Autonomy, Community, Divinity

An excellent primer on advanced ethical relativism in anthropology and beyond is,Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology  by Richard A. Shweder. Funny and provocative, if you want a discrete answer to the question, why men barbecue? you better read another book. He doesn't even bring it up. Which is, I suppose, a way of commenting on how crazy most academic discourses on ethics are. Anyway I loved it. If you know a student heading to college, get them this book. It is the intellectual equivalent of concealed-carry.

Shweder, like me, believes that you shouldn't open your mouth unless you can sustain three distinct viewpoints on any subject. To have a real conversation each person needs to bring along multiple opinions, otherwise you are doing something other than carrying on a conversation. This is one of the ways the internet diminishes our interactions.*  A well educated seven year old should be able to bring three opinions to any subject, but the capacity to make that multi-view clear in a short written text on the internet is too rare. And perhaps there are fewer seven year olds being educated these days.

(cue Erik Satie)

How does this relate to martial arts? Simple. Any instruction I give, or learning situation I set up, is informed by the possibility that it is wrong. It is also informed by the probability that there is another way. And the probability that there is a better way. Probability is a term from statistics. As many of my students have pointed out over the years, this requires enormous maturity on the part of the student! They must be responsible for evaluating what they are learning while they are learning it, they must be actively imagining themselves teaching the same thing and contemplating the variety of reactions they could be having. Students need to be capable of challenging me, and each other, otherwise the transmission they are getting is only the road, not the over-view map. That is why I prefer to teach students over the age of seven.

I suppose in an indirect way I am referencing the famous essay by Isaiah Berlin on the question of Foxes vs. Hedgehogs. (Here is my Dad interviewing Stanley Fish, I think this is the interview where he talks about Isaiah Berlin, you'll enjoy it either way!) Foxes are smart about many things, hedgehogs are smart about one thing. We need both. Unfortunately this perspective is a bit dark. There are always fewer foxes than hedgehogs, so being a fox is lonely. Hedgehogs are boring and they dig too many holes! Of course, we foxes do love a really well developed hedgehog! But they are too rare. And they tend to be good at hiding. A good fox needs a lot of good hedgehogs simply to exist.

Are we still talking about martial arts? Or have we drifted into the realm of enlightenment? Or is this a performance art text? 

Shweder offers a construct for examining ethics, three categories that are useful for understanding behavior across cultural divides: autonomy, community, and divinity. This examining process is a powerful tool, try applying it to twenty different types of examples and see what kinds of results arise.

In martial arts history for instance we could ask, to what extent the arts were purposely designed to serve each of these ethics? Immediately the subject explodes into a 1000 page dissertation. Consider...

• Autonomy: Self-defense, crime, personal journey of self-improvement, dodging the punishment, social status, owning, profit, passion, self-expression, righting wrongs, secrets. 
• Community: Militia, banditry, community defense, family loyalty, brotherhoods, purpose, resource security, vengeance, self-sacrifice, establishing order, keeping the peace, eliminating competition, certainty, duty, unity, giving back, secrets. 
• Divinity (this is perhaps a culturally limiting term to describe the ethical category, but you'll get the idea): Demonic possession, exorcism, transcendence, serving the future, rectifying the past, devotion, purity, cosmic alignment, beauty, cutting all ties, not-knowing, the infinite, enlightenment, secrets. 

In sketching out the above lists I didn't even attempt to crack techniques or technologies. Where do they fit in? Notice that secrets are in all three categories!

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* Saying that "the internet diminishes our interactions," is entirely self-referential.  I don't believe things were better at some time in the past!  The possibilities are just so obviously NOT being lived up to, that's all.  (more on that in a future post).  

Pandit Chitresh Das, dies at 70

It is with great sorrow that I announce the passing of one of my mentors Pandit Chitresh Das.  I got the news last night just before bed.  I dreamt that I was teaching a large class of children when I got the news.  I stopped class to tell them what a great improviser he was, and what an amazing teacher, and how he taught me and so many others new ways of seeing, hearing and feeling.  Then I started teaching the students how to pick flowers, in the Kathak mode, in rhythm, as a man, as a woman, and as a wild man.  

When I woke up, my whole body was full of rhythm.  Laying there in bed, complex rhythmic patterns were coming out of me, from me, and from beyond.  New ones and old ones I hadn't felt in a long time, like emotions spilling over.  

I started studying with Chitreshji when I was 20.  I traveled to India when I was 26 and met up with him there.  He was a child prodigy known throughout India but because of political favoritism in the Guru system he felt under appreciated and when modern dancer Murray Louis offered him a chance to come to America and teach he took it.  For twenty years he didn't return.  He moved to California where he worked intimately with Zakir Hussain and Ali Akbar Khan to innovate new forms of rhythmic mastery.  When I was with him in Kolkata (Calcutta) he was mending fences and building new relationships after 20 years, it was intensely emotional and profoundly gratifying.  He introduced me to a lot of people but sent me alone to visit his Guru brother Bachan Lal Mishra, who was practically in tears after he saw me dance in his tiny studio in a dilapidated building.  He said this was the true martial spirit of the original Kathak, that Chitreshji had kept it alive.  The walls of his studio were covered in pictures of boxers, his inspiration.  

Kathak is an intimate performance the dancer should be close enough to see the audiences expressions, and it is best done on a marble floor to bring out the full range of sounds the feet can make. 

Kathak, North Indian Classical Dance, has changed a lot with time. A hundred years ago it was an intimate style that took on the qualities of an improvised duel between the drummer (tabla player) and the dancer. My teacher was a consummate improviser.  In our first class he channelled the harsh nuns he had known attending Catholic Schools in India, Rambo with a machine gun, and pop star Michael Jackson.  All of this within the strict rhythmic structures of Indian Classical music.  If you’ve never seen Kathak, it is sort of like tap-dance and flamenco done in bare feet and with five pounds of bells wrapped around each ankle.  Das explained that Kathak was developed around Rajput warriors and then moved into the Mughal Courts of Lucknow and as the Mughals fell from power many dancers fell into the role of courtesans. With the rise of Indian nationalism, dance played a role as a marker of Indian pride and identity.  Chitreshji's father and mother were dancers at the center of this revival and Chitreshji grew up in a home that was a major stopping off point for all the great dancers of Indian, most of them probably performed in his living room.  

Martial arts were not taught explicitly, and Chitresh Das was not a fighter, but if you’ve ever tried dueling with blades you know that rhythmic footwork with speed and power is a handy thing to have.  Kathak also has body technique that can be used as chops, sweeps and elbow strikes, joint locks, and drop steps, lots of drop steps.  The bells worn for Kathak are bronze strung tightly together with open facets.  From a martial point of view they were armor for the ankles designed to catch blades and weights for developing speed and power.  In the historic epic the Mahabharata the thunderous sound of thousands of men stamping their feet with ankle bells struck terror in their enemies hearts. 

I saw Chitreshji perform countless times, but the improvisations he would bust out in class when we were completely exhausted were always the best.  As a teacher he put his entire being into it. In a sense he is always right there with me when I teach, he taught me how to be intensely responsive and aware of every sound and movement my students make; precision and nurturing, compassion and fury.  

He wanted to give us students a sense of what it was like to study with his Guru, Pandit Ram Narayan Mishra, so we all went up to a YMCA camp on the Gualala river in Northern California for a retreat.  During the four days we were there I never saw the river because we were dancing the entire time.  We woke before dawn put on our clothes and our bells and started dancing, we ate lamb shank curry for breakfast, which lasted just long enough to eat and take a five minute shower, then we were dancing again until lunch. Lunch was even shorter and we were dancing again, in the late afternoon and evening we did more theatrical movement, singing and reciting in addition to more dancing.  Dinners were a blur and with the last shower of the evening came the risk of falling asleep while standing up. In the morning we did it again, for four days. By the end, all that was left of me was a steady vibration, and feet, the bottoms of which looked like raw hamburger.  

Probably the best performance I ever saw him give was actually a rehersal.  We were staying in the flat of a Calcutta painter friend of his, I remember she had a pet monkey who was completely out of control jumping and swinging about the room.  When Chitreshji was performing a solo he didn't like to rehearse because Kathak is about spontaneity, but also because it is a symbolic duel between the tabla player and the dancer, and duels are not rehearsed.  For about four years I was studying with both Chitreshji and Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri (a great tabla player).  When they were scheduled to perform together, both of their students would try to get them to rehearse, with increasing desperation as the event got closer.  Each of them would say things like, "Okay, if he needs to rehearse we can rehearse, ask him if he needs to rehearse?"  Students were sent back and forth with messages, "Tell him I don't need to rehearse, would it be helpful for him?" Sometimes they would talk on the phone I guess.  Anyway we were in Calcutta and Chitreshji was scheduled to perform with what he called a "red hot chilli pepper," that is, a young very fast tabla player, in this case Bickram Ghosh, son of Pandit Shankar Ghosh.  So he consented to a rehearsal.  It lasted about an hour, I sat at his feet while the two of them went through compositions at top speed, often only doing a half or a third of the composition and then saying something like, "Okay, and so on."  This is the thing about Kathak, it is an insider art.  To really see, feel and hear it, one has to have a lot of training.  When they were stopping a composition a third of the way through I was left hanging on a quarter of a beat.  The confidence they had that these complex rhythmic cycles would come out mathematically perfect was itself on show.  

In recent years, Chitresh Das has had enormous success, the father ten schools in India, America and Canada.  His collaborations and innovations are being felt far and wide.

This last week I sent off the abstract for a paper I'm going to deliver in England at Cardiff University in June titled, Shaking Thunder Hands:  Where Martial and Performing Arts Meet in India and China.  It examines evidence that North Indian Classical Dance (Kathak) and Chen style taijiquan share common movement concepts, theatrical representations, and forms of heightened awareness associated with martial enlightenment.  

I've been working on my book everyday too, and my tabla drums are on the same table with my computer.  That's how I've been writing, back and forth between the drum and the key board.  So Chitreshji has been on my mind, visiting me everyday. And by some strange coincidence, I made lamb shank curry yesterday! It has been 20 years since I danced with him.  Still, his memory, his brilliance and his spirit live on in my work.  I am forever grateful to have had him as a mentor.  

Thank you Dadaji.

Chitresh Das, demanding more from his students! With love.

Medicine, Martial Arts and Bandits

I'm on a writing retreat, working with a new draft of my book, exciting.

I got in a discussion on hoax/outrage central, ie. Facebook.  It quickly became an appeal to authority, boring.  So as a way of backing out I posted this reading list, I thought my readers would enjoy:

The standard definition of Six Harmonies is as follows: 

• Three external, wrists-ankles, elbows-knees, shoulders-hips.  
• Three internal, jing, qi, shen.  

In the interest of clarifying what relationship Chinese medicine might have to Six Harmonies I thought I would offer a short reading list:

This is a superb place to start because it goes from broad to narrow, and past to present, in attempting to give us an understanding of Chinese historic concepts of the body.  It also deals with seeing the body in art, which is a smart way in.  The Expressiveness of the Body  

Next I recommend this one, by Unschuld.  He taught an entire generation of scholars on the History of Chinese Medicine.  This book is from his public lectures, it is not the arcane historic discussion of his other works.  His conclusions are profound: What Is Medicine?  

Third, Unschuld's student Elisabtheth Hsu's work is exceptional and shows the range of ideas that jostle in the 20th Century around medicine and movement arts: The Transimission of Chinese Medicine 

Forth, this book is indispensable for understanding the current milieu: Qigong Fever 

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I also have another recommendation on the topic of Bandits in China.  The book title is, Chinese Femininities/ Chinese Masculinitites.  With a title like that, it is hardly surprising that it came out in 2002 and I never noticed it! (The picture on the front is also a turn off.)  It is a collection of essays, most of which are about historical gender issues, which is just weird.  But the article by Matthew H. Sommer titled:  Dangerous Males, Vulnerable Males, and Polluted Males: The Regulationof Masculinitiy in Qing Dynasty Law, deals with how professional martial artists and actors were viewed and treated by the law.  It doesn't actually discuss martial arts directly but the subject is implicit in the material.  Anyway, essential reading.  

Even better is an essay by David Ownby titled: Approximations of Chinese Bandits: Perverse Rebels, Romantic Heroes, or Frustrated Bachelors?  This essay also does not discuss martial arts directly, but what else could it be about with a title like that?  It is in fact an excellent summary of the issues. This one essay and its references are worth the price of the book, it is like getting ten books in just one essay!  High praise.

Snake Daoyin

This is Daoyin from Vietnam.  Elsewhere I have explained that the Daoyin Paulie Zink does has about twenty animals, it was a Daoist religious theatrical martial training system for animal role specialists.  Paulie Zink was explicitly being taught monkey kungfu (or Tai Sheng, which means Great Sage which is another name for the Monkey King).  All the animals were at times framed as being supportive training for learning the difficult parts of the various monkey roles (there are five of them).  Another way to understand it is that monkey is just the most developed role of the twenty animal roles.  That's how he explained it to me one afternoon, but I don't have that in writing or anything.

That is why I was delighted to find this video on Youtube.  It is almost certainly the same system, the snake movements are the same, but this woman has the full blown snake role.  I would love to know if she has little bits of all the other animals or if she just learned this one?  In any event, if this type of Animal Role Specialist Daoyin is old, like 500 years old, I'm betting there were at one time experts for every single animal.  Are there any other high quality masters of animal daoyin out there?  Experts in an animal other than snake or monkey?  I know there are dog kungfu experts but that appears to be a lesser amateur style.  Are there any pig masters for instance? How about crab masters?  Or frog masters?  Send me the links if you find them!  Please.  Also I'm taking a break from Facebook so if you comment there, please comment here too.  Thanks.

Beer as a Path to Enlightenment

This a very funny read, about an important part of Tibetan History.  The commentary is already excellent so I'm not going to add anything, but if you think all those famous enlightened Masters of the past were well behaved you probably haven't read the Beer Sutra.  

Shanghai 1903 or 1933?

A Junk in New York and London 1851

Check out the latest article by Ben Judkins about a Junk that was sailed to New York and then London in 1851.

The most exciting thing about it is that a group of 20 Southern Chinese sailors, hired to sail the boat, just happened to have enough martial arts and opera training to put on shows in New York and then in London for 2 years.  That is strong evidence for two things:  

One, that martial arts and opera training were wide spread at least among sailors.  Actually opera might not be the right word here but they had some kind of theatrical performance training, most likely amateur.  

Two, they conceptualized martial arts as a performing art that could easily be incorporated into a larger performance.  

There is a lot of other fascinating stuff in there too, a ground breaking law suit, a visit by Charles Dickens, and Westerners playing Chinese opera instruments.  There is also some suggestion that the religious rituals they performed for themselves were accessible as performance.   Now I want to know more.

"Don't Talk" Rightly Won the Nobel Prize for Literature

I try to write reviews of books I think my readers will find stimulating.  These don't always fall in the Daoist or Martial arts categories.  At the recent conference on Daoism I attended in Boston, I met Sabina Knight who was interviewed widely after Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Her review of Mo Yan's work is a must read, The National Interest.  If that link doesn't work here is a link to the PDF.

Here is another link to an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, she was also interviewed by NPR if you prefer pod casts.  

After reading Knight's review I had to go out and read Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out .  I'm not going to write my own review because this one is so good, but I will add some comments.

If you know a bit about post 1949 Chinese history, it is increadibly entertaining to hear a first person account of the various eras from the point of view of a donkey or a pig.  The layers of irony get so deep you really can't crawl out of the well.  It is as if Mo Yan is doing an exorcism and you, the reader, are the demonic force being ensnared by irony and then entrapped in a deep well of meaning.  

The layers of irony are not just historical, there are just as many layers of irony from literature both Chinese and International, the pig with human attributes for instance is clearly a bit of slop thrown in Orwell's direction.  The Cultural Revolution through the eyes of a pig is so infused with theatricality that in 500 years it could perhaps be included as an 'outer chapter' of Sun Wukong's Journey to the West.  Outlaws of the Marsh makes an appearance too.  The characters faces often have color as if they were painted for a performance.  And I found this great description of the kind of music I use when teaching Northern Shaolin to kids:  "It penetrates clouds and pulverizes stones."

Sabina Knight points out that the title is a reference to Buddhism and that throughout the novel he is using phrases which are taken straight out of Buddhist scripture.  There is also an enormous amout of popular religion floating around the book, again layered in as irony with new meanings and absurd contexts.  For instance there is a chapter title (52) "...turn fake into real."  I read this as a reference to the Daoist elixir practice (jindan).  

It is not an easy book to read.  But is has magical qualities that make it worthwile.  It seemed that each time as I neared the end of the book a new section mysterously appeared.  The novel follows a landlord executed in 1950 sir-named "Ximen" or Western Gate, which is cosmologically the gate we pass through when we die.  He is then re-incarnated as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and finally a big headed boy.  

This is an amazingly rich work, the Nobel Prize folks got this one right.  May they escape torture in Lord Yama's Court.  Mo Yan's name means: "Don't Talk," he is one of the most iteresting political writers of our time. 

Some Fun at King Yama's Court

Article on the Boxer Rebellion

The Economist has an article on the Boxer Rebellion that is interesting.  The comments are interesting too.  One of the things I like about the Boxer Rebellion is that the deeper one goes, the more ambiguity one finds.  In the article and in the comments we can see the struggle to claim that one side, or one view, is righteous.  In order to achieve this, one has to use powerful tools of reduction.  So that is an interesting exercise, while I was reading it I was trying to identify the reduction.  What is being conflated?  What is being left out?