Flying Fish

Most people don't have a very clear sense of their spine. There are hundreds of different martial arts and qigong exercises which bring sensitivity, awareness and mobility to the spine. This material is very rich.

The vast majority of this material must be taught in a small class because each person needs a fair amount of feedback and interaction with the teacher. That's why it's not very well known or understood. It's this lack of personal attention which leads people to keep doing brutish things like sit-ups.

I thought I would offer one image which my student have often found helpful.

When the arms lift in Heaven Earth style qigong (or Baguazhang circle walking or numerous other internal arts/movements I could point to) the protuberances (Spinous Process) on the spine starting in the lumbar region move upward. This is true whether you start with the arms moving to the front or to the sides.

This movement matches that of a flying fish jumping out of the water. When the fish jumps its dorsal fin (the one on its lower back) goes up and forward (towards the head). The dorsal fin on a fish is actually the spine, it is simply a spine with long spinal protuberances (Spinous Process).

My Name is Mud

Check out a great post from Martial Arts Blogger Jianghu 2.0. First he gives his explanation of keeping one's tongue on the roof of the mouth and then how one should conceptualize baguazhang's mud walking.

I was taught an additional reason for putting the tongue on the roof of the mouth:  In meditation/stillness, it allows saliva to pool and then descend down one's throat with out creating the gag reflex or having to actively swallow.  Not particularly useful for pure martial arts though.

Perhaps because of my California coastal experiences with mud I think of baguazhang mud walking happening in sticky mud, instead of the slippery or calf-deep mud he describes.  The advantage of sticky mud is that it emphasizes the opening and closing (kaihe) of the joints while giving the same emphasis to the back foot that calf-deep mud would.

Of course, if you have been practicing with the slippery mud idea that has the advantage that you don't rely on a fixed root; a higher level practice actually.  I suppose the next level up might be walking on top of quicksand, or really high level--water.

Monkey View

Monkey sees the peach and up the tree he goes. He doesn't think about climbing the tree, he thinks about the peach.

If he wants the peach badly enough, he may completely bypass the difficulty of climbing, but he may also miss the subtlety of the bark or the softness of the leaves. The peach may even be part of a trap set to capture him.

If you want to make a movement you are doing more difficult-- think about it. If you think too much about running while you are running, you are likely to trip over your own feet.

Many martial artists are motivated by fear or insecurity. Of course, if those were your only motivations, you wouldn't be human, you'd be a ghost. But it is worth thinking about. If you're training for self-defense, it is likely that you are afraid of being attacked. If you are training to look attractive to potencial mates, it is likely that you feel insecure about your current appearance.

The fruition, the peach if you will, of pursuing training motivated by fear, is of course, more fear. Likewise, the peach of training to look more attractive is more insecurity. Fear and insecurity have no end.

A lot of people train because they believe they are likely to be the victims of violence and it often turns out to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Your view, your default understanding of why you practice, is more important than any other factor in martial arts or qigong type training. If your view is narrow, like that of the monkey going after the peach, you may indeed have very clear fruition. You may get what you want, provided what you want is not a fantasy. A very narrow focus is useful for bypassing obstacles and difficulties, but you will also bypass all the other potencial types of fruition. The narrowness of your view may turn out to be its own trap.

I suggest students practice with the widest most open ended view possible. The term view as a metaphor for motivation, understanding, orientation, and purpose is particularly brilliant because it parallels how the eyes should be used in training. Don't lock your eyes on a point, take the widest possible view.

If you practice with a broad view, you will love forms.  Set routines, or forms, are great because they teach you to forget.  When you practice a form over and over and over, it becomes automatic.  You can completely forget the movement, in fact you should. Once a form becomes automatic you can do all sorts of experiments.  You can make an infinite number of subtle or dramatic changes to the quality of the form.  You can also do an infinite number of experiments with your mind.

Why Ritual?

Sometimes we have very rational explanations for our actions which later turn out to be dubious. The human mind likes to believe it is taking a particular action because it is right or justifiable or natural or smart. We have the ability to think up strategies for gaining advantage. We can manipulate our environment. But we also seem to have the ability to get "stuck" in "mind-sets" and to repeat strategies which have worked before but which no longer are very effective.

Occasionally I get a student who has a strong reason for wanting to study gongfu or qigong who sticks with it for a few months or a year and then forgets why they are studying. Perhaps that is because their relationship to movement and body image has changed and they simply don't have the same problems they used to have.

Sometimes that forgetful student who used to have strong motivations will quit practicing for a time until they come up with a new reason for studying. Then they will start the cycle over again, eventually they forget why they came to practice and they quit again.

There are hundreds of great, mediocre, and rather weak reasons for practicing gongfu or qigong. Just because you are able to remember your "strong" reason for practicing doesn't make it true. In actuality our reasons for practicing are changing continuously. From era to era, from year to year, from day to day, from hour to hour.

The ability to use reason effectively means understanding both how easily it can change within a complex or dynamic context and how easily we can fall prey to dogma or a mind-set or a "strong reason."

Ritual; whether it is doing a gongfu practice everyday, or performing a Daoist ceremony on a particular day of the calendar, is done regardless of the immediate reasons one may have or not have. Ritual is action taken with out consistent meaning. Ritual practice itself is not a defense against dogma; however, the practice of ritual has the capacity to reveal the way or mind seeks to lock on to a particular way of perceiving our world.

For heaven's sake, ritual is not a discarding of reason. It is a good thing we use reason to manipulate our environments for pleasure and power. But reason is a form of aggression which itself can cloud our vision. Ritual has the capacity to re-pose the question: How important is reason?

If you don't practice ritual from this point of view, you will occasionally have a crisis of meaning.

Empty Force, Extraordinary Powers & My Qigong Headache

I apologize for not writing more lately, I've been swamped with work, but I also promise that the next few weeks of blogging will be above average. (This is special because, as my regular readers already know, my secret to good blogging is that I make a point of shooting for just below average.)

I have a few more things to say about Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, which is now at the top of my list of recommend books about qigong. ( The two others on the list are Breathing Spaces, and The Transmission of Chinese Medicine.)

The issues raised in this book have plagued me, and most serious martial artists, since the mid 1990's when the first refugee/exiles from Qigong Fever started pouring into San Francisco and other cities all over the world. At one point local Baji master Adam Hsu got so fed up with all the wacko questions he was fielding he simply declared, "Qi doesn't exist!"

The other day I was at a college faculty meeting sitting next to Professor Yu, a TCM Dermatology teacher I hold in high regard. I showed her my copy of Qigong Fever. Just how relevant this book is, was made immediately apparent by the first thing out of Professor Yu's mouth. "My father invented qigong."

"Oh," I said," Perhaps he is mentioned in this book." As it turns out he is not mentioned in the book. Her father was You Pengxi, a xingyi teacher and early student of Wang Xiangzhai, the founder of the Yiquan system of internal martial arts. She explained that qigong came from xingyi.

As usually happens when I hear claims about qigong, I found myself trying to find what truth could possibly be behind the claim with out launching into my own agenda. After all, the book is quite clear about the process in which Communist party functionaries chose the term Qigong from a list of terms intended to frame body, breath and mind techniques under a single therapeutic category while intentionally discarding the martial, religious, and conduct transforming aspects of traditional categories.

But of course I do have my own agenda, I grew up practicing gongfu and studied under Bing Gong who was a top student of Kuo Lien-ying who also studied with Wang Xiangzhai. We did standing meditation, and various routines we called warm-ups. No one ever used the word qigong even thought that is what everybody calls it now.

Knowing that of course there could be a hidden history I don't know, I begin with an inclination to agree with Professor Yu. 90% of what I see called qigong is fallout from gongfu schools-- stuff that was taught or invented on a need-to-know basis for students that needed remedial exercises or were developing some unique quality of gongfu.

Unfortunately the profound idea that all traditional Chinese activities have a Dao-- an efficient way of working or moving that conserves qi-- is not mentioned in the book, nor was it mentioned by Professor Yu.

Professor Yu's father, You Pengxi, was invited, and the CCP gave him permission, to come to Stanford University in 1980 to demonstrate his extraordinary qigong skills. He promptly defected. He had been a wealthy and successful Western trained dermatologist before the revolution (1949). He defected from Communist China the first chance he got. I do not know the details in his case, but it would not have been unusual for a well trained doctor to be publicly tortured and shamed during the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977). As far as I can tell, nobody taught anybody anything during the Cultural Revolution. Because of his association with Wang Xiangzhai (who died in 1963), he may have attracted students shortly after it became possible to teach again, but he can't have been teaching qigong for much more that a year before he defected in 1980. So in that sense he may have indeed been the first qigong master "off the hump." Professor Yu however claimed that he developed and named qigong around 1949.

During the first 15 years of the revolution (the 50's) there was some gongfu training going on, but between fear, repression and a general lack of food, I have trouble imagining that much quality teaching was taking place. During this period fighting skills were officially scrapped away and discarded while the term gongfu (meritorious skill) was essentially replaced with the word wushu (martial art). I suspect that most of You Pengxi's teaching and martial fame was from before the Communist Revolution. To be fair, their were some gongfu classes happening in the dark, before dawn and after dusk. In my imagination, admittedly shaped by George Xu, I see these as serious fighting classes where people came home bleeding more days than not.

During the 1950's qigong as a public activity existed only in the Traditional Chinese Medical Hospitals. It was a cheap and patriotic form of therapy. Before the revolution the Communists, like their Republican and Nationalist rivals, were pro-Western science and anti-traditional (superstitious) healing of all kinds.

After the revolution, the combination of anti-Western hysteria, incompetent use of limited funds, and the obvious efficacy and availability of some traditional healing practices, led the CCP to embrace Traditional Chinese Medicine. Qigong was practiced in a very limited way during the 1950's, mainly within the hospital setting.

Professor Yu talked about her childhood memories of Wang Xiangzhai, and her father's closeness to him. She said her father gave Wang Xiangzhai a check book and told him to buy anything he wanted. Also that her father did not charge for lessons and only taught people with virtuous natures. She described her father and her mother's (Yu Ouming) ability to blast multiple attackers to the ground without actually touching them. They were using qi alone!

Magical and extraordinary powers have been around for centuries, but totalitarian Communism didn't leave any space for performance art. The book Qigong Fever explains how with the first crack of freedom in the 80's the CCP gave authority to individuals only to the extent that everything they did was in the name of Science and Chinese cultural superiority. All knowledge still belonged to the state, but performers and charismatic could claim that practicing qigong in a scientific way would give you extraordinary powers--- like seeing with your ears, reading peoples minds, or guiding missiles with your qi! A complex network developed consisting of Party officials, charismatic teachers, and researchers who were into qigong. The fact that they managed to make it illegal to criticize or be publicly skeptical of qigong, extraordinary powers, or pseudo-science, helped ignite and sustain the explosion of qigong into everyday life.

When I got home I searched for Professor Yu's father in a PFD collection of essays about Wang Xiangzhai that I downloaded from somewhere in the Internet wilderness. He is credited with being the source of all Yiquan lineages which practice empty force (gongjin), the ability to throw someone with out touching them.

If such extraordinary powers are possible (and I'm forbidden by precept from actually commenting on their veracity), I've always thought they would still waste an enormous amount of qi, and thus be in total contradiction with the whole point of daoist inspired practices; namely, to conserve jing and qi! Not to mention the temptation anyone with actual blood flowing in their veins would have to tip their opponent's hand during a poker game or to cop the occasional feel from across the room. (Yes, I know, I would never be allowed to learn such practices because I'm clearly a man of dark virtues.)

My point here is simple. If anyone from the people at New Tang Dynasty TV (Falungong) to your friendly neighborhood qi jock wishes to have the right to be taken seriously by me on the subject of qigong--then they must read Qigong Fever!

Qigong Fever

If this book I'm holding here had been published in 1997 instead of 2007, I probably wouldn't have set out to write my own book on the history and cultural origins of qigong. I also probably wouldn't have failed in that endeavor and ended up putting my collection of writings up on the Internet in the form of a blog called "Weakness with a Twist”and you wouldn't be reading it! 

Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, by David A. Palmer. Published by Columbia University Press, 356 pages.
The book is a history of Qigong, which appropriately frames the subject as a political movement built around a body technology with religious characteristics, and scientific pretensions. It is a book which resists symmetrization. Never the less I'm going down that road.

Qigong Fever tells a really shocking story of mass hysterical enthusiasm. The kind of popular insanity that can only happen in a world where 2+2=5 if the Party says it does! The state in essence banned religious devotion, magic tricks, spontaneous expression, deep emotion, and even self-respect. The Party claimed to be in favor of using science to save the world, but obviously science cannot be practiced in an environment where 2+2 might equal 5. It was from this skewed environment that qigong came to be capable of healing anything and everything. All over China otherwise ordinary people could see with their ears, control guided missiles with their minds, tell the future while balancing on eggs—qigong became the source for the development of everything weird, magical, new age, charismatic, and psychic. That all this could happen in the name of science would already be beyond normal comprehension, but the Communist Party brought what would otherwise have been just weird and wacky to a fever pitch by issuing an order essentially forbidding skepticism.

The title Qigong Fever refers to the explosion of interest and participation in qigong methods, research, charismatic religion, and a whole lot more that reached a peak in the decade from 1985 to 1996, after which the government cracked down on qigong people in general and particularly on the followers of the dangerously unbalanced Li Hongzhi, known collectively as Falungong.

Palmer tasks himself with creating a historic record for a subject that is made up of seemingly limitless false claims and (even more challenging for the historian) partially false claims about its origins and functions. In addition he tackles problems as an anthropologist carefully milking the overlapping realms of scientism, charisma, national consciousness, repression, religious impulse, and shifting political networks into a frothy qi infused tonic.

The political alliance that made the qigong movement possible eventually fell apart creating outlaws and refugees. The last chapter of the book deals specifically with the Falungong and its transformation from a qigong cult into an outlaw and exiled revolutionary utopian movement.

The book has a lot of footnotes. Palmer draws on a wide array of original Chinese sources for historical material and makes good use of the history of ideas. His writing moves easily between telling the story, putting it in context, and bringing in other peoples ideas and research to convey the depth of his analysis.

If you like this blog you'll like this book.

Milieu

I've been reading the book Qigong Fever, it's good, but I'm not ready to review it yet. However, part of the methodology of the book is to investigate the milieu which inspired the invention, expression, and propagation of qigong as a "movement."

I like this kind of thinking. When I was in high school I was in a School of the Arts and I did a lot of ceramics. I got really interested in Sung Dynasty (900-1200 CE) Chinese ceramics. Then I went to Australia where I had a ceramics teacher who was also totally into Sung Dynasty glazes and was trying to replicate the way they made them with natural local minerals (like ash from near by forest fires) and at the same time adding some scientific analysis.

I also got way into dance, dance history, and improvisation. What these two things have in common is milieu. Modern dance, for instance, came out of a very specific cultural milieu and I think it started to stagnate when that milieu ended. Sung Dynasty ceramics had huge cooperative workshops with dragon kilns that burn once a year up the side of a mountain. Each group got the right to fire its huge kiln from the imperial court which held regular competitions for its patronage. If your kiln won the competition, you supplied the entire royal family for a year or so until they had a new competition. This created a really competitive environment where everyone was making imperial quality work, but only one "kiln" was getting to sell it to the royal family so there was literally tons of extraordinary art work floating around. This milieu created the worlds first antique markets.

So when I was in my early twenties and studying gongfu 6 hours a day it occurred to me that neither my gongfu teachers, nor their teachers had lived in a milieu that was capable of inspiring the creation gongfu as I knew it (Shaolin, Taijiquan, Xingyi, Bagua).

I held and thought about that question for many years.  I was still asking that question when I really started getting into Daoist Religion.  (Daoism isn't directly responsible for the creation of gongfu, but it is in the mix.)

My point is this: The main reason I have been writing this blog for the last six months is to both explain what I have learned over the years about the milieu which inspired Chinese Martial Arts generations ago, and to create a new milieu which will re-inspire the arts.

Feelin' Shen

The concept of Shen has so many meanings in Chinese that it probably deserves a whole book. The shen I'm talking about here is the one that is most often translated "spirit" and is the lighter more expansive aspect of qi. (I'm not going to attempt a comprehensive definition.)

One way to explain shen is to say that it is "how we feel space." During moments of extreme fear our shen closes in on us like plastic wrap around our bodies, in English we use the term petrified to describe this feeling. Conversely, when we are in a warm safe environment with a spectacular view in all directions our shen expands way off into the distance.

(Humans are complex creatures. Some people seek out that petrified feeling, perhaps because they treasure the release which happens when the fear finally lets go and turns to exhilaration. People with agoraphobia become petrified at even the thought of wide open spaces.)

Another way to think about shen is what we sometimes call "body image," that is, the way we feel about and perceive our bodies. Skill in martial arts involves the ability to change your own body image as well as the ability to manipulate other peoples' body image. Few people could step into the ring with Mike Tyson and not feel a twinge weakness and fragility. A great fighter, just like a great actor, can make you feel like you are "king of the world" one moment and "a cockroach under a boot" the next.

I believe that hormones have a big effect on shen. How many of us have known a slender woman who once a month asks if we think she is fat? The first time this happens we laugh and say, "Yeah your a regular hippo." The second time this happens we say, "No, honey, of course not," only to be accused of being patronizing or worse. No doubt most of us have learned, through trial and error, that a failure to respond will be received as "ignoring," and that the best response is an audible but non-verbal response:

"Ahhh," can work but risks implying agreement as in, "Ahhh, I see what you mean."
"Oohhh, can also work but might be interpreted as "Oohh, interesting," which would be patronizing again.
The correct response is, "Uuuhh?" exuding slight confusion coupled with perfect acceptance of the statement.

It should be obvious at this point that shen is affected by physical training, diet and sleep. And also that it is very hard to measure analytically.

One of my students claimed not to be aware of shen for several years until we had a conversation about tension in the center of her back. She broke into a story about how when she was a little kid there was a certain place in the hallway of her house that she would pass through quickly because she always got this feeling that someone (or something) was going to stab her in the back. She overcame the fear by permanantly holding a little bit of tension in that one spot on her back. She relayed that her sister felt and did the same.

Chinese cosmology asserts that all shen experiences have a physical body component and all physical body experiences have a shen component. They are inseparable.

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.

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!)