Three Powers

Something that all martial arts share is the three powers.  The powers are:

1. Front and Back


2. Left and Right


3. Up and Down

An individual fighter or a martial arts system can be assessed based on how effectively the three powers are used.

Front and back power is the most common and the least powerful of the three, but without it you will always be too close or too far away.  It is the kind of power used in a 'steppin'a'jab, steppin'a'jab' type technique.  It usually involves a shift of weight.  It can be accompanied by a snap or a push or a twist or any old force multiplier.  The main issue in training front back power is getting the student to not lean.  With leaning the power becomes 'front only' power and while most of us would prefer not to get hit by a football linebacker, such power is vulnerable to attacks from other angles and is easily diminished by getting out of its direct path.

Left and right power is characteristic of anyone with fighting training.  The key for a beginner is turning at the kua, the hip socket.  If you turn from the spine or from somewhere on the leg, right and left power will become 'right only' power.  I can't really think of a kungfu technique which will function against a resisting opponent without left and right power.  If you are going to use more than one hook punch, you must have this kind of power.  If you are going to execute a throw without following your opponent to the ground, you must have this power.  Left and right power is the most strategic of the three powers.  It opens up possibilities.

Up and down power is by far the most powerful of the three.  Effective use of up and down power will increase your power by about 8 times.  Can you stop an upright man from rising by pressing down on his shoulders or on his hips?  No, even without any training, if you ask a  man to bend his knees but keep his back straight, you can not hold him down by pushing on his shoulders.  It would take 8 men pushing down to stop him from coming up.   But up and down power is difficult to use.  The exceptions to this are stomping on someone when they are down, and downward elbow strikes, both are very powerful techniques and take little training.  But when using downward power like a chop or a hammer punch, most people become stiff and carry their own body weight rather than putting their weight on their opponent.  Alternately people are too loose and risk tearing their own shoulder joint.  When trying to use force upwards, most people float and become too top heavy, making them easy to unbalance or topple.  An effective upper-cut, as a lower level technique, relies heavily on accurate targeting.  At the higher levels of skill an uppercut is simply unstoppable, regardless of where it hits you.

The three powers are also sometimes called the six dimensions of power, or six harmonies.  To use each of these powers effectively the two aspects of each power must be inside of each other.   A movement forward must have backwards movement already active inside of it.  A leftward movement must already be moving right.  And so on.  This is written in the Taijiquan classics and many other sources.

These three powers are actually a state of mind.  Together they are a posture which leaves no opening for an attack.  Through the use of these powers the body disappears and we begin to fight using the limitlessness of space.  Baguazhang mud walking without these three powers becomes hard parched earth.  The taijiquan form without these three powers is frail and trivial.

But fighting skills aside, these three powers are luminosity (ming).  This is what brings tea ceremony to life.  This is the archetique's eye.  By this, we are humbled before great art.

Fear vs. Danger: The Real History of Martial Arts and Trance

Sgt. Rory over at Chiron has been talking about the difference between fear management and danger management and the comments are interesting.  Basically Sgt. Rory says that a lot of martial artists are using a fantasy of martial prowess to convince themselves that they are capable of real fighting.  They do this with a combination of bravado, group think, and talismanic power emblems like 'The Black Belt.'  For someone like Sgt. Rory, who does danger management for a job, fantasies can get you killed.

So the real question is, if martial arts were created for real situations, why is everyone acting so dumb?

In other posts and in his book,  Sgt. Rory has made much of the powerful hormone cocktail that takes over your body and mind when you are in a real fight.   How did traditional martial arts deal with this?  They must have known about it.  Why isn't it a part of the average dojo training these days?

Early Chinese martial arts were trance based.  They started from experience and worked backwards.  The first experienced fighters who set out to train students did so by scaring them 'out of there wits.'  As these arts developed they started to include ear splitting metallic gongs and frenetic drumming.  They told frightening war stories and sang haunting songs filled with enmity.  These were soon followed by the invocation of supernatural forces and drunk dancers channeling gruesomely demised soldiers. The teachers were using these techniques to trigger the powerful hormone cocktail in their students so that they would know what to expect.

Cults devoted to martial hero/demons are as old as Chinese civilization itself, and they are still with us.  These days they are more associated with outcast smuggler types, but historically they were the village militia.

Violent situations are full of surprises.  There isn't just one type of trance which is "best" for all fighting situations.  There are many different types of trance.  As martial cults developed they taught different types of trance, often associated with different deities or animal spirits.  Often a movement style or sequence would be taught first and then, after some amount of practice, the spirit would be invoked, at which point the routine would be dropped.   The 'student' was practicing going berserk.  They were practicing being on a high dose of naturally occurring hormone cocktail.  They developed many measures to test if the trance was real including inability to feel cuts or burns and various degrees of memory loss.

When the really fight was about to happen, they would put themselves into trance, essentially preempting the 'shock' or the 'freeze.'

The big problem with this type of training is that it shortens your life.  That hormone cocktail is really bad for your long term health.   The kinds of permission people give themselves when they are in deep trance tend to lead them to bad decisions.  Also the wild movements people do, and injures they ignore, when they are in trance really hurt the day after.



What began as trance invocation movements became dances and martial arts forms.  One of the early purposes of martial training was to make ones body strong enough to survive the more extreme trance possessions the early 'teachers' developed.  Over many generations these martial 'forms' started to include actual 'techniques' and even 'applications.'  It was a slow evolution.  In peaceful times everyone did the forms as entertainment and the music got better, and then as times turned for the worse, they re-invoked the spirits and sanctified the ground with blood.

It isn't hard to see how great performers grew out of this tradition, especially if you know that trances weren't just used for movement but to get people talking and singing.  Poetry was written in trance too.  Imagine a bunch of talented people on stage all in deep trance and each invoking different historical figure improvising their way through history with swords and masks and you are more than half way to Chinese Opera.

It's a long story for another day how all this interacted with the military, but it is an important story because although Chinese armies did sometimes use people in trance, they also had good reasons for discouraging it.

Religion and martial arts parallel each other in that both have had a long history of social movements trying to distance themselves from trance without every totally dropping it.  As we all know, doing these martial arts forms and drills without the trance or the music became a way to train fighting all on their own.  In the religious realm, meditation, stillness without going into trance and without any deity invocation, became a religious practice all on its own.

On the other hand some people became experts in many types of trance.  I believe that Baguazhang was originally a collection of eight classes of god/demon possession.  Each one distinct in its powers but woven together through ritual walking.  Such a collection of forces would have been a very secret transmission.  Althought people would have encountered it, there was no system until someone came along and transformed the god/demon forces into types of qi named after the types of gods each represented --heaven qi, earth qi, wind qi, water qi, thunder qi, fire qi, mountain qi, and lake qi.

Speed and Age

Long ago I accepted the idea that martial arts don't need to train speed.  Why?  Because an old man will pull his hand out of the fire as fast as a young man will.

Is this fair?  As I get older, 41 now, I'm starting to see why older people jump less, and less high.  The effort of jumping can be painful.  And pain is such a good trainer, if it hurts we do it less, and if we do it less we do it not as well.

If you fight in the ring, you need a lot of stamina because staged fights are artifically long for enternainments sake.  And the longer you do something in a short period of time, the slower it tends to get.  So for ring fighting, you need to train speed.

But in a real fight the length of time is likely to be short.  In a real fight the pain an older person might have from moving fast will likely be covered up by the hormone cocktail.  It will only be felt afterwords, perhaps even days later.   So training speed is not necessary.

Instead of training speed, internal martial artists train smoothness.  And we train integrity.  Because, although an old man can pull his hand out of the fire as fast as a young man, for the old man the very act of pulling out at high speed is likely to tear a muscle in the elbow which takes months to heal.  While the young man will likely say "ouch," and forget about it.

Theater and Kungfu

Chinese martial arts are historically inseparable from theater arts.  I do not mean to say that one can not look back on any era and find a well trained single minded bruiser.  But that bruiser is likely to have a gongfu brother who worked as a street performer, or an aunt who was a master at going into trance and channeling historic figures (like generals and minsters) for interviews at the homes of the well-to-do.

The term "Qi" can actually be translated "magic," because when a little kid pulled on the lapel of a street magician's coat and asked, "Master, how did you saw that woman in half without killing her?"  The magician answered, "I used my qi! I was able to separate her and reconstitute her with my enormous reserves of qi!"

Everyone who has read the Taijiquan Classics knows that "Taiji is born from Wuji, and is the mother of Yin and Yang."  When a magician showed you the inside of his hat, he said, "Look, look, it's Wuji (emptiness)."  "I will now circle this hat on my dantian... gathering the qi, returning to the primordial chaos (huntun), suddenly Taiji is born!"  "First Yin" (out of the hat he pulls a small black rabbit) "and then Yang," (followed by a white one).

Here is a website by someone who thinks like me.  Here is his youtube channel.  And here is some rocking old time street gongfu:

Bombs and Cannons from the 1200's

I was looking up some other stuff and I ran into this great discussion of early Chinese firearms.  They had guns.

In it I also found this link to an archeology report about the failed Mongol/Chinese invasion of Japan.  They had bombs.



Does this change the debate about why martial arts were developed in China?

Are Chinese martial arts really really old like African dance? or do they date from the time these weapons were invented?

As I said in a post sometime last Summer, if archaeologists would create a data base of the effects of the lifelong study of various types of martial arts on the bones--we would be able to look at bones from every era and every region and answer this question definitively.