Warriors Part 3

This is a continuation of my discussion of Warriors, part 1, and part 2.

Shaman Warriors of old were experts in using Spirit(s) to invoke absolute terror in their opponents, and blind fury in their allies. In the transition from shaman warriors to lineages that follow warrior codes, some shamanism became institutionalized.

During the Holy Crusades, both sides made extensive use of protective talisman. In Indonesia, the dagger known as a Kris is understood to capture and enslave the spirits of all the people it has slain. The more dead warriors in your Kris, the more power it has. A very powerful Kris itself becomes a player, and can possess a weak owner.

This is one of the parallel stories told in the block buster hit “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.� In the beginning when Chow Yun Fat returns from his meditation retreat, Michelle Yao asks, “Why did you come back?� she is thinking, “He must have come back because he loves me.� But he doesn’t answer, he just looks over at the sword; the sword has it’s own name, Green Destiny (yuming).

In Japan, only Samurai were aloud to own swords. Swords were passed down from one generation to the next. The long sword captured the spirits of one’s opponents; the short sword captured only the spirits of ancestors who had used it to kill themselves. If a Samurai pulled out his short sword in the midst of battle, everyone would just run past him because they knew he was going to use it only on himself.

In this warrior code, a Samurai needed only two things, fearlessness and a willingness to die. The change from Warrior to skilled technician and martial artist is marked historically with the life of Miyamoto Musashi.

Cool footnote: In the Chinese army during the Tang Dynasty there were Korean Suicide Troops, which were used in the wars against Tibet.

Taijiquan Jeopardy

I made up a Jeopardy game from written questions my college students submitted about Taijiquan. This student asked a simple "How?" type question. In order to answer accurately I felt it was important to redefine some basic terms.

Guess the question:

Think about the role of a doctor in traditional Chinese society where health is considered accumulated merit (gongfu) which one dedicates to others—and to the resolution of one’s own unresolved ancestors. In this sense, health and learning are similar because they both involve the accumulation of merit for the good of everyone.

Health is a result of conduct, ancestors, and environment: Jing-Qi-Shen.

The Process of dedicating one’s merit is fundamental to Chinese culture (and Traditional Chinese Medicine.)

Yahoo Service

Yahoo Service seems to be down, this page took 15 Minutes to come up, hope it works later

Push-Hands and Arguing

Taijiquan is the art of not being defensive.

I grew up in a home where arguing was as important as food.  On a recent trip to Turkey I discovered that even in academic and journalistic circles, skill at arguing was very low.  People would argue but if, for instance, I said something like, “I think there are three distinct issues here,� they would get upset become defensive and the argument would lose it’s basis in rationality and civility.  Lack of free speech, years of propaganda, and a difference in culture all contributed to their assessment of me as too confrontational.

On the other hand, on the same trip I went to Israel where several people confided to me, in admiration, that I don’t argue; instead I discuss things clearly and articulately.   I thought the contrast and the comments were quite funny.  Israel is one the few places in the world where a person can get into an argument at a bus stop with a complete stranger and feel like you are making new friends.

Arguing probably releases dopamine into my system, it is my element.  There is no greater complement you can pay me than to convince me I am wrong.

Push hands is similar.  Like arguing, it often reveals more about an individual’s nature and skill, than it proves right or wrong.  Just because you win, doesn’t mean your idea or skill will work in the real world.  When I argue with someone of lesser skill I don’t attack the weak parts of their argument.  Instead I go after the parts I think are the strongest, the points that are most central,  and are the most likely to change one of our opinions.

Push hands is the same.  If I’m pushing with someone better than myself, I’m keenly aware of the smallest possible error they may make.  Even if I find an error I may not be able to use it against them, my purpose is to learn what they are doing so that I can replicate it myself.  Only by deeply understanding the core of their idea can I have any hope of winning.

On the other hand, like arguing with someone who has less skill than I do, if I’m pushing-hands with someone of lesser skill, I don’t try to win by attacking them where they are weak, I try to beat them at their strongest point.  I handicap myself so that we can both learn and improve.

Push hands is not fundamentally about winning.  It is a kind of intimacy.  Too many people push-hands defensively.  Push-hands and arguing are the same, when someone becomes defensive we both stop learning.

What is a Jing? (Part 2)

Most people, including me, first learned internal martial arts and qigong with out a Daoist inspired view.

This missing view is "a way of seeing the world, or a way of affirming experience." If we are not presented with a view we tend to bring what ever view we are already familiar with to the new topic. [Like, dude, is this going to make me into the like ultimate greatest fighter?]

For example, because the Western historical view of creation is deeply embedded in the English language, even at the level of grammar and metaphor, people tend to see 'a divine agent' in the following translation which is not in the original classic text (jing). This translation from a Daoist Shangjing classic(jing), is itself explaining the nature of a jing:

Now the jing "in the beginning coexisted with the Original Breath and were produced at the same time as the Original Commencement." They are formed by the coagulation and the condensation of this first Breath or from one of the three primordial Breaths. Spontaneously born from the Void, they appeared as rays of light that came before the genesis of the world. In these grandiose divine prologues that refer to the time when yin and yang divided and "the five colors started to shoot forth,"....

"Purple books written in characters of red cinnabar" fasten themselves onto the Ch'ien tree growing on the moon. These Books shine "like moonlight" and are the nourishment for immortality. In the Pi-lo heaven within the trees of K'ung-ch'ing grove, the True Writings are formed in purple characters. In this sacred grove, the sound of blowing wind becomes music. And if a bird eats the leaves off the trees in this grove, then written texts appear on its body and whoever is able to obtain its feathers is able to fly. Thus the Tree of Life is Writing and Writing is a Tree of Life.
(Isabelle Robinet, Taoist Meditation, p21,23.)

This amazing definition goes on without a break for seven pages. This little reference may give readers a taste of what they can expect from any traditional Chinese subject.

Roger Ames makes some salient points about the nature of Chinese thinking:

We are always a participant in the unraveling of traditional Chinese subjects, never an 'objective observer.' From the Chinese perspective, agents cannot be decontextualized and superordinated in any final sense; to identify and isolate an agent [re: divine creator] is an abstraction which removes it from the concrete reality of flux, exaggerating its continuity at the expense of its change. Since change is interior to all situations, human beings do not act upon a world that is independent of them. Rather, they are interdependent in the world in which they reside, simultaneously shaping it and being shaped by it. Order is always reflexive, subject and object, are not contraries, but interchangeable aspects of a single category in which any distinction between the agent and the action, between subject and object, between what does and what is done, is simply a matter of perspective.(Roger T. Ames, Yuan Dao, p.20-21)

Roger Ames again:

In fact, categories used to define a Chinese world are fluid, and must be seen as often crossing the borders of time, space, and matter in an unfamiliar way. Dao so understood offends against the most basic of Western cultural distinctions, mixing together subject and object, as well as things, actions attributes, and modalities. Dao is at once"what is" (things and their attributes) and "how things are" (actions and their modalities), it is "who knows" as well as "what is known."(Ames, p. 27-28)

In the above paragraph the term Dao could easily be replaced with the words jing or qi.

In order to understand Internal Martial Arts or qigong and bring the practices to fruition, it may be necessary to relax some of the most basic ways we think about the world. What is the appropriate attitude with which to approach a traditional Chinese subject? How do we go about the process of unfolding the subject keeping in mind its traditional context?

While we are free to dive into these scholarly debates, there is a traditional answer which also points in the right direction and wishes a person good luck at the same time: Long-life!

What is a Jing?

A TRADITIONAL CHINESE ORIENTATION TOWARD KNOWLEDGE.

Sometimes when a Chinese teacher is trying to explain a term they will instead explain a term which is a homonym. Because there are so many words in Chinese which sound alike, simular sounding words can, over hundereds of years, take on parallel or related meanings and so in this chapter, instead of explaining jing, the solid, more structural or dense aspect of Qi, I will instead explain jing, a classic.

The term jing (ching) is usually translated: Classic. "...(It) is the underlying structure, both in the human body, such as the meridians of acupuncture, and in the body of knowledge of a civilization. This is the general name given to all the "master texts," such as the Tao-te ching, ... [or the I Ching (Yijing)]. It can be used to describe books that are not philosophical (e.g. Nei Ching, "The internal Classic," the master text of Chinese medicine) or even Chinese (e.g. Shen Ching, "The Holy Classic," the Bible). The literal meaning of this character is "warpage" (the threads stretched out lengthwise in a loom that give structure to the fabric that is woven),...." (Cyrille Javary, Understanding the I Ching, p. xii.)

What is the appropriate attitude with which to approach a traditional Chinese subject? How do we go about the process of unfolding the subject of the Internal Arts keeping in mind their traditional context?

The classical version of traditional literature uses very dense concentrated metaphorical and symbolic language to describe a topic. Often it is a consolidation of many earlier texts which have made mention of the topic at hand. These concentrated classics are committed to memory. Understanding is expected to come over an extended period of time, with experience. In some ways this is a good summary of what a Taijiquan form or a qigng movement series is in itself.

Out of this literary tradition grew a tradition of commentary and explanation, probably the consolidation of many generation of practitioners notes from the margins of their copies of the original classic. A popular way to begin a study of a classic, or jing, is for the teacher to take only the first character of the text and from just that character, reconstruct the essence, or "view" of the entire text. Commentaries which really pull apart or expand the meanings of a classic text tend to read like overwhelming layers of wafting clouds passing through the reader; too much to actually grasp, likely to invoke sleep, an inventory of embedded meanings meant to have an influence over time.

Studying Internal arts is something like memorizing a classic (jing). A classic, like a an Internal arts routine, embodies conservation, efficiency and the unfolding of the totality of previous experience in a concentrated form. In both cases the relationship of student to practice and student to teacher is the processes of unfolding and revealing the text or form and then re-embodying it in its concentrated efficiency.

I'm calling it concentrated efficiency because that is what it seems like from the outside looking in, but to actually embody either a classic text or a internal arts form feels plain, bland and simple. A traditional Chinese scholar can seamlessly weave a classic, they have memorized, in and out of their speech in such a way that someone who is unfamiliar with the classic won't notice. In fact, scholars who have memorized and embodied many classic texts can play games together where they seamlessly string together classic quotes and yet speak to each other from the heart about things which are important to them. In fact, China has a tradition of scholars with huge appetites for study who can actually quote continuously with genuineness and sincerity. To truly embody an internal practice is the same. On the outside one appears to be doing regular everyday movement, but inside the form (or we could say qigong) is happening all the time, it becomes second nature.

The practice of Push-hand is analogous to the senario where two scholars are spontaneously exchanging quotes from classic texts while discussing a third topic.

Criticism

I interviewed George Xu the other day. I expect to have a video of him talking uploaded soon. He said he has video of him demonstrating in Germany that will likely go on the web by October.
One question I asked him was: In the past 15 years, since I studied with you full time, what is the biggest mistake you have made in your training?

He answered that although there were probably 200 or so small errors, the biggest problem was not having an outside eye to correct him. Had other teachers been willing to offer helpful corrections, and constructive criticism, he could have saved a lot of time--and the art of Taijiquan itself would have been furthered.

He says that when he offers helpful criticism to other teachers they don't want to hear it, they see criticism as a challenge to fight, not as a way to further the art.
In essence, his challenge to us is to create a taijiquan culture of helpful criticism.

Youtube video exchanges/debates are a fun place to start and I really hope to see more of them, but we're really talking about understanding Taijiquan as an ART not just a fighting system. When we view it as an art, we can all take pleasure in our personal contribution, but we can also take pleasure in the furthering of the ART as a whole.

I would love it if a few people would post comments about the biggest mistakes they have made in their training, for everyone else's benefit.

Use Chinese Methods to Convert Barbarians

When two different cultures meet, dance is the first art across the border. Music is very close behind. Interaction with another culture has great potential to create change; most societies fear change. This is why societies so often ban or at least try to control dance.

Dance often invokes trance of various sorts, heroic, competitive, sexual, or ecstatic. All of these types of trances have the potential to disrupt traditional designations of authority and hereditary power.

The brilliance of Chinese (Han) culture is that it has spread Martial Arts (gongfu) instead of dance to all of it's neighbors and all of the societies it comes in contact with. Gongfu is merit based, and on the surface it shuns trance. It seduces the naturally aggressive, and trains the wild-at-heart.

The expression "Yong yu bian yi", use Chinese methods to convert barbarians really captures the idea. I got the expression from a book I recommend about the relations between China's dominant Han majority and the numerous smaller peoples who inhabit the broad periphery of China's territory: Cultural Encounters on Chinas Ethnic Frountiers, Edited by Stevan Harrell.
I think it's interesting that in China right now the most common activities in a public park are, gongfu/qigong, ballroom dance, Weiqi (Go), Chinese Chess and basketball.

Where and When to Practice

When training in traditional Chinese arts, finding the time to practice consistently, actually setting time aside everyday, is most peoples biggest obstacle. The second biggest obstacle is trying to find a safe comfortable place to practice undisturbed.

Some people begin with a more flexible fate then others. Changing ones schedule around or going to bed an hour earlier are possible solutions. Beginners can try setting aside a consistent amount of time everyday at the same time of day and following through even if they don't feel like it. The commitment itself actually makes things easier. The best qi of the day for practice is early morning, between 3am and 8am, but other times are also okay.

Then there is the topic of where to practice. Some knowledge of fengshui is helpful here. The basic idea of fengshui is that the site itself is the most important consideration. Since you will be taking qi(inspiration) from the environment, the best location is a place you want to be, and that you can come to consistently. A place where you feel safe comfortable and can be alone. It should be a place where the air is fresh(free to circulate) yet still (absence of wind).

If your practice location is too cold your circulation may slow down, but it can also be drawn in to a deeper level. Cold places can be fine if they are not damp or wet and you are bundled up and out of the wind. Wind easily disrupts weiqi, the qi on the surface of our waking body. A healthy person will develop weiqi which complements the environment they practice in. The human body is adaptable; however, the effect a particular environment is having on ones practice is of vital importance and requires regular reassessment.
The classical ideal of the perfect place to practice is in a southward facing valley surrounded by gently slopping hills on three sides with the highest point to the north. A traditional Chinese walled garden attempts to replicate this environment in an urban area. The light well in the center of traditional Chinese architecture also tries to reproduce this qi experience.

Considering the totality of your experience over time, you may want to avoid the following:
Cluttered rooms
Open corridors, or pathways where people or animals are likely to walk by.
Standing in direct sunlight in mid-day
Stagnant water, mosquitoes
Things that look like they could fall
Sharp projections.
Where people are sick.

Even expert knowledge of fengshui can not overcome a 'bad' site, the first consideration should be the quality of the site. People who find a great place to practice dramatically increase the likelihood of bringing their practice to fruition.

Breathing

In general I teach that yin proceeds yang. Structure leads to function. However, the opposite is also true. Where you begin, what you emphasize, will create a different style of qigong.

Generally speaking the correct posture will automatically have the right breathing and the right breathing will get you to the correct posture. In practice, however, the way we breathe tends to hold us in certain postures. Breathing is a natural anesthetic, which covers up all types of pain. When we use our breathing to try and force circulation to a certain area, the area tends to become numb. Over years, we accumulate these numb spots and our posture becomes more rigid, our breathing more restricted.
I generally teach people to stand, and to move, before teaching them breathing; however, the two are really inseparable.
Body Image


Cultural conceptions about how to breath and how to stand (posture) are so tied up in emotions, passions, fantasies and identities that either approach can take a bit of unraveling. My experience is that if I say to someone "take a deep breath," they lift up the front of their ribcage (actually constricting their lungs which are mostly in the back) and they tend to harden their diaphragm in a muscular, sometimes even aggressive way. If I say, "breathe naturally," they become self-conscious ("you mean I'm not breathing right?"). Anxiety leads to tension which produces more restriction.

Instead I say, "Take shallow breaths in and out from your nose all the way down to your belly(dantian) and slowly/gently allow the breath(qi) to fill up your lower back/kidney area(mingmen)"

Your breathing should be like the silk spinner and the jade carver.

The silk spinner uses a gentle continuous pull, no sudden jerks, and a smooth even turnaround.

The jade carver doesn't leave any scratches; the breath is inaudible, silent, with no rasping.

The great jade carver discovers what is in the jade as he is carving it, the mediocre jade carver plans out what they are going to carve in advance.

Breathing is essentially about taking the nutritive qi of heaven into all the channels of the body. Our posture is formed in our qi environment, home, school, work, car etc.... How we breath is formed inside our posture. Trying to force a particular type of breathing which doesn't match the physical structure and posture of our bodies will simply be a strain. Frustration itself is a kind of breathing.

The way to change breathing is to change physical structure and posture. The way to change posture is to change the environments we live in and move through, this is the subject of fengshui. The aspect of fengshui that relates directly to qigong is the question of what environment will be most supportive of our practice. Through practicing qigong in a supportive qi environment, we develop sensitivity to the effects the larger bodies we are living in have on our constitution, and on our breathing.

Qigong should not be used as a way to overcome a negative environment.