Summer Training Camp

George Xu just put up new information about the Summer Camp he co-teaches every year with a different Chinese Martial Arts Master. The Camp is held in the woods in a place called La Honda, near Santa Cruz California. Here is the scoop on his co-teacher this year:

Master Yu Chen Yong Born in 1943 Tian Jing, China. Started his training as a wrestler in 1953 then moved to Tai Ji in 1957 with famous Master Wu and Master Niu. He also studied Ba Gua with famous Master such as Gao Yi Sheng and Yang Ban Hou large frame Tai Ji with Master Niu Lian Yuan and Zhao Bao Style Tai Ji with Master Hou and Master Yue. One of his teacher is the very famous master Han Mu Xia whom defeated the Russia champion wrestler in 1930, which he then went on to win 10 gold metal from 10 different countries. The metals are now in the China National Historical Museum. In 2000, the master performance in Tian Jing master Yu got 1st place for the title of "best Master performance". In 2005, Master Yu acquired famous master Zhao Bao Tai Ji title from Wu Dang Mountain.

Master Yu will be teaching all his secrets in this year's summer camp in California

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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...

Journal of Asian Martial Arts

I was excited to see Douglas Wile, one of the heavies in terms of martial arts scholarship, writing an article in the Journal of Asian Martial Arts.

Fifteen years ago when this magazine first came out I was ecstatic. Imagine a martial arts magazine which insists on footnotes and bibliographies in every article! I thought it was a dream come true after years of wishing I was still 10 years old so I could appreciate martial arts writing.

The current addition has 13 contributors. There are two without degrees, two have M.A.'s, one has an M.S., one is an Acupuncturist (M.A.), and eight have Ph.D.'s. Wow, and still most of the writing leaves me wishing for younger days. To be fair, most academic writing is genetically predestined to be boring. At least this stuff is mostly written by people involved in the arts, not by "objective outsiders."

I guess I am a child of the Internet, because I'm finding it harder and harder to read full length books and articles. I still love old media, but it takes so long to get to the point. I mean this stuff should have one of those "Don't operate heavy machinery" warning labels. Again, to be fair, I'm addicted to pithy blog posts and I needed to catch up on some sleep.

Douglas Wile's article is called "Taijiquan and Daoism; From Religion to Martial Art--and Martial Art to Religion." To really do it justice I would have to read the whole thing again. Honestly, I'm in one of those deep practice phases where a few hours of profound internal training makes me want to sleep-- y'all will have to settle for my vague dream like memories.

The gist of Wile's article is that facts about Taijiquan prior to 1900 are really hard to come by but that hasn't stopped lineage holders and historians from freely making sh-t up and pretending it's factual.

One can easily understand why a lineage holder would want to make stuff up. It makes them seem like they have the only key to the chest of treasures while at the same time allowing them the (false) modesty of claiming that their teacher's teacher's teacher was like, dude, really, really good.

It's harder to understand why historians would make stuff up. In America if we catch a historian making stuff up, we use their books for compost. But then again, the various "wings" of the Communists and the Nationalists, were in a propaganda war to prove that only their (death cult) ideologies and allegiances would make Chinese people better and stronger.

Even though Wile spends a lot of time explaining what all these 20th Century scholars thought, I have the feeling he would agree with me when I say, taijiquan has picked up so much baggage we ought to throw out all the books and start over.

Wile dances around the question: Why in light of so little direct evidence for Taijiquan's Daoist roots, are there so many people trying to prove a connection? He writes about Taijiquan's "inventor," the magical dreamer Daoist immortal Zhang Sanfeng:

For sheer contentiousness, the Zhang Sanfeng case can only be compared to issues of racism, sexism, abortion and homosexuality in American culture. At the dawn of the 21st century, the pendulum has once again swung towards the myth-makers. Western practitioners of taijiquan, with their monotheistic, atheistic, or "only begotten son" backgrounds are apt to view Zhang Sanfeng as simply an historical figure with some innocent Daoist embellishments. They are not likely to understand China's culture wars, polytheism, or embodied immortality..."

In summary, his point is that Taijiquan never really had much to do with Daoism, until 20th century people started mixing in a lot of Neidan (inner alchemy), TCM jargon, some quotes from the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, and claims about health. Oh yeah, and some stories. And then a bunch of fake modern scholars said none of that is true-- but what they said wasn't true either (so there!). Now that running a business isn't banned in China, there is this new feel good, feel strong, feel Chinese, feel Taijiquan-is-part-of-Daoism, marketing ethos. No real content.

And Wile gets kind of mad about it,

"Daoist Chauvinism should never be underestimated, and we need only remind ourselves that some Daoist apologists have claimed that Buddhism sprang from seeds planted by Laozi when he rode westwards on his ox."

Them's figtin' words. Bumper stickers have all but disappeared from San Francisco (which I attribute to uniformity of thought); however, I spotted one today. It read, "Lighten Up!"

For the record, those Daoist "apologists," were not writing history, they were writing secret scripture. The name Laozi means "old seed," but if we are talking about the Santianneijing (3rd Century), then it was Laojun (the inspiration behind the Daodejing) which actually incarnated as the Buddha so that the western barbarians would have their own version of "The Way," and would thus have their own home grown basis for mutual cooperation and understanding. Never mind, that's an argument for another day.

I respect Wile's contribution to understanding the history of Taijiquan, I thank him for letting us know it's all a bunch of lies!

My argument with him is this: Orthodox Daoism never claimed Taijiquan as a Daoist art and I doubt it ever will. Monastic Daoism has of late decided that Taijiquan is part of its shtick. Since the 1980's is has also decided that gongfu movies are part of its shtick, big whoop. Monastic Daoism never really had a central authority, from the sidelines it kinda seems like Buddhism with a little inner alchemy for the "we must appear to be loyal Chinese" set. All this means very little.

If you want to know what the origins of Taijiquan are, you are going to have to soften your definitions, and blur your categories. Taijiquan only came into being because it was able to obscure it's origins in religion, popular culture, and secret societies. By the start of the 20th century participation in trance cults or exorcistic and processional dance, was considered politically dangerious and ideologically backwards. That's why they invented and then tried to tack on the suspicious label, "purely philosophical" Daoism.

Likewise, some combination of fear, modernity, and ideology led people to strip down their communal ritual performance traditions into pure "Martial Arts."

People over here were arguing about why they took the Fajing (power issuing?) out of Yang and Wu styles of Taijiquan. I'll tell you why. Fajing is a way to strike terror into your audience, a way to let people know the god has taken possession of the dancer.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put the Fajing back in my form!

Song Zhong Jin

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

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

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

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

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

What do you all say?

The Forth Dimension--My Limit

I know I have earned some trust from readers over the last few months. But never the less I suspect that some readers are wondering just how far out I might go.

Well I'm happy to inform you that there is a clear limit to how far I will go. I promise it will not get any more wacko than this.

The following idea occurred to me and although it may be a (rather high level daoyin) stretch, I thought it wouldn't hurt to be the first person to say it.

First everyone should know about this surfer dude, Garrett Lisi. He may have created a unified field theory.

He had been tinkering with "weird" equations for years and getting nowhere, but six months ago he stumbled on a research paper analysing E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points. He noticed that some of the equations describing its structure matched his own. "The moment this happened my brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," says Lisi. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

Folks, we may be living in 8 Dimensions and only experiencing 3 of them!

Well I've been pondering this during my practice of the last month and thinking to myself, "what if we do have some experience of say the 4th dimension but our brains are wired to make sense of everything in the third?"

The explanations of why and how taijiquan or baguazhang works have never been that great. A lot of us accept the notion that being relaxed with really good alighnment and thinking about very clear force vectors is enough to explain the powers we taiji and bagua guys have, but then again most of us leave some room for doubt.

Well, what if Taijiquan and Baguazhang are actually happening in the fourth dimension?  What if all those strange sensation of yi (intension) and shen (spirit) are actually just shadows of a multi-dimensional experience.  We can't see or hear it, but perhaps we can still play around at the fringes?

You heard it here first, at Weakness with a Twist.

Dizziness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Jordon's Tongue

In Chinese Medical theory the finger and toe nails are considered the ends of the tendons. In gongfu we treat our nails like cat claws that can retract and extend.

Of course humans don't have the full extension/retraction that cats do but our nails do move and we can learn to have control over them. Developing whole body tendon integration is a preliminary stage for learning whole body power. To do this one must practice initiating movement from the nails, the outer periphery of our bodies.

Just like the nails are the ends of the tendons in Chinese Medical theory, the tongue is the end of the muscles.

The chansijin (taijiquan silk reeling power exercises)  movements of the head have a little known tongue component. For instance there is a "head forward and back" neck roll that replicates the infant sucking reflex all babies develop. If you do the exercise correctly the whole inside of your throat, including your tongue, will involuntarily come outward and suck back inward with each rolling motion.

The seventh palm change in Baguazhang is sometimes called "snake spits out it's tongue" for the same reason; it is possible to tap into whole body power through activating the sucking reflex in which the tongue goes forward and draws back. With practice, the whole torso will be involved in the movement.

In both of these cases, the tongue remains hidden.  This is a type of secret teaching known as "indoor" or "six ears never hear."
Michael Jordan, on the other hand, has not been shy about showing us his tongue. He is by far the greatest Basket Ball player I've every watched.

Now I ask you, is it a coincidence that he also happens to be the only player who constantly sloshed his tongue around in his mouth and regularly stuck it out when he was making full use of his muscles?  Was he just fooling around, or was that a secret source of his power?

Steps of Perfection (part 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Golden Thread

There is a common taijiquan metaphor that practice is like making silk brocade interwoven with golden threads.

Brocade has been found in tombs sealed airtight with clay and water dating back to the Fifth Century BCE (or there abouts) in what was then the Chu kingdom. Brocade is a type of woven fabric which can display different images depending on the angle of the light. See this Archeology PFD.

Probably the most widely practiced sinew lengthening routine is called 8 Silken Brocade. Following the metaphor, it has eight movements which reveal eight different images of what the human body can do.

The metaphor of the golden thread is absolutely key to understanding how to practice taijiquan. Each day when we practice we begin with some idea about what we are going to do. That idea may be very complex, or it may be as simple as "I'm going to make circles with my arm and try to make it look like it does when my teacher does it." But during practice, you happen upon some feeling that is new.

Perhaps on this particular day it is a feeling of connection, or a feeling of softness, it could be anything. The first time you feel it, it will feel subtle, even delicate, like a very fine golden thread. If you don't practice the next day, you will certainly have forgotten what the feeling was and how you got to it. Even if you do practice the next day, the feeling may elude you. Or you may refresh this new feeling for a few days, but then you have a wild night and the next morning you forget to look for that golden thread and by the next day it is gone. By the next week it is forgotten.
If you do manage to hang on to one of those new feelings (those subtle golden threads) for a few weeks of practice it will become less subtle and easier to reproduce.

To truly practice Taijiquan or any internal art is to look everyday for the golden thread you felt the day before and to slowly weave it day after day into the brocade that is your whole practice. Eventually these fine threads weave together into pictures that become so a part of you that they shimmer in and out of focus continuously like images on a flexible piece of brocade in changing light.