In depth discussions of internal martial arts, theatricality, and Daoist ritual emptiness. Original martial arts ideas and Daoist education with a sense of humor and intelligence.
New Eastover Workshop, in Eastern Massachusetts, Italy, and France are in the works.
Daodejing Online - Learn Daoist Meditation through studying Daoism’s most sacred text Laozi’s Daodejing. You can join from anywhere in the world, $50. Email me if you are interesting in joining!
My computer started crashing about 10 days ago and it has finally reach the point of no return. Computers must some how be connected to the Underworld because they always pick the times when you are most busy to crash and burn.
So I'm going out to by a new Mac as soon as my laundry is done.
I made myself take private lessons to brush up on my Chinese before my trip. Not that I've been a good student or anything, but like the computer crashes, it has taken time away from blogging.
Also, I am bringing a video camera on my trip so hopefully I'll bring back something wonderful for everyone to see.
Some people say that you should not tell your blog readers that you are going on a trip because your readership will drop, even if you blog while on the road--which I plan to do. I solved that problem however, I no longer look at my ratings. Also, as far as semi-daily blogs about internal martial arts written in English, I'm not seeing too much competition. Where are my readers going to go?
If you are planning to start a new blog about Internal Martial Arts, this is the time to do it, frankly I could use some more competition!
Here are some questions I plan to investigate during my upcoming trip to Taiwan.
1. To what extent are martial arts of any kind understood to have an impact on the unseen world? 2. What elements of Daoist or other ritual practices (such as exorcism, purification or renewal) can be identified in martial arts practice? 3. To what extent can devotional aspects of theater or dance be identified in martial arts? 4. What can be said about the historical development of martial arts as a form of merit accumulation or dedication on behalf of ancestors, gods, community. 5. What can we say about the overlap (in purpose or meaning) of dance and martial arts? 6. Are there parallels between how efficacy is understood in dance/performance and how it is understood in martial arts? 7. Are there parallels between martial arts practice and the ways in which trance is used in teaching or performing dance and ritual? 8. How is trance categorized and identified within Daoist and popular ritual traditions? What can this tell us about the development of martial arts?
Feel free to criticize my methodology or my limited perspective. Add your own questions too.
I just thought I would link to Paul Grilley's yoga site because he has some great pictures of bones. The idea of these pictures is to show how extraordinarily different each individual person can be (even after death). All 16 of them are worth looking at. But it's also brilliant marketing. With out having to explicitly say it, Grilley sends the message, "Every aspect of who you are is unique and deserving of personal attention, right down to the shape and size of each and every one of your BONES!" (He has also managed to make it impossible to "borrow" his images so make sure you click through to have a look at them.)
I still wonder to what extent the shape of a persons bones can be changed once they have reached adulthood. I'd like to believe bones can be changed in a positive way, but I don't think my own bones have changed their shape in many years. How about yours?
Here are some cool new pictures of my smokin' hot Students at Mission Education Center. Five of my more advanced students from E R Taylor Elementary After School Program performed at the new DeYoung Museum last Saturday to a stunned audience who clapped for like 10 minutes! My dream for this year was to have a performing group that would tour. Mid-year the enthusiasm from the students was mixed and I kept running into logistical transportation type problems. I'd actually down graded my expectations. But in the end the students who wanted to perform pulled together and awesome show and my dream came true. I think there will soon be some photos, video and I think were going to be part of a documentary film too.
One of my students pointed out that in the previous post on the early 20th Century I asserted that lineages were invented to defend gongfu against attacks by Modernity, claiming that there was continuity between an older pure martial tradition and certain contemporary styles. They were all trying to avoid associations with performance, ritual, religion, or failed rebellion. Where as in the book Qigong Fever, we see that after the Cultural Revolution (1967-1977) lineages were invented to make qigong appear ancient and mysterious, pre-Modern claims of authority.
Still, in both eras movement artists desired to have the authority of some all powerful "science" on their side; a desire which seems absurd now, in a time when no one is contesting my right or my duty to practice and teach gongfu. Politics is not a rational process. Lineages are a political tool, not a rational one, and certainly not scientific.
Perhaps I accidentally implied that no lineages are real. Shaman, Wu, Tangki, magicians, even puppeteers pick disciples to whom they give the responsibility of passing on a classical art or ritual tradition. In India, Japan and China the disciple is often a family member, but if the extended family hasn't produced any suitable offspring, a disciple will be adopted.
The more illegal (remember legal/illegal is a continum in China) an art is, the more likely it is to be secretive. Also, magicians, martial arts and ritual experts usually had good reasons to keep trade secrets close to their chests. Lineages served this political purpose well. The early 20th century ridiculed secretive behavior none the less, and people at least pretended that all their secrets had been revealed. (I believe Cheng Man Ch'ing wrote a book on Tai Chi book called, "There Are No Secrets.")
I don't believe there are real historical martial arts lineages which were devoid of performance, ritual, religion, or rebellion. But lineage, by its nature, is a changing thing and could certainly purge itself of these aspects and remain a lineage. But be suspicious, a martial art that has had a lot of purging will also have a lot of inexplicable baggage. It's a lot easier to assess the value of an art when you have the whole thing intact, and NOBODY seems to have that!
I suspect there was some previous era where martial arts were shared freely. Buddhist temples had open courtyards where locals could get together and practice. Villages had clan halls where people could get together and practice. I think there was always some paranoia, but it may have been more like basketball secrets. Every village and every temple sponsored a team, and everyone wanted the quality of their competing teams to be high--so after dominating for a few seasons-- you traded coaches.
I'm optimistic that the commercial world is leading us into an era of great sharing.
If there was a "how to" martial arts literature prior to the Ching Dynasty, it seems lost to us now. Martial arts have come down to us primarily as the arts of the illiterate. I do believe at one time martial arts were "high-culture." The evidence for that is in the philosophical literature of the Waring States Era. It is entirely possible that the Tang and Song Era had these too, but perhaps they were destroyed during the years of Mongol rule.
The other group of people who have lineages are Daoist Priests, Daoshi. Daoism is a lineage tradition, everyone given the title Daoshi was included in a lineage and each individual teaching or text had its own lineage. In the event that someone set off on their own and created some new supportive practice or teaching, after a generation or so it/they would be incorporated/adopted into existing lineages. Scholars have their doubts about just how far back some of these lineages go, but no one doubts that they do go way back. But it is also true that most of these lineages are secret. The ones we know about are the ones that stopped being secret to some extent. I suspect that martial artists, beginning in the Ching Dynasty, started imitating Daoist (and Buddhist) ideas of lineages. Martial arts may not have had lineages before that.
Then again their may have been secret Daoist lineages of martial arts. As Shahar points out in his book Shaolin Temple, the popular literature of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties grew out of theater and is perpetually making fun of Daoists, Buddhist, officials, and martial heroes (xia) with their secret techniques.
I've been looking through the index to the Ming Dynasty Daoist Cannon (Daozang) which was just published last year. There are a lot of texts which describe physical practices in conjunction with ritual, purification, astrology, meditation etc... There may even be a few texts which are primarily movement oriented (requiring lineage transmission, of course), but I see nothing resembling martial arts. If such texts ever existed they are either still hidden, or they were destroyed 900 years ago a long with thousands of other texts during the Yuan Dynasty.
I just finished reading Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation, A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China, UC Press 2004.
Before I tell you about that I just want to say I've got a lot on my plate before I leave for Taiwan and so I apologize if my blogging seems rushed and...
My advanced students from ER Taylor Elementary School are performing again, Saturday May 16th, this time at San Francisco's beautiful new De Young Museum. They'll be on the Outdoor Cafe Stage at 1:45 PM, it's free.
In the early 20th Century Chinese people, particularly urban people, were deeply humiliated. For 300 years they had been under foreign Manchu rulers, forced to wear their hair in a queue as symbolic slaves. The Chinese people saw themselves as collaborators in their own oppression. They were unable to work together to overthrow a weak corrupt government until a group of 9 foreign powers allied to bring China to it's knees. All the foreign powers were Christian, except Japan, and all were promoters of Modernity.
Scientism, Rationalist extremism, absolutist truths, and the relentless quests for purity of form, and transparent clarity--swept the country like wild fire. China turned on itself. Anything old which required oral transmission, anything mysterious, secret, difficult to learn, or regionally particular, was viciously attacked as the cause of China's past failures and humiliations. Thus it was claimed, Martial arts were practiced by dirty herbalists, religious nuts, and desperate performers who gather up ignorant crowds and block traffic.
Martial Arts were to be replaced by tiyu, Physical Culture. By that they meant Western Sports fitness and Olympic style competitions. Physical Education Departments opened up in schools all over the country.
Huges swaths of Martial Arts culture were wiped out, never to be seen again. Imagine having spent your life developing an extraordinary "spirit fist" only to be surrounded by ridicule on a national scale. Most chose to take their secrets with them to their graves, many probably committed suicide.
Those martial artist activists who resisted the onslaught of hysteria did so in the name of Modernity! The first powerful voice for making Kungfu part of Modernity was called The Pure Martial Society (Jingwu Hui). They argued that martial arts could be a sport like any other sport. All the other sports came from the West, having a Sport with Chinese roots would be a great source of pride which would help build the nation. For Kungfu to be a sport it had to be totally open, accessible to women, have a clear standard curriculum, have a health and fitness component free of terms like jing, qi or shen, and be competition oriented. Jingwu swept the country and Chinese communities in South East Asia. As political fortunes changed it was surpassed by the Guoshu (National Art) movement. The Kuomintang Government of Chang Kai-Shek (he was a Methodist Christian) implemented Guoshu schools all over the country, at least where he was in power, and used the competitions along with academic testing to pick officers in his government and armies. But everybody who taught martial arts started calling it Guoshu, meaning that they agreed with the modernizing, scienticization project.
They tended to argue that in the past there was a pure fighting art that had been corrupted and could now be extricated from the mildew of history by being simplified and mixed with fitness training. But there were lots of arguments. Some argued that martial virtues had been lost. This was the period when people started making up lineages and publishing teaching manuals.
The lineages allowed people to pretend they came from a great and pure martial line of masters dedicated to nothing but martial virtue and pure technique. Inventing the lineages allowed people to write religion, rebellion and performance out of history. Some of the lineages may have been real, but they were not pure. By claiming a lineage people were also renouncing the past, both real and imagined, they were saying in effect, 'Now THIS art, which was unfortunately secret for many generations is now totally clear and open! Anyone with four limbs and two ears can learn it!'
There was a guy named Chu Minyi who served as a minister for the Kuomintang. He invented something called Taijicao (Tai Chi Calisthenics) and in 1933 wrote a book called Tai Chi Calisthenics Instructions and Commands. "Whereas traditional tai chi was simply too difficult for any but the most dedicated martial artist to master, tai chi calisthenics were pleasingly easy to learn and practice." They could be done in a few minutes and they used a counting formula like jumping jacks. He also gets credit in the book for inventing the Tai Chi Ball practices. (Hey, I didn't write the book, but those tai chi ball exercises always looked a little too much like rhythmic gymnastics for my taste.)
Chu's Tai Chi Calisthenics were performed on stage at the 1936 Olympics. Fortunately or unfortunately he was a peace activist and so naturally supported the Japanese when they invaded and was later executed for treason. But not before performing one last taijquan set in front of the firing squad.
Check out the book. All the good stuff is in Chapter 7, "From Martial Arts to National Skills."
This is all great background for understanding Wang Xiangzai's challenge to every martial artist in the country to either fight him or sit down and explain their art in plain language. It explains why he wanted to to throw out forms, shaolin, performance, philosophy, theory, religion, etc... It also helps explain why his students were confused enough to go in three different directions; 1) standing still as a pure health practice, 2) fighting is everything, and 3) knocking people over by blasting them with qi from a distance.
This quote by the intrepid founder of Honda Motor Company, Soichiro Honda, is also true of martial arts. For each thing I've gotten right over the years, there are 99 others I've gotten wrong. Progress appears to be made by accumulating successes; however, when you finally get something right you realized how simple, clear and straight forward it is. That means all your previous attempts were actually failures.
Lately, my power has been increasing dramatically. I gave up being interested in power a long time ago, so there is great irony here. From where I'm sitting now, it is crystal clear to me why my power was so constrained in the past, and it's just as clear to me why other peoples' power is constrained. Everything short of correct is simply wrong, 99% of what people call martial arts is failure.
99% of the cosmos is yin, only 1% is yang. The earth, tiny spec of a spec that we are, actually has about 92% yin and 8% yang. That's why life can exist here, for the moment. That's what we call balanced!
My students are performing between 2 PM and 3 PM on Saturday May 9th. We are supposed to go on at 2:30 PM but you might want to get there a little early, our last performance jumped the gun. These are advanced 4th and 5th graders, they have about 15 minutes of action packed routines. Details below:
ROOT DIVISION presents New Growth
A FREE Family Arts Workshop and Exhibition featuring artwork from the students & instructors of Root Division's Youth Education Program.
Opening Reception & Family Arts Workshop: Saturday, May 9th, 2-6 pm Free Art Activities, Performances, and Refreshments!
ROOT DIVISION presente New Growth Una exposicion que representa el trabajo de los estudiantes & instructores el Progama de la Educacion de Juventud de Root Division
Reception y Taller de Artes Familia: Sabado, Mayo 9, 2-6 pm Actividades de Arte, Interpretaciones, y Refrescos Gratis!
Exhibition Dates: March 6th-16th, 2009 Gallery Hours: Wednesdays- Saturdays, 12-4 pm (or by appointment) Sliding Scale Donation: $1-$20
Our partner programs include: Buena Vista Child Care Herbert Hoover Middle School Mission Education Center Fairmount After School Seven Tepees Youth Program
I've been wearing a haramaki everyday for two months. The fashionistas among my readers already know that this ancient Samurai undergarment is fast becoming a must have. Here is the Wiki page.
I can think of no other article of clothing more likely to improve your gongfu than a haramaki. They help you establish a "frame" and relax the dantian. My advice, toss in the towel with all that core strengthening gobbly gook and just get yourself a haramaki!
I have one wool and two stretch cotton haramakis. This is the type I have, (Item No. mn-1002, mn-1003) scroll down...find the products second from the bottom!
You can read more about fashion and health benefits here, and here, and then there is Haramaki Love.
In China the generals used to wear a very heavy tiger skin attached where the haramaki is, it would hang down to their knees and probably felt something like an x-ray apron. A softer lighter version was worn by children and used by women for the month after pregnancy, when they were most vulnerable to spirit invasion. The tangki, or spirit mediums of Singapore and other places where Hokkien culture is strong, wear this kind of bib (tou-ioe) when they are possessed by war gods and when they are possessed by baby or child gods. The tiger skin is worn ritually in Tibet and of course Shiva wears one too.
For internal martial artists the image of the heavy tiger skin apron is a reminder to first let the muscle mass of the lower body hang heavily before the mind moves the qi (and the mass follows the qi, of course).
In order for a human body to function it must have a mind. Minds move bodies. How do minds do this? I'm not seeking a "scientific" explaination here. I'm asking, how do we experience the process?
Can a human be still? The answer is no, it is not possible to be still (even in death). Only relative stillness is possible. In relative stillness, the mind continues to move the body. It is fair to say mind and body are inseparable, and for this reason Orthodox Daoism teaches that in stillness practices the mind should be given no more attention than a toe or a rib. Every square millimeter of the body is a cherished blessing.
However, Daoism and Tantric Buddhism sometimes use "visualizations" within their stillness practices; and they certainly use "visualizations" when practicing ritual. The beginning visualizations are often military, generals or characters known for extraordinary discipline. The images then transition towards subtler, softer, and lighter images.
Infinite architectural design
But the terms "visualization," "images," or "picturing" are not adequate terms to describe this process of mind. It might be better to think of them as 3 dimensional feelings. For a human to function we need to feel. We need to feel in 3 dimensions. Any movement we do is organized by a 3 dimensional feeling. It is as if this 3dFeeling holds us together and gives us order.
When we are walking down the street, we have a particular 3dFeeling. We need this feeling to function, without it we wouldn't be able to stand, walk, or look around. These 3dFeelings are infinite, even this particular 3dFeeling we use for walking is infinite. But it is the kind of infinite that happens within boundaries. That particular 3dFeeling is very stable, it is changeable, but it doesn't change very much. However, when we were children learning to walk, that particular 3dFeeling was very unstable. Each time we tried to find it, it was a little different, we had to learn to replicate the same 3dFeeling day after day in order to walk like the adults around us. As a teenager, I decided my walk wasn't cool enough and I actively changed this 3dFeeling, which in turn changed my walk to the degree that my new cooler walk became automatic and unconscious.
The affects of a particular 3dFeeling are sometimes noticed by other people. We say, "That guy looks like he has a dark cloud over his head," or, "She looks like she is about ready to break out in song!"
These Daoist and Tantric Buddhist 3dFeeling-stillness-ritual-practices free us from the 3dFeeling habits we have developed through our lives. They un-lock the absolutely normal everyday 3dFeelings which order our movements, giving us the ability to be at play with 3dFeelings.
This is what we call an adept. This is what we call the earthly immortal "dancing with qi." Internal martial arts are simply not internal if they lack this type of freedom. And it is freedom, not power. It is potency, not a tool. Yes, applied to fighting, it can unleash unstoppable power. Yes, applied to healing, it seems to produce amazing results. But to use it as a tool is to limit it. The adept cherishes freedom, accepts fate, and leaves his/her potency unexpressed. But even this freedom is not the Constant Dao, it is only a "name."
Scott Park Phillips
A place to train and learn about traditional Chinese martial arts, which are a form of religious theater combined with martial skills.
In depth discussions of internal martial arts, theatricality, and Daoist ritual emptiness. Original martial arts ideas and Daoist education with a sense of humor and intelligence.
