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.

Song Dynasty Ship Lifted From the Sea

This is a really cool story.  We should expect to learn all sorts of interesting history as they dig around this 100 foot ship.  (There is a video if you follow the link.)

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - An 800-year-old merchant ship was raised from the bottom of the South China Sea on Saturday, loaded with artifacts that might confirm the existence of an ancient maritime trade route linking China and the West.

The 30-meter (100-foot) wooden vessel, containing thousands of gold, silver and porcelain trading goods, was hoisted onto a barge in a steel cage as high as a three-storey building, a live broadcast by national television showed.

The Two Finger Rule

I've got lots of material lined up to write about but much of it is in the category of "mind blowing" revelation and reinterpretation, so I want to really take the time to do it right. That means a lot of metaphorical heavy lifting, perhaps long posts broken up into sections. So I'm offering something a little lighter for tonight.

No, sorry to disappoint all you scholars of Neapolitan sign language, the "Two Finger Rule" is not a method for creatively responding to rude hand gestures, (although I hope to put out a video on that subject this Spring). The Two Finger Rule is a way to cultivate weakness and sensitivity.

You see, shocking as this may seem, normal human beings are really quite strong without any training at all. Just being fated to a human birth makes you a mighty, mighty strong and dynamic beast.

We are naturally strong enough. If as it happens you want to lift something very heavy, there are an enormous number of tools, from levers to cranes to pushcarts, which allow even the most effete among us to effortlessly enlist the gods of gravity to our cause.

And if you happen to find yourself without the right tool, you can always enlist a friend or a neighbor or two. The rule is simple: If it is too heavy to lift using two fingers from each hand, than it is too heavy to lift. Get help.

Those among you who have a natural inclination toward indolence, are no doubt planning to adopt this rule. But perhaps you are asking yourself, "What good could this possibly do me?"

Building up strength cuts off fluid circulation, and reduces sensitivity. The more strength you build, the less ability you have to continuously engage every millimeter of your body. Our bodies are dynamic enough that we can be more like tigers and octopuses, or we can be more like oxen and yaks. Which type of animal you are like depends a little on personal preference and a lot on fate. If you have the fate to practice internal martial arts than you can cultivate weakness like a tiger or an octopus.

Back injuries usually happen because people are insensitive to the situation they find themselves in. Often I've injured my back simply because I was angry. I was posessed (if you will) to a point in which I wasn't paying attention to my own limits.

One of the most common ways to injure ones back is to reach for a heavy pot on the back of the stove. If you follow the Two Finger Rule you'll be sure to pull that pot of black-eyed peas and bacon to the front burner before trying to pick it up.

The Two Finger Rule is one of those limitations that opens up new possibilities.

Because I just said a few things about back injuries I would be remiss if I didn't remind people that the number one cause of stiffness and insensitivity in the lower back is letting the legs get colder than the torso. Long underwear is a mighty, mighty tool. Use it early and often.

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!

Fate

Well I took a nice long break from writing. Actually it took me six days to delete all the unopened emails in my box. I also went up north for a few days where I stayed close to a wood burning stove at a Hippy hostel called Jug-Handle Creek Farm. Even considering the conspiracy theorists we shared a fire with, it was pretty sweet.

I would say my fate has been good, even princely perhaps. Most people don't want to believe in fate. They figure only silly people and Asians believe in fate. What is fate?

First of all I should point out that there are Daoist Precepts against predicting the future, and if that wasn't enough to convince you, there is a precept against making a living from fortune telling.

Let's start from what everybody has, a body. The body we get at birth is fate. Yes it may make a difference if your mother ate a lot of rocky-road ice cream during her pregnancy, but there are still some basic parameters that will determine your body type. True, it matters to some degree what we eat over 20 or 30 years. But we don't actually have direct control of our appetite.

Appetite is a key concept in understanding how fate relates to martial arts. Everybody gets hungry, everybody has an appetite, just like everybody gets angry, everybody has aggression that can explode.

Part of growing up is a process of refining our appetites. It's a touchy thing we don't have direct control over, but you can make yourself sick of even the most tasty dish by eating it every night for a week. Imagine how bad tuna casserole would be after eating it six times in a row. Likewise, if you deprive yourself of chocolate for a couple of months and then accidentally bump into a friend eating a bar of Scharfenberger's.... They'll be lucky if they get to keep half.
If you have a wide range of food choices and you understand the different qi qualities of those foods and how to combine them, you can really start to play with your appetite. The qi quality of a particular food refers to the categories of foods which have a similar effect on your body and your appetite. So cabbage and kale are pretty similar while chocolate is in a category by itself (Yes, I agree that carob is good, but it is not chocolate).

The body we have is pretty much fate. But it is a kind of flexible fate. Meaning it is unlikely that I'm ever going to have long sharp teeth, but if tattoos got old and teeth sharpening became like the new hip urban craze, I could at least sharpen my teeth. We do have some control over what we want to eat, but a lot of it is fate. If you are Polish and you haven't had black bread and sausage in like a year, just me saying this is going to make you jones for it. Polynesians and pineapple, Norwegians and lutefisk.

Martial arts work the same way. You have a body that wants certain kinds of movement, it wants certain kinds of stillness too. It's like an appetite. If you have a wide range of training options and you understand how they will effect your body, you can play with that. What you do everyday will actually change what your body wants. A great deal of it is just fate, but there is also room to play around.

Where we live, the kind of gongfu we practice, the languages we speak, what we eat for breakfast--as humans we have some flexibility up to a point, and no doubt you can move to a foreign country, learn a new language and forsake you grandmothers recipe toffee, but most of us, most of the time, have a fate, a rhythm, a set of patterns that make us feel comfortable.

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.

Historic Discovery

I was delighted that Emlyn found these photos after reading my post on Daoist Shoes. There is no evidence that they were used by Daoists in ritual. But the more orthodox the ritual, the more private it is, so we will never know. But the shoes are used in theater and were widely worn by Manchu women.

They were understood to do at least two things: One, they gave a feeling of potency to the wearer. Two, they were an imitation of Han (Chinese) womens' esthetics, namely bound feet.

Bound feet, and the reason(s) behind them, is one of the most fascinating and disturbing pieces of Chinese culture. Manchu women were forbidden by the Manchu government (1650~1905) from binding their feet. The government was never happy about Han women doing it, but it was out of their control. Some scholars now say that foot binding was an act of female agency. Men showed their acceptance of subjugation to the Manchu rulers by wearing their hair in a cue (shaving the front and leaving a thin braid in the back). Han woman showed their disdain en mass for this act of subordination by binding their feet. This act conveyed stored potency, as if to say, "We will act at a later date! (This did in fact happen in 1911 when women whose feet were not bound were slaughtered.) (Hat tip to Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well, also scroll down the comments section where some heavy scholars go at it. )

The problem with this explanation is that binding ones feet seems to us like torture, perhaps it is even self-mortification for the misdeeds that led to being conquered by the Manchu. To understand foot binding as an act of potency one has to understand the difference between, what we call in Taijiquan, jin and shi.

Jin is power which manifests through the balls of the feet (peng & ji) or through the heels (lu & an). Shi is potential power which is stored up and does not manifest. It is the power of being able to manipulate the spin of a battlefield simply by ones position. It is not overwhelming force or shock troops. To develop shi, one must not use power from the balls of the feet or the heels.  The more common type of jin must be discarded to develop the "higher level" shi.



Thus, by pure accident I discovered that these shoes were actually meant to convey shi (potential power). I was using my memory/dream of them to convey something not well understood about taijiquan and stumbled on the debate about foot binding.

Here is the poem from Frog in a Well:

Get a carpenter’s adze to make the shoe-bottoms
Get a carpenter to make the outside of the shoes
Use a card of yarn
Eight lengths of fine cloth
Altogether it will take three years
To make a pair of embroidered shoes
Call a girl to try the shoes

Whether short or long
The girl stretches her foot
to fit the embroidered shoes
The shoe small the foot large
Constrained and uncomfortable
Awkwardly and crookedly to the back wall

The left foot crushing eight tigers
The right foot crushing nine wolves

Wow, I hope this is taught in the schools some day. (Perhaps they'll even mention my famous blog.)
The best book on foot binding to date seems to be Cinderella's Sisters. I haven't read it yet, I did read Dorothy Ko's earlier book on Chinese women and recommend it for those with a scholarly appetite.

http://www.footwearhistory.com/lotusconstruction.shtml

http://www.shoeblog.com/blog/friday-shoe-history-corner-2/
--For an alternate view of why these shoes convey potency, that may give a little bit of wiggle room to anyone caught with their pants down, read this.

Taiji means

First of all, since I slept most of the day, here is a repost from September about sleep and training.

Following on yesterday's word meanings, Taiji has a definition people don't often talk about.
Taiji is very close to Dao, at least as far as human experiences go. It is the source of inspiration (of Qi and breath). To practice Taijiquan is to continually return to the source of inspiration. It is the place or state of transition from which inspiration arises and where inspiration goes to die.

As a fighting art, taijiquan is the idea that you take your opponent with you to that place of inspiration.

Does he (your opponent) want to stay in the source of inspiration? (ie. became one with Dao at the moment of death) or does he want to come back with a new inspiration (think: attitude)! Does he want to go to his usual home, or back to his original home?  Let him decide.

Lian Gongfu

In Chinese it's not correct to say "I am studying Taiji (or Tai Chi)." First of all Taiji is a cosmological principle, so it is like saying, "I'm studying the ocean." Yeah but what part of the ocean? The correct term is Taijiquan, which refers to the art, which is itself a type of gongfu (or kungfu). But the Chinese word for study xue, is not used when referring to types of gongfu. The correct term is liàn.

Gongfu, as I have said before, means meritorious action, or acts or merit. Liàn is often translated "practice or train," as in "I practice gongfu." The character for liàn is made up of the characters for "silk floss" and "card," implying a sorting out process. If we look at the homonyms for lian we see that it means to link together, chain, to connect, a continuous flow, ripples, to refine (and thus "lotus" because these flowers are purity that rises up from the muck), and to smelt ore.

Lian actually means is "to link together in one continuously unending process." "liàn gongfu" means to continuously link together acts of merit. The word liàn is used for all types of gongfu.

So next time someone says they are learning or studying Taijiquan, say: "You mean you are linking, sorting out, refining and smelting together acts of merit into one continuous flow?"

"Yo, that's fresh!"

Red or White?

George Xu used to tell us stories about the Wild East. Often he was a character in these stories, and honestly I think they were true stories, but more often than not he seemed to be the cowboy with the white hat. (He was the good guy in morality tales that may or may not have been so black and white.)

One story he told us took place during the Cultural Revolution when he was on "The Farm" (forced re-education camp with inadequate food and shelter). Nearby "The Farm" there was a black-marketeer who dealt in cigarettes and alcohol and, among other nasty things, happened to be a rapist. He was a bad dude, with some kind of back up, and a tough-guy-name like "Black Face."

After some particularly cruel machinations by Black Face, George broke down his door looked him in the eye and said, "Which do you want red or white?"

Dropping his box of contraband cigarettes and shaking in his chair, Black Face asked indignantly, "What do you mean Red or White?"

George replied, "Red, I stop when I see blood. White...Death"

From that day forward Black Face was no longer a problem for the locals, (I think he chose red.)