Chansijin

Chansijin or chansijing depending on which character one chooses means roughly, silk reeling power.  Last summer I posted this list of the seven types or levels of chansijin.  I'm linking to it now because it never got any discussion at the time.  There may not be much to say about it, but I still think it is a cool list.  I think there is a suggestion in this list that the entirety of Taijiquan can be transmitted through any one practice if that practice is ridden all the way out.

Defining the Dantian

I've been searching my blog to see what I've written about this year and I realized that although I've mentioned the dantian plenty, I've never tried to define it.

But don't get too excited, I don't think a definitive definition is within reach at this moment. Never the less it's worth thinking about.

The term dantian literally translated means cinnabar field. I don't know the earliest usage of this term but what it refers to is a flat, square, platform of packed earth perhaps as large as one mile square. Raised platforms of this sort were used for state rituals from before written history. One could argue that Beijing has several large "public" squares which are indeed used for state ritual.

Going back into pre-Han (200 BCE) history, it is problematic to used terms like Daoist ritual, Chinese, or even the state. Historians sometimes use words like fangshi or ritual expert to designate the priests or leaders of these rituals if they were not performed by the heads of state themselves.

By Han times, the two most important rituals were the sacrifice to heaven and the sacrifice to earth. Grand rituals which demonstrated military prowess, scale, and unity were also very important. If we look over the scope of time, I think it is sensible to think about a continuum of overlapping ritual traditions. Shamanic journeys on behalf of a ruler, ancestral sacrifice, funerals, rituals for the unresolved dead, theatrical tales of gods and demons, trance possession exorcisms, and Daoist rituals for the rectification of qi--all require a sanctified, ritually purified, space in which spacial and cosmic boundaries are defined. They all require a stage.

The dantian is a stage for the performance of ritual.

This early part of Chinese history also supplies us with two other sources of our tradition.

External alchemy, which should really be called early chemistry, was centered around rituals using a furnace and a cauldron which could be vacuum sealed. Clearly, the dan (cinnabar) in dantain, comes from this tradition in which the most basic experiment separated cinnabar into mercury, lead and other trace elements. The literature of this experimental tradition was highly developed by 300 CE when the Upper Scripture of Purple Texts Inscribed by Spirits, was written (See Early Daoist Scriptures).

Meditation, as we call it today, is first clearly described in the Neiye, which is part of the Guanzi, and dates to approximately 400 BCE. Originally it was a practice taught or practiced by kings. While it is impossible to get inside the minds of those early kings, it is worth noting that this earliest meditation text supplies information about the three walled "quite room" in which this practice was to take place. Diet, posture, incense, and the idea that this meditation would have an effect on the conduct of the kingdom, were all present from the beginning.

Many scholars believe that the Daodejing (~300BCE) was originally written for kings and royal families, but by the time Zhang Daoling became the first Orthodox priest of religious Daoism (1st Century CE) the Daodejing was being taught, along with meditation, to anyone who wanted to learn.

These three traditions ritual, meditation and alchemy merged. By the Tang Dynasty (~600CE), members of the imperial family were studying Dzogchen, Tantric Buddhism, and a new school of Daoism called Shangjing (Highest Clarity). The innovation of the Shangjing school was that it used the metaphor of external alchemy in combination with meditation to create a stage for Daoist ritual to be performed inside the body.

The process of a chemical transformation conceived in alchemy became a way to describe the transformations that take place in meditation. The vocabulary was synchronized so that a discussion of one sounded like a discussion of the other. From that base, and under the influence of Dzogchen and Tantric Buddhism, the complexity and detail of Daoist ritual became internalized. As time passed, Orthodox Daoism (Zhengyidao) adopted the idea that efficacious ritual must take place both outside and inside simultainiously.

To understand the meaning of Dantian, it helps to remember that we are talking about a world in which most people are practicing an animist religious tradition. A tradition in which the world is constantly animated by unseen forces--spirits, ghosts, gods, demons.

The Dantian is a purified stage on which internal ritual takes place, inside an internal world animated by ten thousand unseen forces. The external ritual--the dance if you will--happens both on the stage and in an unseen animated world which is rooted in the dantian.

So the dantian is the place where the inner world merges with the outer world. A still place prepared for ritual. A ritual in which the chaos of the cosmos is danced into the dantian. A ritual in which the chaos of our total inner/out experience is brought into or onto a completely stable, mile square, platform of packed earth.

In Taijiquan, when we say, "Sink the qi to the dantian," this is what we mean.

In internal martial arts we rarely hear about these roots, but clearly the vocabulary is meant to invoke them. It is meant to invoke an animated world in which outer and inner are simultaneously and mutually self-recreating and self-rectifying. A world where the influence and potency of our conduct is with out limits.

All those explanation you have read about the dantian being a point or a ball below or behind the navel, the center of gravity, or a feeling of coordination...they were all correct. It is all those things... and it is also a container big enough to hold the entire ocean, and then some.

From the Daodejing:

I have three unchanging treasures. Hold and preserve them;

The first is compassion, the second is conservation, and the third is not imagining oneself to be at the center of the world.

Half-Life of a Dream

Last night I went to see Half-Life of a Dream an exibhit of contemporary Chinese artists. What the artists all have in common is that they were trained to make art as Communist state propaganda and they all have supurb technical skills.

I haven't put up images of any of the art work in because the images from the show that I found on line are not big enough or photographed well enough to do justice to the work.

Every piece of work in the show is good enough to provoke a conversation. In that sense the work is conceptual, but much of the work is also worth looking at for its technical virtuosity or its experimental prowess.

If you can handle darkness and ambiguity, you'll really like this show. Speaking of ambiguity, there is an artist, whose name I can't remember. I just tried for twenty minutes to figure out which artist it was and came up sort. Anyway he only had one piece in the show and it was clearly designed to get people's goat. It is a technically simple piece consisting of about ten 3000 to 5000 year old neolithic ceramic vases covered in brightly colored industrial paint. From an archaeological point of view, this is vandalism. Thinking about this piece as a martial artist or a Daoist, it poses many interesting questions, which my readers might like to consider (in no particular order).

1. If we have simular ceramic vases which are 6000 to 8000 years old, does it really matter what happens with these 3000-5000 year old ones?


2. Isn't industrial paint more useful and practical than dark colored clay?


3. Isn't a replica of an ancient artifact more valuable than the original? At least you can pick it up, feel it, or put flowers in it?


4. If you could be put in a cryogenic sleep for 3000 years, wouldn't you be embarrassed to find your scratched up discolored Tupperware in a museum?


5. When the government controls archaeological research and publication, instead of working archaeologists, are the results any more ethical than if artists were in control?


6. The ancients had a nice sense of form but had poor knowledge of industrial materials and mass production.


7. Is the surface more important than the story behind the object, person, or event?


8. If the past can be improved, should it be?


9. Is reverence for old stuff a form of vanity?


10. What makes something valuable? Its story, history, rareness, function, location, age, or the meaning/experience we derive from it?

Check out the show, and if you are no where near San Francisco check this list to see if anything from Contemporary China is headed your way.

Two Images Worth Thinking About

I noticed these two images in the San Francisco Examiner last week.

The first one is of the creepy Chinese police training to kill unarmed civilians on Segways. It would have been simple enough to construct bullet proof shields on the front of the Segways if there was any intention to use them against people with arms.

The second is of the latest competitive format for showcasing masculine prowess. Five bouts of boxing interspersed with a game of chess. I don't know what the head phones are for. Seems like it would be more interesting if they had to concentrate on the chess game with a crowd of unruly boxing fans screaming, "Take his knight, you big oaf."

Here are the rules!

Six Harmonies

To practice any style of Chinese martial arts one must align with the Six Harmonies.

Six Harmonies can be divided into the three fundamental categories of all Chinese cosmology, Jing, Qi and Shen.

The jing category of Six Harmonies is usually expressed like this: Wrists match ankles, elbows match knees, and shoulders match hips.

The jing category is easy to see in many orthodox martial arts postures because each of above pairs (wrist/ankle etc.) line up vertically. But it is important to understand that the postures are not static, they are not held. The postures must have this alignment in motion, constantly. So if you think of a particular posture, say for instance Single Whip in Wu Style Taijiquan, the alignment must be felt not just in the posture but while entering it and while leaving it.

So the jing category is often simply thought of as correct alignment. But the jing category in Chinese cosmology cuts across generally conceived categories of Western thought. Jing is not simply one's underlying structure, it is also the origin of that structure. In other words, one's alignment must follow its own developmental pathways. It must come out of, and be informed by, the way we are made--the way we grow and develop form a single cell to a fully formed adult.

Thus the rules for correcting alignment are not rooted in the simple pairing of wrist with ankle, elbow with knee. They are rooted in kinesthetic awareness of the most fundamental patterns of a person's growth.

The qi category of Six Harmonies is like falling through the doors of perception. A joint can not be seen as a joint. It must be seen as a dynamic animated force. A force which is animated simultaneously in six direction, three planes; up/down, left/right, forwards/backwards. (George Xu calls this Space Power.) When a person animates a joint simultaneously in all three planes, spiral power will naturally emerge. But it is not really the individual joints which take on this quality, it is all the joints simultaneously, it is the whole body as one thing.

The ability to differentiate jing from qi emerges effortlessly from the aggressionless feeling of the whole body traveling between movement and stillness as a single thing. Once this differentiation is made, we can move just the one qi, or in better English: move the qi as one.

The shen category of Six Harmonies is the process of revealing one's true nature. It is the simple quality of finding one's place. In Daoism we call this returning to the source.

The shen category of Six Harmonies is usually described like this: One's mind, body and spirit align with Heaven Earth and the Ten Thousand Things. I hesitate to unfold this one because each of those six terms is a potencial hang up. Should I define them one by one? Will that help?

The method is this: Practice the jing category until it reveals your origins. Practice the qi category until your qi moves as one. Then, look and perceive outwards, allow your sense of space to feel limitless. Next, simultaneously feel the ground supporting, solid and expansive in all directions. And finally, let go of your person hood, that which makes you think/feel you are separate from all other things:

"To be preserved whole, bend,

upright, then twisted.

To be full, hollow out.

What is worn out will be repaired.

Those who little, have much to be gained--

having much, you will only be perplexed."

-(from the Daodejing.)

More Trouble

While I get excited when I figure out how to do something new on the computer, that excitement is usually overridden by all the problems created by that same new development.

Here is what I got right.

1. Updated version of Wordpress (from 2.0.1 to 2.5.1).


2. New theme with widgets.


3. Changed header image and colors (not finished yet).


4. Added the most recent comments section to the sidebar.

Here's what isn't working.

1. When I get a new commenter, I have no way to approve them...error of some kind. (I think I found a temporary fix: I think I can approve comments remotely through email.)


2. My sidebar links/pages are in the wrong order and don't seem to have the flexibility I thought they would, of course it is better than what I was doing before which was...experimentally cutting and pasting php code. (I put "A1" in front "Classes & Videos" so that it would come before "Blogroll" in alphabetical order...silly, I know.)


3. I pretty sure I messed up the wp-config.php file but most stuff seems to be working.


4. My sidebar issues may be caused by my failure to delete certain files. I only found out about this through troubleshooting, so now I'm wondering if I should start over.

These errors and imperfections are probably things I can live with until I can find someone to help me. Wordpress Camp in San Francisco Aug 16th?

All this took way more time than it should have, but at least I got to see Hellboy 1 and 2 this weekend. Fun stuff. Mix Martial Arts watchers will notice the choreography style and moves used in the Hellboy 2 Troll Market Scene are all taken from inside the MMA Cage. That scene ends with a "ground and pound." La-la-la.

Themes

I have been planning a whole series of posts on mind and the martial arts but I've also been trying to improve the look and function of my blog for the last 6 hours.
Therefore, you may have noticed that I failed, and I've been trying different themes, and sidebar functions.  My mind is now completely wacked.  I was going to sign up with BlueHost and re-do everything until I read their terms of service and the guy told me they were based in Utah and would be searching my pages for inappropriate material.  No thanks.

So...more work tomorrow.

What Makes a Man a Man?

Looks like my homey Sasha Barron Cohen is up to his old tricks again. If you're not familiar with him, he is the voice behind the kid's song, "I like to move it, move it" the title track of Disney's rather entertaining gay agenda movie--Madagascar.

Now, last year I was sitting with my mom out in front of a cafe in the Castro District, the self-described gayest neighborhood on earth. Since gay identity came out of Hippie identity, gays love flowers. So naturally next door to the cafe, was a flower shop. And in the flower shop, mounted on the wall, was a television set. Now, I've noticed that a certain pizza shop on the next block also has a television mounted on the wall which plays gay porno 24/7 (the pizza's ok). But in the flower shop, that would be too much. No, the flower shop uses their mounted television to plays Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

Why might you ask? Because being yourself is beautiful.

So click on the link and check out what Bruno is up to. And make sure you click though the extra pages because there is some funny stuff. I seems like the fighters really came to fight! Is there a lesson here about letting go of what we think we are?

UPDATE: film info:

Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.

Daoism and Sex (part 3, or Why you should trust Me)

I'm 40. During the sexual revolution in San Francisco, my family was ground zero. I was the kid in school everybody came to when they had questions about sex. Every single aspect of the sexual revolution was active in my home and the places my family took me.

My great grandparents were suffragettes in New York. My grandmother and her brothers and sisters grew up in a sexually liberated environment. In fact, my grandmother was an advocate for anatomically correct sex education in the schools-- and she occasionally bragged about sex orgies in the 1920's.

During the 1970's my father started the first public class on sex (erotica) for adults. The idea for the class was that anyone could ask any question they wanted and if the answer wasn't known, it would be researched for the next class. That class eventually became the Sex Forum, which eventually became the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality--which gives out doctorates and has been the source of Biology 301 (Human Sexuality) course in nearly all modern universities.

Just to pile it on, he also started the first Sex Information hot-line, the Yes Book(s) or Sex (he is featured in the one on masturbation), and helped run C.O.Y.O.T.E. (Come Off Your Old Tired Ethics) also known as the prostitutes union. I could go on.

As a kid I was surrounded by sexual experimenters. The one word that I never heard around the dinner table was "pervert." When the second wave of sexual liberation started in the 90's I got a chance to go to sex rituals and consensual sex parties (instead of orgies). I've seen it all.

Sexual liberation has positive psychological and physiological effects. However, if you are having a lot of sex you are going to need extra qi in the form of food, more rest and more sleep. Otherwise you'll become deficient. [In Chinese medicine deficient is a diagnosis which is sub-medical (because all you need to fix it is food, sleep and rest) but which is a contributor to many medical problems.]
I've been listening to sex jocks all my life. More experiements in sex have been done in the last 40 years in San Francisco than were ever conducted by Tantrics or Daoist. History is simply not a good resource for good sex.

Imagine you are still a virgin and your parents have set you up on a blind date in which you have agreed in advance to have sex! Sound crazy? It's called arranged marriage and it was the norm in India and China. It's no wonder that they created the Kama Sutra and various Chinese Pleasure Manuals. These kids needed basic sex education. In most cases, an alliance between two families (the marriage) was riding on the hope that that first date would go well.

The idea that Tantra or Daoism has something to teach modern internet competent people about sex is far fetched indeed. Folks, all those Tantric and Daoist Sex classes and books are just modern experiments with an oriental gloss-- they aren't magic, they aren't particularly honest, and the health benefits are nil if you are already liberated.

But I will say this, some people are making a lot of money selling couples sex education vacations with an Oriental Mystic. Nice.

Daoism and Sex (part 2)

In my previous post I didn't get as far as discussing the history of Sex and Daoism or misunderstandings resulting from that history. Instead I focuses on what Daoism understands sex to be.

The brilliant young scholar Liu Xun has written about two person Daoist practices from the ~1600's generally undertaken by two people of the opposite sex. Unfortunately it looks like his writing on this subject remains unpublished at this time. Perhaps he will read this and correct me. My recollection is that it is often difficult to tell from textual sources whether sex of any kind was involved because most of it is written in metaphoric language. There probably were some practices involving sex and meditation, but they were by no means widespread and it is questionable whether they should be called Daoist at all. (More on this below.)

Others have tried to say something about early Celestial Master (~200 CE) sex practices, but the truth is we don't know much about them. It seems like there was a short period in which teachers would pick two people of opposite gender from among their disciples and guide them through some sort of private marriage ritual in which the teacher and the two disciples were all present. Because the practice was discontinued, I think it is fair to conjecture that it didn't produce the best results.

Judging only from the precepts followed by Celestial Masters at the time, I think it is safe to say they were not engaged in anything they thought would increase desire. Most likely they were practicing not getting excited. Or, as I describe in the previous post, perhaps they were engaged in some type of physiological awareness which had as its goal, limiting the production of jing in the form of eggs or sperm, so that it would be available for some other practice. Generally speaking, sexual desire causes our bodies to produce more sperm/semen and more warmth excitement and lubrication.

I have heard that some Chinese Emperor's may have practiced getting an erection with out any desire. Supposedly it is possible, through extreme discipling of the mind, to get an erection, have sex, and neither ejaculate nor feel any desire. Presumably one doesn't feel much pleasure either, but I don't know. This kind of practice makes a little sense if you are an Emperor and have 800 concubines who are bored. It is important to remember that while some Emperor's were no doubt sex addicts, each and every concubine represented a political alliance which had to be maintained. If you never had sex with them, you might cause more trouble that it was worth. I can't imagine why anyone would want to try those practices today.

Now on to the misconceptions (no pun intended). The Daozang, generally known as the Daoist Cannon, has been complied by order of various governments into different additions over the last few hundred years. It is an enormous collection of texts (≤5000). No Daoist could study or use more than a fraction of these texts in a lifetime. Which would lead one to ask, "Are there texts in the Daozang which no Daoist has ever used?" And the answer is, probably. Compared to Buddhism, and Confucianism, Daoism has been a lot more lax about condemning what other people do. Practices which were outside the norms of Confucianism or Buddhism, were openly rejected by these two traditions. But Daoists have been more likely to respond, "Maybe it is Daoist, I don't know." So there is a trend that whatever no one else wanted, got stuck with the label "Daoist" simply because Daoists didn't reject it. Daoists have generally held precepts encouraging discretion and even secrecy, so it's likely that individual Daoists would not know the details of what other Daoists were doing.

That being said, there have been lots of books written about Daoist sexual practices. For the most part these have been invented out of whole cloth, or deal with issues your average sex advice columnist could handle better. But we also have the problem that people have intentionally limited (and therefore mis-translated) the meaning of the term jing to mean simply semen. Thus, we have been treated in some books to the disgusting image of semen traveling up the spine to nourish the brain.

And yes, of course, there are Daoist precepts against wasting jing. But folks, that is meant to refer to jing before it goes into sexual reproduction. There are many ways you could interpret this precept. For instance, I would say push-ups and sit-ups are a violation of the "don't waste jing" precept because the day after you do them your body will start using jing to regenerate your injured muscles, which is a waste because push-ups and sit-ups serve no purpose (except perhaps vanity).

[Note to readers, my updated position as of 11/17 is that people should practice Maximum Vanity. There is not enough true vanity in the world.]

The crazy idea that an average Joe, like me, would get an erection, make-out for twenty minutes and then have sex and not ejaculate, is the stupidest idea ever!

Man, just shoot!

Let it out, it's too late to save it, might as well clean out those pipes.

On a slightly different note.

Over the years, many people have come to me wanting to study qigong because, in their own words, "I want more energy!" After a couple minutes of interviewing it inevitably turns out that they are deficient either because they do drugs, don't get enough sleep, work too many hours, have a poor diet, or don't exercise enough. All of these problems are solvable with out qigong, so they never stick around. (A couple of times the problem has been they exercised too much, in which case the problem was easily solved by suggesting they do less.)

However, there are some weird power accumulation exercises out there falling under the category of sexual qigong. None of these are good for your longterm health, because like taking drugs, they mess with your endocrine system (In TCM language they use up yuan qi). They are also completely unnecessary because you can get the same amount of energy from proper diet, sleep and exercise. My guess is that these practices were originally invented for people who were starving in times of famine, when such practices might have served a real purpose.