The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (last chapter)

The last chapter of The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, is titled "A Moving Yi Jing." The meat and potatoes of this chapter are two great lists.

The first list is a paragraph for each of the qi transmissions associated with each of the eight "mother palms" and gua (trigrams) of B.K. Frantzis's baguazhang system (which has no form).

The qi transmissions are supplemented in the applications section too. The authors clearly and succinctly describe the feeling of each palm change; how it moves and what makes it distinct. They also explain that the best way to develop these qi transmissions is through the practice of Soft-hands, Roshou (a dynamic moving and slapping version of push-hands).

I plan to do a video for each of the Baguazhang qi transmissions with in a year.

What is a Daoist Body? 

The second list is this:

1. The Physical Body


2. The Qi Body


3. The Emotional Body


4. The Thinking Body


5. The Psychic Body


6. The Causal Body


7. The Body of Individuality


8. The body of the Dao

The authors give very short descriptions of what each category might mean, calling them energy bodies. Beyond that what they say is embarrassing for it's lack of connection to anything real.  (Baguazhang is not a self-help program, and neither is the Yijing.)
Religious Daoism conceptualizes a human being as not just one body but many bodies. Calling them "energy bodies" is misleading. Your house is a body that you share with everyone else who lives there. You can clean, remodel, or move to another house, but the fact that you have such a body is a given. All bodies relate to other bodies. If you live in a damp shack for a month your physical body will start to creek at the joints and your lung capacity will decrease (effecting your qi body).

The way religious Daoists conceptualize it, we share a body with everyone who reads this blog or speaks English. More importantly, we share a body with everyone who makes the same commitments we do, thus Christians all share a body, Muslims all share a body, and everyone who worships Guanyin shares a body.

Ghosts have very weak bodies, demons and gods very strong ones (we give them our strength).

Horror movies are so visceral because as you watch them your various "commitment bodies" are being contorted, poked and exploded. (Obviously, I love the horror genre.)

This is a list used to train Daoist exorcists. In order to do an exorcism you must be able to recognize all the different types of possession in other people and in yourself.

1. Physical possession is pain. In it's lesser forms we recognize it as tension or even "strength." Physical possession causes people to lash out and to blame.


2. Qi possession is associated with controlling the breath, it amplifies feelings, creates excitement and it can lead to transcendent states. (Godlike or "I can't feel my body" types of disassociation.) Mania.


3. Emotional possession translates perfectly into English. Possessed by fear, anger, love, etc...


4. Thinking possession is like believing that the oceans are going to rise because we drive to work. Or that everything that happens in the Middle-East matters. You know, "Global Conspiracy," "The world is in crisis, dude."


5. Psychic possession is believing you know what someone else is thinking, or what is about to happen next.


6. Causal possession is like schizophrenia. When you think objects or icons or voices in your head are the cause of something in the real world. Profound disassociation.


7. The body of Individuation is supreme ego-mania. There are a number of narcotics that can bring about this near-death experience. It is when you feel/believe that you are the cause and purpose of everything.


8. The body of the Dao is a complete death. Sometimes call immortality. It is experience without any limits or conceptions.

Baguazhang is a dance form that explores all the different ways we can become possessed.  It is dancing with what it is to be alive.  Perhaps we could think of it as a personal, daily exorcism, although that certianly isn't traditional.

In case I lost you-- and you don't see the connection to martial arts-- notice that I just made a really good list of what might cause someone to attack you.

The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (Part 4)

Continuing my discussion of the Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, by Frank Allen and Tina Chunna Zhang, we turn to the chapter entitled "The Daoist Roots of Baguazhang."

The chapter can be summarized like this: Dong Haichuan and Liu Hung Chieh both studied with some unnamed Daoists and Daoists do meditation. Baguazhang practitioners do sitting, standing, and walking meditation, which must have come from these unnamed Daoists. See the problem yet?

In the second paragraph we read:

Apparently, these Daosits looked to their predecessors--the shaman founders of Chinese culture--for some of the patterns of their moving meditations. Some of the oldest texts relating to the study of the Dao have chronicled a few of the dance patterns of the legendary Yu, mythical father of Chinese Shamanism. The patterns of many of these Shamanistic practices were circles and spirals.

The connection of the Dance of Yu to baguazhang is one of those big multi-layered topics for another day. But I can at least point out what the authors don't; Da Yu (the Great Yu) was an exorcist. The reason he is considered the founder of Chinese culture is because 4000 years ago he toured the known world (the whole country) performing the first national exorcisms.



I grew up around a lot of Cantonese speaking kids. When they got mad they would shout "Fuk Da Yu!" which sounded so much like F--k Y-u! that we had a lot of fun saying it. It turns out that they were saying "A curse upon your ancestors." Yu is the mythic ancestor of all Chinese and his name has actually come to mean "ancestor!"

The authors present Professor Kang Gewu's thesis that the roots of baguazhang are to be found in a circle walking practice of the Longmen sect. The concept of "secularism" does not translate very well into Chinese. For instance, Catholicism and Protestantism have often been viewed by Chinese as completely different religions. The idea that Daoism has sects is foreign to Daoism itself. This notion adds somewhat to the confusion about baguazhang's daoist roots. If it's possible to be ordained in a Quanzhen monastery, go and study ritual with a Tianshi householder, and then go live in a Zhengyi hermit enclave on Mao Mountain--then these categories don't meet the definition of sects.

To the authors credit, Longmen (Dragon gate) is correctly identified as a later Daoist lineage (1656) of the Qing Dynasty which merged with Confucianism and promoted a public code of conduct for lay practitioners. (I think of it as decaf-Daoism. It would be very hard to figure out why people drink coffee everyday if the only kind you had ever tried was decaf.)

That's most of what the authors have to say about Daoism. At one point they describe the meditative goal of circle walking as, to "make heaven and earth reside within one's own body," thus joining our inner world with the outer world to become "One with the Dao." Thanks for that. Basic Chinese cosmology posits that we are a temporary contract between Heaven and Earth to hang out in a body for, give or take, 80 years. How does walking in a circle make that more or less true?

In the second half of this chapter, the authors describe in detail a method of "dissolving" taught by B.K. Frantzis. The method described here is great. The problem is that without contextualization, without some grasp of the view which inspired this method, there is a very high probability that the fruition of practice will be overlooked. (And that appears to be what happened.)

The method they describe has the goal of clearing "energy blockages" from the body so that we can store unlimited amounts of qi. I'm deeply familiar with this method but I don't personally like to think of myself as being full of energy blockages, whatever that means. Frankly, the method is not very important.

My intension is not to sound dismissive, by all means, clear out those energy blocks! But taking a step back, isn't that what I am-- a big old energy blockage. To all my fellow energy blockages out there (this means you, dear reader) I say this: Respect yourself, lighten up, and trust your experience. You'll figure it out.

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The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (Part 3)

Chapter 6 is a translation with commentary on the Bagauzhang Classics. If someone actually thought these ideas worth putting into poetry, I should hope that an effort would be made to make them sound like poetry in English. Maybe the problem is in the original, I can't tell. The book doesn't give enough background about these classics for me to know if I should take them seriously. They don't say much. The Taiji Classics where written for the advanced student, but these classics seem more rudimentary. Usually poetry is multi-layered, but if there is a second layer to these classics, the translation hides it. Why are we writing songs about martial arts anyway? In an age of video, a martial arts song better have some substance.
Here is a song about martial arts worth singing. "bmm bmm bmm...another one bites the dust."

Still, I'm going to study the classics. I can't help it. But I find myself wishing they said something different. Here is a fun one (#33). The Chinese title is "not-two-natural-principle" The authors' translated it "Accuracy Method.":

Do not shoot an arrow without a target,
Shoot again if the target is missed.
Even if he moves like a ghost,
I catch the evil spirit in no time.

The authors commentary interprets this to mean be accurate, wait rather than strike blindly. If you strike and miss, you leave yourself open. If you do miss, keep striking constantly until you win.
This was worth putting into poetry? A jade-maiden just whispered this in my ear, perhaps it is an improvement:

Baguazhang is an art without arrows or targets;
If something can be missed once, it can be missed again.
Even if my opponent is already committed to his own death,
No time or distance separates us.

Here is another one from the book (#31):

Blocking is a skill of protecting,
To avoid attacks with a casual attitude.
When the distance is more than inches away,
Skills are useless and power will not be effective.

The commentary says it means blocking is important and should be casual and effortless. Be close enough to block, if you are too far away you won't be in control.

Oh, I feel another tickle in my ear. She says write!

If blocking works, it's not a real fight.
It's not my intension to melt,
I simply have nothing to protect.
Wolves bite flesh, not air.

The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang (Part 2)

Here I continue my commentary on The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, by Frank Allen and Tina Chunna.
The first section of the book is called "The Origins of Ba Gua Zhang: A Blend of History and Legend." It is the most complete collection of stories about baguazhang that I've seen. It follows all the various lineages down from Dong Haichuan. Wow, how do I put this? Writing should be like fighting a war. I fell asleep six times reading this section.

Still I found lots of material that was new to me. I didn't know that Wang Shujin spent a year studying with Wang Xiangzai, the founder of Yiquan. Hong Yixinag and Wang Shujin Yi were both members of the Yi Guan Dao religious society. "The outer teaching of the sect revolved around the belief that Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam and Christianity are all different expressions of the same universal and unwavering Dao, while the esoteric teaching of the sect involved various qi gong and other energy practices. " Wang was a Yi Guan Dao leader and thus fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan in 1948.

This section has lots of interesting material I didn't know before. I think my frustration with it stems from that fact it wavers between the encyclopedic tracking of all the various bagua masters, and stories about them. Should I memorize these stories? Is there some teaching point behind them? Does this history mean anything?

I know a reason these histories are important. If you go into any park in the morning, anywhere in the world where there are people practicing Chinese martial arts, and do your baguazhang, people will come up to you and ask where you learned. They will probably trace you back to a common gongfu ancestor with someone else in the park. Chances are good that they will ask you to perform and that if you have been taught correctly you will refuse twice, saying each time that you really are not good enough, that you would only embarrass your teacher, and that only your teacher's teacher was really great. But the third time they ask you, it becomes your duty to perform. The benefit of this is that after you perform you can point to anyone who was watching and they will obligated to show their stuff. It's kind of like a drinking game with your "new family."
There is also another reason. Many of us want to know how our individual style got its characteristics. The authors do a good job of tracing this "progress" or "decline" (which ever you prefer) from Dong Haichuan. However; where Dong Haichuan learned his Baguazhang is at this point, just a bunch of ledgends and unconvincing theories.

Frank Allen's main teacher is B.K. Frantzis and since I also do his style of Baguazhang, we have the same lineage through Frantzis to Liu Hengjie (Liu Hung Chieh).

In the section on forms (p. 87-88) the Authors explain why Liu Hung Chieh didn't teach a Baguazhang form and why his style is not orthodox Yinfu or Cheng Tinghua:

While still in his teens, Liu Hung Chieh became the disciple of bagua master, Liu Zhenlin. Liu Hung Chieh furst studied with Liu Zhenlin when Liu was teaching in the school of Cheng Tinghua's son Cheng Youlung and Dong Haichuan's student Liu Dekuan. Liu Zhen Lin was a famous fighter and bodyguard who first studied bagua under Yin Fu's student Liu Yongqing (who was a close friend and training partner of Yin Fu's top student, Ma Gui). The young Liu Zhenlin learned all of his basic bagua from these two masters, but his teachers brought him to bow before and become the disciple of court minister Liang Zhaiwen; in this way, Liu Zhenlin received entry into the third generation of bagua masters, which was the same generation as his foundation teachers. Liang Zhaiwen was a military man who had been the chief guard at the most important fire gate on the Great Wall before becoming a court minister. Due to Liang's position in lthe court, his association with the palace eunuch servant Dong Haichuan was not widely known until after Liang's death. Because he was the top student of Liu Zhenlin, it is same to asume that young Liu Hung Chieh also received training under his teacher's gongfu "uncles," Liu Yongqing and Ma Gui.

I am indebted to the authors for supplying this history even if my regular readers are likely to find it on the boring side. I promise to spice things up in the next couple of posts!

The authors go on to say that Liu Hung Chieh spent many years studying Daoist Circle Walking Meditation which influenced the development of his style of practice and teaching. In my opinion, someone, very possibly Liu, studied Daoist exorcism, not just circle walking. From my experience of Daoist exorcism it is a more likely source for the diverse phyiso-spirit knowledge that Liu passed on to B.K. Frantzis, (even if I'm the only one who thinks so.)
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The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang

Let me begin by saying that books are very important to me. My books are like my relatives, each staring down at me with their own ideas and expectations for me. And like relatives, there are those that I would prefer to see only once a year on Thanksgiving. That being said, I have a whole shelf of martial arts books that make me feel uncomfortable and for whom I am embarrassed.

I love baguazhang. When I pick up a book about it, an intense struggle begins. For the last month I have been struggling with The Whirling Circles of Ba Gua Zhang, The Art and Legends of the Eight Trigram Palm by Frank Allen and Tina Chunna Zhang. I wish I could write an objective review of it, but I care too much. If you love baguazhang, you need this book. It is clearly one of the best books on the subject written in English.

I'm going to spend a few days talking about the book, but more importantly the book is a good jumping off point for my own ideas.

Since it is late, and I haven't published a blog all day, let me begin with the superficial.

Frank Allen can really manifest the different qi qualities of the various palm changes but that doesn't really come across in the photos. Photos of applications are of little use, applications must be felt because in Baguazhang they rely not on the movements, or which foot is where, but on the quality of movement in contact with an active opponent. To photograph it well would take a very skillful photographer who understood what they were trying to capture. Also, what is the point of photos of a bagua form? Or in this case three forms. I don't get it. Nobody can learn a bagua form from a book. A book like this should be a collaboration with a great photographer or the photos should be left out.

I asked a non-martial artist what she thought of the picture of Frank Allen with all the tattoos doing roushou with B.K. Franzis and she said, "Oh, is he a Hells Angel?" So I showed her the picture in the back of Frank with his reading glasses on and she said, "He looks like a guy in the advanced stages of Wise Man Syndrome." So if the authors were shooting for funny, they got funny. (Note to Frank, I think it's the hair.)

If you practice Baguazhang, buy the book and we'll talk about it more tomorrow.

Ergonomic Crime

Not long ago I read somewhere that Martial Artists are left handed way out of proportion to their presence in the general society. At the time my morning class was 70% lefties.

Is this because us lefties have some advantage in fighting? Or do we just have more inner torment because deep down, we know we don't belong? In Italian left hand is "mano sinistra", the sinister hand.

When children in American schools are at their fastest rate of growth they are forced to sit in chairs that are harmful to their alighnment. The problem is doubled for lefties with long legs. Not that I ever accepted my victim hood; I refused to sit in these types of chairs in high school. If the classroom had them I brought along a foam backpackers mat and sat on it against the wall in the back of class.

The claim that sitting in one of these uncomfortable chairs staring at the back of someone else's head is actually good for learning and taking notes is worse than negligence. It is an ergonomic crime.

Yang-Chu

If you haven't read Yang-Chu, I recommend it. Yang-Chu is considered one of the early voices of Daoism (300 BCE), a voice for wuwei.

His ideas are recorded in the seventh section of the Leizi (Lieh-Tzu). It's a short section and you can read it on-line here.

Yang-Chu said, all we are is a body and a story. It isn't much but applying his minimalism is useful for cutting through hype.

Yang-Chu didn't reject qi, or wealth, or pleasure--to him these are just relative ways of describing experience. He seems a little anti-fame, but that's because he sees freedom in the possibility of changing our story and fame has a tendency to lock us into our stories. We definitely have a body which moves around, thinks, and changes. And we tell all kinds of stories.

It is hardly ever the body that stops people from developing great martial arts skills, it is usually the story that gets in the way.

Most modern people find discussions of fate kind of silly. Like dude, I'm free, right? Yang-Chu cuts through all that. You do have a body, and it does have limitations. Those limitations are not always known, but they do shape our life and our experience of life. Our body does have a fate, or put another way, our fate does have a "shape."

Our story also has limitations, fate. Tell too wacky a story and you'll get yourself locked up. But even if you are walking around with a bad reputation, you are still pretty free to change your story. That freedom to change our story also suggests that we might be able to discard our story or cut it down to a nice manageable size.

The book Blink talks about a guy in Oregon who studied couples on video and developed a scoring system based on observations that could tell him with 90% accuracy if a given couple would still be together in 15 years. When I first heard this I was in shock for a few days. Why was I bothering with all the little details, like doing the dishes and "communicating" if almost all the significant data was in a 15 minute video interview? Is it possible that we really don't have free will?

Anyway, I would really like to get a video scoring system to determine whether or not a student is going to practice everyday, or if they will still be studying gongfu in like 10 years. Heck, I'd like to score myself!

We should definitely be offering discounts to people who have the FATE to practice everyday. What is your fate?

Blocking

I've said in earlier posts that higher-level martial arts don't use blocking. Those comments created a few ripples of discontent among my readers. It was pointed out correctly that at the technique-level Xingyi (and many other arts) use a type of punch which cuts across the opponent's strike in such a way that the opponent's power is defused and your punch strikes first.

At the technique-level circular movements are often used to simultaneously re-direct and strike. These moves are in a sense blocks even if they are also strikes.

But when I was ten years old and started learning Springy-Legs, Tantui (Northern Shaolin), I had to develop solid stances. A good way to test six harmonies power in each stance is to see if the student can keep their arm up while you take a swing at them. Beginning students should pass through a blocking-techniques stage of practice. Good blocking skills can help with integration, structure and relaxation.

I went to a middle school (age 11-13) where kids wore razor-blades on chains around their necks. It was a sweet time. The Latino gangs were the most dangerous, but I was on the inside of that by the middle of my second year. Some of the taller black kids were under a lot of pressure to prove themselves violently and they started the most fights.

At the end of the P.E. (Physical Education) period we went into the locker room to change out of our P.E. uniforms and back into our street clothes. The locker aisles were exquisitely dangerous, we all learned to change in under 20 seconds. But the time alotted for changing was more like 10 minutes so about 50 of us would cram into this space with the lockers to our backs and the doors to freedom in front of us for 9 minutes and 40 seconds.

This wide hallway had a red line that split the room in half. O.J. Simpson went to my Middle-School and his first-place time in Track was on the top of the board in this very hallway. On one half of the hallway were the doors to freedom and a gym teacher, on the other half all of us, crammed together. We were all wearing backpacks which served as a little bit of spine protection. The taller black kids would practice punching everyone else. If you kicked or punched back, the possibility of major escalation was high. The best strategy was to block the punches.
I did not advertise my Shaolin training, however those blocking skills proved to be pretty handy, and earned me some "respect."
Blocking skills should be discarded if you want to develop higher level, non-defensive, skills. Still they have a place.

Pretense

Let's drop the pretense for a minute and just admit that the main reason we study Martial Arts is vanity.

We want to look good. We want to be beautiful (you have my permission to roll your eyes) in the bright flowery sense of the word and in the more sublime confident-lion-about-to-pounce-on-a-bear sense of the word.

Wang Xiangzai said that if you call it "quan" (fist/boxing) it should make you healthy, happy and strong.

Should we really claim that gongfu makes sad people happy? And what happens if you already feel happy? Does gongfu make you more happy?

Part of the reason we practice is because we feel beautiful when we do it. I don't normally bring this up to my students because it would make me sound like a pansy, but naturally it's a feeling I try to transmit.  But what happens if you feel beautiful right in the first few weeks of practice, what then becomes the motivation to keep getting better?
Most of us are twice as strong as we need to be for 95% of the tasks we do, and frankly you could put a little less stuff in each grocery bag and still get the job done. While it may be fun to accumulate power and efficiency it doesn't serve much purpose outside of fantasizing about some major fight to the death in some dark alley we aren't likely to venture into anyway.

I was falling asleep trying to read a book as is my habit, and it occurred to me that my health has been extremely good for the last three years. I haven't gotten sick. Actually it was kind of a lament-- because what is getting sick but a chance to spend a couple of weeks bundled up in bed with chicken soup and a pile of good books to read?  I kind of miss it.  Clearly the hours I spend everyday on gongfu practice are not justified by my good health.

So while tomorrow I'm going to pretend I didn't say this, for today let's just admit our main reason for practicing Martial Arts is vanity.

Frustration

Chinese internal arts are very different than Yoga.  The biggest difference is that Yoga breathing is in unison with the movement.  In Chinese internal arts our breathing is natural.  In fact, if you have taught yourself to breath in unison with the movement, you have to un-teach yourself.  The stronger your yoga practice is, the more you'll feel your breathing get stuck in a pattern.

This points to a bigger difference, namely transcendent practices verses wuwei practices.   Can you really breath in unison while you are doing the dishes?  Would you want to?  But I'm not going into that right now.  I just wanted to say this:  If you are feeling frustrated during practice, it may simply be the way you are breathing.  Yes, it could be that you don't like the person next to you, or that your teacher is trying to teach you too much, etc... But it is worth considering that it may be your breathing.

Frustration is a type of breathing.