Speed and Age

Long ago I accepted the idea that martial arts don't need to train speed.  Why?  Because an old man will pull his hand out of the fire as fast as a young man will.

Is this fair?  As I get older, 41 now, I'm starting to see why older people jump less, and less high.  The effort of jumping can be painful.  And pain is such a good trainer, if it hurts we do it less, and if we do it less we do it not as well.

If you fight in the ring, you need a lot of stamina because staged fights are artifically long for enternainments sake.  And the longer you do something in a short period of time, the slower it tends to get.  So for ring fighting, you need to train speed.

But in a real fight the length of time is likely to be short.  In a real fight the pain an older person might have from moving fast will likely be covered up by the hormone cocktail.  It will only be felt afterwords, perhaps even days later.   So training speed is not necessary.

Instead of training speed, internal martial artists train smoothness.  And we train integrity.  Because, although an old man can pull his hand out of the fire as fast as a young man, for the old man the very act of pulling out at high speed is likely to tear a muscle in the elbow which takes months to heal.  While the young man will likely say "ouch," and forget about it.

Theater and Kungfu

Chinese martial arts are historically inseparable from theater arts.  I do not mean to say that one can not look back on any era and find a well trained single minded bruiser.  But that bruiser is likely to have a gongfu brother who worked as a street performer, or an aunt who was a master at going into trance and channeling historic figures (like generals and minsters) for interviews at the homes of the well-to-do.

The term "Qi" can actually be translated "magic," because when a little kid pulled on the lapel of a street magician's coat and asked, "Master, how did you saw that woman in half without killing her?"  The magician answered, "I used my qi! I was able to separate her and reconstitute her with my enormous reserves of qi!"

Everyone who has read the Taijiquan Classics knows that "Taiji is born from Wuji, and is the mother of Yin and Yang."  When a magician showed you the inside of his hat, he said, "Look, look, it's Wuji (emptiness)."  "I will now circle this hat on my dantian... gathering the qi, returning to the primordial chaos (huntun), suddenly Taiji is born!"  "First Yin" (out of the hat he pulls a small black rabbit) "and then Yang," (followed by a white one).

Here is a website by someone who thinks like me.  Here is his youtube channel.  And here is some rocking old time street gongfu:

Bombs and Cannons from the 1200's

I was looking up some other stuff and I ran into this great discussion of early Chinese firearms.  They had guns.

In it I also found this link to an archeology report about the failed Mongol/Chinese invasion of Japan.  They had bombs.



Does this change the debate about why martial arts were developed in China?

Are Chinese martial arts really really old like African dance? or do they date from the time these weapons were invented?

As I said in a post sometime last Summer, if archaeologists would create a data base of the effects of the lifelong study of various types of martial arts on the bones--we would be able to look at bones from every era and every region and answer this question definitively.

Antarctica

One of my best friends, Cheryl E. Leonard, is blogging from Antarctica.  She was sent there in her capacity as a world class music composer, and she also happens to be an Aikido Black Belt.  Lot's of cool photos too.  (Some of you might recognize her from my youtube videos.)

A Quan-Shu Manuscripts: Push-Hands

If you haven't read this article by Xiang Kairen on the nature of push-hands, I highly recommend it.

And here is another article by Xiang Kairen.

Dr. Laura Turns to Yoga

Last night I was driving home late and I flipped on AM Radio.  Dr. Laura Schlessinger was talking to a woman in the US Army.  I missed the beginning but I gathered from listening that, the woman had a behavior which she knew was bad but which nevertheless, she kept engaging in.  Dr. Laura told her to take yoga classes. If I hadn't been driving I would have been floored.

The idea of using a physical practice to improve ones ability to make and keep commitments is, as far as I know, a Chinese idea.  It's called gongfu (kungfu):  meritorious action.

Dr. Laura is Jewish and conservative.  I don't really know how yoga was practiced historically in India, but I've never heard of a traditional context in which it was used this way.  I don't want to say it's just a Chinese idea because I think the idea is common to various North Asian cultures, but as far as I know Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam do not contain this idea.  Protestantism has the idea that "work will fix you."  And Catholicism has the idea that something slow and painful (like yoga) can bring you back to "God's virtuous path."  But both of those are quite different from the idea that a physical practice will improve your ability to make and keep commitments.

In the traditional Chinese version weak commitments, or the habit of repeating an action you know isn't appropreate, is often considered to be the negitive influence of lingering ancestoral "ghosts."  Dr. Laura even hinted at an ancestoral cause by saying that in the caller's family a lot of crazy stuff seemed normal and yet she was going to have to change anyway.  Yoga is being used as a form of gongfu, and the idea of gongfu is spreading fast, even on AM radio!

Harry Potter Goes to Shaolin Temple

The Martial Arts Nerd!

The Martial Arts Nerd is now an American icon.  It is right up there with Superman and Marilyn Monroe.  In fact, in a strange way, Superman, and the guy he shares his body with Clark Kent, may have been an early version of the Martial Arts Nerd. I may look, sound and act like a helpless bumbling straight guy, but underneath this facade I'm a scary powerhouse of flying arms and legs!

It is a good thing that blogs didn't exist in 1993 because Matthew Polly would surely have used a blog to document his year at Shaolin Temple instead of giving us this wonderful book:  American Shaolin.  Besides being a funny almost lovable nerd, Matthew Polly gives us a bone crushing and forced splits account of what it was like to spend a year at the Shaolin Temple.

Polly is honest, so honest you kinda feel sorry for him in an "I'm glad it wasn't me" kinda way.  His story telling skills are delightful.  I especially liked his stories about seeking out a trainer in the drinking game "Playing Hands".  He starts that chapter with a quote from The Dream of the Red Chamber

:

"Drinking games are to be observed even more seriously than military orders."

His "Playing Hands" trainer is his most important master.  He teaches him, through the drinking game, how to achieve goals, negotiate deals, intimidate a criminal Triad affiliate, and get laid.  Then Polly learns that:

"Earlier European and American writers called the Chinese fatalistic and passive.  This was a mistake.  They aren't passive; they are introverts.  They study the patterns and wait for their opportunity.  But if opportunities were continually deferred, they exploded.  This was the reason why luan (chaos) was the most feared word in the language."

Polly was an undergrad at Princeton in Religion and Chinese Language for 3 years before he went to Shaolin.  Unfortunately studying Religion without a lot of History didn't prepare him enough to actually explain why a Buddhist Monastery would be credited with creating martial arts.  But he takes a shot at it anyway:

"Shaolin Kungfu has eighteen different official weapons, but there are forms for more.  Shaolin has five main animal styles-- tiger, leopard, eagle, snake, and praying mantis--but there are more.  It is estimated that Shaolin has more than 200 open-hand forms, but no one has been able to record them all.  Historians of martial arts explain the creation of all of these styles either for self-defense (Shaolin was an isolated monastery often attacked by bandits) or religious reasons (kungfu forms ar e a type of moving meditation), but that doesn't explain the complexity.  It took me all of a week to come up with my own theory: boredom. Put a bunch of sexually repressed young men on a mountaintop with nothing to do but meditate and practice kungfu and the myriad of Shaolin styles is the result."

Of course what he learned there was Wushu, not Shaolin exactly.  The Shaolin Temple was destroyed and then, after Jet Li made the movie Shaolin Temple (1982), it was rebuilt to accommodate tourists and the thousands of kids who swarmed there (or were abandoned there by their parents) to learn martial arts.  Wushu was created by the Chinese government to replace kungfu because the Communists wanted an absolute monopoly on sources of power and authority.  It is a combination of Northern Shaolin (what I teach), Dance, and Acrobatics.  He also learned Sanda (kickboxing with Chinese rules), some traditional body surface conditioning associated mostly with performance (like brick breaking), and of course drinking games.  Buddhism doesn't seem to have been much of a priority when he was there in 1993, although he thinks it may be now.

History aside, the biggest difference between Wushu and traditional Chinese martial arts is that Wushu performers wear out at the same age as ballet dancers, in their late 20's.  Over stretching is the problem they have in common.

It is a really funny book, and it's insightful too, but you'll have to keep reading my blog if you want to find out why a Buddhist temple is so oddly credited as the creator of kungfu.

Are Martial Artists Natural Procrastinators?

Or I could have titled this piece, "Does Procrastination Improve Martial Skill."  I've really enjoyed the last couple weeks.  I've had a light schedule and I've gotten plenty of rest.  But all that ends on Monday and I've got mountains of work to do before then.

It seems I've been procrastinating.  This is a skill that has always come easily to me, and I suspect that with age my skill is improving.

Great martial arts skill often involves utter calm, even stillness, followed at the very last moment by explosive energy.  The ability to hold back, to wait calmly, to delay as if nothing in the world could move you, and then to suddenly "Do Stuff!" like really important "Stuff," all at once in a simultaneous blast of energy--sounds like procrastination doesn't it?

Do years of matial arts training help  facilitate better procrastination?