Demons with Six Packs

Why do Chinese demons have muscles?

I train a fair bit everyday, and the constant challenge for me is to not build muscle. That's because my body builds muscle very easily and quickly, and that muscle would restrict my circulation and inhibit whole-body integration.

A few winters ago I fell on the ice while trying out snow boarding for the first time. Actually, I fell four times on my back on the ice in one day. The next day my whole body was ripped. I had muscles everywhere, my arms, my neck, my butt, I even had a six-pack. Muscles hurt! Of course if you have them all the time you just become numb and insensitive, so they appear to stop hurting.

I prefer to leave my muscles in a "potencial state." They pop up if I'm in an accident or I work too hard or something but otherwise they are just relaxed and active.

Pain becomes chronic pain, then it becomes tension, then numbness, then strength and then stiffness.

Aggression and inappropriate conduct often result from trying to impose ones fear or fantasy on the situation at hand. This often leads to emotional pain which, if left unresolved, becomes chronic pain which likewise is stored in the muscles. Pent-up tension gets stored in the shape, quality, and movement patterns of the muscles.

A Chinese demon is unresolved emotional turmoil that becomes so intense, so physically overwhelming that a person no longer sees what's in front of them.  They become so inappropriate that at the moment of death they don't even notice they died, and so continue to torment the living with their unresolved emotional distress.

Check out the six-packs on these guys!  And here too! 

Moral Superiority

No, don't worry this post is not about all those Aikido hotties who believe they can whoop your butt with out even hurting you!

There is a more pernicious vibe that has been eating me: People who claim that a teacher who doesn't charge a fee to students is somehow superior to those who do charge.

In Europe this idea is historically inseparable from hatred of Jews. A Jew, by definition, lacked virtue. The European definition of a noble gentleman was of course predicated first on being born to a father and mother of noble birth. But that title could be revoked if you failed to protect the honor of your women or your name. Opening a store or pedaling goods was a quick way to lose your nobility.

The word luxury has come to mean something nice that isn't cheap, but it used to be a sin. To commit the sin of luxury was to have objects or products and services that were reserved for people of a higher class.

Offering a service for free meant you were avoiding the taint of money. Aristocrats controlled everything, land, church, food. Aristocrats did not concern themselves with money, that was the way of peasants and merchants who coveted the luxuries of a life they were excluded from at birth.

In the Middle-east, prices are still set by complex family tribal relationships, anyone outside of that system lacks virtue, and automatically gets a higher price. To offer services for free in this context would simply mean that you are accumulating social obligations in a society where those obligations trump money.

China was somewhere in between. A system of merit existed by which individuals could take an exam and gain a rank in the government or the army. People were also promoted within this system on the basis of their competence. Of course there was nepotism and corruption, but the basic idea was to promote a person because he was the best person for the job.

This existed simultaneously with big family networks. Chinese power can be viewed as multiple overlapping and concentric rings of family influence, each of which makes alliances with other circles of power, the government simply being the biggest most powerful family.

I'm not exactly sure why a certain strain of traditional Chinese thought has felt merchants, and itinerant performers were people of lower virtue. Perhaps it is an extension of the Confucian precept against calculating your advantage over others? More likely it is just a fear of people who are more worldly, people who have a drive to seek their fortune outside of the often stifling confines of village life.

Now add to this that the Communists made a totalitarian state religion out of hating independent business people. After all, business people travel and have a way of undermining the status quo by creating alternate sources of authority.

Doctors in Communist China in the 1980's had to see everyone for free. Gordon Xu (George Xu's brother) worked in a Hospital. He would arrive at 8 am and wasn't allowed to leave until everyone waiting in line had been seen. Most days that was after 8 pm, about 80 patients a day. The state paid him a small salary for his service.
There is no virtue in not charging a fee. If you want to reward low income students who demonstrate merit by giving them free lessons, that's great. But that's because you want to have great students, not because you are doing some great deed for society. Not charging money is often a way of creating social obligation, which has its own value. If you are already rich and don't charge, so what, it means nothing. If you are low income yourself and you don't charge, so what, it just means you don't need the money.

If honor and virtue are diminished by charging money, then they are things not worth having.

The Death Penalty for Qigong?

Here is an article my readers might enjoy.

The long-named Columbia University Chinese Student and Scholars Association: United for China's Peaceful Rising (CUCSSA) has taken the stance, as of a few weeks ago, that "Anyone who offends China will be executed no matter how far away they are!" and said so on their website for all to see. That's what 'peaceful rising' means in Mandarin, right? Someone translate for me.

Empty Force, Extraordinary Powers & My Qigong Headache

I apologize for not writing more lately, I've been swamped with work, but I also promise that the next few weeks of blogging will be above average. (This is special because, as my regular readers already know, my secret to good blogging is that I make a point of shooting for just below average.)

I have a few more things to say about Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, which is now at the top of my list of recommend books about qigong. ( The two others on the list are Breathing Spaces, and The Transmission of Chinese Medicine.)

The issues raised in this book have plagued me, and most serious martial artists, since the mid 1990's when the first refugee/exiles from Qigong Fever started pouring into San Francisco and other cities all over the world. At one point local Baji master Adam Hsu got so fed up with all the wacko questions he was fielding he simply declared, "Qi doesn't exist!"

The other day I was at a college faculty meeting sitting next to Professor Yu, a TCM Dermatology teacher I hold in high regard. I showed her my copy of Qigong Fever. Just how relevant this book is, was made immediately apparent by the first thing out of Professor Yu's mouth. "My father invented qigong."

"Oh," I said," Perhaps he is mentioned in this book." As it turns out he is not mentioned in the book. Her father was You Pengxi, a xingyi teacher and early student of Wang Xiangzhai, the founder of the Yiquan system of internal martial arts. She explained that qigong came from xingyi.

As usually happens when I hear claims about qigong, I found myself trying to find what truth could possibly be behind the claim with out launching into my own agenda. After all, the book is quite clear about the process in which Communist party functionaries chose the term Qigong from a list of terms intended to frame body, breath and mind techniques under a single therapeutic category while intentionally discarding the martial, religious, and conduct transforming aspects of traditional categories.

But of course I do have my own agenda, I grew up practicing gongfu and studied under Bing Gong who was a top student of Kuo Lien-ying who also studied with Wang Xiangzhai. We did standing meditation, and various routines we called warm-ups. No one ever used the word qigong even thought that is what everybody calls it now.

Knowing that of course there could be a hidden history I don't know, I begin with an inclination to agree with Professor Yu. 90% of what I see called qigong is fallout from gongfu schools-- stuff that was taught or invented on a need-to-know basis for students that needed remedial exercises or were developing some unique quality of gongfu.

Unfortunately the profound idea that all traditional Chinese activities have a Dao-- an efficient way of working or moving that conserves qi-- is not mentioned in the book, nor was it mentioned by Professor Yu.

Professor Yu's father, You Pengxi, was invited, and the CCP gave him permission, to come to Stanford University in 1980 to demonstrate his extraordinary qigong skills. He promptly defected. He had been a wealthy and successful Western trained dermatologist before the revolution (1949). He defected from Communist China the first chance he got. I do not know the details in his case, but it would not have been unusual for a well trained doctor to be publicly tortured and shamed during the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977). As far as I can tell, nobody taught anybody anything during the Cultural Revolution. Because of his association with Wang Xiangzhai (who died in 1963), he may have attracted students shortly after it became possible to teach again, but he can't have been teaching qigong for much more that a year before he defected in 1980. So in that sense he may have indeed been the first qigong master "off the hump." Professor Yu however claimed that he developed and named qigong around 1949.

During the first 15 years of the revolution (the 50's) there was some gongfu training going on, but between fear, repression and a general lack of food, I have trouble imagining that much quality teaching was taking place. During this period fighting skills were officially scrapped away and discarded while the term gongfu (meritorious skill) was essentially replaced with the word wushu (martial art). I suspect that most of You Pengxi's teaching and martial fame was from before the Communist Revolution. To be fair, their were some gongfu classes happening in the dark, before dawn and after dusk. In my imagination, admittedly shaped by George Xu, I see these as serious fighting classes where people came home bleeding more days than not.

During the 1950's qigong as a public activity existed only in the Traditional Chinese Medical Hospitals. It was a cheap and patriotic form of therapy. Before the revolution the Communists, like their Republican and Nationalist rivals, were pro-Western science and anti-traditional (superstitious) healing of all kinds.

After the revolution, the combination of anti-Western hysteria, incompetent use of limited funds, and the obvious efficacy and availability of some traditional healing practices, led the CCP to embrace Traditional Chinese Medicine. Qigong was practiced in a very limited way during the 1950's, mainly within the hospital setting.

Professor Yu talked about her childhood memories of Wang Xiangzhai, and her father's closeness to him. She said her father gave Wang Xiangzhai a check book and told him to buy anything he wanted. Also that her father did not charge for lessons and only taught people with virtuous natures. She described her father and her mother's (Yu Ouming) ability to blast multiple attackers to the ground without actually touching them. They were using qi alone!

Magical and extraordinary powers have been around for centuries, but totalitarian Communism didn't leave any space for performance art. The book Qigong Fever explains how with the first crack of freedom in the 80's the CCP gave authority to individuals only to the extent that everything they did was in the name of Science and Chinese cultural superiority. All knowledge still belonged to the state, but performers and charismatic could claim that practicing qigong in a scientific way would give you extraordinary powers--- like seeing with your ears, reading peoples minds, or guiding missiles with your qi! A complex network developed consisting of Party officials, charismatic teachers, and researchers who were into qigong. The fact that they managed to make it illegal to criticize or be publicly skeptical of qigong, extraordinary powers, or pseudo-science, helped ignite and sustain the explosion of qigong into everyday life.

When I got home I searched for Professor Yu's father in a PFD collection of essays about Wang Xiangzhai that I downloaded from somewhere in the Internet wilderness. He is credited with being the source of all Yiquan lineages which practice empty force (gongjin), the ability to throw someone with out touching them.

If such extraordinary powers are possible (and I'm forbidden by precept from actually commenting on their veracity), I've always thought they would still waste an enormous amount of qi, and thus be in total contradiction with the whole point of daoist inspired practices; namely, to conserve jing and qi! Not to mention the temptation anyone with actual blood flowing in their veins would have to tip their opponent's hand during a poker game or to cop the occasional feel from across the room. (Yes, I know, I would never be allowed to learn such practices because I'm clearly a man of dark virtues.)

My point here is simple. If anyone from the people at New Tang Dynasty TV (Falungong) to your friendly neighborhood qi jock wishes to have the right to be taken seriously by me on the subject of qigong--then they must read Qigong Fever!

Qigong Fever

If this book I'm holding here had been published in 1997 instead of 2007, I probably wouldn't have set out to write my own book on the history and cultural origins of qigong. I also probably wouldn't have failed in that endeavor and ended up putting my collection of writings up on the Internet in the form of a blog called "Weakness with a Twist”and you wouldn't be reading it! 

Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, by David A. Palmer. Published by Columbia University Press, 356 pages.
The book is a history of Qigong, which appropriately frames the subject as a political movement built around a body technology with religious characteristics, and scientific pretensions. It is a book which resists symmetrization. Never the less I'm going down that road.

Qigong Fever tells a really shocking story of mass hysterical enthusiasm. The kind of popular insanity that can only happen in a world where 2+2=5 if the Party says it does! The state in essence banned religious devotion, magic tricks, spontaneous expression, deep emotion, and even self-respect. The Party claimed to be in favor of using science to save the world, but obviously science cannot be practiced in an environment where 2+2 might equal 5. It was from this skewed environment that qigong came to be capable of healing anything and everything. All over China otherwise ordinary people could see with their ears, control guided missiles with their minds, tell the future while balancing on eggs—qigong became the source for the development of everything weird, magical, new age, charismatic, and psychic. That all this could happen in the name of science would already be beyond normal comprehension, but the Communist Party brought what would otherwise have been just weird and wacky to a fever pitch by issuing an order essentially forbidding skepticism.

The title Qigong Fever refers to the explosion of interest and participation in qigong methods, research, charismatic religion, and a whole lot more that reached a peak in the decade from 1985 to 1996, after which the government cracked down on qigong people in general and particularly on the followers of the dangerously unbalanced Li Hongzhi, known collectively as Falungong.

Palmer tasks himself with creating a historic record for a subject that is made up of seemingly limitless false claims and (even more challenging for the historian) partially false claims about its origins and functions. In addition he tackles problems as an anthropologist carefully milking the overlapping realms of scientism, charisma, national consciousness, repression, religious impulse, and shifting political networks into a frothy qi infused tonic.

The political alliance that made the qigong movement possible eventually fell apart creating outlaws and refugees. The last chapter of the book deals specifically with the Falungong and its transformation from a qigong cult into an outlaw and exiled revolutionary utopian movement.

The book has a lot of footnotes. Palmer draws on a wide array of original Chinese sources for historical material and makes good use of the history of ideas. His writing moves easily between telling the story, putting it in context, and bringing in other peoples ideas and research to convey the depth of his analysis.

If you like this blog you'll like this book.

Yi

In the Early 90's when George Xu came back from judging a tournament on the East Coast, he told us that he had been in an interesting and friendly argument with Nan Lu, a baguazhang practitioner in New York City.

The argument was over how to describe high level Yi. Yi is most often translated "intension," but the English word doesn't do it justice. Some modern Qi jocks now use the word Yinian, generally meaning something more like "mind" but in qigong circles it simply refers to "the pathway along which you intend to send qi."

When George Xu wanted to explain to a beginning student what yi was, he would describe two Doberman-pinchers. Both were told to charge at a group of people. One dog got up close and hesitated, jumping around and barking, not sure who to bite. The other dog, the one with clear yi, immediately bit the neck of the guy with the blue shirt.

George had been arguing that one should train with "killer" yi, the mind should be focused exactly on how to kill the opponent. Nan Lu was arguing that one should have "zero" yi, a mind like a translucent sky. George wasn't willing to concede but he thought Nan Lu's argument had merit.

A more common use of the word Yi, one that nearly all Chinese martial arts teachers use, means to have an awareness of technique. A student has yi in his form when a knowledgeable observer can see the fighting idea in the students movement. Numerous throws, joint breaks, and striking combination possibilities should be apparent.

Every technique must have the correct force trajectories, and these must be practiced on a live partner. These trajectories themselves are also called yi. Martial arts techniques use trajectories which are vectors, arcs, and spirals. All of this is referred to as yi.

One of the magical things about a gongfu form or routine is that because the same movement can be used for many different techniques, a seasoned practitioner will develop more and more complex yi as the years go by. A single movement can have a hundred different expressions.

This seasoned and complex yi at some point starts to look less specific. With very clear yi, it looks like I'm making an upper-cut to the chin. But if I've thoroughly trained 15 different techniques for that movement I can do the movement in what we might call an undifferentiated potential state. Instead of a specific technique or fighting idea showing itself, the yi starts to look like clouds swirling around the body. It is not that you actually see the clouds, what you see is all the possibilities at once.

Practicing at this yi level also feels like clouds, or sometimes like water, fire or mist. Once a practitioner reaches this level, she stops thinking in terms of techniques.

Kumar Frantzis said about Xingyi that when you strike you should be thinking "Only One Thing."

A Samurai by the old code (budo) didn't need technique, he needed only to be willing to die.

Wang Xiangzhai, one of the greatest internal martial artists of the 20th Century, said that "the yi should always be round." I'm working on it.

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.

Balance, Blankets and Gnarly

As a teenager I was very good at skateboarding. This was before the technology of super light boards and thus before all the hopping and kick flips. Living in San Francisco we skated down hill using slalom and sliding techniques on both streets and sidewalks. I can count on one hand the number of people that could keep up with me.

Whenever I size someone up, of course I look at the usual stuff: their alignment, do they look weak in some areas and stronger in others? what kind of reach do they have? but the big question is, could they do something to me that would hurt more than falling off my skateboard at 30 miles an hour onto the pavement and then sliding to a stop?

I don't personally take credit for inventing the word "gnarly" but many of my friends at the time were convinced that I had a claim to first usage.

You can tell someone who is just learning how to skateboard because he or she will try to use their leg muscles to steer (and because they will say, "ahhggrrhh" and then fall down.) Downhill skateboarding requires using the whole body to balance and steer.

Balance is not something you find and maintain, it is the ability to constantly shift your weight around. To someone watching a skateboarder doing slalom down a hill it looks like he or she is leaning forward and back. Actually what happens is the instant one moves their weight to one side of the board, the board starts turning to come underneath the weight. This creates first a feeling of heaviness as your weight goes into the board, and then a feeling of lightness as your forward momentum takes you over to the other side of the board. As your weight crosses the centerline you feel weightless for a moment and then you come down heavy on the other side of the board as it turns again.

This heavy-light-heavy sequence is what wins fights. Think about the key moment of a martial encounter in which your body weight comes into full contact with the other person. Just like skateboarding, if you try to use your leg muscles to balance, you will be bowled over. Balance comes from being able to become suddenly light then suddenly heavy.

One high level description of this is that you first throw a very fine light weight silk blanket over your opponent, then you throw a very heavy one.

The Return of Paulie Zink

I made a point of asking Paulie Zink and his wife to please get some stuff up on Youtube and I probably wasn't the only one. They've done it. And here too.

Even better, he is coming out of retirement to teach Monkey Kung Fu. I also talked to both of them about how extraordinarily wonderful it would be if this Monkey Daoyin was being passed on to kids. I'm thinking here of a Mr. Rogers with mad Kung Fu skills. The wild dynamic world of animation coming to life.

I've been teaching the little bits of his system that I learned to my Northern Shaolin students and they love it. I think I'm going to try to get to Southern California for the workshop.