Quan (Ch'uan)

What does quan mean? As in the terms taijiquan, xingyiquan, shaolin quan. The standard answer is that it literally means fist, but in context means boxing or art. Thus taijiquan means 'the taiji style of boxing' or 'the fighting art of taiji.' (For a definition of taiji see my previous entry.)

This is a bit misleading. One should ask the question why other languages don't have an equivalent term? Korea and Japan mainly use the term dao (do in japanese as in 'way of' that we also discussed in an earlier post); hapkido,karatedo, Aikido, judo. (Taikwando uses both: kwan is the same word as quan). In English we just say boxing, or fencing. We have different terms but not a category like quan.

As I've said elsewhere gongfu has many historic roots. The most important for explaining the meaning of quan is it's roots in village level trans-medium religion. There were cults to local deities, heroes, and ancestors. Each cult had a central shrine and an incense burner and as the cult grew, ashes from the original incense burner would be distributed to satellite shrines in other villages. Processional celebrations for each cult would travel between villages according to a ritual calender. This is one of the ways that villages renewed their ties of social order, commercial vigor, and mutual defense. Along a procession, depending on the nature of the particular cult, a village would sponsor a festival. These festivals were sometimes very complex and could last weeks. This created a kind of "unseen" or "celestial" extra-government or social order.

One common aspect of these festivals was performance. A standard thing to perform was a demonstration of your village's martial prowess. People were usually invited and paid to perform in other villages but when you performed in your own village you did it for free. What you performed was your village quan. So quan really means a traditional routine that demonstrates your village's prowess. Prowess was, of course, understood in terms of gongfu or accumulated merit.

It is still common in 2007 for a Chinese person in San Francisco to ask another Chinese person, "What is your home village?"

These festivals also had what we would call magic shows, circus arts, and theatrical performances that told religiously significant stories. Thus, gongfu and Chinese Opera are really different components of the a single tradition.

Shuijiao Chinese Wrestling

Everyone interested in Chinese Martial Arts should have a copy of The Method of Chinese Wrestling by Tong Zhongyi, Translated by Tim Cartmell.

The first reason is that it is beautiful. It is a complete translation of a book on Shuijiao from the 1930's with grainy black and white photos that are easy to see and very detailed. (No editing necessary! Thanks North Atlantic Books.)
The second reason is that it is material that helps to put internal arts in context. Shuijiao is a kind of gentrified form of Mongolian wrestling, stand up throws, with similarities to Judo take downs and Sumo too.

Shuijiao isn't however all that gentrified, (push-hands should get the gentrified wrestling award). Shuijiao throws are elegant, they make great police training for dealing with drunks, which historically is the biggest part of a policeman's job.

Practitioners of internal arts will quickly see how shuijiao techniques are a part of every taijiquan and baguazhang movement. It is kind of a mini-subject within a subject.

Go get it!

Play the Pipa

Making fun of the traditional names of various Taijiquan movements is pretty common. Many of the names sound weird to an English speaking ear. The poetry and metaphors are mostly obscure.
Recently a Taiwanese student of mine suggested a really great explanation for the name playing the Pipa (sometimes translated as playing the guitar). The pipa, as everyone knows, is a stringed instrument but pipa also means scapula. Breaking the scapula was a traditional punishment for fighting. The official administering the punishment would restrain the "fighter" and then slip one of his hands behind the scapula and use the other to chop, breaking it in half. This is just how the movement is done in Yang style taijiquan. Two broken scapulas would damage any fighting career for sometime, possibly forever.
Chinese law or jurisprudence, differs from jurisprudence in English speaking countries. An important difference is that they use different underlying metaphors for what constitutes a violation. In English speaking countries our metaphor is a line or a wall. If you cross this line, you have broken the law. The Chinese metaphor is more like a downward slope. For instance, if you have young children under you care and you are dueling, the punishment is likely to be much worse, because you are really risking other peoples lives. Fighting in this context can be more or less legal, depending on what the longer term outcomes could be. It is, of course, traditional to punish ones whole family because it is assumed that they must have seen you acting badly, bit by bit over time and done nothing to stop it.

Confucianism and Martial Arts

All of the major categories of Chinese religion have developed the notion of perfecting one’s self, though each in distinctly different ways. While each is a contributor, Confucianism is the obvious and most prominent origin of gongfu as a process of perfection. The Confucian approach is one of consistent vigilance in the refinement of a changing person in a changing world. The idea that one would practice the same routine everyday and thus constantly refine ones skill, while simultaneously adapting and applying that skill to ones ever changing duties, needs and circumstances is a Confucian idea. The result of such a practice would be a combination of embodied discipline, efficiency and flexibility. Confucians assert that Gongfu thus conceived does not need to be rewarded because the process of perfection is intrinsically rewarding.

Are you on a path of self-perfection?  Does this idea translate into English speaking cultures? When I searched Google images for "perfection" I mostly got images of nature, drugs, and technology.

Gongfu (kungfu) and Trance

Another possible source of gongfu is as a form of physical training to survive trance. As I've already said, the trance-medium tradition was pervasive in China for most of its history. Full-on possession by a god, as happens in both African religion and Chinese religion, is extremely taxing on the body. Wild movements may toss, whip, shake and gyrate the possessed person. I suspect that at some time in the distant past, this experience was a near death one; people who were repeatedly possessed had shorted lives. Yet in Africa as in China people who become possessed have extraordinary physical training which allows them to survive, some even with radiant health. In Africa this training is dance, and in China, at least in Taiwan and the South East Asian Chinese Diaspora, it is gongfu.

This is also one of my favorate explanations for the difference between internal and external martial arts (neijia and waijia). In Africa and the African Diaspora, priests and drummers are required to be familiar with the rituals for each deity and his/her particular characteristics. For instance, a particular deity is invoked through specific rhythms, dances, songs, and sacrifices. A deity might be known for being jealous, carrying a sword, being female, being associated with the color green, having a sharp wit, and of course, wielding power in a particular realm. However, both priests and drummers are forbidden to become possessed by the deity. Should they become possessed they lose their ritual statues. They are experts in managing and differentiating the different types of human trance.

Chinese religion is very similar. Orthodox Daoist priests were forbidden to become possessed yet their training involves becoming intimate with each type of trance. Daoism is, among many things, a systematic ordering of all types of deities by the characteristics of their local or national cults--and by the specific types of trance that lead to possessions by particular deities.

Taijiquan, xingyiquan, & baguazhang each teach different types of trance. Taijiquan, for instance, teaches peng, ji, lu, and an. Xingyi teaches the five 'phases' and the various animals.

External martial arts is training to survive possession by a deity. Internal martial arts is training to become familiar with the ways in which our bodies fall into trance so that we don't become possessed. What we know in the 'West' as Chinese martial arts is actually fall out from this religious tradition.

Here is a great article about trance-mediums in China.

Update: Because the term "priest" doesn't real translate perfectly into any language, it would be more accurate for me to say about African religion that atleast one person in a given ritual has the role of not going into trance.  Sometimes the "priest" may be the only person possessed.

The origins of Gongfu (Kung-fu) (part 2)

Gongfu training has always been associated with the military, with militias, with crop guarding, with bodyguards, and with constables under the jurisdiction of a magistrate. The question anyone trying to sort out the historic origins of gongfu must ask is: Since most nations and peoples of the world trained and drilled armies, why did China alone (and later some of its neighbors: Japan, Korea, Tibet, Burma, the Philippines, and Indonesia) develop martial arts? Many cultures developed matched fighting, fencing schools, technical wrestling, and warlike games and dances, but not the sets and routines characteristic of all types of gongfu.

My answers to this question are conjecture, that is, I sometimes stray from what can be supported by the available facts, but I hope my answers are interesting food for thought and perhaps future research. (In other words, I'm doing something good scholars never do but the rest of us wish they would once and a while).

During the Warring states era, as the warrior class was loosing its grip on the kingdoms of China, larger and larger groups of peasants were forced into gigantic armies. The ability to conquer huge areas and incorporate those peoples into larger and larger armies was years ahead of the state-craft necessary to maintain them. A group conquered its neighbors and a few years later another group rose up and did the same.

At this time, armies prepared for a fight by singing, dancing and drumming themselves into a blood thirsty frenzy. When Qinshi huangdi, the first Chinese emperor, established his unified state, he banned this type of music and dance because it was within the song and the dance that all of the disparate peoples he conquered stored their enmity. After the Qin fell and the Han dynasty arose, the process of incorporating neighboring clans or tribes into the army continued.

While they wanted the physicality and the energy generated by music and dance, they did not want the enmity it perpetuated. These dances were trance invocations of powerful animals like snakes or tigers and the angry spirits of the unresolved (or un-avenged) dead. By taking the music out yet keeping the dances as a source of power focused on fighting, they developed into set routines that captured the physicality of powerful animals. Later the idea of a form or a set that could be passed down through time made it possible to immortalize the movements of individual great war heroes.

Thus practicing gongfu can be understood in the context of Chinese religion as a kind of trance-medium-ship; whereby, a practitioner regularly and systematically invokes the routine's martial ancestors. Through this act the prowess of those ancestors is received and embodied. (The Chinese term for this type of 'spirit' prowess is ling, but it is taboo to talk about it.)

The origins of Gongfu (Kung-fu) (part 1)

A saying of Confucius: "never worry your parent’s unless you are sick" has been interpreted to mean that children (starting at age 7 or 8 ) should be given substantial responsibility for maintaining their own health. This often manifests through the study of gongfu.

In traditional Chinese society health is considered a kind of accumulated merit which you dedicate to others-- and to the resolution of your own unresolved ancestors. For instance, I might decide I’m going to eat only vegetarian food and dedicate that act to my mother, who is prone to illness. There is a confluence between religious Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism in which they all agree that there is a mechanism whereby the inappropriate actions of our ancestors can, to some degree, be rectified ('put right') by the upright conduct of their descendants. This notion is at odds with Western cultural distinctions but is intrinsic to the meaning of the word gongfu.
Inappropriate conduct in the Chinese context, a Chinese sin—if you will, is an action which creates ongoing problems for other people. It is an event which is unresolved. Thus appropriate conduct is action which resolves lingering problems, but it is also actions which are efficient in that they leave no need for further action—they are self resolving. The term for this process in Chinese is zhengqi. (The word means orthodox and upright, but also to rectify, resolve, or correct qi).
For example, I was teaching some Chinese elementary school students in San Francisco, and I had learned from a very smart 5 year old girl that her grandfather, a Red Army general, had come from China to live with her family and that he was very sick. After winter break I asked after his health and she stood very upright and said with a big smile, "My grandfather died two weeks ago." This was not the first time I had experienced this cultural phenomenon, but every time it happens my first reaction is shock. " She can’t be happy," I thought to myself. By smiling she was letting me know the facts, but also letting me know that I did not need to get involved emotionally in her family affairs. She was trying to limit the spread of those aspects of her grandfather’s life which were still unresolved. Her actions were zhengqi. Obviously this particular expression of cultural values doesn’t translate very well, otherwise I wouldn’t still be talking about it.
When a person dies, his inappropriate conduct, and his unfinished projects can linger. Most influence fades quickly after a persons death, but not everything. Imagine if you were to die right now? What actions would your family or friends have to take to resolve your death. If you have young children, someone is going to have to care and provide for them. This is why we write wills. But only issues of money and property get dealt with in a will. It is even possible that the will we left could create jealousy and lawsuits. If you were murdered the perpetrator would have to be found and punished. If you have a job, someone would likely have to be found and trained to replace you, or perhaps your business would close and all the people it serves would have to find that service elsewhere. Emotional conduct can linger after death too. Hatred of a particular ethnic group can be passed on to ones children, as can a habit of drinking alcohol to numb depression.
So the idea of gongfu, is to improve yourself. It is to improve your collective-family-self. It is to take actions which resolve bad habits you may have inherited, directly or indirectly.

Of course the influence of our ancestors need not be negative. Our condition and opportunities at birth are largely do to our ancestors. It is hard to say how much of the way our lives go is do to our own merit and how much we inherit. The idea of gongfu, accumulation of merit, acknowledges that the merit we eventually pass on to others is an accumulation of the merit of our ancestors, our teachers and our own upright conduct.
Gongfu means: self-improvement for the good of others.

African Bagua #1

The first in a series of lectures I am producing about the origins of Chinese martial arts is up on Youtube. Check it out

Internal Coordination

Internal coordination is the ability to link-up the movement of one part of the body to another, it is an essential aspect of qigong and all internal arts. Another way to think about it is to say the six limbs, head, tail, arms and legs, are all connected to the movement to the lower dantian, or the belly. With practice, even very small movements will become supported by the subtle movement of the rest of the body. This is primarily accomplished through the continuous twisting and wrapping of soft tissue from one extremity to another.

In qigong as well as all the internal arts, internal coordination is achieved within the frame of the tailbone sinking, the top of the head rising and the shoulders directly aligned with the hips so that the spine itself does not twist at all. This leaves all the internal organs free to move with the twisting and wrapping of the extremities.

This is just a small piece of a very large proccess and there are many different approaches to teaching this principle. Some teachers may treat it as 'advanced' and so many qigong movements neglect this principle. This is partly because it is possible to break the over all principle of internal coordination into smaller components and develop them independently. It is also partly because once the principle is thourghly integrated into ones movement it is possible to be internally connected in any type of movement, including freely twisting the spine.

In practice, internal coordination is usually combined with other teachings; for instance, pulsing the joints, opening the qi gates, and various hydrolic processes in the body.

If you focus your training on internal coordination your movement will be come more snake-like.

Stance Training

All Chinese martial arts schools do stance training. It is often considered the most important training for developing a gongfu foundation.

I estimate that I have stood still for on the order of 6000 hours, probably more. The longest period of time I have held a single stance is 6 hours. My shaolin students learn and train the following stances: Horse, Cat, Falling stance, Bow'n'arrow, Monk, cross leg or t-stance, and natural step (ziran). Every movement in taijiquan should be held, and basically the same goes for xingyi and bagua.

Wang Xiangzhai, the highly influential 20th Century founder of Yiquan said quality stance/stillness training was what all great Chinese martial artists have in common.

My own experience is that deep stance training is more effective than stretching and high kicks for re-making young Northern Shaolin students bodies so that they have a bigger range of movement potential. This is sometimes called, "getting the qi in the channels."
While in my twenties, an hour a day of low stance training initially made my thigh muscles and shoulder muscles bigger, but as time passed and my alignment improved my muscles got smaller and smaller. This is sometimes called, "qi going into the bones."

It's true, my muscles got smaller. My alignment improved and along with it my ability to issue power, to connect (integrate), twist, and pulse (open/close). Believe it or not, I got weaker. Not lazy or deficient but muscularly weaker and functionally more sensitive.

As time has passed I feel my use of higher stance training (still an hour a day) has helped develop more freedom and naturalness in my everyday movement. This is sometimes called, "Writing the Classics (jing) on your bones."

Stances on one leg, both high and low, are essential for developing kicking power, and are of course great for balance (in a future post I'll explain the physiology as I understand it.)

There is a ton more I could say about this subject and probably will in future blogs. I encourage readers to add your comments about what role stances have played in your training. In your opinion, what does and what doesn't stance training achieve?