Daoism and Sex (part 1)

Daoism's doctrine on sex and sexual practices is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Daoism.

I recently dove into the debates about gay marriage on some political blogs. I'm not going to link to them because I was just goofing around. But in the process of considering some of the strange and desperate arguments put forward against gay marriage, it suddenly struck me that many people actually don't know what sex is. Wow, what a shock.

So I thought I would try to shoot two pheasants with one arrow, and exposit both subjects.

The Daodejing has a phrase,

"If Heaven has a reason, nobody knows it."

I think this is a good place to start. We don't know why life exists. We are capable, however, of recognizing that there are two categories, "alive" and "not alive," and that we belong to the category, "alive." (I have talked about the blended categories of ghosts and other such "part alive, part not-alive" entities in previous posts--so I'll skip that part of the argument here.)

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the "alive" category is that we are capable of reproducing ourselves. The substance, force, and function which reproduces itself in all life is called in Chinese: Jing. The word therefore includes English words like, sperm or eggs, and underlays English functions like scabbing, and regenerating.

All living things ingest qi (air/water/nutrients/light) and transform some of it into jing. Plants and animals which reproduce themselves sexually also differentiate themselves (to some degree) into male and female genders (or parts of themselves in some cases such as worms and slugs). Sexual reproduction requires that the two genders of a particular species combine their jing.

All living things produce way more jing than they actually need for sexual reproduction to be successful, and way more jing than ever gets used in the sexual reproduction process. In other words, sex is very inefficient, A plant or animal can be extremely potent in its production of jing, and still not produce offspring.

Here are some examples. Some chickens lay eggs everyday. Cockroaches and mosquitoes produce eggs in the millions, with very low survival rates for individual eggs. During certain times of year, the grass and trees are constantly trying to have sex with my eyes and nose (pollen). Dogs hump people's legs.

You can fit a million sperm on the tip of a pin.

The process of transforming qi into jing has two basic routes it can follow:

1. Qi can transform into jing which regenerates and heals the individual living entity.
2. It can produce sperm, eggs, pollen or ovules.

Some Daoist practices seek to gain some volition over this process so that less qi will go down the sperm and egg producing path and more qi will go towards producing jing used for regeneration or healing.

Many plants produce beautiful flowers which take advantage of animal desires to help them combine their jing (pollen with ovules). Animal behavior which can lead to the combining of the jing of two animals of the opposite gender is, like jing production, incredibly inefficient in every species.

According to Joseph Needham in Science and Civilization, the three basic sex hormones were recognized and isolated into pure substances in China during the 5th century CE.

Daoist practices aren't concerned with hormones directly, but they recognize that certain foods, exercises, activities and even uses of the mind, can effect how much a person is concerned with or even obsessed with sex. More importantly, they recognised that no matter what we do, we are likely at any one moment to be transforming way more qi into jing than we actually need for producing a few viable offspring.

This natural inefficiency is inseparable in animals from the thorny issue of desire. Daoist practices can be divided into two categories.

1. Leaning how stop ovulation so that you ovulate only when you have decided to attempt reproduction.
2. Reducing or limiting desire.

Desire is a physiological part of our survival apparatus. It is also incredibly inefficient. When desire builds we become totally focused--to the exclusion of other information. To quote the huainanzi, "We run rough-shod over subtlety."

Thus, for Daoists, the physiology of efficiency takes on a moral dimension. Inappropriate behavior is not considered unnatural, it is simply excessive or deficient--misdirected or too strong.

The primary methods through which Daoism engages with desire, are the making of commitments and the refining appetites.

This always begs the question: How can we tell an appetite from a desire? There isn't a simple answer. Appetites generally include assessment and evaluation phases, they are more reflective and experimental-- less driven.

However, it would be a mistake to think that either appetites or desires are somehow rational. I guess you could say that appetites are to desire what reproduction is to sex.

Since all human sexual activity--from putting on lipstick to bumping chests with your male competitors, to vaginal intercourse itself--is naturally inefficient and rarely results in offspring, the desire to have sex with someone of the same gender, with a tree, or with a consenting gorilla, is all just part of this wild inefficiency and abundance we call life.

But if you've ever contemplated a rushing river pouring over a cliff, you already know this.

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Yelp* Reviews

A few years ago some inexperienced internet people came up with a great idea. They created a search-able review site for local businesses called Yelp*. Any business owner could list and describe their business and anyone else could write a review about it. Brilliant, they should have become billionaires by now.

Would that it were.

Yelp(ers) were the first people to get a site up and running, and they quickly cornered the niche, but they have had such poor business sense that years later they are still having problems.

First of all let me encourage you all to check it out. Secondly, if you've ever studied with me please write me a review. Lots of people in San Francisco use Yelp* to decide what businesses to patronize.

But...be forewarned...(because they won't tell you) if you only review one business or service, they will erase your review after a few days. Why? Because they are loony. They have some theory about the ethics of single-reviews. Whatever, if you take the time to write me a review (for which I will be deeply appreciative) also write one about a sushi restaurant, or a bed and breakfast, or a dentist.

I first found out I was dealing with amateurs three years ago after I wrote a review of Mao's Village Restaurant, which used to be an annoyance around the corner from my house. The next day I got a call from a guy at Yelp* who sounded like he rides his skateboard to work (nothing at all against skateboards, he just sounded young and unprofessional). We talked for about half an hour. His reason for calling me was that he didn't think I had actually eaten at the restaurant, which was true and obvious from my review. I commented on the Chang Kai-Shek's Wife's Chicken on the menu as well as many Mao and Zhou Enlai references that just made me think about starving babies. I mean would you buy an oven from a store called Hitler's Stoves? I commented about the mess around the cash register and the fact that hardly anyone ever eats there. In fact, I was pretty sure that it was a mafia money laundering scheme. A restaurant which has no customers can invent cash receipts, then pay taxes on them, which makes the money clean. The only people I ever saw in there were partying and drinking whiskey late at night.

Anyway, they took my first review down off the site.

Then, last year they called me to say I had some pretty glowing reviews, perhaps I would like to have my business moved to the top of the search for a fee of $300 a month. They worked really hard to sell me on this, obviously having no idea how my business works. I mean, look, if I was in a competitive business like a restaurant, and I had 20+ customers a night, $300 might look like a good price. But heck, I'm happy if I get 2 new students a month! Their business model made no sense at all.

So just the other day I (and nearly every small business person I know) got this message from Yelp*

Hello,

I'm writing to let you know about our decision to close your account. Your user account was flagged by the Yelp community, and our Customer Service team has determined that your account has violated Yelp's Terms of Service (http://www.yelp.com/static?p=tos).

Specifically, the Terms of Service state that:
> "You shall not: create user accounts by automated means or under false or fraudulent pretenses."

We have determined that you have been using Yelp to improve your business' and your friends'/other small business owners' ratings on Yelp through review trading. We have determined that review trading does not reflect unbiased customer opinions which violates the spirit of Yelp.

We review every situation with detail and care and take account closure very seriously.

Regards,
Kris
Yelp Inc. User Support
San Francisco, California.

Did you notice that Kris spells his name like the spirit capturing daggers of Indonesia?

Don't worry, they didn't take down my business description itself, just the reviews I had written for others and my personal ability to comment on other people's businesses--Oh, and all of the reviews people had already posted about me, except for one.

See, by Yelp* Logicâ„¢, if I write a review for someone in my business network it must be fraud! Thus all my students and former students who have their own businesses are automatically disqualified from sharing their opinions because they might be biased in my favor.

Get a clue Yelp*! The majority of my clients/students run small or even one-person businesses. This is San Francisco! A whole host of technologies, starting with the answering machine and now including Yelp*, have made it possible for individuals to run their own businesses. The possibility of the one-person business is the greatest single institutional change in the direction of freedom in my lifetime.

I was prepared to ignore the whole thing and move on but then this article made it into the San Francisco Chronicle, and someone started up a site called Yelp-Sucks.com

Sweet.

UPDATE: My honey tells me that not only do you have to review some other business in addition to mine, you also have to add a picture--otherwise they'll just toss your review in the cyber-trash.

Distinguishing Jing and Qi (part 2)

Musicians must learn to distinguish between jing and qi.

Most of you don't know that I studied Indian Classical Tabla drumming.  You can hear me playing on a few of my Youtube videos, but don't go back and listen to them for that reason alone, because I never got especially good.  I did, however, approach the study of Indian Classical music the way I approached everything in my twenties--that is, I practiced like crazy (four hours a day for several years).

In Indian music there is a virtuoso  rhythmic pattern which repeats three times called a tihai.  Tihais can be long or short, they come in many different types and they are amazing to hear.  But at the highest level, the level of the greatest musicians, there are actually only two types of tihais, ones from the heart and ones from the mind.

Both of these two types of tihais are improvised.  Tihais from the mind blow you away with their perfect blend of structural precision and complexity.  Tihais from the heart are more difficult for me to explain, they are more relational, emotional, and transcendent.

Zakir Hussein said that when he plays tihais he is actually making and seeing multi-dimensional geometric patterns in his mind.  Ali Akbar Khan said that he is playing with pure light.

When we really play music, our mind is not on the notes, the time signatures, beats, or scales.  When we really play music we want to express mood, sentiment, and emotion.  It's not usually raw emotion either, it is what we might call a crystalline form of emotion--Emotion which has already been explored, plumbed, completed or even resolved.

One's mind must not be focused on the musical details of technique, composition, or if I understand the Indian master's explanations above correctly--our minds shouldn't be on the music either.
In music as in internal martial arts, one must separate jing and qi--the physicality from what animates it.  

Distinguishing Jing and Qi (part 1)

When I'm typing, I'm not thinking about the keys I'm hitting, and I'm not thinking about the words I'm spelling, I am thinking about what I want to say. I am thinking about the sentiment I want to convey, the style, the flavor, and the rhythm.

But in actual practice even those things I am consciously thinking about spin in and out of my mind in a very spontaneous way, they don't have any particular order, often they simply emerge fully formed at the moment of expression.

Martial arts are the same. This is as true for fighting as it is for performing forms.

In typing, if my mind goes to the keys, I stumble. In internal martial arts, taiji, xingyi, bagua--the moment you distinguish one muscle group from another, you have made a mistake. You can no longer have whole body power. You can no longer have the differentiation of jing and qi.

When you are learning to type, of course you look at the keys. When you are training martial arts, of course you make distinctions between muscle groups (and a lot of other things.) But once you are performing at the level of an art, once you are an artist, your mind must not get stuck distinguishing different parts of your body.

300th Post & Business News

The Three Hundredth post of this blog came and went recently. Maybe I should go out and celebrate, but instead I'm at home cleaning and organizing my room/office.
When I started the blog last year I had a business plan in the shape of a triangle. In one corner was my regular website which promotes my classes, another was the videos on my Youtube page, and the third was this blog. The idea was that they would all be mutually supporting, people who looked at one would be drawn to the other two.

My success has been modest. One of my videos has had 90,000 viewers. Combined with the others my videos have been watched a total of 145,000 times. I haven't made time for more videos in 9 months. My goal for the summer is to produce a video I can sell, and to make more videos for Youtube.

I've also got a plan to make some cool t-shirts to sell through Cafe Press or some such site.

My regular website has basically been doing its job of informing people about my classes and getting me new adult students, but I've done almost nothing to improve it, so that is on my list of things to do this summer too.

Over all I've been happy with the look of my blog but disappointed in my abilities to do more with it technically. I made about $15 from Amazon books linked through the site for the whole year. I'm considering having a separate book reviews page that will sell books, but I've decided not to have them on the main page.

I would like to go through all my posts and put them into new categories so that people can follow the themes I have covered over time more easily. However, that is a big project and I may not get to it for a while. I also want people to be able to see the most recent comments, but the software I'm using has resisted that change, so I may be changing software. Perhaps I'll attend a Wordpress camp or something.

The various tools I've tried for counting how many people read my blog, and how often, have been frustrating. At one point in the spring my yahoo counter was telling me that I was getting 2000 hits a day. Now it's way down at 150. Go figure. Still I'm happy for even one reader. When I started I had no idea whether people would be interested in what I have to say.

San Francisco is usually a great place to practice outdoors all year round, if you don't mind wearing long underwear . At the moment, however, San Francisco has been covered in smoke from fires burning all over California. It's been like this for a week. After practicing outside I come back in and cough. I hope the fires end soon. Despite the fires, my practice has been taking new turns and is a great source of excitement. Of course when that happens it means I change from being a wuwei master who is content with his faults, to striving for transcendence. In other words, I'm back on the track of striving for perfection which leaves me feeling imperfect.

One of the difficulties of teaching children through the schools is that I don't have a way to keep them together after the residencies end. I would like to have a children's performing troupe but for that to happen I think I will have to have a dedicated space, which is really difficult in San Francisco because renting space is so expensive. Most of the martial arts schools either shoot for huge numbers of students, thereby lowering the quality of teaching, or they have a lot of teachers in the same style, or they run their space as a business that rents to yoga and other simple fitness stuff. Renting to other teachers is a whole business unto itself, one that would take away from my role as a teacher. Still the thought lingers.

In the past I've done workshops during the summer but this summer I'm laying low. I'll probably do a couple of ad hoc workshops for my students in push-hands and roushou but by next year I should be ready for something on a larger scale.

The article I wrote in the Journal of Daoist Studies in now available for purchase in electronic form or hard copy.

Thanks to all of my readers, this year has been a great beginning.

The Foot Fist Way

I had to go see this movie, The Foot Fist Way.

It is about an American Tae Kwon Do teacher named Fred Simmons. He says and does all the wrong things. As a teacher myself, occasionally something inappropriate has come out of my mouth while I was talking to a parent or a student. When that happens, immediately I go in to back peddle mode, I do everything I can to try and take it back. If I can't do that I apologize, or deflect, or change the subject. Fred Simmons says and does inappropriate things and then he just keeps going, he makes them worse and worse and worse.

It is a painful movie to watch. It is funny, but not in a way I recommend. I mean I had to laugh to keep my sanity, but I wouldn't wish that pain on another. At one point my friend was bent over with his face in his hands while I was laughing and pounding on his shoulder blade with my fist--If I have to watch this, you have to watch this too.

On my very worst days as a teacher I have thought to myself, "People laugh at me when they hear I'm a martial arts teacher. What am I doing with my life?"

I'm a pretty happy person, I love what I do, those bad days are few and far between. But this film made me think about them. Skip it unless you want to pass through the "Seven Rings of Pain!" (Movie title with in the movie.)

Monkey View

Monkey sees the peach and up the tree he goes. He doesn't think about climbing the tree, he thinks about the peach.

If he wants the peach badly enough, he may completely bypass the difficulty of climbing, but he may also miss the subtlety of the bark or the softness of the leaves. The peach may even be part of a trap set to capture him.

If you want to make a movement you are doing more difficult-- think about it. If you think too much about running while you are running, you are likely to trip over your own feet.

Many martial artists are motivated by fear or insecurity. Of course, if those were your only motivations, you wouldn't be human, you'd be a ghost. But it is worth thinking about. If you're training for self-defense, it is likely that you are afraid of being attacked. If you are training to look attractive to potencial mates, it is likely that you feel insecure about your current appearance.

The fruition, the peach if you will, of pursuing training motivated by fear, is of course, more fear. Likewise, the peach of training to look more attractive is more insecurity. Fear and insecurity have no end.

A lot of people train because they believe they are likely to be the victims of violence and it often turns out to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Your view, your default understanding of why you practice, is more important than any other factor in martial arts or qigong type training. If your view is narrow, like that of the monkey going after the peach, you may indeed have very clear fruition. You may get what you want, provided what you want is not a fantasy. A very narrow focus is useful for bypassing obstacles and difficulties, but you will also bypass all the other potencial types of fruition. The narrowness of your view may turn out to be its own trap.

I suggest students practice with the widest most open ended view possible. The term view as a metaphor for motivation, understanding, orientation, and purpose is particularly brilliant because it parallels how the eyes should be used in training. Don't lock your eyes on a point, take the widest possible view.

If you practice with a broad view, you will love forms.  Set routines, or forms, are great because they teach you to forget.  When you practice a form over and over and over, it becomes automatic.  You can completely forget the movement, in fact you should. Once a form becomes automatic you can do all sorts of experiments.  You can make an infinite number of subtle or dramatic changes to the quality of the form.  You can also do an infinite number of experiments with your mind.

Accidents (part 3)

People sometimes achieve very high level martial arts by accident. Accidents happen when we aren't paying attention, so they are often effortless.

A few years ago I was teaching Northern Shaolin to juvenile delinquents. A program was set up that was a collaboration between the school district, the sheriff's department, and Performing Arts Workshop. It was a lock down school which had a significant performing arts component. My classes always had a probation officer present watching on the side. All the students were between 13 and 16 years old and had been convicted of crimes.

Somewhere towards the end of my residency I brought my friend and Choi Li Fut expert Greg Mooney in as a guest artist. One of my rules is that students bow as they enter or exit the room. On this particular day, like most days, they were unruly, rude and disorganized as they entered the auditorium. As I introduced Greg they started pestering and shouting that they wanted us to fight, "We want to see you fight."

I looked at Greg, he is a performer, a stunt clown (he used to do 500 shows a year), we had sparred enough to know each others stuff. He looked game.
"OK," I said, "I'll make a deal with you guys." "You give us your full attention, you work hard, concentrate, and give todays class the best effort you've ever given, and we'll fight for you-- at the end of class."

As I said it, I thought to myself, 'these kids don't have any discipline, there isn't much chance that they will really concentrate?'

"Really?" They asked, "If we do our best you'll really fight each other, for real?"

"Yes," I said. I knew I was taking a little risk, I looked over at the probation officer and he was motionless. "Alright, it's a deal then let's practice."

That day they practiced harder than they ever had before, it was a fun class. I guess they trusted me. So at the end I had them all sit down and Greg and I went at it.

Neither of us were looking to connect a punch, we were putting on a show. Our strikes were intentionally missing by just enough to make it look real, we each took a couple of dive rolls on the hard floor, our sweeps were slow enough to give each other time to fall the easy way, our kicks were to the meaty parts. The juveniles were screaming with delight.

Then I did a simple bagua zhang single palm change. Greg accidentally turned into it. I was trying to make all my movements empty of force, and at that moment I wasn't even aiming at a target, I was paying attention to my audience. But my elbow connected with Greg's temple and he flew backwards into the air. His temple opened up and blood spurted out everywhere. My movement at that moment was so effortless I didn't even feel my elbow connect.

I helped Greg to his feet and we had an eye to eye bonding moment. The juveniles were completely blown away, their enthusiasm was profound. They also found it incredible that after such an event we were showing all the signs of being best friends.

As they left class that day, each of them bowed with reverence and sincerity I hadn't believed possible. The staff of the school reported to me that a year later the students were still talking about it as their best day ever at school.

Accidents (part 2)

Why are accidents so potent? Have you ever seen that style of both Chinese and Japanese painting which begins by spilling the ink on the paper?

I've seen it done a few times. For instance, a blotch of wet black ink still creeping is led out into the branches of a plum blossom branch. As the ink sinks into the paper, the peddles are added.

I was with George Xu the other day and he mentioned a Chinese Idiom which I didn't quite catch in Chinese. He said it meant, "A Wild Man Beats the Master." In other words, for some reason a completely wild man with terrible technique, who kicks in the wrong place and loses his balance...can beat the trained master of martial arts. It is as if the wild man beats the master because he does everything so wrong, he is unpredictable and unselfconscious. (He is not in his own way--he is not his own obstacle.)

Does this suggest a way to practice? Can you find a martial arts way to spill the ink?

(I accidentally got the cool photo of the ceramic cup/cans from a google search for "spilled ink demo" but the site itself (geekologie.com) was too big for my computer so I don't know the back story, still it is a cool picture. If anyone figures it out please add the artist's name to the comments.)

Accidents (part 1)

Accidents do happen.  The greatest, most effective, fast-acting medicine ever invented was invented by accident.

No, dear reader, I'm not talking about Viagra (although that was also invented by accident), I'm talking about anti-biotics! Penicillin! 

What happened was, someone was eating a sandwich in the lab where they weren't supposed to be and they dropped some bread crumbs into one of the cultures.  The penicillin in the bread stopped the bad germs from growing.  Dude, it like killed everything, but in a good way.  (Tell that to your teachers next time they complain about you eating in class!)

Oh, and by the way, did I tell you I reached the highest level of martial arts the other day?  Yah, it happened by accident.