How to use Taijiquan in a Fight

Here is my latest video offering, enjoy.

Quan (Ch'uan)

What does quan mean? As in the terms taijiquan, xingyiquan, shaolin quan. The standard answer is that it literally means fist, but in context means boxing or art. Thus taijiquan means 'the taiji style of boxing' or 'the fighting art of taiji.' (For a definition of taiji see my previous entry.)

This is a bit misleading. One should ask the question why other languages don't have an equivalent term? Korea and Japan mainly use the term dao (do in japanese as in 'way of' that we also discussed in an earlier post); hapkido,karatedo, Aikido, judo. (Taikwando uses both: kwan is the same word as quan). In English we just say boxing, or fencing. We have different terms but not a category like quan.

As I've said elsewhere gongfu has many historic roots. The most important for explaining the meaning of quan is it's roots in village level trans-medium religion. There were cults to local deities, heroes, and ancestors. Each cult had a central shrine and an incense burner and as the cult grew, ashes from the original incense burner would be distributed to satellite shrines in other villages. Processional celebrations for each cult would travel between villages according to a ritual calender. This is one of the ways that villages renewed their ties of social order, commercial vigor, and mutual defense. Along a procession, depending on the nature of the particular cult, a village would sponsor a festival. These festivals were sometimes very complex and could last weeks. This created a kind of "unseen" or "celestial" extra-government or social order.

One common aspect of these festivals was performance. A standard thing to perform was a demonstration of your village's martial prowess. People were usually invited and paid to perform in other villages but when you performed in your own village you did it for free. What you performed was your village quan. So quan really means a traditional routine that demonstrates your village's prowess. Prowess was, of course, understood in terms of gongfu or accumulated merit.

It is still common in 2007 for a Chinese person in San Francisco to ask another Chinese person, "What is your home village?"

These festivals also had what we would call magic shows, circus arts, and theatrical performances that told religiously significant stories. Thus, gongfu and Chinese Opera are really different components of the a single tradition.

Shuijiao Chinese Wrestling

Everyone interested in Chinese Martial Arts should have a copy of The Method of Chinese Wrestling by Tong Zhongyi, Translated by Tim Cartmell.

The first reason is that it is beautiful. It is a complete translation of a book on Shuijiao from the 1930's with grainy black and white photos that are easy to see and very detailed. (No editing necessary! Thanks North Atlantic Books.)
The second reason is that it is material that helps to put internal arts in context. Shuijiao is a kind of gentrified form of Mongolian wrestling, stand up throws, with similarities to Judo take downs and Sumo too.

Shuijiao isn't however all that gentrified, (push-hands should get the gentrified wrestling award). Shuijiao throws are elegant, they make great police training for dealing with drunks, which historically is the biggest part of a policeman's job.

Practitioners of internal arts will quickly see how shuijiao techniques are a part of every taijiquan and baguazhang movement. It is kind of a mini-subject within a subject.

Go get it!

What do Daoist's do?

What do daoists do? It can be divided up into three categories: Conduct, Hygiene, and Method.
An example of conduct practices are the Xiang er precepts. These are a first century C.E. summary of what the Daode jing suggests trying, like be honest, be weak, cultivate stillness, and practice wuwei. They are considered scripture for religious Daoists.(see Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures)

Hygiene practices conserve qi and make it easier to follow these suggestions, they include things like bathing practices, qi gong, and an appropriate diet.
Methods include things like zowang(sitting and forgetting), jindan(the elixir practice, internal alchemy), and ritual.

Hygiene practices can also be considered conduct practices because they are meant to have an impact on physical and qi manifestation of our daily conduct.

Qi gong, like taijiquan and baguazhang, is the practice of cultivating weakness in order to sensitize us to our impact on our environment and our environment's impact on us. For instance, I notice that my knee hurts when I walk up a bunch of stairs. If I don't know that qi gong is a 'conduct' practice, I might be inclined to think that my qi gong practice is the cause, instead of considering that the way I've been charging up stairs has been to use strength to cover-up an old knee injury, which practicing qi gong actually revealed.
Practitioners of these so called "long-life" practices, reach their peak level of performance in their 60's and 70's.

Taiji and bagua probably have their origins in ritual dances which rectify qi. That is they dance the qi (time and directionality) of the universe into a condensed moment and then dance it back out into the universe again, (wuwei). Each step containing birth and death, the rhythms of life.
Tracing taijiquan and baguazhang back to their original roots may require such a huge step backwards that it is out of our range, but it is a mistake to think they are purely martial.

Play the Pipa

Making fun of the traditional names of various Taijiquan movements is pretty common. Many of the names sound weird to an English speaking ear. The poetry and metaphors are mostly obscure.
Recently a Taiwanese student of mine suggested a really great explanation for the name playing the Pipa (sometimes translated as playing the guitar). The pipa, as everyone knows, is a stringed instrument but pipa also means scapula. Breaking the scapula was a traditional punishment for fighting. The official administering the punishment would restrain the "fighter" and then slip one of his hands behind the scapula and use the other to chop, breaking it in half. This is just how the movement is done in Yang style taijiquan. Two broken scapulas would damage any fighting career for sometime, possibly forever.
Chinese law or jurisprudence, differs from jurisprudence in English speaking countries. An important difference is that they use different underlying metaphors for what constitutes a violation. In English speaking countries our metaphor is a line or a wall. If you cross this line, you have broken the law. The Chinese metaphor is more like a downward slope. For instance, if you have young children under you care and you are dueling, the punishment is likely to be much worse, because you are really risking other peoples lives. Fighting in this context can be more or less legal, depending on what the longer term outcomes could be. It is, of course, traditional to punish ones whole family because it is assumed that they must have seen you acting badly, bit by bit over time and done nothing to stop it.

Yangsheng

The term yangsheng, "nourishing life," is sometimes suggested as a precursor to qigong. But again, it means something different. The term has also been rendered into english as long-life practices, macrobiotics, or daoist hygiene. It is a more general term that refers to diet, bathing, movement, stillness, trance, calendrical observation, talisman, the ingesting of special foods, and purification for ritual.

Doctors (Zhongyi) traditionally practiced yangsheng. Elisabeth Hsu points out that it was the first part of the transmission of Chinese medical training in the first half of the 20th century. In the Dream of the Red Chamber, the 17th century Chinese epic novel, there is a fascinating scene where a famous doctor has been called to treat one of the ladies of the house. He comes in the evening, acknowledging the urgency of the situation but then says he can not make an accurate pulse diagnosis until the next morning after he has had time to regulate his own pulse.

Origins of Qigong (part 2)

An older term that is sometimes conflated with the modern notion of qigong is Daoyin . The word daoyin is more specifically, movement done in conjunction with Daoist religious practices which include various types of meditation and purification. Daoyin is better understood as the dao of religious adepts.

Hermits practicing meditation or trance for long periods of time sometimes develop poor circulation, muscular atrophy or digestion problems –this tendency inspired the development of exercises which can be done in a small space to balance the rigors of long periods of stillness. Daoyin lineages contain many layers of knowledge which have been passed down to adepts over the centuries, they are however focused mainly on developing a body which can maintain its vigor through long periods of stillness or during long periods of specialized fasting.

Systematic Daoyin looks a bit like hatha yoga mixed up with vigorous slapping, rubbing, pounding, bouncing and rolling. Individual exercises could also be extracted to treat specific ailments, but it is a mistake to say that daoyin is the same thing as qigong.

I do not reject innovation or re-invention but it is kind of funny to think of office workers cramped up in their cubicles taking a little "daoyin" break--But that’s one of the characteristics of modernity: Culturally and historically miss-match activities sharing the same space. Often the result, while sometimes humorous, is inappropriate enthusiasm obscuring shallow appreciation of tradition.

(Because Paulie Zink (see Below) teaches a daoyin lineage that is thoroughly integrated into what appears to be a performance tradition of monkey gongfu, it is possible that daoyin began as a performance tradition. It is also possible that it became part of what we might call a 'youth training program' for the Sung Dynasty version of a "Renaissance Man." )

African Bagua #2

I just posted a new video on Youtube! Check it out: African Bagua part 2

Origins of Qigong (part 1)

There is a common convention of Chinese culture in which the word Dao, meaning the way (or road), is applied to any field of study. The dao of archery, the dao of writing, the dao of mothering, even the dao of basketball. This expression refers to a way of knowing and embodying which is unique to each pursuit, and implies both ease and confidence. It is somewhat like saying in English, "She really has a knack for juggling." (Yet it implies that the activity itself transforms the person who does it, it is not just an act of doing. It also implies that there is a curriculum.)
For most of the last 1500 years in China (since the introduction of Kaishu style calligraphy), the first lessons one received when learning to write were instructions on how to sit with out obstructing the circulation of qi and blood, how to hold and move the brush in coordination with ones breath such that the student might start discovering the dao of writing from day one. It was a lesson in how to embody the physicality of great public officials of the past.
All traditional Chinese subjects had this "dao of" training; music, martial arts, medicine, weaving, etc….In traditional Chinese culture the physical process of acquiring knowledge is not subordinate to knowledge itself-- How one learns is, in a sense, given priority to what one learns. [Of course, the threat of violence was sometimes part of the teaching process, (I don’t want to create a fantasy playland out of Chinese history), but there was an emphasis on process nonetheless.]
The term qigong, coined in the 1950's, has come to describe the modern idea of abstracting all these varied approaches to the physical basis for learning-- and making them into a distinct subject. For instance the specific daily exercises that a blacksmith family had been passing down from generation to generation (the dao of blacksmithing) now became a type of qigong taught for general health.

Confucianism and Martial Arts

All of the major categories of Chinese religion have developed the notion of perfecting one’s self, though each in distinctly different ways. While each is a contributor, Confucianism is the obvious and most prominent origin of gongfu as a process of perfection. The Confucian approach is one of consistent vigilance in the refinement of a changing person in a changing world. The idea that one would practice the same routine everyday and thus constantly refine ones skill, while simultaneously adapting and applying that skill to ones ever changing duties, needs and circumstances is a Confucian idea. The result of such a practice would be a combination of embodied discipline, efficiency and flexibility. Confucians assert that Gongfu thus conceived does not need to be rewarded because the process of perfection is intrinsically rewarding.

Are you on a path of self-perfection?  Does this idea translate into English speaking cultures? When I searched Google images for "perfection" I mostly got images of nature, drugs, and technology.