The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (Part 2)

Here I continue my commentary on The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, by Frank Allen and Tina Chunna.
The first section of the book is called "The Origins of Ba Gua Zhang: A Blend of History and Legend." It is the most complete collection of stories about baguazhang that I've seen. It follows all the various lineages down from Dong Haichuan. Wow, how do I put this? Writing should be like fighting a war. I fell asleep six times reading this section.

Still I found lots of material that was new to me. I didn't know that Wang Shujin spent a year studying with Wang Xiangzai, the founder of Yiquan. Hong Yixinag and Wang Shujin Yi were both members of the Yi Guan Dao religious society. "The outer teaching of the sect revolved around the belief that Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam and Christianity are all different expressions of the same universal and unwavering Dao, while the esoteric teaching of the sect involved various qi gong and other energy practices. " Wang was a Yi Guan Dao leader and thus fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan in 1948.

This section has lots of interesting material I didn't know before. I think my frustration with it stems from that fact it wavers between the encyclopedic tracking of all the various bagua masters, and stories about them. Should I memorize these stories? Is there some teaching point behind them? Does this history mean anything?

I know a reason these histories are important. If you go into any park in the morning, anywhere in the world where there are people practicing Chinese martial arts, and do your baguazhang, people will come up to you and ask where you learned. They will probably trace you back to a common gongfu ancestor with someone else in the park. Chances are good that they will ask you to perform and that if you have been taught correctly you will refuse twice, saying each time that you really are not good enough, that you would only embarrass your teacher, and that only your teacher's teacher was really great. But the third time they ask you, it becomes your duty to perform. The benefit of this is that after you perform you can point to anyone who was watching and they will obligated to show their stuff. It's kind of like a drinking game with your "new family."
There is also another reason. Many of us want to know how our individual style got its characteristics. The authors do a good job of tracing this "progress" or "decline" (which ever you prefer) from Dong Haichuan. However; where Dong Haichuan learned his Baguazhang is at this point, just a bunch of ledgends and unconvincing theories.

Frank Allen's main teacher is B.K. Frantzis and since I also do his style of Baguazhang, we have the same lineage through Frantzis to Liu Hengjie (Liu Hung Chieh).

In the section on forms (p. 87-88) the Authors explain why Liu Hung Chieh didn't teach a Baguazhang form and why his style is not orthodox Yinfu or Cheng Tinghua:

While still in his teens, Liu Hung Chieh became the disciple of bagua master, Liu Zhenlin. Liu Hung Chieh furst studied with Liu Zhenlin when Liu was teaching in the school of Cheng Tinghua's son Cheng Youlung and Dong Haichuan's student Liu Dekuan. Liu Zhen Lin was a famous fighter and bodyguard who first studied bagua under Yin Fu's student Liu Yongqing (who was a close friend and training partner of Yin Fu's top student, Ma Gui). The young Liu Zhenlin learned all of his basic bagua from these two masters, but his teachers brought him to bow before and become the disciple of court minister Liang Zhaiwen; in this way, Liu Zhenlin received entry into the third generation of bagua masters, which was the same generation as his foundation teachers. Liang Zhaiwen was a military man who had been the chief guard at the most important fire gate on the Great Wall before becoming a court minister. Due to Liang's position in lthe court, his association with the palace eunuch servant Dong Haichuan was not widely known until after Liang's death. Because he was the top student of Liu Zhenlin, it is same to asume that young Liu Hung Chieh also received training under his teacher's gongfu "uncles," Liu Yongqing and Ma Gui.

I am indebted to the authors for supplying this history even if my regular readers are likely to find it on the boring side. I promise to spice things up in the next couple of posts!

The authors go on to say that Liu Hung Chieh spent many years studying Daoist Circle Walking Meditation which influenced the development of his style of practice and teaching. In my opinion, someone, very possibly Liu, studied Daoist exorcism, not just circle walking. From my experience of Daoist exorcism it is a more likely source for the diverse phyiso-spirit knowledge that Liu passed on to B.K. Frantzis, (even if I'm the only one who thinks so.)
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Ergonomic Crime

Not long ago I read somewhere that Martial Artists are left handed way out of proportion to their presence in the general society. At the time my morning class was 70% lefties.

Is this because us lefties have some advantage in fighting? Or do we just have more inner torment because deep down, we know we don't belong? In Italian left hand is "mano sinistra", the sinister hand.

When children in American schools are at their fastest rate of growth they are forced to sit in chairs that are harmful to their alighnment. The problem is doubled for lefties with long legs. Not that I ever accepted my victim hood; I refused to sit in these types of chairs in high school. If the classroom had them I brought along a foam backpackers mat and sat on it against the wall in the back of class.

The claim that sitting in one of these uncomfortable chairs staring at the back of someone else's head is actually good for learning and taking notes is worse than negligence. It is an ergonomic crime.

Yang-Chu

If you haven't read Yang-Chu, I recommend it. Yang-Chu is considered one of the early voices of Daoism (300 BCE), a voice for wuwei.

His ideas are recorded in the seventh section of the Leizi (Lieh-Tzu). It's a short section and you can read it on-line here.

Yang-Chu said, all we are is a body and a story. It isn't much but applying his minimalism is useful for cutting through hype.

Yang-Chu didn't reject qi, or wealth, or pleasure--to him these are just relative ways of describing experience. He seems a little anti-fame, but that's because he sees freedom in the possibility of changing our story and fame has a tendency to lock us into our stories. We definitely have a body which moves around, thinks, and changes. And we tell all kinds of stories.

It is hardly ever the body that stops people from developing great martial arts skills, it is usually the story that gets in the way.

Most modern people find discussions of fate kind of silly. Like dude, I'm free, right? Yang-Chu cuts through all that. You do have a body, and it does have limitations. Those limitations are not always known, but they do shape our life and our experience of life. Our body does have a fate, or put another way, our fate does have a "shape."

Our story also has limitations, fate. Tell too wacky a story and you'll get yourself locked up. But even if you are walking around with a bad reputation, you are still pretty free to change your story. That freedom to change our story also suggests that we might be able to discard our story or cut it down to a nice manageable size.

The book Blink talks about a guy in Oregon who studied couples on video and developed a scoring system based on observations that could tell him with 90% accuracy if a given couple would still be together in 15 years. When I first heard this I was in shock for a few days. Why was I bothering with all the little details, like doing the dishes and "communicating" if almost all the significant data was in a 15 minute video interview? Is it possible that we really don't have free will?

Anyway, I would really like to get a video scoring system to determine whether or not a student is going to practice everyday, or if they will still be studying gongfu in like 10 years. Heck, I'd like to score myself!

We should definitely be offering discounts to people who have the FATE to practice everyday. What is your fate?

Pretense

Let's drop the pretense for a minute and just admit that the main reason we study Martial Arts is vanity.

We want to look good. We want to be beautiful (you have my permission to roll your eyes) in the bright flowery sense of the word and in the more sublime confident-lion-about-to-pounce-on-a-bear sense of the word.

Wang Xiangzai said that if you call it "quan" (fist/boxing) it should make you healthy, happy and strong.

Should we really claim that gongfu makes sad people happy? And what happens if you already feel happy? Does gongfu make you more happy?

Part of the reason we practice is because we feel beautiful when we do it. I don't normally bring this up to my students because it would make me sound like a pansy, but naturally it's a feeling I try to transmit.  But what happens if you feel beautiful right in the first few weeks of practice, what then becomes the motivation to keep getting better?
Most of us are twice as strong as we need to be for 95% of the tasks we do, and frankly you could put a little less stuff in each grocery bag and still get the job done. While it may be fun to accumulate power and efficiency it doesn't serve much purpose outside of fantasizing about some major fight to the death in some dark alley we aren't likely to venture into anyway.

I was falling asleep trying to read a book as is my habit, and it occurred to me that my health has been extremely good for the last three years. I haven't gotten sick. Actually it was kind of a lament-- because what is getting sick but a chance to spend a couple of weeks bundled up in bed with chicken soup and a pile of good books to read?  I kind of miss it.  Clearly the hours I spend everyday on gongfu practice are not justified by my good health.

So while tomorrow I'm going to pretend I didn't say this, for today let's just admit our main reason for practicing Martial Arts is vanity.

Grip

I stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere on the way to the mountains last month. I checked the oil and it was pretty low so I bought a couple of quarts. I worked in a gas station when I was 14 so I know some tricks for getting a good grip, but my engine was really hot and the oil cap wouldn't budge. I went looking around in my trunk for someway to get more leverage and came up empty. I felt my manhood was being challenged. Just then a thick stocky man, about 6 inches shorter than me said, "Can I give you a hand." I'm sure I looked embarrassed but then I looked at his hands and they were clearly twice the size of mine, his fingers were as thick as cigars. "Sure, uhh...thanks" I said, and he unscrewed it. I asked where he got such huge hands and he said it was his Scottish ancestry.

Bone crushing power like that can not be trained.

I've been looking around the internet for a good picture of a bundle of chopsticks used for developing twisting power and grip strength. I don't see one, but I've done a fair bit of this type of training and I recommend it.

Grabbing is often considered inferior to striking or throwing because if my hands are closed around my opponent's body they aren't free for fighting. In a one-on-one match if someone grabs my wrist, I still have my hand free.

But that's generalizing, in reality there are many different types of grabbing that are effective.

If your grip is strong and well placed it can cause a lot of pain and injury or death to your opponent. For this type of grip to work your wrist, elbow and shoulder must be free to move, not rigid. Your nails must lengthen out like a cats claws with the intent to pierce the skin. The two smallest fingers are actually the strongest part of one's grip for holding, but the two larger fingers combined with the thumb are often superior for piercing.

In Taijiquan the movement "Cai" or plucking is a type of very light grabbing used only when your opponent is already leaning. Cai uses the two larger fingers with the thumb to move you partner on a 45 degree angle toward the ground. It requires no strength training, just sensitivity and clear intention (yi).
Likewise, good grappling technique does not require strength, it is all about positioning and timing. If I get you in a hold it's because I'm sensitive and you've made yourself vulnerable; it can't be planned unless one is using a surprise attack. If I've got you in a hold I can increase the pain or brake the joint with little effort. If I don't have you in the hold, strength isn't going to help me get there.

Half grips are used a lot to suddenly jerk your opponent. Done well these can cause dislocations, but they don't require that you hold on to your opponent, so a light grip works fine.

Curved fingers are used for plucking tendons. This technique is like a grab but the hand doesn't usually close.

What is important about a grip is that it connects to your torso. Twisting a bundle of chopsticks is a good technique for developing this because you are effectively twisting one arm against the other and the two arms meet in the torso where the real power should come from. You can do a simular thing with two hands on a spear.

I also practice a light dynamic grip by using a jian (double edged sword) with a slippery handle.

To develop the ability to inflict pain, you need a willing partner who lets you know what really hurts and what doesn't. You can also practice on yourself to some extent.

Making fists correctly will really develop your hands and improve your grabbing skills. If you don't practice making fists all day long, you're probably not a martial artist. It is painful to hold a solid, tightly packed fist for five minutes unless your technique is good. If it hurts, it is wrong (the spirits have left the body.)

Grabbing should be relaxed. When your hand closes it should feel like your whole torso is wrapping around something, all your organs and big muscles should support the movement. Developing Popeye forearms is a waste of time.

Clairvoyance-Annoyance

Many years ago I studied a mixed internal/external system of gongfu called Lan Shou (Open the Door) with George Xu. I was training 6 hours every day. One of Lan Shou's specialties is the development of ripping and tearing power. We were practicing techniques designed to rip off limbs. It was a lot of fun, no one ever actually got a limb torn off. Injuries were infrequent but when they did occur we used the same basic body of knowledge and experience to fix people that we were using to rip them apart. Years later I learned that we were practicing Tuina (healing massage, literally: push-pull).

When you train to tear off a limb you have to develop specialized Yi, often translated: intentionality. We trained our ability to see weaknesses in peoples underlying structure which could be leveraged to rip a muscle, tendon or ligament. The side effect of all this training is that I would get on the bus and see everyone's chronic physical problems. I would look at someone and imagine myself ripping them apart as if they were a chicken. In my mind each person would come apart in a unique and different way.

The more I trained, the more weaknesses I saw in everyone's underlying structure. It got weird. Finally I decide it was too weird walking around ripping people apart with my mind so I stopped doing that type of practice.

Still, I developed the ability to see and correct alignment problems, and to spontaneously create simple exercises that release tension and increase mobility in joints. This ability is a kind of intuition.

All forms of healing, medicine, and bodywork rely on intuition to some extent. Intuition and clairvoyances are closely related, the difference is that clairvoyance includes a claim of certainty. Superior forms of medicine attempt to verifying what is perceived through intuition, both before and after treatment. Clairvoyant claims are usually self-verifying, and tend to be dismissive of challenges.

In my experience, bodywork is between 60 and 90 percent intuition. The other 10 to 40 percent is technique. I strongly encourage people to develop their intuition, and to reject clairvoyance.

While we can get very technical about mechanisms of injury and repair, we can never be certain what causes healing.

Precpts

The Xiang’er Precepts of the Dao are meant to summarize what the Daodejing says about appropriate conduct. They are held and regularly renewed by all Celestial Master (Tianshi) daoist priests. In a traditional daoist village lay people would also be encouraged to keep these precepts. The word translated here as "practice" is xing which actually means "a way of moving":

The Nine Practices

Practice lacking falseness.

Practice flexibility and weakness.

Practice maintaining the feminine. Do not initiate actions.

Practice lacking fame.

Practice clarity and stillness.

Practice good deeds.

Practice desirelessness

Practice knowing how to cease with sufficiency.

Practice yielding to others.

Translated by Stephen R. Bokenkamp in, Early Daoist Scriptures.

The ninth precept, yielding to others, is wuwei. The first precept probably works better in English as "Be Honest." The second precept is often the tough one for people. The flexibility part sounds cool, but the weakness part is confusing. Here is what Wang Xiangzai says should be the second step of martial arts training:

If one does not have the basic mechanical ability, then no matter what the movement is like, it is all wrong. The same applies to using strength and not using strength. The movements of an ordinary person cannot have strength without constant unilateral tension that disturbs the blood circulation. Every kind of strength based on constant unilateral tension is stiff and inharmonious, and besides that, harmful to health. Having strength without constant unilateral tension is namely having strength without using strength, and when using it, one gains strength.

There is a type of strength that develops from fear of being weak. And there is a type of weakness that develops out of a fear of being too strong. The type of strength (shili) we are trying to reveal when we practice internal arts is potential strength--It can be cultivated while walking, sitting, reclining and standing still.

Walking #4

It's been a busy weekend but I've been reading this interview with Wang Xiangzai that "adz" sent me. It's from the 1940's and really captures Wang's voice like nothing else I've read. He riled people up in a good way. Check it out. If anyone knows the Chinese for "...intuitively perceiving the peristalsis of the whole body," I'd like to know the characters.

Here is my "Dao of the Day": We don't know how humans can walk on two feet.

Birds can walk on two feet but they have huge feet relative to the size and weight of their bodies. Humans have at least six different mechanisms which allow us to balance, a few of which we understand, like fluid in our ears. But basically walking on two feet is still a mystery. When my students are trying to learn something new that seems difficult I remind them that they have already mastered walking, and that's a skill way beyond anything I can teach.

Zhang Sanfeng

I've been weeding around for a standard translation of the Zhang Sanfeng Taijiquan creation story. Every book or website seems to tell the tale a little bit differently.

Let's try this one:

Zhang Sanfeng's family came from Dragon Tiger Mountain (Longhushan). Sometime around the end of the Song Dynasty(960-1279 CE) he passed the Imperial exam and worked for the government. He learned some Shaolin and some jindan (meditation). The Mongols invaded, there was war and a new Yuan Dynasty(1279-1368). Side stepping the turmoil and chaos he went off to live on Wudang mountain.

One day he saw a crane and a snake fighting. Each used different natural styles of movement to yield and attack, but neither the snake nor the crane got hurt. That night he had a dream in which the deity Xuanwu appeared and taught him a way of moving. When he awoke he began practicing what Xuanwu had taught him. Sometime later he was attacked by 100 bandits and using his new practice was able to defeat them all. He lived for over 200 years and his practice eventually became known as Taijiquan.

What does this mean?

The Zhang family residence at Dragon Tiger mountain was the home of the Tianshi, the head priest of Religious Daoism. The name Sanfeng means "three mountains" and most likely means he was a member of an inner alchemy jindan lineage. Lineage names are picked from a secret poem, so people in the same lineage of the same generation sometimes have the same name. Either he really lived for 200 years or was several different people from the same generation within a Daoist lineage.

The last part of Zhang Sanfeng's life corresponds with the founding of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE). At that time the Tianshi, the most important religious leader in the country, went into a nine year retreat on Dragon Tiger mountain for the purpose of teaching the God Xuanwu, to be the head deity of the Chinese pantheon of gods. At the end of the nine years Xuanwu was promoted to the seat at the North Star and given the title Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior. This god was promoted at the request of the first Ming Emperor who had made many sacrifices to Xuanwu (Mysterious/Dark War God) during the years he battled the armies of the previous Yuan Dynasty.

The snake uses wave action, rolling from one one end to the other. The Crane uses opening and closing, drawing in toward the center and pushing out toward the periphery. Zhang lived in a natural setting and practiced Daoist Dreaming. This is the practice of weaving Night and Day seamlessly together. His experiences during the day drifted into his dreams, and his dream body became his waking body.

Infants do not know if they are awake or asleep and they can spend hours playing with their internal organs. To the infant what is inside has no name and what is outside has no name. This undifferentiated state has a name in Chinese: Taiji.

The art of Taijiquan is a guide to weaving our day into our dreams and the unbounded movement of our dream bodies into our waking bodies.

The two Zhang's (Sanfeng and the Tianshi) were on the same mountain, hanging with the same god as he went through a transformation. In Daoism they are called seed people because they carry knowledge from previous eras and make it relevant in the present.

Why Create a Martial Art?

I just wrote a long response to José de Freitas whose comment at the end of the New Students post is worth reading. It raises the very difficult and multi-layered question of why and how Chinese martial arts were created. To answer it adequately requires knowledge of Chinese history, religion, language (my weakness), and martial arts.

Here is an excerpt of my response to stimulate your appetite:

It might make more sense to argue that Chinese Martial Arts were created to promote the idea of universal responsibility. In a world with no aristocracy and no warrior class, it is the citizen-merchant-farmer who must be prepared to defend the nation, the family, and the internal social order. (Notice I did not include self-defense, which did not exist as an excuse for fighting in Chinese history.)

I absolutely love this question. If we look at all the individual and wildly diverse Chinese martial arts and all the individual and wildly diverse motivations people have for training in them--and try to work backwards to explain why they were created; it is a mighty tough task. What were the social milieus that inspired and supported the invention of Chinese martial arts? Do they exist in any form today?

I have commented in previous posts that there are quite a few books these days which assert that martial arts were created and preserved exclusively by people who had martial arts jobs. However; many martial arts creation stories talk about someone wandering out of the wilderness, or dreaming a dream, or finding a secret text. I find it hard to believe that these are just silly stories. It is more likely that they are summaries of a longer, more complex story. So in the next day or so I will take on the Taijiquan creation story.