Warriors, Artists and Technicians #2

What is the difference between warriors, martial artists, and skilled fighters? (Continued)

The time when Confucius lived and taught in China was just before the Warring States Era. It seems likely that his codes of conduct and visions of social order were inspired by an earlier era when wars were fought by a class of warriors. The story goes that Confucius was born into a warrior class but his group or lineage was defeated before he came of age. So he had the warrior training (he was the greatest archer of his time), and the warriorcode (extraordinary discipline), but he no longer had the status of a warrior. The warrior era was waning.

During the Warring States Era, hundreds of thousands of people were brought on to the fields of battle. These were not warriors; they were farmers, artisans, and convicts given weapons and conscripted to fight for generals, princes and kings.

At the end of the Warring States Era the first Emperor of the Qin (Qinshihuangdi), mostly finished off the warrior class. By the time of Han Wudi, there was none left in China.

In Ancient Greece warriors invented democracy. The recent movie "300" is about a last stand of a group of warriors against a conscript army. Alexander the Great and later the Romans, fielded huge well-disciplined armies, but when not at war, men were considered "citizens" not warriors.

In Europe around 1000 years ago, various kings called together every man who had a horse and sent them into battle. They carved up the land in to kingdoms. Those men, whose contribution was their horse and their bravado, were made noble. They became "gentlemen" "landlords," and "knights." They developed a very strict warrior code, which we have come to think of as Honor. With in this code, if someone called you a liar, or insulted someone beneath you in the hierarchy, you had to fight them. If the offender was also a gentleman, you had to duel with them. In this world, people were not free to disagree. The expression "I beg to differ," is a holdover from these times. If you opened a shop and started selling stuff, you lost your status as a gentleman.

Fortunately this code of honor is mostly gone today. But it does linger. This aristocracy was very weak at the beginning of the 20th Century, and they died in disproportionate numbers during WWI.

A very tough form of Warrior Honor developed on the border between England and Scotland. These two countries were at war for 1000 years, so long that the landlords in the borderlands collected their taxes by something they called Blackmail. They lived in small rough houses, abducted their wives, and sharpened their thumbs for plucking out eyes. In 1650 or so, when England and Scotland made peace, better-organized landlords came in and slaughtered the boarder people. The survivors fled briefly to Northern Ireland and then came to America. They are known formally as the Scots-Irish, but they have always called themselves 'rednecks.'

So it is fair to say that tiny hints of Warrior Honor exist in the US Military today, but it is a volunteer army most citizens (and some non-citizens) can qualify to join.

In Japan, to be a warrior, you had to be born into the Samurai class. (I believe a Samurai could also adopt you at any age.) Only Samurai were allowed to own swords, on penalty of death. Before Musashi, there was some training, mostly match fighting, grappling, throwing and wrestling. The code of a Samurai was very strict. It emphasized fearlessness and a willingness to die with out hesitation. Musashi was a real man, but as a myth he is credited with destroying the Warrior Code by using and teaching technique to win. Like the Europeans who considered it a violation of the code to practice shooting or fencing before a duel, the Samurai code valued pure fearlessness, pure willingness to die, not skill.

Part 3: Art vs. Skill

Warriors, Artists, and Technicians #1

What is the difference between a warrior, a martial artist, and a skilled expert?

A warrior is a member of a class, generally it is a privilege of birth. The warrior is not a universal concept but variants of it exist world wide. The first warriors could also be called shaman-kings. Most likely they developed from hunter-gather groups that occupied mountains, jungles or dry plains. These hunter-groups, often at war with each other, were in the habit of raiding the first agricultural settlements. At some point, these settlements probably got the idea that they could offer the hunter-groups ruler-ship in exchange for protection. They thus became the first warrior classes.

These warrior shaman's most powerful weapon was inspiring fear. Chinese historians record this kind of shaman-commander charging off into battle with a poisonous snake in each hand, wild hair, animal skins, horns and a terrifying mask. After countless generations, these shaman-warriors morphed into warriors with a strict code. The warriors of neighboring kingdoms fought each other on designatied fields of battle, with codes of conduct and rules about how to kill, whom to kill, and what to do with captured enemies.

In China, this was the time when the Zhouyi was written. The Zhouyi eventual developed into the Yijing (I Ching) or the book of changes. Richard Rutt's translation and commentary sheds really interesting light on this era of warrior inspired codes that used divination and both mass animal and human sacrifice as a tools for staying in power.

This is not just history. The warrior-shaman-kings are still around in isolated parts of Indonesia. (See Don F. Draeger's beautiful book the The Weapons & Fighting Arts of Indonesia.) The Lords Army in the Congo, would also qualify. As would The Terror Twins in the Burma-Thai boarder region.

Part two: Warrior Codes

Shoot first. Ask Questions Later.

This is pretty much my approach to teaching martial arts.

"Shoot first. Ask Questions later." It is description of American pragmatism. We get the job done, and then we figure out how to explain it.

I've been listening to woefully inadequate explanations of the origins of Chinese Martial Arts all of my life. I started this blog largely to express what half a lifetime of study has revealed about those origins, so I'm not surprised that I've got people saying I'm wrong.

The first question that has to be answered is a tough one and will probably take me at least 10 postings:  Why did Chinese culture create Martial Arts, when no other culture did this? (I plan to stand by this outrageous statement and I will deal with the exceptions in  in a future posting--they are Indonesia, Cochin-India, Muay-Thai, Korea and Japan.  I've already dealt with Africa in my videos.)
The term "cultivate qi" is used in Daoism a lot, to some extent in martial arts, less so in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), and for practically everything in qigong.

I asked my future wife(?) who is an Acupuncturist, what she thought "cultivating qi" meant? Her answer, "Live Free, or Die Hard!" Which we both saw and loved.

To 'cultivate qi' means to do experiments which reveal your true nature (de). This of course can be contrasted with experiments which obscure your true nature.

But this poses the question, what is your true nature? The Chinese term 'true nature' is de, which has many different translations because it actually means a whole bunch of really different things. For instance, in Confucius Analect's, it is usually translated "virtue." It was on the basis of this translation that European Enlightenment thinkers were able to argue that a non-Christian could be virtuous, and thus fully human.

Nei Jia Quan

Jess O'Brien edited together a bunch of interviews with internal martial artists called Nei Jia Quan Internal Martial Arts, Teachers of Tai Ji Quan, Xing Yi Quan, and Ba Gua Zhang.
What I like about the book is I can really imagine these various teachers are talking to me. In fact, it's pretty funny, because a lot of the time I have this sense that the teachers are shouting at me. I'm willing to bet Paul Gale likes to shout. Here is a nice excerpt:

"'The bottom of the foot is the back.' There's a physical reality of it that the bottom of the foot is the back, meaning that the bottom of your foot is pulling your back forward. You have to learn to move that way, otherwise there's no foundation. You'll always get swept and knocked down because you'll be top-heavy."

I think my favorite section was the interview with Luo Dexiu where he talks about the cultural barriers he had to get around in order to learn from very traditional teachers. In that traditional setting a direct question would have been perceived as a challenge to the status of his teacher, and his teacher would have gotten very angry. He and his fellow students came up with all sorts of ingenious ways to get questions answered with out actually ever asking a question.  At one point he and another student stage angry huff and puff arguments and then ask the teacher to settle them.   This technique got some their questions answered.
I noticed a theme that many of the teachers brought up.  They said qi is given too much attention and that yi (intentionality?)  is not given enough.  I guess that's true with some teachers, but it wasn't true with any of mine.

It's impossible to generalize about all the student teacher relationships out there, but in my opinion once you've internalized about 300 martial applications of various sorts, yi in the application sense of the word becomes less important.  One can continue using the word yi by tweaking it's meaning but there are other terms for this "higher level" yi such as jingshen. 

It's a good book and I had fun arguing with the various teachers.  I would have shortened most of the interviews if I was editing it, but I'm planning to buy volume 2 if there is one.
The book includes interviews with these teachers: Gabriel Chin, Tim Cartmell, Paul Gale, Fong Ha, Luo De Xiu, Allen Pittman, William Lewis, Tony Yang, Zhao Da Yuan, Bruce Frantzis. Check it out.

100% Qi Free?

I took the following quote from Joanna Zorya at Martial Tai Chi:

100% Qi-Free

Our own teaching completely rejects the concept of qi, also known as chi, ch'i or ki. Other instructors coming to the MTA [Martial Tai Chi] should also reject the idea completely. However, on this website there are a couple of articles which specifically deal with the issue. Qi is also dealt with briefly on our "Taiji Concepts" DVD - the clip (in "3 internal harmonies excerpts") is shown on our "Techniques" video clips page. We have found it necessary to address the issue of qi, because most people in the Tai Chi mainstream are utterly obsessed with it, and we wanted to make our position on it absolutely clear. The concept is at best obsolete and at worst dangerous. Significantly, the notion of qi is simply not true.

The way I see it the word Qi is polysemous. It has many different meanings depending on context. So if the teachers at Martial Tai Chi want to ban the word, they aren't necessarily banning the concepts that come with it.

The word qi might in a particular context mean the totality of everything you can feel. Or it might mean the feeling of blood or lymph pulsing through your body. But in another context it means the bubbles in a glass of soda pop. If the term qi is not clearly defined in context, it can be used to create intensional vagueness. Such vagueness is often used by Charismatics to create a feeling of authority among witnesses to a performance of healing or other subordinating demonstrations of power.

However, we really aren't sure what it is we are feeling inside and even outside our bodies. The term qi can be used in conjunction with other words to communicate the density, directionality, size, or relative temperature of something we feel. I'm not going to argue that it is a necessity, just that it can be used appropriately.

Here is my LONG definition of Qi. I wrote this 10 years ago, so it may need some updating, but perhaps readers will have suggestions.

UPDATE: I've had some interesting exchanges with Joanna Zorya in the comments for a previous post on Lineage. I mention these books:

Thinking Through Cultures, On Beauty and Being Just, The Trouble with Principle.

Balance

It is a standard of Chinese martial arts that one should cultivate balance. When I learned my first broad sword form (wuhudao) my teacher, Bing Gong, had me learn it with the sword in the left hand because I am left handed. This meant that I had to learn a mirror image of the form he did. Being the precocious kid that I was, I taught myself the right hand too.Later a second teacher, George Xu, taught me another sword form (baxianjian). At the beginning I suggested that perhaps I should learn it left handed. His response was memorable, and classic gongfu-teacher-speak, "You don't have any idea how to use either hand...yet." (I learned it right handed.)

Balance can be measured or assessed in a number of different ways. Here is a short list which I will elaborate on in a future post:

TYPES OF BALANCE

• What is Comfortable to use: One's preference for left or right can be balanced by using the "good side" less

• Body shape and size (including balancing muscles on the left with muscles on the right). Think losing muscle to get to balance, instead of building muscle to get there.

• Weight distribution (front to back and side to side)

• Range of motion (functional range of motion and optimal range of motion.)

• Muscle strength or weakness as distinct from size

• Ability to move qi, fluids, micro-articulation of circles (or other shapes)

• Since the internal organs are never balanced in terms of weight and size they can be balanced in the sense that they can all be felt with equal clarity.

• Multiple layers of qi. Starting a Weiqi (the feeling of the surface of the body) and then going inward layer by layer, sensing left to right, front to back or top and bottom.

• Balance is also part of complete embodiment. What feels balanced?

• Lack of balance in range of motion lower down in the body effects the verticalness of the spine and all angles above the hips? The levelness of the hips dramatically effects the verticalness of the spine.

• Fighters know that you can have a 'blind spot,' a place in your preception where you don't sense things very well. For instance punches that come from a certain angle are more likely to hit you. These can and should be 're-embodied.

Do you own your legs?

Readers can comment on this provocative idea:
George Xu claims to be the source behind Chi Running. One of the things he said is that most people let their legs carry their bodies, they don't use their bodies to carry their legs. By this I understand him to mean that most people lack both integration between their legs and their torso, and they also lack a kind of mind or embodiment.

This integration of the legs and torso, once gained, can be measured as a smaller, more efficient range of motion.  Xu refers to this type of embodiment as the predator mind. It is a kind of fearless self-possession. It is a predatory way of seeing and moving.  It is relaxed yet ready to pounce. It is drawn in toward the center but not closed, not  contracted.

Breathing Spaces

Nancy N. Chen's book Breathing Spaces, qigong, psychiatry, and healing in China, was published in 2003, by Columbia University Press. Before Chen's book there was nothing available about the history of Qigong in the 20th century that would satisfy a curious 12 year old, much less a scholar.

I have at least 45 post-it notes in my book. Why do I love this book so much?

Here is a brief biography form the back cover: "Nancy N. Chen is associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A medical anthropologist, she also teaches courses on food, ethnographic film, urban anthropology, China, and Asian Americans."

She grew up in the US studying gongfu, and like me, heard about this thing called qigong sometime in the late 80's. It turned out to be, at least partly, what we had all been practicing and referring to as martial arts warm-ups. But there where also lots of claims being attached to this new "qigong" that didn't seem to fit our experiences. There was a lot of religious feeling and parlor tricks too. There were strange and sometimes very specific claims made about healing powers associated with both the practice of doing qigong and these new "Masters" themselves.

Being a lover of history, the biographies various masters would pull out from the underside of their 'inner cauldrons,' were particularly irksome to me. Nancy N. Chen deals with all this beautifully.
So the only real question now is, why haven't you read it yet?

Understanding Lineage

How does the process of resolving ones ancestors through the practice of gongfu manifest within the lineage of a particular practice?

From within a Chinese cosmological world view--when we practice qigong which has been passed down to us through many generations of adepts, we are receiving the collective "perfected" form of all the people in the lineage receding back through time. This practice resolves us (zheng). It resolves our fate (ming). It gives us a way to literally embody resolved action. If we remain sensitive to this process, the result --the fruition of practice -- is appropriate conduct in our daily lives.

This also works in the other direction. Imagine for a moment that the qigong we are doing seems to overwork our liver. Perhaps it is because someone in our lineage drank to much alcohol and her conduct is manifesting itself in the qigong we were taught and practice. If we keep precepts and practice appropriate action, our own healthy liver and our own healthy habits will eventually change the qigong practice itself, thus resolving the past and passing on to our students a healthier qigong practice. So the practice of qigong not only influences our ancestors and the lineage of our teachers, but also influences our students and our decedents.

Now I'm not a lineage fundamentalist, and I'm not a puritan either. But I think it is a little sad that just because Westerners don't understand Chinese cosmology, they toss it out like so much flotsam and jetsam.
In response to all the hucksterism and Qijocks in the qigong and yiquan worlds we are seeing more and more American qigongers and marital artists who reject any traditional Chinese ideas about how studying a martial art could improve your humanity or your health.

We now have qigong Atheists with a puritanical edge.

Tai Chi and Science

Here is a fun article about the Motion and Gait Analyisis Laboritory at Stanford University.

"Stanford Researchers Record 'Optimal Force' of Tai Chi Master"

The picture is of Chen Taijiquan teacher Chen Xiang, I don't know much about him but he is a senior student of Feng Zhiqiang so he is the gongfu brother of one of my teachers Zhang Xuixin.

I love these devices they have for learning about human movement. I also love that we now have scientific "proof" that Taijiquan is the most efficient movement in the world. (OK I think the article gets a little too enthusiastic but it's still a fun quote.)

It also raises the idea that taijiquan is a form of technology itself. Theory, and there is a fair amount of it, is subordinate to the technology. In fact, the technology is just a continuous transmission of movement experiments and experiences.

Medicine can't explain taijiquan, and probably these scientists won't be able to either, but they may accumulate some really interesting data that could lead to new technologies. And by technologies I mean both tools and movement techniques.  (My modest dream is that a Stanford scientist will someday say that muscle building is not necessarily smart.)
Since this center also studies gait, I would love to see what they think of baguazhang walking technique.  I think this is their main public website, look they have blogs too!

Update:  Here is the Video