The Sound of Wen and Wu

I woke up this morning with my arms crossed.  Actually more than crossed, knotted-up would be a better description.  One hand jutting past my armpit, the other arm wrapped around it twice and dangling between my ear and my shoulder.  It took a minute to figure out which arm was which.  My honey says I do gongfu in my sleep.

Anyway I've been reading a wonderful dissertation, which I will review when I finish reading it, called "Martial Gods and Magic Swords," by Avron Boretz.  The Daoist scholar Paul Katz recommended it.

Today I just want to talk about one of his footnotes.  In a discussion about the relationship between wen (civil, scholarly, cultural) and wu (military, martial) he mentions that the drum is wen and the cymbal is wu.  That really got me thinking.

The drum establishes order, it is steady and precise.  The cymbal is an explosion of sound, it breaks the air and shatters the peace.  When I teach kids or perform, I use the drum for stepping, and the cymbal for sudden kicks.

The large gong is, of course, used for bowing, but it is also good for transitions or even moments of transcendence.

The wood-block (called a fish in Chinese) is used for accenting orders or commands, it is often answered by the performer with a stomp of the foot (leading into cat stance or monk stance).  It is a high sharp sound.  Wood-blocks are used for chanting invocations, and by Buddhists for chanting sutras.  The same wood-block sound was traditionally used in formal arguments and teachings to accent an important point that had just been made.

"The Dao which can be named is not the true Dao!" "PAAHK."

The flutes and reed instruments mimic the human voice.

Confucius

Confucius said, "If I show the student(s) one corner of the square and he doesn't show me the other three, I change the subject."

There are some scholars who believe that this quote from Confucius is about taxes. They believe this because taxes were paid in grain which was grown on square plots made up of nine sections. Eight families would work together on all nine sections and the center section would be collected by the government.

Ahhh taxes, well at least we don't have to pay them in grain anymore...

Anyway... I don't think Confucius was talking about taxes.

What I love about this quote is it really shows the reciprocity that is key to understanding Confucius. It even implies cosmology--a cosmology where everything is mutually self-re-creating.

If I show the student one corner of the square, it is the student's job to show me the other three. That is not my job. It is the student's job to bring significant energy and commitment to the lesson.

One the other hand, if the student doesn't respond to my lesson I don't look to criticise the student. I first reflect and then acknowledge that I'm not offering a teaching which meets the student where they are, at their learning level or interest. A good teacher will move on to a new subject or try a new approach.

Spiraling Bones

All the bones in our bodies have a spiral. The direction of every bone's spiral is pretty much the same on everyone. These are set while we are still in the womb.

Ligaments give the spirals in each bone continuity across joints; from one bone to another. A given bone may spiral more than once while it is growing, but the second spiral will be in the same direction.

A good example of this is the clavicle (collar bone).  You can see that there is a spiral on the left side of the picture where it would attach to the scapula and the rest of the arm.  That spiral rotation is contiguous with the spiral further to the right where the bone would attach to the sternum.  Each of those spirals are actually the same spiral but the one on the arm side grew first, the one on the sternum side happened later.

So if you are trying to figure out how the spiral in you humerus (upper arm) continues through to your sternum, find the first part of the spiral rotating your arm forward/inward, then find the second part of the spiral by bringing your sternum up.

The spirals in our bones are there all the time.  If you know which way each bone spirals,  you can figure out which ways force will transfer through the body most easily.

Internal arts are all designed with these spirals in mind.

Here is a cool website which says something different about human structure, but interesting none-the-less.

Ligaments

One thing that I recently learned about ligaments is that they are generally more elastic than tendons.

Muscles, bones, tendons, cartilage, and ligaments are all made up from the same basic stuff but in different ratios. So tendons are like ligaments, the defining difference being ligaments connect bone to bone, tendons connect muscle to bone.

The main purpose of ligaments (besides stopping our mass from flying apart when we smash into a more solid mass) is to transfer force from one bone to another.

Since all our bones grow into a spiraling shape, the ligaments continue those spirals from bone to bone, transferring force through the continuity of a given spiral. It is key to the effective transfer of force that weight does not go into the joints. Thus if your opponent touches you or puts their weight on you--all of that force should travel in a spiral through your bones to the ground.

Whenever you transfer force from one bone to another, it is the ligaments that do that job.

Troops

It is not a great idea to let your muscles lead. When muscles get tired they are like vampires craving blood! Like hormone enhanced teenagers looking for trouble. Hungry muscles will take what ever they can get, they want slow-food, fast-food, sugar, even beer--anything that can be turned into blood.

Thus the metaphor used in Daoism and Chinese medicine is that the muscles are the troops, soldiers. They need to be well trained and well cared for.

If the muscles are making decisions, you will have mob rule. Alternately, the internal organs can function as a government, the heart/mind is the Emperor, the lungs are the chief ministers, the spleen is in charge of ordering, logistics, "ways & means", and the liver is the general, in charge of delivering blood to the troops and mustering them to action.

Well trained troops certainly can take some personal initiative. If it is truly in support of the larger cause, personal initiative can make or break a campaign, still the troops are rarely in a position to make good independent decisions so most of the time it is imperative that they simply follow orders.

For an army to function well, every stage of leadership must be clearly delegated and the chain of command exact.

Our body has things called proprioceptors which tell the brain where we are in space, where we are moving, and how fast. Most people's armies are in disarray because their proproceptors --scouts, spies, and communications networks-- are poorly trained. I don't know for sure, but my experience tells me that large numbers of proprioceptors live in the ligaments.

The muscles can move without consulting the ligaments but it is clumsy, the ligaments should lead--calling the troops, the muscles, to order. Once that mechanism is in place and scenarios have been set up and drilled, then the troops can be commanded.

Happy Ching Ming Day

Here is a good article about religion in Hong Kong:

This long weekend marks Ching Ming, a significant Chinese festival, but one that few tourists would notice unless they happened to see people burning offerings on the sidewalk. It is a private observance held mostly at home shrines, ancestral villages or cemeteries, as the living give gifts of food and fresh flowers to the dead, and sweep and clean their graves. You may also see stands selling paper replicas of everything from yachts and cars to mobiles and MP3 players. In modern, materialistic Hong Kong, these can be burned as offerings, too, in case your ancestor would like having a new Mercedes or Motorola in the afterlife. A traditionalist would warn you against buying one as a kitsch souvenir, though.

[Ching Ming means Clear Bright, it is also the name of the Qi Node for the next two weeks. Qi Nodes divide the solar calendar into 24- two week segments. The Western banking calendar divides the solar calendar into 4 segments (solstice/equinox).]

According to The South China Morning Post, the temple will spend H.K. $140 million, or about U.S. $18 million, on building what they say will be the largest worship hall of its kind in China, plus an LED-lit glass dome filled with Taoist entities. That sounds about as modern as burning an i-Pod offering for your late grandma.

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And here is an article about a new approach to Daoism I would call "stuttering and embarrassed." Looking beyond the Chinglish writing style, and the picture of the "empty suits," the Research Association of Laozi Taoist Culture (CRALTC) looks like it was invented to kill off anything ziran, spontaneous or naturally beautiful.

China has started to invest more money and attention into Taoism after it has successfully exported Confucianism to the world by establishing hundreds of Confucian institutes and schools around the world. China.org.cn reporters witnessed the largest ever International Daodejing Forum held in Xi'an and Hong Kong last year. Daodejing, the Taoist bible, is one of the most widely published books on the planet, only second to the Christian Bible.

And then there is this event last year which I found by following the link in the above paragraph.  (I'm speechless.)

As the prelude of the forum, a total of 13,839 citizens recited Daodejing together at Hong Kong Stadium on April 21, setting a new Guinness record for "most people reading aloud simultaneously in one location."

My comments on other blogs and some reruns

I left a few comments on other blogs today.  Two are here on the subject of martial arts metaphors.  Another one (at the bottom) is on self-defense as a way of staying open.

In case you missed these back in August, I'm still rather fond of these four posts on eyes.
Eyes

More about Eyes

Eyes and Baguazhang

Eyes and Baguazhang (cont.)

Yoga is not what it seems

Charles Weidman --Photo by Barbara Morgan (1944). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David C. Ruttenberg, 1987 

I admit that I've had it out for yoga for years. It is not the fact that people are getting to know themselves by practicing something physical with discipline, that part I find beautiful. My problem has always been that yoga seemed so "in the box" when compared to dance and martial arts. To put it bluntly, if your "downward dog" doesn't eventually scamper around the room and chase its tail, what is the point?

Years ago I had a dance teacher who trained with one of the early moderns,

Charles Weidman. Incidentally, his stuff rocked. Anyway she said to the class one day, "You know at some point during the late 70's people started saying that the way I start my class is like yoga. It wasn't until years later that I took a yoga class and saw what they meant. I wonder where those early modern dancers learned it?" Hmmm....

I was at a party a couple of years ago and spoke with a woman who made a lot of dough in the first internet explosion. She has been a Zen practitioner for 30 years and has practiced yoga for the last 20. She told me that when she first started practicing yoga, the meditation component was entirely Vippassina oriented. Meaning that it was a process of examining and transcending the body. Now yoga classes are almost all Zen (what she referred to as the "Insight" tradition) oriented meditation, meaning they see the precision of the posture as the method and the result, non-conceptual, non-transcendent, emptiness without a goal.

She wasn't really taking sides as to which type of meditation goes better with yoga, and neither am I, she was just saying it is an unacknowledged innovation.

Well, maybe this article from Yoga Journal will shed some light, as the yoga crew are fond of saying. The article is partly a review of The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by N. E. Sjoman, as this quote shows:

Modern hatha yoga draws on British gymnastics? The yoga of Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and Krishnamacharya influenced by a potpourri that included Indian wrestlers? These are claims guaranteed to send a frisson of horror up the limber spine of any yoga fundamentalist. But according to Sjoman, his book is meant not to debunk yoga, but to pay tribute to it as a dynamic, growing, and ever-changing art.

Here is a quick quote from an Amazon review:

The core of the book is a translation of a text from the 1800s from the private library of the Mysore palace which is the only textual documentation of an extended asana practice - asanas being the yoga positions that form the core of yoga practice today.

I haven't read the book but it purportedly explains that the standing and inverted posses in yoga come from western gymnastics and the ubiquitous "sun salutations" come from Indian wrestling!

Is it true? I don't know, but you gotta love this stuff.

Oh, and just in case anybody is wondering (or listening) all that health stuff about how this or that posture is good for this or that organ, this or that problem...that all happened in the last ten years! --Intelligent people combining personal experience with wishful thinking and a little (Martha Steward inspired) "distressing" the surface to give it that antique feel!

Check out this wonderful list of all the things people are doing with Yoga these days over at Jen's Reviews. 18 Amazing Benefits of Yoga, According to Science.

Eating Bitter

Well, now that it is spring I will give some simple nutritional advise.

Eat one umeboshi pulm a day. Umeboshi is a special preserved plum from Japan that is really sour, squish up your face sour. It is prepared with shiso leafs (sesame). The sourness will be a jolt to your system, which feels great coming out of winter into spring. Think of it as breaking up the ice and letting the rivers flow. Umiboshi will create a lot of saliva and invigorate your digestion. It literally makes me want to squirm and jump.

I have a real appetite for umeboshi, but I didn't know that until I was in my twenties in Japan. At first I just ate them when I sat down to breakfast because everyone else was eating one. It was like a "I can survive this!" challenge.  Over time I felt my body start to gently crave umiboshi.

Americans are so used to eating by taste, they will often claim not to know what appetite is, outside of "I'm starving." Appetite is sensitivity to your internal organs.  Sensitivity of what each part of your system needs. The muscles crave blood like thirsty vampires. Organs which have a role in producing blood all extract different types of gu qi (nutrition) from food. These organs communicate what foods they need in order to produce quality blood through appetite.

All internal martial arts improve appetite sensitivity,...if you are paying attention.

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Bitter melon was in my local farmer's market this fall and winter. I'm not sure if it was there during the summer when Chinese traditionally eat the bitterest foods. Americans only eat bitter with sweet in the form of burnt things. That ruins the effect.

Bitter foods like grapefruit and bitter melon are really good for improving the function of the liver, which is in charge of blood distribution throughout the body. The heart's job is really easy if the liver is working optimally, so bitter foods are considered especially good for the heart.

Alcohol and sugar go right to the heart and brain, so the liver doesn't get a workout. Alcoholics often have really healthy hearts when they die of liver disease. Here is an article about Bitter melon and the seemingly endless modern experiment to completely ignore the role of appetite in health.

and here too. 

note: My current favorite way to prepare raw bitter melon is to slice it very thinly, sprinkle it with salt and leave it for 4 to 6 hours covered in the fridge.   (A single portion raw is a one inch chunk.)

Does intent matter?

Up until I was in my late twenties in San Francisco, there were many places where I could practice gongfu outside, even when it was raining. Sheltered areas in parks, tunnels, the overhangs of buildings, even thick tree canopies were available as public space. Now there are almost no public sheltered spaces because bums were using them for sleeping.

Our legal system is based on assessing a persons moral intent to do harm. A bum sleeping in the park is intending to sleep. They don't intend to make our quality of life worse, so we don't feel morally right punishing them for the destruction of public space.

Japanese society has no such problem because they don't care about moral intent. They treat crime as a problem of impulse control. This point is beautifully and brilliantly illustrated in the film Doing Time by Sai Yoichi. A guy goes to prison for the crime of wanting to feel the power of firing a pistol. He shoots into a bucket of water alone in a rural area but he gets caught anyway and sent to prison.

Almost all Japanese convictions come with a confession. (Historically in China, all convictions required a confession.) Prison in Japan is not a place to punish, it is an isolated environment where people with weak impulse control get an opportunity to develop it.

If I ever teach high school students again, I think I'll make this film required viewing.

This is important in the realm of martial arts because the pivotal term here, the operative word, is intent or yi in Chinese. Many internal and external martial artists claim that intent is the most important part of practice.



You can have a really clear and strong intent and still not get the results you want. Our good intentions do not necessarily produce good results. Intent can actually be a type of aggression that stops us from experiencing subtlety. Highly focused intent can even make us blind to what is right in front our our faces.

In our legal system we also make a distinction between pre-meditated intent and spontaneous intent.

I'm honestly not sure how to explain the difference between the Chinese term yi and the English term intent, but I thought this little discussion about impulse control might generate some insights.

Note: Yoyogi park, in central Tokyo, has a designated area for people to permanantly camp-out. It is clean and safe, and kind of edgy weird experimental.