Yi

In the Early 90's when George Xu came back from judging a tournament on the East Coast, he told us that he had been in an interesting and friendly argument with Nan Lu, a baguazhang practitioner in New York City.

The argument was over how to describe high level Yi. Yi is most often translated "intension," but the English word doesn't do it justice. Some modern Qi jocks now use the word Yinian, generally meaning something more like "mind" but in qigong circles it simply refers to "the pathway along which you intend to send qi."

When George Xu wanted to explain to a beginning student what yi was, he would describe two Doberman-pinchers. Both were told to charge at a group of people. One dog got up close and hesitated, jumping around and barking, not sure who to bite. The other dog, the one with clear yi, immediately bit the neck of the guy with the blue shirt.

George had been arguing that one should train with "killer" yi, the mind should be focused exactly on how to kill the opponent. Nan Lu was arguing that one should have "zero" yi, a mind like a translucent sky. George wasn't willing to concede but he thought Nan Lu's argument had merit.

A more common use of the word Yi, one that nearly all Chinese martial arts teachers use, means to have an awareness of technique. A student has yi in his form when a knowledgeable observer can see the fighting idea in the students movement. Numerous throws, joint breaks, and striking combination possibilities should be apparent.

Every technique must have the correct force trajectories, and these must be practiced on a live partner. These trajectories themselves are also called yi. Martial arts techniques use trajectories which are vectors, arcs, and spirals. All of this is referred to as yi.

One of the magical things about a gongfu form or routine is that because the same movement can be used for many different techniques, a seasoned practitioner will develop more and more complex yi as the years go by. A single movement can have a hundred different expressions.

This seasoned and complex yi at some point starts to look less specific. With very clear yi, it looks like I'm making an upper-cut to the chin. But if I've thoroughly trained 15 different techniques for that movement I can do the movement in what we might call an undifferentiated potential state. Instead of a specific technique or fighting idea showing itself, the yi starts to look like clouds swirling around the body. It is not that you actually see the clouds, what you see is all the possibilities at once.

Practicing at this yi level also feels like clouds, or sometimes like water, fire or mist. Once a practitioner reaches this level, she stops thinking in terms of techniques.

Kumar Frantzis said about Xingyi that when you strike you should be thinking "Only One Thing."

A Samurai by the old code (budo) didn't need technique, he needed only to be willing to die.

Wang Xiangzhai, one of the greatest internal martial artists of the 20th Century, said that "the yi should always be round." I'm working on it.

Song Zhong Jin

I just wanted to throw this term out into cyberspace and see if anyone is interested in discussing what it means.

Song, (first tone in Mandarin) often written sung, is a homonym with pine tree, it means to let go of status, to slack, to relax and to sink.

Zhong means "center," as in Zhongguo (China, center country).

Jin means a type of power which can be cultivated through practice. The word is almost always used in compound form and so it can mean widely different things, like gongjin (empty force, pushing without touching), or tingjin (sensitivity, literally "hearing power").

I believe that song zhong jin means something like: Non-structural power. Perhaps it means power which does not rely on a clear center. It may even mean power which is not transfered or generated through the back, the spine, the bones, or the centerline.

What do you all say?

Balance, Blankets and Gnarly

As a teenager I was very good at skateboarding. This was before the technology of super light boards and thus before all the hopping and kick flips. Living in San Francisco we skated down hill using slalom and sliding techniques on both streets and sidewalks. I can count on one hand the number of people that could keep up with me.

Whenever I size someone up, of course I look at the usual stuff: their alignment, do they look weak in some areas and stronger in others? what kind of reach do they have? but the big question is, could they do something to me that would hurt more than falling off my skateboard at 30 miles an hour onto the pavement and then sliding to a stop?

I don't personally take credit for inventing the word "gnarly" but many of my friends at the time were convinced that I had a claim to first usage.

You can tell someone who is just learning how to skateboard because he or she will try to use their leg muscles to steer (and because they will say, "ahhggrrhh" and then fall down.) Downhill skateboarding requires using the whole body to balance and steer.

Balance is not something you find and maintain, it is the ability to constantly shift your weight around. To someone watching a skateboarder doing slalom down a hill it looks like he or she is leaning forward and back. Actually what happens is the instant one moves their weight to one side of the board, the board starts turning to come underneath the weight. This creates first a feeling of heaviness as your weight goes into the board, and then a feeling of lightness as your forward momentum takes you over to the other side of the board. As your weight crosses the centerline you feel weightless for a moment and then you come down heavy on the other side of the board as it turns again.

This heavy-light-heavy sequence is what wins fights. Think about the key moment of a martial encounter in which your body weight comes into full contact with the other person. Just like skateboarding, if you try to use your leg muscles to balance, you will be bowled over. Balance comes from being able to become suddenly light then suddenly heavy.

One high level description of this is that you first throw a very fine light weight silk blanket over your opponent, then you throw a very heavy one.

The Return of Paulie Zink

I made a point of asking Paulie Zink and his wife to please get some stuff up on Youtube and I probably wasn't the only one. They've done it. And here too.

Even better, he is coming out of retirement to teach Monkey Kung Fu. I also talked to both of them about how extraordinarily wonderful it would be if this Monkey Daoyin was being passed on to kids. I'm thinking here of a Mr. Rogers with mad Kung Fu skills. The wild dynamic world of animation coming to life.

I've been teaching the little bits of his system that I learned to my Northern Shaolin students and they love it. I think I'm going to try to get to Southern California for the workshop.

Dizziness

You know that feeling you get when you spin around really fast and then stop? In the cartoons this feeling is usually illustrated with a swirl and some stars around the head. But actually the whole body has this spinning feeling. You can feel it in your knees and elbows too.

With this sort of disorientation it feels as if there is a body that is now still, and a second body that hasn’t stopped spinning yet. As you gain your baring, it feels as if that "other" body comes back inside.

A similar thing happens to me (and I think most people) when I am laying down very relaxed and still. I feel my body start to move around slowly, even though I know I’m not actually moving. I can control it, but it requires that I relax first, it feels like I'm letting myself drift.

Well this feeling of the body drifting out is an important aspect of Baguazhang, Taijiquan, and Internal Martial Arts practice in general. When I soften my movement to the point where I feel like I’m continuously melting, as I turn side to side it feels like my body keeps turning even after I have stopped. If I follow the "other" body, my solid body will lose its integration, so the correct response is to stop and re-integrate. Then I can turn the other way and repeat the experience on the other side.
When doing a form, or practicing push-hands, or even fighting, we control this 'other' body, circling it around and even throwing it like a light silk blanket over our opponents.

A significant number of martial arts techniques gain efficacy through disorienting the opponent in one way or another.  Likewise, a significant amount of training is designed to familiarize us with strange sensations and orientations so that when they happen in a fight we don't get disoriented.

There have been a few studies that show taijiquan training improves balance in older people.  I like to point out that his is "fallout" from, or a  "sidecar" to, the main project of martial training and cultivating weakness, but never the less it is a nice benefit.

Dong Hai-chuan's foot

Just a simple image for today.

Most Bagua zhang practitioners have heard the story about Dong Hai-chuan breaking a cobble stone with his foot. The story goes, one day a junior student asked why as he was required to walk leading with his toes and pressing his back heal while Dong sometimes stepped on his heel and pushed off his toe? After giving the student a good thrashing for asking a question, Dong went over to a solid cobble stone about 6 inches thick, put his foot on it and shattered it into tiny pieces. Then he said, "When you can do that you can walk however you want!"

OK what's going on here? Old man crushes stone by pushing down on it. Even if he put double his own weight it would not be enough. I've crushed cobble stones--with a sledge hammer. It normally takes a very hard heavy object, like a hammer, being swung from a height to break a stone.

So what is the story supposed to teach us? That Dong was a god made out of steel? That we should just shut up and practice otherwise we'll have to listen to silly stories? That Dong had mastered bring down the Qi of Heaven? Whatever. No, there must be a point to the story.

My take on this story is that every stone has fissures and invisible crack already in it. Dong's foot was so sensitive that when he put his foot on the stone he could feel all the places where it would crack. As he applied pressure his foot expanded and spread all the tiny fissures apart and the rock just crumbled.

To do this your foot would have to be wiggly and dynamic like an octopus and it would have to be as sensitive as a baby's cheek! (OK that's your homework.)

Steps of Perfection (part 2)

Here I continue my discussion of, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, by Donald S. Sutton. (see Here for the earlier post.)

This book has implications for how we understand Martial and all other Chinese arts.  To be fare to the author, this post is more about what the book inspired me to think and less about the actual content of the book.
When Taiwan's Jiajiang martial dance troops are traveling in procession, the head of the procession is a guy carrying a board covered in miniature torture devices. His other hand can hold a whip or various other weapons. Some of the boards appear to be like sandwich boards with various traditional torture devises glued or nailed to the surface.

What's going on? Well, part of what is exciting about this book is that nobody knows exactly. That is, people have explanations but the various explanations don't always jive with each other. However, the practice and how these events should be organized and performed is an orthopraxy, it has a clear right way and a taboo wrong way. This is true even taking into consideration that what is right and what is wrong has some flexibility from troop to troop and has changed somewhat over time.

The the author tells us that during the early part of the Ching Dynasty, before people from Fuzhou came to Taiwan, local magestraites organized parades in which they exhibited the actual devices used by the courts for torturing confessions. As you probably know, all convictions in a Chinese court required a confession. Very often this required a bit of torture. (Trance-mediums were also sometimes used in courts. For instance they might be hired to channel a recently murdered person in order to ask the person, "Who killed you?")

Processions for popular Heavenly gods mimicked the parading that magistrates and other representatives of Earthly government employed. In one account, Sutton describes how a magistrate and his entourage are forced to wait for some offensive amount of time while a god (often a youth with a painted face) passes by in a sedan chair dressed in magistrate like robes with a simular but perhaps larger entourage.

In the West, for reasons I won't go into here, we gradually decided that torturing a confession was a bad idea. But in China, torture by degrees took on various meanings which where not all together bad.

At a basic level, a confession can play a role in creating a feeling of resolution. This is true for society in criminal cases, but it is also true in personal relationships. An honest reckoning is actually essential for progress in any field or practice. A martial artist that doesn't admit the mistakes they have made in training will surely fail to progress. A person filled with shame who continues to avoid a confession or an honest reckoning will continue to do shameful things. For people with pour eating habits or hygiene, an honest reckoning can extend their lives.

Thus confessions were associated with both healing and merit. The threat of torture in the near future or by ghosts and demons during the slow process of being re-assimilated by heaven and earth at the time of ones death, was and is still thought to motivate people to confess their indiscretions.

Daoists framed this discussion in terms of qi. Indiscretions could be thought of as qi crimes, which were graded from the most extreme, killing people for fun, to the most subtle, using too much effort for a simple task like opening a door.

Social reforms, from a Daoist point of view generally incorporated the idea that bad behavior, like wasting qi, has consequences for the actor that take effect very quickly after the act. In other words, humans are self-correcting entities. We torture ourselves. The problem is that people aren't always paying attention to these consequences. This is one of the reasons that Daoists developed so many methods that develop sensitivity to are own body.

Hard styles and soft styles of martial arts can be understood this way. A hard style is a form of self torture in which the pain you cause in practice acts as a corrective agent, leading you to acts of merit (which is what Kung Fu means!) A soft style like taijiquan, is based on the idea that on any given day we are committing numerous qi indiscretions (or small qi crimes if you prefer) and that we ought to dedicate an hour or two a day to practicing not wasting qi.

Aggression, of course, is a constant "cause" of qi wasting. From a Daoist point of view, if you lose your temper, you probably caused yourself a very minor internal injury, but you also caused some kind of reaction in the world around you. That reaction, like a ripple in a pond might dissipate gently, but it also might lead to a tidal wave somewhere down the line. And since we have no way of really knowing, losing your temper is seen as inappropriate. I think it is important to note, that from a Daoist point of view, well timed aggression may be worth the risk.

At the Acupuncture college where I teach it is well known that if given a choice between two treatments, most native born Chinese will choose the more painful treatment. I believe the inspirations for this, perhaps buried deep in the unconscious, is that acupuncture and moxabustion are like mini-torture sessions in which worldly and other worldly "causes" of pain and illness are forced to confess and correct their ways!

Two Talismanic Questons

I started a new Northern Shaolin teaching gig today, three classes of 1st graders. Yes they are sweet and cute and enthusiastic. That brings my weekly teaching total to 11 kids classes and 9 adult classes. Which leaves me just enough time to write one weakness inspired blog post every day.

I have more to say on yesterday's post but it will have to wait until tomorrow when I have more time to think.

Six months ago I wrote down two questions which I posted on the cork board above my desk. Besides being talismanic, the questions have functioned as a daily mini-mantra check-in.

My practice has seen more positive change in the last six months than it did in the previous two years. I, of course, credit you all, my virtual audience, because writing and exchanging has forced me to re-think and unravel all the metaphors and methods I employ in my practice. So thanks!

But then again, maybe it was those questions. So here they are. And feel free to make them into a talisman or a mantra.

Do you own your legs?

Do you trust your arms?

Steps of Perfection (part 1)

Before our former vice president invented the internet I had a habit of reading thick scholarly books. Now, I have to go hide out in the mountains for a few days or feign illness if I want to get through something really erudite.

While I love these books they are the opposite of juicy. That being said, if you have the discipline or isolation to really read a book, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, by Donald S. Sutton, is an impressive work.

This book falls in the the category of books which are so scholarly they hint at the juicy ground breaking ideas rather than say them outright. With a book like this you have to read the footnotes or you might miss the best part of the argument.

The book is about a type of Chinese martial dance called Jiajiang which runs roughshod over all Western categories of conceptualization to such an extent that it takes a whole book just to say what the dance is. Sutton took a lot of video in 1993 while researching this book, and I would give one of my best swords to see the best of that tape. The book should have a DVD, but I guess the author didn't have proper releases or something (he hasn't answered my emails on this question so I don't know.)

(Here is a google video search for Jiajiang, someone with better Chinese language skills can probably find some better stuff, wink, wink? )

The scope of this book appears on the face of it to be narrow, but the implications of the book for conceptualizing Chinese martial arts, medicine and religion are huge. I'm going to spend a few days talking about this book so let me spin off for a minute to get you oriented.

The long history of the survival of various civilizations could be viewed as the project of getting nice people to fight. There are now and there have always been, humans who love killing. The duty of the civilized and the free is to see to it that people who love killing do not get into positions of power; and that in the event that such people do get into positions of power, they get taken out.

How that happens in each and every civilization or era is different. Historically in China there were several layers of organized armed groups which shared the duty of keeping power civil: Standing armies, militias, small professional forces maintained by a magistrate, and local family protection societies.

How do you get people to support the common good in an environment in which there are competing interests. Part of what this book deals with is how people are connected through ritual, and how various needs of the different layers of society find their way into ritual expression. Yikes that's a mouthful.

The jiajiang martial dancers share some of the important roots of modern martial arts. Sutton maps a spacial environment in which different ways of organizing reality overlap and interact.

In one corner you have Daoist ritual which is done in private. Orthodox Daoists by definition do not subordinate to deities. They perform rituals with cosmological forces that go unseen by the general public, but exist in peoples' imaginations. People know about them, even if they don't see them. Daoists are part of a bigger landscape of ritual relationships, and they represent a particular approach to life.

In another corner are the representatives of a government which has its own rituals. Historically, for instance, magistrates would arrive in an area with a sedan chair and an entourage, sometimes huge processions demonstrating real power.

In another corner there are the trance-mediums who publicly speak for and with the gods, controlling and healing people with other worldly powers, spells, and self-mortification.

Then there is the corner of medicine and elite scholarly exchange which merges in to the much larger realm of commerce.

And then there is the popular realm where local elites interact with the guy who drives the gravel truck. Where martial artists train and perform gongfu, where school kids learn martial dance routines for a two day festival procession that twists around visiting local temples and homes. Where the presence of the dead is felt in places people frequent and exorcism is a regular occurrence. A place where gods and demons possess not just mediums, but the guy you went to high school with.

The fighting dream dances of Taijiquan and Baguazhang came out of this world, and like everything else that grew up in Chinese society, these arts have a limb in each corner.

A New Word

The word orthodox is pretty common. It means a right way of thinking or a correct standard way of understanding.

When it comes to taijiquan and really any Chinese martial art there really isn't an orthodoxy. There are definitely lineages which transmit explanations and define concepts, but really it is the practice which holds to a standard, not the ideas.

A lineage holds together a list of practices. If you ask a teacher or a practitioner why they do a certain movement, or what it's function is, or even what one should try to accomplish with a particular aspect of practice--you'll get wildly different answers. And it's not just that different people in the same lineage will give you a different answer, ask the same person twice and you're likely to get a different answer the second time.

For instance, what a teacher says about the function of the movement "play the pipa," can vary tremendously-- one day it has some health or relaxation feature, another day it is a foot hook with a shove, another day it is a joint lock, another day it is a foot trap with a slap, another day it is a technique for breaking the neck, another day it is a throw from the hip, another day it is a throw from the neck, another day it is a way to catch the eyes............................................................................................Hey don't go thinking I'm a broken record (for you youngsters that's an old fashioned musical devise that sometimes repeats itself). I taught gongfu to kids for 4 hours today, at two different sites and adults for 3.5 hours at two different sites, and I had a business meeting at another site--all this in the rain...I am tired!...but my appetite for blogging is over powering my appetite for sleep. (See yesterday's blog below.)

Anyway I was telling you dear reader about a new word: Orthopraxy. Taijiquan is an orthopraxy. A martial arts lineage is an orthopraxy, it is a correct way of doing something. It is not a correct way of thinking about or explaining something. Get it?

I'm sure you get it. But immediately this raises another question.  I practice an orthoprax style of taijiquan, fine, but I've been innovating new movements with my xingyi, what do I call that? Not heterdox but heteroprax!

When you are just doing your own thing, we can now call that heteropraxy!

Note to the Oxford English Dictionary: I suspect you will be including heteropraxy in your next addition. Please include my URL when you site me as an example of first uses. Thanks!