Capone and Jessie James.

Reishi mushrooms (lingzhi) have ling in the name because they suck in such complex qi spontaneously form the environment and they are blood red.
Lingshu is the name of the second half of the Han Dynasty classic of medicine, it is usually translated Spiritual Pivot.  Here it refers to the ability to perceive the changing nature of an illness and all of it’s causes-- to find the acupuncture points and the time of day to use them which will reverse the illness with the least harm.

Fengshui is not a tool for redecorating your apartment. The purpose of fengshui is to limit the influence of the unresolved dead.  It is the manipulation of ling.

One of the great justifications for anthropology is the notion that in our attempt to learn about another culture we mainly end up learning about ourselves.  This is particularly true when taking on a subject which is taboo in another culture--both because we end up understanding our own taboos better and because our ‘other culture’ informants are particularly unreliable when it comes to discussing taboos.

Wealth accumulates almost entirely through commerce but kings and bandits accumulate it through violence and taxation.  Marx called money “dead labor.”  I don’t really care what Marx thought but it does help explain some taboos.  Marx was restating a common notion of his time in order to make a distinction between money and capital.  Marx’s idea of money was wrong, all money is also capital.  All money represents the value of an exchange which is an extremely complex calculation which factors in all previous exchanges of goods and services.  Money is a steaming pile of ling.

Chinese Imperial magistrates enlisted yamen runners and other toughs to serve warrants, bring in criminals, guard jails and torture suspects. Yamen did not get paid by the court, they got all their money from bribes.  They were also a degraded caste, not as low as actors but low enough that their children were forbidden to marry a commoner or take a civil or military exam.

Exquisite weapons probably accumulate ling too.  Wars were often commemorated with exorcisms and individual soldiers sometimes sought exorcism to deal with the lingering conflicting emotions of battle.  Fighting in wars must have been polluting, but interestingly it was not a polluting profession.  A soldier could reach the highest levels of society through marriage, adult adoption and promotion.

One of the things that makes martial arts so fun is the lively mix of danger and power.  Of course it is about ling. It is about the manipulation of unseen forces, extreme emotions, extraordinary agility, vigor, sensitivity, and surprise.  It is about the possibility of death, guilt, longing, fear, and triumph.

At this point my readers would be forgiven for wondering if there is anything that doesn’t mean ling.  Terms central to Chinese cosmology like ling, qi, jing, jin, shen, yi, xin, de, etc...developed by accumulating layers meaning.  Most people did not read or write or speak the same dialect as the villages in the next valley, they weren’t making distinctions between “characters” in a dictionary.

This language openness has at times been blamed for the retardation of science in China.  Perhaps, but it should also be given credit for preserving a very dynamic world-view which is now giving the rest of the world a much more open idea of what a human body is and what that body is capable of.

Golden Bell vs. Iron T-Shirt

Hammering a Gong

At the recent Daoism Today conference in LA, in addition to presenting my unfinished paper, I did a participatory demonstration of many of the elements of Northern Shaolin, daoyin, taijiquan, and baguazhang which are theatrical, and appear to be connected to exorcistic rituals.  Most of the responses were positive and encouraging.  I did the demonstration on the first day of the 4 day conference so I had lots of time to respond to peoples comments and to hear suggestions.  Zhou Xuanyun is a Daoist priest/monk who is married and lives in Boston.  He describes himself as Zhengyi (Orthodox Unity) but he was trained on Wudang Shan which is a center of Quanzhen (Perfect Reality) monasticism and martial arts.  His comment, which he made through an anthropologist, was that he didn't understand how I could practice both Daoist (taijiquan, baguazhang) and Buddhist (Shaolin) styles of practice simultaneously--wouldn't the training methods undermine each other?

My first response was that my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying, practiced theater, Shaolin, taijiquan, and baguazhang.  The anthropologists loved this answer because finding an actual person who embodied both traditions and saw no contradiction in practicing them both is their gold standard.  The anthropologist view is that the continuity of culture is unbroken.  To say continuity or tradition is broken is to apply some external idea of purity to a culture which never had it.  So actual informants are king.  I may not be doing them justice but I think that is the gist of their view.  I tend to see the idea that Shaolin (Buddhist) and Taijiquan (Daoist) would need to be kept separate as a contemporary political contrivance.  But I must add here that the anthropologists are doing a wonderful job of gathering detailed accounts of living and recently passed Daoists. This is fantastic stuff.  (More on this in a future post.)

Hammerng by hand

Zhou's challenge is still serious.  He is right that the practices seem different and sometimes contradictory in methodology.  Teaching a lot of Shaolin does disrupt my bagua and taiji practices.  But I think this has less to do with method and more to do with the type of trance and energy expenditure necessary to teach kids classes.  I might just as well ask, how can a person do Daoist practice in Boston?  Isn't the chaos of urban America too much?  I would hope that the answer is no, disruptions are not enough to negate strongly held commitments.

Historically speaking, I could spin this argument a lot of different ways but taking the time right now would be too much disruption of my own practice.  Instead, I can make the argument simply and quickly.

One of the founders of the Boxer Rebellion (Yi He Quan) was a martial artist famous for his "Golden Bell" practice.  This practice was said to be the original basis for what became the much derided Boxer Rebellion claim of invincibility to bullets.  Golden Bell is still a common form of conditioning.  The term conditioning here means a method of developing resistance to, or protection from, strikes to the body.  It is a kind of toughness.

Tuning a gong

The other common type of body conditioning is called "Iron T-Shirt."  Golden Bell and Iron T-Shirt are good stand-ins for the larger argument between the internal practices of taiji and bagua on the one hand, and the external practices of Shaolin on the other; Golden Bell is internal, Iron T-Shirt is external.

The methodological difference between inner/outer or Shaolin/Wudang (Buddhist/Daoist) is resolved by looking at the convergence of these two practices.  Iron T-Shirt is a process of rubbing, pounding, massaging, scraping and hitting the surface of the torso.  Over time it makes one tougher and more resistant to strikes by thickening the surface, strengthening the bones, and desensitizing one to the shock of being struck.  Over time the differentiation between outer toughness and inner softness becomes stronger and more prominent.  At that point the process begins to reverse itself.  The external surface becomes quiet while the inner softness becomes more lively.  One no longer fears strikes to the surface because the differentiation of a lively, soft interior makes it is easy to move the vulnerable inner organs out of the way.

Golden Bell works by the opposite methodology.  It starts from the inside.  One relaxes and empties the torso of all tension, initially testing the torso for uniformity as a container of qi, like casting a bell, or tuning a gong.  The density of the surface of the bell must be uniform, and the interior of the bell must be free of tension, imperfections or obstructions.  Over time, the differentiation of inner liveliness and outer stillness becomes more distinct.  Once this distinction is achieved it is tested the same way Iron T-Shirt begins, with rubbing, pounding and strikes to the torso.  If the process has been completed correctly strikes to the quiet relaxed surface of the torso do not disturb the internal organs because they can be easily moved out of the way.

Learning martial arts, whether internal or external is always a disheveled process.  No two teachers use exactly the same methods.  External and internal methods are both defined by long lists of preliminary, basic, advanced, and extra-curricular experiments or exercises.  Two different schools rarely produce the same fruition, regardless of whether they share the same "internal" or "external" designation.

I see the fruition of martial arts as a type of freedom.  People are very nearly robots, our actions are usually predictable and automatic.  Martial arts training, both internal and external, is a way to become unglued from our robot nature.  Whether we call that robot "inner" or "outer" doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

(more on gongs, here and here)

Bruce Lee Puts Himself in an Opera Context

My vacation at home will continue (family stuff) for a bit so I've decided to go on a blogging spree. It has been really good to just take a break from teaching any big classes and from the crazy push of ideas I put myself through in the run up to the Daoism Today conference in LA last month.
To start off here is Bruce Lee's first Hollywood screen test. The video speaks for itself, anyone who does xingyi dragon or bagua high leg turns will recognized those movements when he is asked to show a bit of Chinese Opera. He falls short of actually explaining gongfu in the context of theater, but clearly he his pitching the animal qualities of movement as well as the human. Then he gives the classic explanation from the Daodejing of water as applied to martial arts.

New Jet Li Movie

At least the movie had some cool swords!

The new movie Warlords staring Jet Li comes out this Friday and I would have had to see it even if I hadn't been given a free preview ticket because it is a historical epic film dealing with the Taiping Rebellion! This film is really dark and normally I love darkness, but in this film I just couldn't see the point.

I just happen to have been re-reading Jonathan D. Spence's classic God's Chinese Son, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan.  There is so much truly great theatrical material in the actual history of the Taiping Rebellion that is truly inexcusable for a contemporary film to bore us by following the bond between three men of prowess--two bandit leaders and a Qing Dynasty general named Pang (Jet Li).  There are a couple of OK fight scenes but we've come to expect so much more, stay home and re-watch Once Upon A Time in China if you want action.

Ching Shih 1836, Female Pirate Leader

I rarely get on my high horse and defend women, probably because none of the women I know actually need defending, but as I walked out of the film with my friend, who happens to be a female martial artist, we turned to each other and the first thing both of us said was, "What was that woman doing in the movie?"  You see, the film makers wrote one of those romantic subplots into the story.  It was totally irrelevant and uninteresting.  You're probably thinking, yeah, whatever, but consider this:  During the period of the Taiping Rebellion there were many well known female bandit and pirate leaders. That's great theatrical material that was completely neglected, no?  These were powerful leaders, some of whom actually went back and forth between being pirates and being bandits--from horseback to sailing-- These were women with skills! Damn it, I want to see that movie! Not some drivel about men who fought for 5 years without taking a bath.  Hello.

But there is more:  During the Taiping Rebellion, copies of the Bible in Chinese were widely distributed.  At one point there are so many people going into trance and becoming possessed by Jesus, Mary, Moses, God, God's wife and other characters from the Bible, that the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion have to go around from village to village authenticating Prophets--you know--is that really Jesus talking, or is it the devil pretending to be Jesus?


And this was a huge war that lasted for more than 15 years, with millions of combatants.  The Taiping population was fanatical.  They separated men and women into different encampments during the whole rebellion.  It's possible that hey fielded millions of female troops for battle.

Would it be too much to ask that they make a better movie next time?

Paulie Zink Workshop in Marin

Here is the info on a Paulie Zink workshop April 17th and 18th in Marin County, California.  This is a bit difficult to write about because he is calling it Yin-Flow Yoga instead of calling it by it's actual name Daoyin.  It's a weird problem, he wants to be able to teach his material and it nearly fits within the yoga class context, but if you read the text of the link you won't understand why this guy's stuff is so special.  And because of that participant's expectations are going to be for yoga not Daoyin.

For those of you not familiar with Paulie Zink, he is the preeminent practitioner of Monkey Kungfu, he dominated the tournaments and exhibitions in the 1980's and I've yet to see a better performer of Monkey Kungfu.  There are better acrobats out there and there are better contortionists, and there are possibly people who act a little more like monkeys than he does--but there is no one else I've seen who puts it all together the way he does.  It's too bad he never had a whole troop to perform with.  He does have a disciple now, so I'm hopeful that his lineage will get passed down.

He credits his ability to years of train in the Daoyin system which he learned along with the Monkey Kungfu.  This system is a combination of meditation techniques, some of them very old and shamanic like spending 4 hours balancing on only your knees and elbows staring at a flame, along with balancing, stretching, folding, rolling, exploding, pounding and scrapping.  It is made up of animal imitation.  Each animal has a whole series of meditations, postures, and forms of locomotion.  It is the forms of locomotion that really sets it apart from a yoga class, but around half of the postures are quite similar to yoga postures.  The difference is, his frog eats flies and hops, his bunny wiggles it's tail, and his downward-dog, scampers around the room and tries to lick people.

I think of Daoyin primarily at a hermit practice done in conjunction with long periods of meditation.  It is a capacity increasing tradition and is likely one of the roots of Chinese medicine.  In his lineage it seems to have merged with a circus tradition.  How did this happen?  The answer is pretty simple but not widely understood, in fact I don't think Paulie Zink agrees with me on it.  But any way here it is:

Paulie Zink

The most common and widespread form of religious experience in China was public Physical Ritual Theater (often called opera in English).  There were quasi elite performing families which were part of a designated caste.  These families were hated outsiders.  It seems likely that Zink's teacher was from one of these families and taught a single outsider (an American) because he wanted to free the art from the tradition.  In the South of China, where his tradition comes from, Daoist priests performed public rituals which included theater and theatrical components.  So it's not hard to imaging that Daoists were working with performing troops and may have even apprenticed there sons and daughters to each other occasionally.

Anyway, if you've got the time, check out the workshop!

Performers are Mean People

It would seem the most obvious thing in the world that martial arts are performing arts.  I mean, Jackie Chan, hello?  But denial of this notion is deeply embedded in contemporary Chinese culture.

Beijing Opera (Jingju) has as its most basic physical training something called "da" literally hitting or striking.  The warm ups I learned as a kid studying Northern Shaolin are the very same ones used in Beijing Opera.  The stage roles are divided into either martial or civil categories (wu and wen).  Extensive weapons training is given to everyone because much of the traditional repertoire involves depicting historic conflicts and battles.  Probably the best piece of evidence is the most famous Chinese Opera star of the 20th Century, the female impersonating dan Mei Lanfeng, studied Baguazhang with one of the toughest internal martial artists of his time!  It was said to have improved his sword dance.

Yet people will tell you that Chinese Opera has nothing to do with martial arts.

Beijing Opera is just one of many forms of physical theater in China.  There are urban regional styles like what Jackie Chan studied as a kid and there are rural regional styles.  There are also village lineage families, and there are amateur village and regional styles.  And within all of those categories there are ritual styles.  This is a quick gloss to give readers a sense of the scope--there were probably more than a hundred styles of physical theater in 19th Century China.

But there is a big problem here.  Denial.

Jackie Chan has said in variously self deprecating ways that he doesn't know about fighting.  And although it is well known that the Physical Theater of the Red Junks was created by the first Wing-Chun masters, it is also reported that they kept their fighting skills entirely separate from their performing skills.  Even today tight lines of distinction are drawn---at least in peoples minds---despite the fact that the stances used in fighting and performing are the same, and it is hard to know when a martial arts form has crossed-over into theater.

And everyone knows that Bruce Lee left Hong Kong for the US because he wanted to come here and teach Cha-Cha, right?  It's true.

Martial artists go to great lengths to deny any links to performing arts; the "New Life" and other nationalists movements in the 20th Century set out to completely separate martial arts from religious ritual and theater.  Sometimes they went ahead and just changed the arts, like Yang and Wu styles of taijiquan.  For example, Chen, the older style, is chockablock with pantomime training.  Other times they just discarded whole categories of practice, like back bends and high kicks, and sometimes they went for straight faced denial:  "No, that movement isn't for cueing the music, it's for poking your eyes out!"

Mean People!

I have not even finished reading David Johnson's new book, Spectacle and Sacrifice, The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China, but the chapter on Entertainers is so astounding I just had to blog!

Entertainers (yuehu) were a degraded caste in China.  Long time readers of this blog may know that I was deeply shocked and offended by my experiences of caste in India in the 1990's.  Chinese culture is not nearly as shocking to my American sensibilities, but then again, I've been studying Chinese martial arts for 32 years and no one has ever spelled it out to me as clearly as Johnson does in his book.

An entertainer had to move off to the side of the road to let "good people" pass.

[Performers] were known as jianmin, "mean people": they could not marry commoners, could not sit for examinations, and could not change their status.  In some cases they were required to be on call to the local yamen to entertain at banquets and other occasions.  (Just what their responsibilities were is never made clear, but they may well have included sexual services.)  They were treated with contempt by the general population....

While there were two major categories of entertainers, there were also castes within castes.  The basic categories were coarse (cu) and fine (xi), generally it appears that the coarse played music and the fine played music but also had acting skills.

"Mean people" were used for everything from entertaining visiting dignitaries, to weddings, to the most sacred rituals of a region.  "Opera Families" were profane outsiders who lived in separate districts or separate villages and yet were paid to entertain and purify--to bring order and expel evil.

A caste of hated artists brings to mind Roma (Gypsy) culture in Europe [hat tip to Liu Ming for the analogy].  The "mean people" were considered profane, but they were a necessity for the maintenance of the sacred.  Ritual Theater was the most common and widespread religious experience in China before the 20th Century. (Here are some links to previous posts.)

There were many different types of ritual performance throughout the calender year and every single village handled things differently.  So it is important to note that amateur commoners performed important roles in rituals and theater, as did Daoist priest, Buddhist monks, Yinyang masters, military personal, local elites, children and even high officials.  In fact, I think it is fair to say that some village rituals had a role for everyone.

Which brings us back to martial arts.  Martial arts were used extensively in these rituals.  It seems almost too obvious that the basic physical training for popular and rarefied physical theater in China was in fact martial arts training.  Each region had it's own style of gongfu (kung fu) and it's own style of theater (ci).  But the basic training was the same.  It could be refined for either fighting, performing, or both.

What I've just now realized is that the ideology of modernity functioned in China as a cover for the deep animosity towards the performing castes.  These castes are now probably close to extinction.  Of course it's risky to generalize, but we now have a better explanation of why most martial arts lineages did everything they could to deny their past participation in ritual performance (lion dance being the big exception).  While the entertainer castes were officially liberated, their historic vocation as ritual experts was derided as the root cause of China's humiliations and failures as a nation!  I suspect that in some cases individual artists from degraded castes managed to survive by first denying any connection to ritual theater, and then skillfully transforming themselves into pure martial artists.

Now I have to re-think what qigong is in this context.  Kind of gives a different meaning to the expression "secret teaching," doesn't it?

(Remember if you are reading this on facebook you can see more images by clicking "original context" below.)

Spectacle and Sacrifice

"Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China"

a new book by David Johnson, Professor, History Department, UC Berkeley

DATE: Wednesday, January 27, 2010
TIME: 4:00 PM
PLACE: IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor, Berkeley, CA
FORMAT: IEAS Book Series: New Perspectives on Asia
SPONSORS: Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Chinese Studies

"In the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China, temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. UC Berkeley History Professor David Johnson's new book describes the great festivals as their supreme collective achievements, carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay.

Chinese culture was a performance culture, and ritual was the highest form of performance. Village ritual life everywhere in pre-revolutionary China was complex, conservative, and extraordinarily diverse. Festivals and their associated rituals and operas provided the emotional and intellectual materials out of which ordinary people constructed their ideas about the world of men and the realm of the gods. It is, David Johnson argues, impossible to form an adequate idea of traditional Chinese society without a thorough understanding of village ritual. Newly discovered liturgical manuscripts allow him to reconstruct North Chinese temple festivals in unprecedented detail and prove that they are sharply different from the Daoist- and Buddhist-based communal rituals of South China.

Introduced and moderated by Wen-hsin Yeh, Richard H. and Laurie C. Morrison Professor of History, and Director, Institute of East Asian Studies."

--I'm going to go hear this talk tomorrow, I haven't seen the book yet but it looks interesting. Join me if you've got the time and you're in the area.

Martial Theater

This article from Kungfu Magazine is a great overview of the total overlap of Triads, Kungfu, Theater, Religion and Opera.  It dips into the relationship between Theater and the Taiping Uprising, the Opium Wars, and the Triads.  Reading it you get that sense that Chinese Theater was nurtured in a violent world.  The authors keep their focus narrowly on Red Junk Opera, but what they say is likely true for many other styles of Theater and Martial Arts.  (hat tip: Jianghu)

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Here is a quick interview where Xingyi master Song Guanghua explains:

Another interesting comment that M Song made is that the 5 element fists can be practiced in different ways depending on the context. Specifically, he stated that, for each element, there is a performance version, a training version and a combative version. Thus, when comparing the performance of the 5 elements across styles, one must know which version you are seeing, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.

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Also:

Popular Religion in China Stephan Feuchtwang

Has a great overview of Popular Religion in China!

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And if you haven't checked out Marnix Wells site it's worth a look!