Milking it

I was performing Wuhudao (five tiger sword), a classic Northern Shaolin form for some first graders the other day. We had a conversation I've had many times with many different groups of kids.

I perform, I bow, the kids clap, "Are there any questions?"

First kid, "Can that sword kill someone?"

Me, "As you can see if you look closely if isn't sharpened." I bring it over for the students to inspect.

Second kid, "Was it sharpened when you first got it?"

Me, "No, it is an authentically weighted practice sword, for training gongfu. It was never sharp."

Third kid, "Could that sword kill somebody?"

Me, "Hhhmmm"

First kid again, "But could that sword be used to kill someone?"

Me, " I think you guys are asking the wrong question."

Another kid, "Would that sword be able to kill someone?"

Me, "Of course this sword could be used to kill someone, but so could a glass of milk. A glass of milk in the wrong hands could become a deadly weapon."

First kid again, "I want to get a sword!"Buffy

Monkey Swings

BaihuiLast month I was at a family gathering and there was a five month old girl who was crying. Her aunt, who has several wild children of her own, tried rocking her and then bouncing her, but the baby was still crying. Then with a big grin she announced, "We are going to have to try Monkey Swings." I can now verify from my observations that monkey swings are an effective crying control mechanism.

The standard Taijiquan, Xingyi and Bagua zhang instructions tell us to lift up our heads from the Baihui point on the very top of the head. Some Shaolin and meditation schools say to lift from a point a little further back so that the chin comes in slightly. Further, I have heard lift from the roof of the mouth, lift from the base of the skull and even lift from a point in the air about one foot above your head.Monkey Swing 2

All of these instructions are useful gates. It is vitally important to develop awareness of head position, centerline, dingjin (upward power), and zhengqi (upright, self-correcting vigor). However, I think these instructions alone will not produce a high quality final product.

I've now spent way too much time looking at baby pictures on google images, I may need some time to recover my manliness. Unfortunately I could not find a single picture of a monkey swing so I'll have to describe it. Here is how you do a Monkey SwingTM:
While sitting down place the baby on its back in your lap with the its feet facing you. Take hold of an ankle and a wrist in each of your hands. Then lift up and swing the baby's bottom toward your face and then it's head out and away, using your forearms as the pivot. Continue swinging until the desired results are achieved.

BabyAs you are imaging this, you might think that the baby's head would flop backwards like that of the child on the swing above. But it didn't. The baby's head stayed right in line with its torso. This was a five month old I was watching, a younger baby probably would have had a floppy head. An older child would certainly be able to do this, but in most cases it would be obvious that they were using voluntary neck muscles.

The baby I watched did all this automatically. Her head was inside her dantian!

The highest level martial artists put their head inside their dantian.

Here is:
A baby development site.

Shaped by the Sea

The way martial traditions are shaped by the environment is an interesting topic at many levels. In a hundred years Californian martial arts will have been re-formed by and for people who spend lot's of time in cars, drinking coffee, and typing on computers.

Southern Shaolin, like Choy Li Fut, seems like it was formed by people familiar with fighting in confined spaced, narrow corridors, and tight corners.

Northern Shaolin, on the other hand, seems like it was formed for wide open fields of battle, spear training particularly.

Liuhe (Six Harmonies) style of Xingyi seems like it might have developed on narrow rice paddy pathways.

Baguazhang is harder to place, but from my experience walking in the mountains, I would say there is a strong case to be made that carrying something around on narrow or steep mountain ledges is a likely possible origin.

Taijiquan comes out of the water.

Willem de ThouarsYears ago I had the opportunity to meet Willem de Thouars who, as a child in Indonesia, studied Silat. After achieving a significant level of martial skill at an early age, his family told him to ask the Chinese people living down the road if they would teach him.

The man he ended up studying with eventually taught him Baguazhang, Taijiquan and other arts. The teacher's first condition for allowing young Willem to become a student was for him to go to the river and jump off of the bridge onto the slippery floating logs that were part of a local logging operation and balance there. He said it took a long time to learn and it was very brutal.

(If you are not going to try this method yourself, at least think about what it would feel like. How relaxed do your legs need to be? How much mobility do you need in your torso?)

If you've watched all my Youtube videos you know that I have a little experience fighting on fishing boats in Alaska. The first couple of times I went to sea, I got seasick, but with a little coaching I learned. To avoid seasickness first you have to keep your eyes gazing out on the horizon. Looking at the boat or the water will make you sick. This is very simular to the kind of vision we use in Taijiquan, we soften our focus and gaze way off into the distance.
The second part of not getting seasick is just relaxation. If you try to "hold" your balance, or "hold" your internal organs in place, you will vomit. You have to just let your whole body move around on its own. Trust the rolling of the sea-- again, very simular to taijiquan practice.
We worked 20 hour shifts on one of the worst fishing boat in the fleet (worst because the skipper's brain wasn't equipt with the re-evaluation process). All the guys got sore knees, except yours truly.

The secret to my knees not hurting like everyone else's was that I was rolling my dantian and keeping my knees bent the whole time I was on the boat. At that time, when I wasn't working 20 hours, I was doing about 4 hours a day of Chen Style Taijiquan Chansijin (silk reeling exercises).

When I came back to San Francisco my teacher at the time said to my fellow students (probably hoping another student would use his words as an excuse to challenge me to a fight), "You all have been practicing here with me all Summer, the Priest (that's what he liked to call me) has been away in Alaska and he has progressed more than any of you have." (Yikes, competitiveness encouraged.)Stern Oar River Boat

The last thing I want to say about water is that if you've ever poled a boat through the water or used a Chinese style stern oar, you might have noticed that it is a lot like the Taijiquan movement, "Grasp the Birds Tail."

Oh, O.K., one more thing. If the founders of Taijiquan were actually fisherman, then it would explain how the modern day practitioners' picked up the habit of exaggerating (the size of the fish that got away).

Keep Your Fingers Straight

I have a friend of a friend who, last I checked, has been studying Shaolin and Taijiquan with the same teacher for nearly 20 years. This friend is convinced he is becoming the greatest of fighters. This particular teacher claims an important lineage and has both nurturing qualities and a fierce temper.Ju Ming Single Whip

There is a shadow side to the previous discussion about metaphorically passing through difficult gates or crossing over bridges of unnecessary practice.  That shadow is the sometimes desperate pathos of the student-teacher relationship.

Perhaps if you are a teacher you've thought to yourself, "Why are so many of my students lesbian vegetarians? Is it something about me?" Perhaps if you are a student you've wondered, "Why do I keep accidentally calling my gongfu teacher MOM instead of shirfu? He doesn't look or act anything like my mom!"

When I think about it, I doubt that the younger me would have studied martial arts at all if my teachers had been the sort of people that expect me to call them "Master."Ju Ming Single Whip

There are many teachers out there that make good second mommies or daddies. In the South Asian traditions they just go right ahead and call the teacher some version of Ma, or Dada.

I find it hard to resist having a little laugh at this phenomenon, but in all honesty I have great respect for people who provide this kind of support to the emotionally needy. I have known a great many people who have attached themselves to a teacher who really cared about them, and through that particular type of intimacy made disciplined and rewarding changes in their lives.

Some people need a fierce father figure in order to thrive. Others need a nurturing mother figure to give them the confidence to face decisions the rest of us see as routine. I'm rarely fierce or nurturing, so students that come to me looking for those qualities tend not to hang around.Ju Ming Single Whip

But we digress. I have this friend of a friend I mentioned at the begining. The teacher he studies with has been very exacting and demanding and has truly nurtured him in a way that brings out his better qualities. As far as martial arts goes, he gets posture corrections and that is it! He has gotten one Taijiquan instruction in 20 years, the same one over and over, "Keep your fingers straight." He keeps expecting that some day he is going to get to learn push-hands, and many other secrets too.Ju Ming Single Whip

It would all be sad and pathetic if not for two factors. The posture corrections are good, so his Shaolin and Taijiquan forms, which he practices without fail everyday, are pristine. The second factor is almost funny. The instruction, "Keep your fingers straight," is wrong by most accounts. But because he believes in it and practices it so diligently--because he uses it as a measure of everything he does-- he has actually made it mean something true. Every millimeter of his body movement is calibrated to "keep the fingers straight," what ever that even means.Ju Ming Single Whip

He has no knowledge of functionality or applications, no subtle power or push-hands experience. But I have to admit, his form looks good!

And on that note, here is a quote from Henry David Thoreau, (from memory of course)
Why are we in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps if is because he hears the beat of a different drummer, let each step to the beat which he hears, however measured, or far away...

Song Zhong Jin

laughingsquid San Francisco in JelloI 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?

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.

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.

We're in the News

The article I have copied at the bottom of this post is from the Wall Street Journal. It is about the battle between Wushu and Shaolin, which is a "fairly artificial" battle as Gene Ching of Tai Chi Kung Fu Magazine puts it. Wushu is the Communist version of the Republican Era (1906-1948) idea of Guoshu.

Wushu means "martial arts," Guoshu means "national art." The idea of a national art was that a strong country is made up of physically strong and healthy individuals. This was meant to counter the Japanese propaganda that China was "the sick man of Asia," and to do it with "non-Western" exercise. (Really I kind of Chavanism, but one which has had a positive effect on world culture.)

Before the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977) Wushu was exclusively a performing art for kids and a health practice for young adults. No sparing competitions. I would say that martial arts were illegal during the Cultural Revolution, but that would imply there was actually a legal system. During the Cultural Revolution anyone practicing or even thinking anything "traditional" was a target for public torture.

The claims made in the article about Shaolin should be taken with a grain of salt. I think the actual Buddhist lineages of Shaolin fled China around 1900. The 12 or so people who were occupying the Temple at the end of the Cultural Revolution are a question mark.

The eclectic nature of Shaolin Zen is an interesting topic I hope to learn more about some day, but Gongfu or (Kungfu if you prefer) did not come from Shaolin. Gongfu means "meritorious action," and it has been part of the religious life of China for a very long time, certainly for a thousand years, probably more than two thousand. Gongfu has always been a public demonstration of dedication to a larger body (family, village, state), it has always had a fighting implication, and it has always been practiced with wide variation and local innovation. It has alway been part of ritual procession and festivities, which by their nature include some troops and exclude others. Why should the Olympics be different?

Shaolin Temple had gongfu. Perhaps it had some very good gongfu too. What was unique about it is that you didn't have to be born in the Temple to learn it. You could shave your head take the vows, carry water and scrub floors for a couple of years and then they would teach you! Normally one had to be born (married or adopted) in a Village in order to learn a local style(s) of gongfu. But gongfu was everywhere.

Kung Fu Monks Don't Get a Kick Out of Fighting  (if you get the WSJ)


Read the whole article by clicking below: 





























Kung Fu Monks
Don't Get a Kick
Out of Fighting


Famous Temple Spurns
Beijing Games, Sparking
Trash Talk From Rivals

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER and JULIET YE
December 14, 2007; Page A1


Kung fu master Shi Dechao can swing his 22-pound "monk's spade," an ancient Chinese shovel, like a majorette twirling a baton. His lightning punches, in a style the ancients called Iron Fist, generate a thunk! straight out of kung fu movie sound effects. A powerful grunt punctuates his routine.


But Dechao, and most of the other martial monks at the 1,500-year-old Shaolin Temple in China's central Henan province, decline to join in one of the biggest kung fu battles of modern times -- a competition to be staged in tandem with next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.


[Shi Yongxin]

Clad in saffron Buddhist robes, Dechao insists that real kung fu monks don't fight. They meditate and practice kung fu to reach enlightenment. "Every fist contains my love," says the 39-year-old Dechao, also known as Big Beard.


The Shaolin Temple's decision to stay out of the competition, to be held at the same time as the Olympics and passing out medals of its own, made headlines in China. And it has rekindled a disagreement familiar from the movies: Is kung fu a form of devotion, a style of fighting or both?


Zen Buddhism and kung fu have long made an unlikely pair. As legend has it, Zen's founder, an Indian missionary to China named Bodhidharma, worried that too much seated meditation would make monks flabby. So he taught the monks in Shaolin a set of 18 exercises codified as "Yi Jin Jing," or "Muscle Change Instruction," many of them based on animal movements.










 
WSJ's Geoffrey Fowler reports that the Chinese government wants to promote kung fu as a sport in the Olympics. But, the famous monks of the Shaolin Temple refuse to fight.

"Kung fu is Zen practice in motion," says Shi Yongxin, the abbot of Shaolin, sitting in his office next to a sculpture of a meditating Buddha. When he moved to the temple from a devoutly Buddhist family in 1981, Yongxin learned to add kung fu moves to his meditation.


Over the centuries, the otherwise peaceful monks have occasionally used their physical prowess in battle to defend the temple and its allies. But they didn't always like it. In lore, the monks went to battle only when they were facing a life-or-death crisis and had no alternative.


Now, a debate over the Olympics has transported the classic kung fu monk's fight-or-pray dilemma to the 21st century.


For the Games, the Chinese have backed a committee-regulated version of kung fu split into two competitions. One, dubbed taolu, is a sort of rhythmic gymnastics in fast-forward. Individual athletes are scored on the "power, harmony, rhythm, style and musical accompaniment" of their routines, which have names such as Lotus Kick and Dragon's Dive to the Ground. A second form of kung fu competition, called sanshou, involves fighting -- and a fair amount of protective padding. Kung fu itself is also known as wushu.













[Wushu]
Justin Guariglia
Today, kung fu is practiced by more than 60 million Chinese and millions more around the world.

At the International Wushu Federation's Ninth World Wushu Championships in Beijing last month, fighter Zhang Yong entered the ring to chants of "Go for it, China!" He won the gold medal in the 65-kilogram (143-pound) combat competition by striking his Russian opponent with a fierce combination of kicks and punches, at one point flipping the Russian into the air.


"Sometimes I get hurt during the training," says the 24-year-old Mr. Zhang, a Muslim, pointing to a scab on his right eyebrow. Yet "wushu is something that starts with fighting and ends with spirit," he says. "This spirit isn't a religious concept, but rather love to the nation."


To the monk Dechao, the spirit, or qi, in Shaolin Buddhism is embodied in breathing, not force. "I can practice kung fu internally while drinking tea quietly with my friends," he says.


After the abbot publicly distanced Shaolin from the Olympics in October, Chinese bloggers and athletes began to suggest the monks are just scared they wouldn't win. At the competition, athletes said their sport was simply not comparable to Shaolin meditation.


"We are the best wushu competitors," says Ma Lingjuan, the 21-year-old Chinese world champion in taolu. She has been practicing spinning and jabbing a spear since she was 10. "Our goal is the medal," she says. "The monks in the temple do it as a hobby."


Yongxin, the abbot, says monks practice kung fu "with an understanding of Zen Buddhism and love of the temple. On the other hand, the athletes use wushu as a way to find honor. It is easy to tell which one is more sustainable and deep."


Whether with blows or rhetoric, it seems, everybody is kung fu fighting.


Controlling Kung Fu


The government's efforts to standardize the diverse practice of kung fu were also designed to control it. After China's 1949 revolution, the Communist Party at first promoted martial arts but eventually grew leery of kung fu as a subversive self-defense practice.










[Kung Fu]
Fighters at Wushu championship in Beijing in November, and monk Shi Dechao (inset)

During the Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s, the Red Guards attacked the Shaolin Temple and other religious orders. By the early 1980s, after centuries of unbroken master-to-student lineage, only a dozen or so monks lived at Shaolin. Outside the temple, though, traditional kung fu schools, not all of them associated with Buddhism, thrived.


'Chopsocky' TV


In the 1970s and 1980s, a blizzard of "chopsocky" TV shows and films, such as the 1982 Jet Li film "Shaolin Temple," helped to sear the Buddhist legends into the popular imagination, both in China and abroad.


The 1970s American TV show "Kung Fu" featured David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, a Shaolin monk who travels through the Old West armed only with his kung fu. In flashback scenes to the temple, his master teaches him to "avoid rather than check. Check rather than hurt. Hurt rather than maim. Maim rather than kill."


Today, kung fu is practiced by more than 60 million Chinese and millions more around the world -- and its purpose remains a topic of debate.


"The Shaolin Temple is only a building," says Kang Gewu, the secretary general of the Chinese Wushu Association. He points out that martial arts had existed in China for centuries before the Shaolin temple began practicing kung fu. He adds: "In our mind, wushu is a sport, not a religious practice."


It can be both. The town around Shaolin is home to dozens of wushu schools, some employing monks from the temple who accept as students both the spiritually and competitively inclined.


Meeting Place of Paradox


"Shaolin is a meeting place of paradox -- tourism, Zen, military, sports, communism, martial arts, history," says Gene Ching, the associate publisher of Kung Fu Tai Chi magazine in California. He thinks the debate between the monks and the athletes over spiritual affairs is "fairly artificial."


[Zhang Yong]

For the temple, maintaining its image as the capital of kung fu is about both expanding its reach and paying its bills. Yongxin, who has been dubbed the "CEO abbot" in the press, has installed a spectacle of his own: a one-hour stage show featuring music by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" composer Tan Dun and the kung fu skills of hundreds of back-flipping students. Tickets cost $32.


Even as he distances himself from Olympic competition, "the abbot keeps this stereotype alive that kung fu is about fighting," says Justin Guariglia, a photographer who spent several years getting to know the monks and recently published a book, "Shaolin: Temple of Zen." The "real monks," he notes, are kept far away from the tourists.


The abbot, periodically checking his cellphone during an interview, said the temple doesn't actually make that much money from the tourist activities. "What we have done is spread Buddhism and its spirit of universal love," he said.


Another monk at Shaolin, named Bodhidharma after the Indian missionary, dismisses suggestions that the monks don't want to play because they are afraid they would lose.


"Oh, lord," laughs Bodhidharma, who lives in Malaysia and visits the temple to meditate from time to time. "Monks have a very kind and patient heart. We could win that. But we don't want to hurt anybody."




--Sue Feng contributed to this article.



Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com and Juliet Ye at juliet.ye@wsj.com


The Era of Conditioning

Lego Conditioner for KidsI 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!

ZiranquanI'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 (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.