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!)

Contest

If it is true that, at the time the various taijiquan postures got their names the main people practicing taijiquan were pirates, then the names should actually have salty meanings.

I know most of you out there have at one time or another made fun of the silly sounding names of the taijiquan postures. My guess is that who ever came up with those names had a sense of humor and was also a bit of a dandy.

The posture "Lazy About Tying One's Coat" probably means, "Forgetting to tuck in your shirt (after a quickie)."

What do you think the posture names/metaphors actually mean? Can you unlock the indoor secret (salty) teachings?

Grip

I stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere on the way to the mountains last month. I checked the oil and it was pretty low so I bought a couple of quarts. I worked in a gas station when I was 14 so I know some tricks for getting a good grip, but my engine was really hot and the oil cap wouldn't budge. I went looking around in my trunk for someway to get more leverage and came up empty. I felt my manhood was being challenged. Just then a thick stocky man, about 6 inches shorter than me said, "Can I give you a hand." I'm sure I looked embarrassed but then I looked at his hands and they were clearly twice the size of mine, his fingers were as thick as cigars. "Sure, uhh...thanks" I said, and he unscrewed it. I asked where he got such huge hands and he said it was his Scottish ancestry.

Bone crushing power like that can not be trained.

I've been looking around the internet for a good picture of a bundle of chopsticks used for developing twisting power and grip strength. I don't see one, but I've done a fair bit of this type of training and I recommend it.

Grabbing is often considered inferior to striking or throwing because if my hands are closed around my opponent's body they aren't free for fighting. In a one-on-one match if someone grabs my wrist, I still have my hand free.

But that's generalizing, in reality there are many different types of grabbing that are effective.

If your grip is strong and well placed it can cause a lot of pain and injury or death to your opponent. For this type of grip to work your wrist, elbow and shoulder must be free to move, not rigid. Your nails must lengthen out like a cats claws with the intent to pierce the skin. The two smallest fingers are actually the strongest part of one's grip for holding, but the two larger fingers combined with the thumb are often superior for piercing.

In Taijiquan the movement "Cai" or plucking is a type of very light grabbing used only when your opponent is already leaning. Cai uses the two larger fingers with the thumb to move you partner on a 45 degree angle toward the ground. It requires no strength training, just sensitivity and clear intention (yi).
Likewise, good grappling technique does not require strength, it is all about positioning and timing. If I get you in a hold it's because I'm sensitive and you've made yourself vulnerable; it can't be planned unless one is using a surprise attack. If I've got you in a hold I can increase the pain or brake the joint with little effort. If I don't have you in the hold, strength isn't going to help me get there.

Half grips are used a lot to suddenly jerk your opponent. Done well these can cause dislocations, but they don't require that you hold on to your opponent, so a light grip works fine.

Curved fingers are used for plucking tendons. This technique is like a grab but the hand doesn't usually close.

What is important about a grip is that it connects to your torso. Twisting a bundle of chopsticks is a good technique for developing this because you are effectively twisting one arm against the other and the two arms meet in the torso where the real power should come from. You can do a simular thing with two hands on a spear.

I also practice a light dynamic grip by using a jian (double edged sword) with a slippery handle.

To develop the ability to inflict pain, you need a willing partner who lets you know what really hurts and what doesn't. You can also practice on yourself to some extent.

Making fists correctly will really develop your hands and improve your grabbing skills. If you don't practice making fists all day long, you're probably not a martial artist. It is painful to hold a solid, tightly packed fist for five minutes unless your technique is good. If it hurts, it is wrong (the spirits have left the body.)

Grabbing should be relaxed. When your hand closes it should feel like your whole torso is wrapping around something, all your organs and big muscles should support the movement. Developing Popeye forearms is a waste of time.

Zhang Sanfeng

I've been weeding around for a standard translation of the Zhang Sanfeng Taijiquan creation story. Every book or website seems to tell the tale a little bit differently.

Let's try this one:

Zhang Sanfeng's family came from Dragon Tiger Mountain (Longhushan). Sometime around the end of the Song Dynasty(960-1279 CE) he passed the Imperial exam and worked for the government. He learned some Shaolin and some jindan (meditation). The Mongols invaded, there was war and a new Yuan Dynasty(1279-1368). Side stepping the turmoil and chaos he went off to live on Wudang mountain.

One day he saw a crane and a snake fighting. Each used different natural styles of movement to yield and attack, but neither the snake nor the crane got hurt. That night he had a dream in which the deity Xuanwu appeared and taught him a way of moving. When he awoke he began practicing what Xuanwu had taught him. Sometime later he was attacked by 100 bandits and using his new practice was able to defeat them all. He lived for over 200 years and his practice eventually became known as Taijiquan.

What does this mean?

The Zhang family residence at Dragon Tiger mountain was the home of the Tianshi, the head priest of Religious Daoism. The name Sanfeng means "three mountains" and most likely means he was a member of an inner alchemy jindan lineage. Lineage names are picked from a secret poem, so people in the same lineage of the same generation sometimes have the same name. Either he really lived for 200 years or was several different people from the same generation within a Daoist lineage.

The last part of Zhang Sanfeng's life corresponds with the founding of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE). At that time the Tianshi, the most important religious leader in the country, went into a nine year retreat on Dragon Tiger mountain for the purpose of teaching the God Xuanwu, to be the head deity of the Chinese pantheon of gods. At the end of the nine years Xuanwu was promoted to the seat at the North Star and given the title Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior. This god was promoted at the request of the first Ming Emperor who had made many sacrifices to Xuanwu (Mysterious/Dark War God) during the years he battled the armies of the previous Yuan Dynasty.

The snake uses wave action, rolling from one one end to the other. The Crane uses opening and closing, drawing in toward the center and pushing out toward the periphery. Zhang lived in a natural setting and practiced Daoist Dreaming. This is the practice of weaving Night and Day seamlessly together. His experiences during the day drifted into his dreams, and his dream body became his waking body.

Infants do not know if they are awake or asleep and they can spend hours playing with their internal organs. To the infant what is inside has no name and what is outside has no name. This undifferentiated state has a name in Chinese: Taiji.

The art of Taijiquan is a guide to weaving our day into our dreams and the unbounded movement of our dream bodies into our waking bodies.

The two Zhang's (Sanfeng and the Tianshi) were on the same mountain, hanging with the same god as he went through a transformation. In Daoism they are called seed people because they carry knowledge from previous eras and make it relevant in the present.

Why Create a Martial Art?

I just wrote a long response to José de Freitas whose comment at the end of the New Students post is worth reading. It raises the very difficult and multi-layered question of why and how Chinese martial arts were created. To answer it adequately requires knowledge of Chinese history, religion, language (my weakness), and martial arts.

Here is an excerpt of my response to stimulate your appetite:

It might make more sense to argue that Chinese Martial Arts were created to promote the idea of universal responsibility. In a world with no aristocracy and no warrior class, it is the citizen-merchant-farmer who must be prepared to defend the nation, the family, and the internal social order. (Notice I did not include self-defense, which did not exist as an excuse for fighting in Chinese history.)

I absolutely love this question. If we look at all the individual and wildly diverse Chinese martial arts and all the individual and wildly diverse motivations people have for training in them--and try to work backwards to explain why they were created; it is a mighty tough task. What were the social milieus that inspired and supported the invention of Chinese martial arts? Do they exist in any form today?

I have commented in previous posts that there are quite a few books these days which assert that martial arts were created and preserved exclusively by people who had martial arts jobs. However; many martial arts creation stories talk about someone wandering out of the wilderness, or dreaming a dream, or finding a secret text. I find it hard to believe that these are just silly stories. It is more likely that they are summaries of a longer, more complex story. So in the next day or so I will take on the Taijiquan creation story.

Daoist Ritual Standing

Daoism has always maintained its roots to the shamanic and ecstatic worlds and at the same time used them do distinguish itself. Orthodox Daoist's do not practice any martial arts yet Daoists use swords in ritual dance and summon demon armies.

Ancient martial arts traditions are surely an important influence in the development of Daoism, and Daoism has continued to spin-off inspirations for martial arts. I have a bunch of posts dealing with this that I'm working on, but let me start by addressing an interesting quote that "adz" left in the comments sections of my posts on standing.

For me standing is a very active practice (as bizarre as that sounds to some folk). There are so many different aspects that can be worked, but Yao ZhongXun has already said it much better than what I ever could: Training of the mind alone is not Yiquan as is not physical practice alone. The two must be combined. The essence can only be cultivated by integration of the mind and body. Visualization or mental imagery must be employed in relaxed standing (Zhan Zhuang) to direct an integrated neuromuscular coordination that results in a whole-body response. Kinesthetic perception of the internal/external opposing force pairs (Zheng Li) and internal isometrics is developed to seek, sense, experience, cultivate, understand and master the whole-body balanced force (Hun Yuan Li).

This secular attempt to describe jindan (the golden elixir meditation) runs into the same problems Mantak Chia did.

In Taijiquan it is standard to learn "peng, ji, lu, and an" as four separate internal changes and then put them together in a seamless circular motion. The circles then become smaller and smaller. In Xingyi a very similar method is used in, for instance, the metal element to create cutting movement which resembles a forward moving skill-saw-blade.

Wang Xiangzai, the founder of the Yiquan system mentioned above in the quote, may have developed his method from Xingyi. One practice we do in Yiquan is to stand like we are holding a tree. We then move the imaginary tree imperceptibly up-down, left-right, forward-back, and inward-outward. Like taijiquan, this individual training eventually becomes a seamless movement and what starts as small circles becomes smaller and smaller until we can integrate these small circles into our larger movements. We then have power in all directions.

It is a stretch to call this meditation or standing still, no? My friend was joking that it is meditation for people with Attention Deficit Disorder (A.D.D.).

(Here I go digging myself a whole so deep I can't possibly dig myself out in one post.)

In Acupuncture we call the first needle, "calling the qi to order." In Daoist ritual the first act is also called, "calling the qi to order." To call the qi to order one must first invoke the Perfected Warrior, Zhen Wu. This is done by standing still using the physicality of the method described above. It is a totally ready stance--able to instantaneously issue force in all directions.

But Zhen Wu is not just a physicality, he is a whole way of seeing the world, and he is the first stage in the practice of jindan (golden elixir) (Daoist ritual was totally integrated into a solo meditation system during the Tang Dynasty, 600 CE.)

Zhen Wu is visualized in his armor with skin like the night sky drawing inward, chain and silk is woven into his hair. He has bare feet and he is energetically on the edge of his seat. Think of him as holding a sword in one hand, without a sheath, the tip of the blade is dragging on the ground. He is the embodiment of the taijiquan concept song (or sung, let go, sink) he is utterly fearless, the god of nothing-to-lose.

This is stage one. Don't get me wrong, stage one is cool. But these secularists have no way to deal with stage two, and no coherent explanation of fruition. (Perhaps we should have an old-folks home especially for people who can issue power in all directions at once.)

UPDATE: the quote about mentions "whole body balanced force," when I wrote this ten years ago I didn't know what that was. Now I teach it! But I call it the six dimensions and three thresholds of counterbalancing.  

Taijiquan and Death

Today is Yom Kippur.

It is traditional to greet people with the saying, "May you be sealed in the Book of Life for a Good Year."

Chinese and Jewish traditions both use the same metaphor to think about human conduct. Once a year our actions are recorded in a book and that book contains both a tali of our meritorious acts and records our fate for the up coming year. Our actions throughout our life have a cumulative effect.

In the Chinese tradition when we die our actions during our lives continue to effect the living after we have died. Ideally, we simply become a supportive ancestor for our descendants. But it is also possible that we pass on bad habits, strange quirks, or even vendettas.

The residue of our inappropriate conduct during our lives is called unresolved qi. It becomes the responsibility of our descendants to resolve this qi for us if we leave it floating around after we have died. One way this is done is by offering incense and sacrifice to ancestors. This is mandatory for Chinese people.

The resolution of unresolved qi can also be achieved through appropriate conduct. For example if we brake a bad habit like quiting smoking, or start a good one like keeping the kitchen really clean.

Taijiquan clearly falls into this category. It is a positive social practice, it keeps people in good health, and it improves the efficiency of our movement so that we aren't wasting qi. Central to the practice of taijiquan is the exploration of wuwei: variously translated--not doing, non-aggression, or "like water it does nothing, yet leaves nothing unnourished."

Taijiquan is the practice of easily bringing things to completion, it is practice for dying a complete death. A death in which the only legacy we leave behind is unconditional support for the living.

Sleep

Getting enough sleep is one thing. Consistently sleeping until you are not tired is another thing entirely.

Everyone knows that if you exercise well, you tend to sleep well. Unfortunately exercise can be overdone. If you regularly begin your practice at night after you are already tired you run the risk of giving yourself insomnia; tapping into that deadly "second wind," and depleting your yuan qi.

Each internal organ has two basic ways of moving, the generative and the re-generative. For example the liver uses jelly-fish-like movement to distribute blood out to the muscles when it is in the active generative cycle. When you get a good night's sleep blood draws towards the liver and it swells up. During the re-generative cycle the muscles need less blood.

In addition to the quality of its movement, the shape or tone of an organ is indicative of its functioning.

Internal Training

The first level of internal martial arts is usually try to do nothing internal so that you can just relax. The second level involves feeling the internal organs moving but do nothing with them. At the third level, we connect the movement of the organs to the movement of the limbs, head and torso. All three levels are actually infinite; we never stop practicing them.

All three of these practices tend to involve changes to the movement, shape and tone of the organs. When this happens it can trigger a need to return to the re-generative cycle. In other words, sometimes an hour of no-sweat Taijiquan at 8 AM can leave us wanting to get back into bed.

This can happen even if you are getting enough sleep because an individual organ may be in the process of changing. Hopefully the internal practice is improving the organ's efficiency (but as we age it is certain that eventually our organs will start to fail). When we resist the urge to sleep, we are resiting the process of re-generation.

Don't Short Change the Organs!

Whenever the seasons change or you change your internal practice, your internal organs will need a new type of sleep and rest.

If you still feel groggy after 10 hours of sleep it is because one or more of your internal organs didn't get the kind of sleep (think: shape/movement/tone) that it needed.

Note: Stillness and other "resting" practices move and shape the organs in different ways than sleep and activity. Rest, sleep, food and exercise are all indispensable

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Surrender?

The Taijiquan Classics say: "The most important thing in a fight is that you win!"

Not.

What I think is most often missed about the Taijiquan classics, because it isn't explicitly stated, is that they present Taijiquan as a conduct practice.

The literary roots of these classics are pretty clearly Daoist and Confucian. The style, language and even a few quotes make this clear. The Taiji classics are syncretic, meaning they draw on several sources yet give a feeling of cohesive wholeness.

Both Daoism and Confucianism conceive human beings, or perhaps I should say humanness, in terms of commitments. It is easy to argue that a person who starts eating human flesh has lost their humanity, but what makes Daoism and Confucianism distinct from "Western culture" is the notion that humanness is a continuum.

In other words, they pose the question, "Just how human are we?" Confucians answer the question by saying there is a protocol one can follow which is based in, and renewed by, an examination of our natural relationships with other people. How well we interact with the people close to us will influence how well each of them interacts with the people they know-- thus creating interlocking chains of good conduct leading all the way from the Emperor to every person in the nation.
Daoists agreed with this assessment, but they said that if a mechanism exists by which we are all connected, than it works on the cosmic level too. Thus our conduct must be connected to animals, stars and earthquakes. Popular Chinese religion often took this idea in to the realm of "wacky." Cults regularly sprung up saying things like, "If we regularly use too much energy getting across town, we will cause the icebergs to melt, the seas to rise and soil to become parched." Oh wait, that was Al Gore--anyway, you get the idea.

Confucians and Daoists both summerized their teachings with lists of precepts. I should add that Daoist precepts often concerned the inner workings of the body itself. While it is often posited that bad digestion must somehow be connected to earthquakes, the connection is not known, and keeping in mind that the connection itself is unknown--is a Daoist precept.

Oh yeah, I was supposed to be talking about Taijiquan. Well, if you take almost any saying from the Taijiquan Classics like for instance, "One's form should have no hollows and no projections" it is easy to see that this is a suggestion about how to perfect the efficiency of one's movement. Confucians think that efficient movement rectifies the heart/mind, and thus leads to clarity in one's actions-- which makes it easier to align what one intends with what one does!

If your intention is to resolve a dispute quickly and efficiently, it is entirely possible that the easiest resolution is to just drop your guard and take the hit.

The Re-generative Cycle

Here is a concept from Chinese Medicine which has a lot of currency for internal martial artists.

The body has two cycles: A generative cycle which is operative whenever we are active, and a re-generative cycle which is operative when we are sleeping and resting.

First I should remind everyone that people cultivate Qi in four ways: Eating, Moderate Exercise, Sleeping, and Resting.

The generative cycle uses up qi, if we stay in the generative cycle we will slowly get more and more tired until, if we are still healthy, the re-generative cycle grabs us and throws us on the couch. If for some reason we don't have an opportunity to rest our reserves of Qi called Yuan Qi, or original Qi, start getting used. This is what people sometimes call "getting their second wind." If we habitually tap into our reserves of original Qi, it often leads to insomnia, and then slow degeneration; the body's ability to store and distribute fluids becomes impaired leading to weakening of the teeth and spine, loss of flexibility, and eventually death (a final return to the re-generative cycle).

OK, that was grim. But remember sleeping and rest allow our bodies to re-generate so that we don't expend Yuan Qi. Eating, Exercising, sleeping, and resting are all essential. A change in one of the four will produce noticeable changes in the other three.

So where do internal martial arts fit in? If practiced correctly they fall in between exercise and rest. It is possible to practice in such a way that you move between the generative and re-generative cycles. The long term effect of daily practice is that you can easily start up the re-generative cycle while you are in slow motion, doing simple tasks, like making tea, or taking a stroll.

More on this soon: Internal Arts and Death

I got the Art work above from Jamie J. Rice, check it out