Bowing

There is a Daoist precept against subordination. In fact there is a precept (one of the 180 of Lord Lao) that says, "Do not serve in the military. If you must serve in the military do not serve in a subordinate position." I take this to mean join as an officer and be in a position to make decisions about life and death.

I think people living as we do in a commercial society find the idea of not being subordinate both appealing and at times unworkable.

(Currently I feel subordinate to my web hosting service and my ISP which are never able to solve all the weird intermittent and indeterminate problems I have in my daily struggle/walk-in-the-sun to publish my blog. 2 hours on the phone, zero results. If you occasionally get a “Yahoo 404 Error� or a "500 error" when you try to read my blog, I’d love to hear from you.)

What is the purpose of bowing? A traditional class has at least three bows. The first bow is done upon entering the space. Why bow to the space? This tradition comes out of the shamanic practice of subordinating oneself to allies (gods, spirits, ancestors) in exchange for power. The power one gets through subordination is then used to exorcise, scare away, or subordinate all other beings in a given space. It is often called "purification." (Today at the farmer’s market I watched a large man attempt a rather weak version of purification while swinging a bible and shouting in a horse voice about revelation.)



The Japanese term Dojo means Hall of the Dao. It most likely comes from Sung Dynasty (900-1200 CE) Daoism. Clan halls, trade halls, and halls associated with the mega-deity-category "Earth," were used as community centers, places for everything (Dao). When you entered one of these halls to practice gongfu (meritorious martial training) it was important to clear the space of spirits that might try to possess you--dangerous spirits are particularly attracted to weapons and those who wield them.

When a shaman purifies a space, she uses her acquired strength to forcibly evict all the ghosts and spirits that have taken up residence there. Since Daoists did not practice subordination to other entities and they were weak by precept and commitment, they didn’t actually purify the space immediately. Instead they bowed. The act of bowing is a declaration that human beings are going to temporarily use the space for meritorious actions. Bowing doesn’t scare away ghosts, or banish them. Bowing is a way of asking spirits to temporarily clear out. It is a declaration that the practice about to be performed will not be of any interest to ghosts. A ghost is an entity defined by weak, deficient, or lingering commitments.

The second bow is usually to the teacher. The teacher joins this bow because the bow is not to the person but to the teaching itself. It is as if all the teacher’s teachers are standing behind him and he ducks so that the bow of the students will fly over his head to be received by all of the ancestors of the teaching itself.

(In many schools, before and after working with a partner people will bow to each other as equals. This bow again represents a declaration to practice only acts of merit.)

The third bow is to give up the space to who ever or what ever is going to use it next. It cautiously invites the spirits back. After doing this ritual in a space for several years the spirits attracted to dangerous behavior or people with weak commitments will have had time to find another place and will have moved on. Through this continual demonstration of acts of merit (gongfu) some spirits will have found the strength to complete themselves and become one with Dao. Thus we call this place a Dojo, a hall of the Dao.

Conference on Daoism

On Saturday I made it to the last session of this conference on Quanzhen Daoism, which was exciting. Unfortunately I didn't get any of the papers in advance so I'm just reading them now.

David A. Palmer and an old friend of mine Elijah Siegler are collaborating on an interesting project investigating the relationship between Daoism in America and Daoism in China. Unfortunately the paper is in draft form with a request not to cite or circulate, so I'm not going to talk about it, but it seems like a good time to link to my own "American Daoist, Tours China" article. This is really just a bunch of emails I sent out to friends in 2001 before I had even heard the word "blog" but if you can stomach the jarring transitions and feeble use of paragraphs, I do explore some of the same questions these scholars are asking.

David A. Palmer has a book I'm dying to read and review, but If you want to pick it up before I review it, here it is: Qigong Fever.

I met Terry Kleeman whose book Great Perfecton deals with the multi-ethnic origins of Daoism. It is a difficult read, but if juicy footnotes make you hot, you'll love it.

I also talked with Paul R. Katz whose book Images of the Immortal deals with Lu Dongbin and the founding of Quanzhen Daoism. When I read this book my particular interest was in his thorough exploration of the on-again off-again relationship of Quanzhen (Perfect Realization) to Zhengyi (Orthodox Daoism).

Professor Katz immediately picked up on my interest in the links between martial arts and ritual performance, exorcism and social organization. He recommend three books, so I have some serious reading to do. He also has a new book out called When Valleys Turned Blood Red: The Ta-pa-ni Incident in Colonial Taiwan.

Lastly I've gotten some requests for references backing up my claims about rhythm and music in my videos African Bagua and African Bagua 2. So I plan to write a few blogs on Daoism Martial Arts and Music. Let me just say up front that I stand by the claims I make, but if you want to understand why I make the claims I do, the place to start is reading all the major writers of the 100 Schools who wrote on music during the Warring States Era (400-200 BCE), starting with Xunzi, Mozi, and Hanfeizi.  Laozi, Zhuangzi, Confucius and Mencius also all comment on music and its place in society.  There isn't one book to read.  The major writers on Daoist ritual all have chapters on music.  As someone who came to Daoism and Martial arts with a dancer's ear, I've listened for references to music all along and slowly put together my ideas.

The Era of Conditioning

I want to announce that we have officially entered the Era of Conditioning.

Conditioning has now become one of the primary ways we think about the world. It is not enough to learn good habits, we have to make them permanent. People ask questions like: How can we condition people to put their garbage in the trash? To not over eat? To work more productively? To not run red lights? To get on an airplane efficiently? To smile?

Sports, physical therapy, and parenting are all dominated by theories of conditioning. I did some boxing yesterday with gloves and mitts, issuing combinations of punches as the trainer calls them out. The whole idea is to condition a response in a cycle that is intense for 3 minutes and then rests for 1 minute. Release a combination when you see an opening, get your body out of the way when you are attacked.

Medicine is moving fast in the direction of conditioning. Like drugs that condition a particular response from the body. And more shockingly, we now have genetic engineering and stem cell research predicated on the idea that we can grow people the way we want them.

People are even trying to condition their hair!

I'm anti-conditioning. I believe in doing things form the inside out. If I said, "I believe in beginning from the heart," you could accuse me of being a silly romantic. But it's not because I want to bring out genius, or preserve mystery, I just prefer spontaneous unconditioned responses.

I try to teach people to have unconditioned responses. For me, teaching Shaolin to kids is about meeting completely self possessed human beings and presenting them with a tool they can use to keep their bodies unconditioned. A tool for countering or side-stepping conditioning. When a student enters the room the first thing they do is bow. The act of bowing is a declaration that only completely self possessed acts will happen in this room. Students are not permitted to say the words "I can't" because those words mean "something outside of you is in control." Teaching is not something one gives away, it is too difficult for that. It is something students must take for themselves.

In Chinese the term ziran means unconditioned and is often used to describe great art. It means: natural, so-of-itself, and spontaneous. There is even a style of gongfu called Ziranquan (Natural fist) famous for its loose light stepping. (Sun Yat-sen used a Ziranquan guy for his personal bodyguard.)
There is a fine line between super-high-level internal martial arts conditioning and a completely unconditioned, spontaneous, ziran response. It is the same fine line I have talked about before between "perfection," and "wuwei."

For instance, there are three approaches to jindan, the Daoist golden elixir (meditation/alchemy).

1. We could have the embarrassing idea popularized by Mantak Chia that we are moving qi around the micro-cosmic orbit (up the back and down the front), for no particular reason except "orgasmic power." That would be a type of qi conditioning, an act of inviting external forces to possess you.
2. Or we could have the perfection model of jindan, where through perfect visualization and embodiment of various deities and their attributes we become acutely aware of simultaneous movement and stillness. Here specific pathways of qi circulation become the measure of that swing between movement and stillness. That would be transcendent conditioning.

3. Or we could just naturally trust being still.

American Qigong Ethics (part 3)

Here are a few more American Qigong Ethics.

2. Know the actual history and cultural context of your qigong methods. Are they part of a larger system or tradition? What inspired them? Don't exaggerate your knowledge or experience--or that of your teacher.

3. Be explicit about what your qigong methods are supposed to do. Being honest here may be counter intuitive. Because kinesthetic learning is characterized by continuously changing cognitive understanding, my best explanation of what a method will do is the one catered to the kinesthetic knowledge of the listener. In other words, this will not lead to pigeon-holing. More likely it will lead to complexity with some ambiguity.

For example, in In Erle Montaigue's book Power Taiji (Which by the way I like because his writing has the flexibility of a conversation.) he lists the Taijiquan posture/movement "Repulse Monkey," as being good for the Gallbladder. While I have a clear and distinct perception of my gallbladder and can evaluate "Repulse Monkey's" direct effect on my gallbladder, most people can not. I also happen to know that in classical Chinese the term "gallbladder" is not only technical but highly metaphoric, it means to open into a springtime of revitalization that will re-inspire and give support to your decision-making capabilities. In contrast, in English the gallbladder produces bile.

If you understand the statement "Repulse Monkey is good for the gallbladder" the way I do, than you also understand that it is not referring to a remedy. It is an engaged process of complete embodiment. My regular readers will recognize this statement as being in tune with a world view that encouraged long-life, slow motion, continuous and consensual exorcism.

4. Help your students understand their own motivations. Don't encourage people to practice for silly reasons or reasons which will eventually leave them feeling disappointed.

(For instance, regular practice of taijiquan will make your calf muscles smaller, so don't expect to look better in These boots!)

American Qigong Ethics (updated)

As Americans we have always come face to face with cultures different from our own. Multi-culturalism is an ethic based on our sense of what is right and good and desirable in a society. Unfortunately multiculturalism often gets conflated with cultural relativism.

We acknowledge that people from other cultures have different rituals and customs, as well as different narratives (historical perspectives) and priorities.
Multiculturalism is the idea that we can all benefit from a cosmopolitan environment where there is tolerance for gatherings with culturally distinct attributes and which nurture traditional or historic world views and practices. This is because such an environment leads to a greater good. Through hybridization and cross-cultural integration, we can incubate creativity and innovation.

This idea grows out of a more primitive one, "Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water." An expression which reveals the tension between innovation and tradition found in cosmopolitan environments.

Cultural relativism is the simple idea that what seems real or true to people from one culture may not seem so to people from another. A further corollary to this idea is that the methods people of a particular culture use to test or measure whether something is true or real are often different than those of another culture.

The idea of cultural relativism opens the possibility that we may be wrong about how we decide what is right. Why? Because when we cross a cultural boundary the measure or test which determines what is real or what is true may have changed. Such boundary crossing can happen in a cosmopolitan environment, but multiculturalism as a value stands clearly in my culture, which also happens to value personal freedom and commerce.

Where cultural relativism and multiculturalism become conflated a kind of reluctance or hesitancy to make ethical decisions can lead to a weakening of ethics all around. Fertile ground for cultural and social fundamentalists.

How do we know when subordination of someone else is wrong? How do we know if, indeed, subordinating ourselves is wrong?

This is all pretty relevant to qigong because there really are no qigong traditionalists or qigong conservatives. Everyone is an innovator because qigong as a distinct concept is a new invention. It is a creation of cities. Mainland Chinese cities had explosions of Qigong in the 1980's and 90's, imagine a thousand people all practicing together in a park. The government felt that Qigong was out of control and dangerous so it instituted certifications and regulations. Some teachers went into exile, some went to jail, some styles were made illegal, some went underground, but most found a way to work with the government.
The ethical issues that arise teaching Qigong in America (and elsewhere) are different from those in China. We don't need certifications or oversight. We do need good cross-cultural communication and ways to assess the value of a particular style or teacher.

Historically speaking, it is safe to say gongfu (one of the roots of qigong) has been practiced for a thousand years, and probably longer. People could study and practice movement or meditation or martial arts routines within their families or villages. The Chinese word for village is "cheng," which actually means "wall."  All the people within the city "wall" shared the same body of  ethics.

China also has a long history of itinerant performers, healers and religious teachers. Most often these were also associated with a family and a village. Even a traveling Gongfu-Opera-Circus likely had a home, a family and a particular religious association. The historic conflation of performers, healers, ritual experts and religious teachers makes it difficult to create ethical standards for teaching modern qigong. It has all of these roots.


If you are teaching "qigong healing" and just happen to pull a rabbit out of your hat, is it ethical to say "My qi is feeling jumpy today?" I think not. I think you should say, "I will now attempt to pull a rabbit out of my hat," do the deed, then say, "Ta-Dah!" and take a bow.

The ethic of multiculturalism requires us to tolerate some weird blending of performance and healing, but those same ethics also require us to hybridize by drawing some dotted-lines between, for instance, performance and healing, or stretching and kowtowing.

In trying to understand and practice qigong and gongfu ethically, we should be aware of the religious meaning in these practices, and the relationship our style has to various healing, performing and devotional traditions.

Meditation Muscle

In an earlier post I talked about the invocation of Zhenwu (The Perfected Warrior) as a preliminary stage of all meditation. In the secular world, which includes Zen, Yiquan, and Vipasina among others, the invocation of of the Perfected Warrior becomes just "the discipline to be still."

Particularly in the Soto School of Zen (Chan) the posture itself is the central teaching, the method and the fruition. Zen has the Zhenwu preliminary stage, it just isn't given any attention in the teaching, except to say, "sit still."

In Yiquan, Zhenwu becomes a barely active body. Thus students are instructed to wrap their arms around an imaginary tree and try to move it. This constant vigilance could also be called "stillness ready to pounce."

While it is entirely possible to just start practicing meditation with no instruction save a posture; meditation does require a certain kind of strength. Let's call it meditation muscle.  Generally the Zen tradition helps people build this meditation muscle by having new students join a daily group of people who have already established a committed practice.

Willing oneself to "be still" by constantly resisting the urge to move has the same effect as the Yiquan approach of "stillness ready to pounce." Both approaches develop this meditation muscle. They are both pulling on the same "rope."

Since we are not actually Zhenwu (a permanently meditating war god ready at any moment to leap up and charge off into battle), all these methods give-in to something softer and weaker, they reveal our true nature--they are non-productive.

Chansi Jin (Silk Reeling Power)

I dropped by to see George Xu yesterday and he gave me this great list of the seven levels of chansijin.

1. Like a Three-Section Staff.


2. Like a Rope.


3. Like a Snake.


4. The Dantian becomes a perfect ball that rolls in all directions.


5. The Outside and Inside move together.


6. Sense of space moves the body.


7. The mind spirals. (Only the opponent feels the spiral.)

Chansijin is closely associated with Chen Style Taijiquan, but the idea of spiraling is common to most internal martial arts. Chen Style has spun-off its own qigong system called chansigong (silk reeling work). The metaphor here is the act of transferring a silk cocoon to a spool by pulling just a single filament (strand) of silk out of the cocoon. The filament is gently attached to the spool and then the spool is slowly and continuously turned. Once you have many spools of filament silk, they can be spun together into a very strong thread, which can be made into fabric.

When I studied with Zhang Xuexin he liked to call this same practice "making noodles" which mixed the metaphors of pulling and twisting with the resulting looseness.

The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (last chapter)

The last chapter of The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, is titled "A Moving Yi Jing." The meat and potatoes of this chapter are two great lists.

The first list is a paragraph for each of the qi transmissions associated with each of the eight "mother palms" and gua (trigrams) of B.K. Frantzis's baguazhang system (which has no form).

The qi transmissions are supplemented in the applications section too. The authors clearly and succinctly describe the feeling of each palm change; how it moves and what makes it distinct. They also explain that the best way to develop these qi transmissions is through the practice of Soft-hands, Roshou (a dynamic moving and slapping version of push-hands).

I plan to do a video for each of the Baguazhang qi transmissions with in a year.

What is a Daoist Body? 

The second list is this:

1. The Physical Body


2. The Qi Body


3. The Emotional Body


4. The Thinking Body


5. The Psychic Body


6. The Causal Body


7. The Body of Individuality


8. The body of the Dao

The authors give very short descriptions of what each category might mean, calling them energy bodies. Beyond that what they say is embarrassing for it's lack of connection to anything real.  (Baguazhang is not a self-help program, and neither is the Yijing.)
Religious Daoism conceptualizes a human being as not just one body but many bodies. Calling them "energy bodies" is misleading. Your house is a body that you share with everyone else who lives there. You can clean, remodel, or move to another house, but the fact that you have such a body is a given. All bodies relate to other bodies. If you live in a damp shack for a month your physical body will start to creek at the joints and your lung capacity will decrease (effecting your qi body).

The way religious Daoists conceptualize it, we share a body with everyone who reads this blog or speaks English. More importantly, we share a body with everyone who makes the same commitments we do, thus Christians all share a body, Muslims all share a body, and everyone who worships Guanyin shares a body.

Ghosts have very weak bodies, demons and gods very strong ones (we give them our strength).

Horror movies are so visceral because as you watch them your various "commitment bodies" are being contorted, poked and exploded. (Obviously, I love the horror genre.)

This is a list used to train Daoist exorcists. In order to do an exorcism you must be able to recognize all the different types of possession in other people and in yourself.

1. Physical possession is pain. In it's lesser forms we recognize it as tension or even "strength." Physical possession causes people to lash out and to blame.


2. Qi possession is associated with controlling the breath, it amplifies feelings, creates excitement and it can lead to transcendent states. (Godlike or "I can't feel my body" types of disassociation.) Mania.


3. Emotional possession translates perfectly into English. Possessed by fear, anger, love, etc...


4. Thinking possession is like believing that the oceans are going to rise because we drive to work. Or that everything that happens in the Middle-East matters. You know, "Global Conspiracy," "The world is in crisis, dude."


5. Psychic possession is believing you know what someone else is thinking, or what is about to happen next.


6. Causal possession is like schizophrenia. When you think objects or icons or voices in your head are the cause of something in the real world. Profound disassociation.


7. The body of Individuation is supreme ego-mania. There are a number of narcotics that can bring about this near-death experience. It is when you feel/believe that you are the cause and purpose of everything.


8. The body of the Dao is a complete death. Sometimes call immortality. It is experience without any limits or conceptions.

Baguazhang is a dance form that explores all the different ways we can become possessed.  It is dancing with what it is to be alive.  Perhaps we could think of it as a personal, daily exorcism, although that certianly isn't traditional.

In case I lost you-- and you don't see the connection to martial arts-- notice that I just made a really good list of what might cause someone to attack you.

The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (Part 4)

Continuing my discussion of the Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, by Frank Allen and Tina Chunna Zhang, we turn to the chapter entitled "The Daoist Roots of Baguazhang."

The chapter can be summarized like this: Dong Haichuan and Liu Hung Chieh both studied with some unnamed Daoists and Daoists do meditation. Baguazhang practitioners do sitting, standing, and walking meditation, which must have come from these unnamed Daoists. See the problem yet?

In the second paragraph we read:

Apparently, these Daosits looked to their predecessors--the shaman founders of Chinese culture--for some of the patterns of their moving meditations. Some of the oldest texts relating to the study of the Dao have chronicled a few of the dance patterns of the legendary Yu, mythical father of Chinese Shamanism. The patterns of many of these Shamanistic practices were circles and spirals.

The connection of the Dance of Yu to baguazhang is one of those big multi-layered topics for another day. But I can at least point out what the authors don't; Da Yu (the Great Yu) was an exorcist. The reason he is considered the founder of Chinese culture is because 4000 years ago he toured the known world (the whole country) performing the first national exorcisms.



I grew up around a lot of Cantonese speaking kids. When they got mad they would shout "Fuk Da Yu!" which sounded so much like F--k Y-u! that we had a lot of fun saying it. It turns out that they were saying "A curse upon your ancestors." Yu is the mythic ancestor of all Chinese and his name has actually come to mean "ancestor!"

The authors present Professor Kang Gewu's thesis that the roots of baguazhang are to be found in a circle walking practice of the Longmen sect. The concept of "secularism" does not translate very well into Chinese. For instance, Catholicism and Protestantism have often been viewed by Chinese as completely different religions. The idea that Daoism has sects is foreign to Daoism itself. This notion adds somewhat to the confusion about baguazhang's daoist roots. If it's possible to be ordained in a Quanzhen monastery, go and study ritual with a Tianshi householder, and then go live in a Zhengyi hermit enclave on Mao Mountain--then these categories don't meet the definition of sects.

To the authors credit, Longmen (Dragon gate) is correctly identified as a later Daoist lineage (1656) of the Qing Dynasty which merged with Confucianism and promoted a public code of conduct for lay practitioners. (I think of it as decaf-Daoism. It would be very hard to figure out why people drink coffee everyday if the only kind you had ever tried was decaf.)

That's most of what the authors have to say about Daoism. At one point they describe the meditative goal of circle walking as, to "make heaven and earth reside within one's own body," thus joining our inner world with the outer world to become "One with the Dao." Thanks for that. Basic Chinese cosmology posits that we are a temporary contract between Heaven and Earth to hang out in a body for, give or take, 80 years. How does walking in a circle make that more or less true?

In the second half of this chapter, the authors describe in detail a method of "dissolving" taught by B.K. Frantzis. The method described here is great. The problem is that without contextualization, without some grasp of the view which inspired this method, there is a very high probability that the fruition of practice will be overlooked. (And that appears to be what happened.)

The method they describe has the goal of clearing "energy blockages" from the body so that we can store unlimited amounts of qi. I'm deeply familiar with this method but I don't personally like to think of myself as being full of energy blockages, whatever that means. Frankly, the method is not very important.

My intension is not to sound dismissive, by all means, clear out those energy blocks! But taking a step back, isn't that what I am-- a big old energy blockage. To all my fellow energy blockages out there (this means you, dear reader) I say this: Respect yourself, lighten up, and trust your experience. You'll figure it out.

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The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (Part 3)

Chapter 6 is a translation with commentary on the Bagauzhang Classics. If someone actually thought these ideas worth putting into poetry, I should hope that an effort would be made to make them sound like poetry in English. Maybe the problem is in the original, I can't tell. The book doesn't give enough background about these classics for me to know if I should take them seriously. They don't say much. The Taiji Classics where written for the advanced student, but these classics seem more rudimentary. Usually poetry is multi-layered, but if there is a second layer to these classics, the translation hides it. Why are we writing songs about martial arts anyway? In an age of video, a martial arts song better have some substance.
Here is a song about martial arts worth singing. "bmm bmm bmm...another one bites the dust."

Still, I'm going to study the classics. I can't help it. But I find myself wishing they said something different. Here is a fun one (#33). The Chinese title is "not-two-natural-principle" The authors' translated it "Accuracy Method.":

Do not shoot an arrow without a target,
Shoot again if the target is missed.
Even if he moves like a ghost,
I catch the evil spirit in no time.

The authors commentary interprets this to mean be accurate, wait rather than strike blindly. If you strike and miss, you leave yourself open. If you do miss, keep striking constantly until you win.
This was worth putting into poetry? A jade-maiden just whispered this in my ear, perhaps it is an improvement:

Baguazhang is an art without arrows or targets;
If something can be missed once, it can be missed again.
Even if my opponent is already committed to his own death,
No time or distance separates us.

Here is another one from the book (#31):

Blocking is a skill of protecting,
To avoid attacks with a casual attitude.
When the distance is more than inches away,
Skills are useless and power will not be effective.

The commentary says it means blocking is important and should be casual and effortless. Be close enough to block, if you are too far away you won't be in control.

Oh, I feel another tickle in my ear. She says write!

If blocking works, it's not a real fight.
It's not my intension to melt,
I simply have nothing to protect.
Wolves bite flesh, not air.