Fighting in Space

I recently heard that some astronauts spent 6 hours trying to loosen a bolt on a space station.  It’s extremely hard to get leverage in space.  This led me to asking, just how much fighting is gravity dependent?

The answer is, almost all of it.  In space if you try to poke someone in the eye, you will both spin away from each other.  However I think you could poke a persons eye if you were simultaneously pulling them towards you by the neck.  Anyway nearly all strikes, kicks and throws are gravity dependent.  Probably about 70% of joint locks are too.  Most of them would be impossible to get on a resisting partner in space.  Even hair pulling is out.  We are left with squeezing grabs to the groin and neck--and head locks.

Since everyone knows, space is the next wild, wild west (Firefly fans?), I think we should start training for zero gravity fighting.

It’s also a good way to explain why relaxation is superior to tension in a fight.  Almost everything we do in a fight is gravity dependent.  The best fighting methods force an opponent to carry not only their own weight but your weight too, at the worst possible angles. Even with throws in which the opponent is picked up into the air, momentum is used in combination with a destabilized base to create a circular force around a center of gravity and a gravity dependent still point--ending of course with a smack down.  (I just wanted to say smack down.)
So start analyzing fighting methods in terms of gravity and they will become more effective.     As long as you are controlling the exchanges of momentum, your opponent should be carrying as much of your mass as possible.  So, for example, if you punch someone you want all of your weight to hit them with momentum.  If you do it right, strength is completely irrelevant.

A Challenge

I recently met with professor Yeh Chuen-Rong, an Ethnologist at the Academia Sinica who is a big fan of Clifford Geertz.  I was meeting with professor Chang Hsun and she suggested that I meet her colleague next door because he had a collection of video of folk rituals.  But I misunderstood her, and I thought she was introducing me to the librarian of the multimedia center. (He is the curator of the museum too, so that's how the misunderstanding happened.)

So, I immediately tried to describe what I wanted to see, at his convenience of course-I was expecting to come back another day.  What I didn't realize was that he had something on the order of a thousand videos of folk rituals in his personal collection.  He took me into another room to show me the scale of what he had, and perhaps to make it clear I didn't have any idea how to ask for something specific.

Anyway, we got off to a bad start.  While I was talking to him there was an American graduate student in Green Engineering sitting in, he was there to get some directions actually but he stayed for the first part of our talk.  After about 20 minutes, Professor Yeh looked over at the other students and said he could tell I didn't know the field and he called me Carlos Castaneda.  I retorted that Castaneda was insane.  But Yeh said, no, he was just a practitioner--who lacked rigor and perspective--he just wanted to tell his own story.

He said there is another writer he could compare me to if I didn't like Castaneda.  I wouldn't have heard of her because her book was published in Hong Kong or something...HAh, he turned out to be talking about Margret Chen!  He called her work worthless to scholars like himself, shallow! a nice coffee table picture book perhaps.  I read her book in the two months before coming to Taiwan.  For me it was a marvelous source of information on Tangki Spirit Mediums in Singapore.  But one of the reasons I didn't review it was that her comments about Daoism and the early history of Chinese religion where poorly informed.

Yeh seemed momentarily charmed by knowledge of the book and by my assertion that I also abhor shallowness.  But he quickly went back on the attack.  If I wanted to do this kind of research I would have to know Chinese cosmology really well.  My reaction was, go ahead, test me!  He started listing cosmological ideas, and then we got stuck on a translation.  He was saying ganzhi (stem and branch) which is a way of calculating auspices, so when I figured out what he meant I said, of course I am familiar with the tongshu (the complete almanac of cosmological calculations, also the oldest continuously published book on earth.)

So he pulled one out, then he showed me a drawer full of tongshu from previous years.  As I flipped through the tongshu, I had to admit that although I had spent 7 years following various indicators from the tongshu and observing a few dozen commemorative days each year, most of the tongshu was totally over my head and outside my ability to comprehend.

Having made his point, he gestured toward his collection of Clifford Geertz books.  Did I know of him?  Yes, actually, I've read a few of his books (later I revealed that my father had interviewed him on the radio).  OK, he said, have you eaten?  I don't think the kind of work you are proposing is of any use, but lets continue this conversation over some dumplings.

Over the next four hours we argued.  At one point I fired back that perhaps his work wasn't of much use because as a non-practitioner, he lacked fundamental experience!  I think he liked that. He offered many challenges.  Here are some of them:

• Gods do not teach people to fight.


• When people in trance possession cults fight, they are not possessed, they are just fighting.


• The Chinese literature on the subject does not use the term trance in a continuum the way I do.  Generally trance means a specific deity is present.


• No one else has proposed that there are different types of trance for different types of deities (Professor Chang also said this).  In other words it could be good that I'm proposing a new direction of thought but the people who belong to these cults don't make such distinctions.  So I'm dangerously close to making stuff up. (My argument is that it is implicit in the different ways trance is invoked and in the different types of movement deities use.  Also, in Daoist ritual all the deities are invoked through the visualization/embodiment of the eight generals.)

By the time I left four hours later, I had learned a lot, and he had conceded a few points too.  I also got asked to help him with a letter to the Louvre (you know that museum in Paris) and he showed me a bunch of videos!  I'll be back!

Dead Martial Artists Society

I recently saw the film "The Dead Poets Society."  The story is about being a romantic, and the good romantic teacher tells his students to rip up the school's standard introduction to poetry which explains that poetry can be understood by plotting it on a graph where one axis is musicality, and the other axis is the importance of it's content.

I believe I have said elsewhere that we can graph trance on a continuum from:

An image in the mind ---------to------- Total possession by a deity

With language, dance, music, routine, altered states of consciousness, and perhaps emotions; all falling somewhere on this line.

(Perhaps we could say trance is the physicality of desire.  A terrified or enraged fighter is likely to be possessed by her desires--in a very physical way.  While we may have evolved this way through random selection because it improved our ability to survive, it seems illogical for us to fall deeper into trance the more we desire something.  That's why Vulcans are so cool, they are an intelligent design.)

If we want to add another axis to our graph we could add will power:

Autonomic Nervious System------to-------  Fine motor control.

Gross motor control would be somewhere in the middle, with panic, involuntary, and reflexive movement all falling somewhere near the beginning.

(Of course there is the notion from Mencius that the will of Heaven and the will of Man can be aligned.  And a saying from the Daodejing, "If heaven has a reason, nobody knows it.")

And if we want to add a third axis to this graph we could add awareness:

Unconsciousness------to------ Seeing things as they actually are.

I suspect an increase in ones ability to remember could almost run parallel to this last axis.  Which is interesting mainly because the inability to remember is often cited as a marker of a true deity possession.

I've been thinking using these three continuum's for years, and I sometimes forget that most people don't think this way.  Perhaps even farther afield is the Daoist idea that our humanness can be defined by our appetites.  This can also be viewed as a continuum from:

Spontaneous adaptable human-----to---- Blood thirsty demonic vampire-zombie-king.

With predictable vanilla ice cream humans and robots falling somewhere in the middle.

NOW, in keeping with the Dead Poets movie, if you don't think these graphs can help you understand martial arts, or history, or human nature you can now rip up this page...oops, I guess you can't, this is the internet.

Some New Leads

In my conversation with Professor Hsieh Shi-Wei, which I mentioned briefly in an earlier post, he suggested that I try to see a type of ritual performance warfare called Song Jiang Zhen.  Unfortunately the season for these performances ended just before I got here, but I'm going to try to meet some people involved with this tradition this weekend near Tainan.  Here is breif article about this art.  He said one of Kristofer Schipper's students has done work on the many types of Song Jiang Zhen, but I believe the work is published in French (Daniel, want some homework?).

Everyday there is more Daoist Ritual and other Taiwanese ritual performance finding its way onto youtube.  I found this one just surfing around.  The first part appears to be a Daoist priest (Daoshi) doing a public ritual.  For some Zhengyi (orthodox) Daoshi this would be a violation of precepts but as I learned from reading an article by Daoist expert Lee Fong-Mao, the various communities of people who are served by Daoshi have different expectations of them, and some Zhengyi Daoshi do public ritual previously associated with "red hat"  Daoists.  Just to make it more confusing I don't know where the video is actually from or if every thing is from the same ritual.  However, the beginning "dance" does look martial and the martial art it looks the most like it Baguazhang.  The second part of the video shows too Tangki.  I'm not sure what deities they are possessed by but be careful you don't fall into trance watching this one.  They appear to be possessed by different deities.  Check out the movment they use for hitting their own back...it looks a lot like a Tongbei gongfu move to me.

Ali Shan

I'm writing from Alishan, a mountain retreat in the southern part of Taiwan.  I spent a few days in Kaohsiung and it was just too hot.  I don't see how anyone can do a gongfu workout in that weather, or any other workout for that matter.  I did see people riding bicycles, they were sweating buckets just riding on the flat with no headwind.  And believe it or not the World Games will be in Kaohsiung next month.  I just don't understand hot weather.

Alishan is cool.  There is actually a justification for wearing clothes up here at 7000 feet.  Alishan is a tourist park by-the-way, but I climbed up to the top of Tashan this morning after having my first decent workout in a week and I didn't run into anyone.  And for future reference, if global warming turns out to be real, I'm moving to Antarctica.

Now that I'm out of the hot weather I can think and meditate again.  I find it hard to believe thinking or meditating have ever been done in hot climates.  It occurred to me that perhaps the reason it is often hard to get students to practice is that they actually experience practice as difficult.  I know duh, right?  But that never occurs to me because practice is just really easy for me.  It is just my nature.  Experiencing practice as ones true nature is considered one of the fruitions of practice.  But honestly, I don't remember ever experiencing gongfu practice as difficult.  Until I landed in hot humid weather, that is.  The god of air conditioning needs to be promoted to a higher office!

I went to a lot of temples in Kaohsiung but surprisingly the first temple I visited here on Alishan is a temple to Zhen Wu (the Perfected Warrior) the highest Daoist Icon.  Zhen Wu is on the top floor.  Before being promoted to the highest position in the pantheon at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, Zhen Wu was called XuanDe (dark mysterious natural virtue).  The icon on the ground floor of the temple was called Xuan Tian (dark mysterious sky).  He is black and made of wood. They are all the same deity fulfilling different functions.  Ritual implements used in trance dance were laid out in front of the downstairs altar.  The Zhen Wu statue was beautiful and made of bronze.  I recognized him immediately because of his hair, his armor and his bare feet.  A separate statue of a turtle and snake intertwined (the symbol of the North Star where Zhen Wu sits in meditation) was just below his feet.

There was a large carved wooden sign in a side room that said Chang De Yun Ren (Constant nature cloud person) below it was a framed chart of the "60 talisman of cloud fates."  That is, a talismanic piece of writing for each of 60 different ways one can become an immortal.

The temple is modern and yet has fantastic wood carving everywhere.  At least some of the carvings depict scenes from the History-Legend of the Three kingdoms and the Outlaws of the Marsh.  In one of the carved scenes on a ceiling partition I noticed that one of the carved figures was wearing glasses.  Cute!

I asked a resident guide/interpreter if there was a Daoshi maintaining the altars.  She said no there was a Miao Gong.  I've never heard of a Miao Gong before.

Taiwan Project

This is the first day since I arrived in Taipei that I’ve really rested.  It was raining the day I arrived but it’s been clear all week until today and I must say the rain cooled things down a bit.  Air conditioning is necessary for thought, I actually feel my brain turning off and on as I walk in and out of the heat.

I went on a reading frenzy in the two months before I came and it has continued since I arrived.  On Friday I met with professor Paul Katz in his office at the Academia Sinica and he gave me three papers to read and made a number of further suggestions for future reading.  Two of the papers were on the organization of martial cults, dance procession groups dedicated to martial deities and exorcistic rites.  The third paper was on the roll of justice and judicial thinking in Daoist ritual and its relationship to a wide range of social institutions including martial cults. He has been very helpful in introducing me to other scholars here too.  Our talk was less than an hour but it gave me a lot to think about and helped me organize my ideas from the point of view of a research project which is turning out to be essential for speaking with other scholars.

The next day I met with Dave Chesser of the blog Formosa Neijia.  We had a wide ranging talk about life in Taiwan, martial arts gossip, and business.  As readers of his blog know, he has a real talent for encouraging friendly open debate and we talked about how he can use that skill and experience to build a school integrating kettle ball training and martial arts skills.  He has read all my father’s books on business so we really got into how to translate my father’s ideas about what makes a business flourish into the Taiwanese context.  As all business people know, being in business means constantly refining and adapting what you do through trial and error.  And that takes time.  In my opinion he has what it takes to be successful and he’s off to a good start.

Dave convinced me to take a class with He Jing-Han (his blog is:  http://tw.myblog.yahoo.com/hejinghan-bagua).  Master He taught a three hour class in the park behind the big public library (where students on the weekend line up 2 hours before opening time, just to make sure they have an air conditioned place to study).  The class was focused on a linear form of baguazhang he calls baguaquan, the form can be seen on his Youtube channel.  This form is just a small part of what he teaches year round and I got the impression that his style of baguazhang is organized very differently than mine.  In fact, of all the things I’ve studied it most resembled the mixed internal/external Lanshou system I originally learned from George Xu 20 years ago.  I would love to come back and get a sense of the full scope of what he teaches, this guy is a living treasure.



Shirfu He is a warm and gracious guy.  After class we went to lunch for two hours and had a wonderful talk about Daoism and the history of internal martial arts.  When I told him about my project He suggested that martial cults were created for group fighting while martial arts are focused on individual fighting, but he conceded that it was quite possible that historically people practiced and taught both together.  He also made the important point that what he teaches has changed dramatically from what his teacher, born in 1906, taught.  He suggested it was nearly possible to comprehend how his teacher thought about the arts, considering he lived through such different and turbulent times.  Going back 5 or 6 generations is really stretching credulity.  I know he is right and yet the project seems important anyway.  I think it is worth while trying to understand not only what teachings have been discarded or changed, but why.

I also had the opportunity to meet twice with Marcus Brinkman.  Once for a Chinese Medical Cupping treatment (my whole back got cupped with more suction than I’ve felt before!) and once for a Baguazhang lesson on his roof.  He is a fun guy with an in depth knowledge of Chinese medicine and substantial martial prowess.  He gave me some really good theoretical explanations about the relationship of internal martial arts and medicine, but I’ll save them for some future blogs. (I need time to digest them!)



Yesterday I met with a Professor of Daoism named Hsieh Shi-Wei.  I honestly believe he is the first person to really understand the full scope of my project and he was very encouraging!  More on that later.

Other highlights--
People are warm, kind and helpful.  The subway and bus system in Taipei works like a charm. I don’t even have to pull my pass out of my wallet because it has a radio chip in it, I don’t even have to slow my stride when entering and exiting the subway!  Taipei is much cleaner than I imagined it would be, public bathrooms are much cleaner here than they are in America.  I went drinking at an outdoor beer factory and a dinosaur bone covered bar.  I’ve enjoyed asparagus juice, salt-coffee, a mug-bean smoothie, tons of interesting street food, seaweed chips, a harrowing scooter ride, and I stubbed my middle toe black and blue hiking in the mountains.

I have one more meeting here in Taipei tomorrow and then I think I’m headed for the south.

Flexibility Routines

I'm here in Taiwan where it is way too hot to stretch, but I wrote the notes for this blog in cold and foggy San Francisco.  I spent many many years stretching.  As I age I'm in danger of over-stretching my ligaments, once ligaments over-stretch there isn't a whole lot one can do, the joints just become too loose.  Of course most people have the opposite problem, they never stretch.  So take what I'm saying with plenty of salt.

Flexibility routines in kungfu are to make sure you don't stretch.  They are feedback!  The purpose of daily flexibility routines is not to create flexibility.  The purpose of these routines is to let you know you went too far in your practice the day before.  When you stretch too far you'll know it because the next day, or sometimes the day after that, you will feel pain where you over stretched.  The lower back and the sacrum are common places people feel this pain.  I've known dancers that lived with pain from over-stretching everyday of their careers.

If you go through a flexibility routine pain-free, you are doing it correctly.  If you feel stress in you're joints you are not.

When we sleep well, our bodies naturally draw in towards the center.  If we don't sleep well the whole body is looser.  In general people are looser at night-time classes and tighter in the morning.  Sleep is an extremely important factor in flexibility.

The story goes that my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying would reach over to put his chin on his toes every morning before getting out of bed.  Toward the end of his life, he cried when he wasn't able to get his chin on his toe.

How important is Alignment?

I think it was blogger Tabby Cat who used the term "Alignment Gulag" to describe people who are obsessed with perfecting alignment.  I'm not sure where his blog is now but the last blog post I read by him he had a whimsical list of examples of reasons people never get good at internal martial arts.  In every case it came down to some excuse for being something less than completely relaxed.

I have to admit that there was a stage in my teaching where I was alignment focused.  Students' really appreciated the alignment corrections but in the long run I don't think alignment corrections do a lot for martial development.  So I guess I've returned from Siberia.

Here are some alignment precepts I've come up with:

1. Move Spontaneously.


2. Move with conservation and efficiency.


3. Move without affect, narcissism, self-consciousness, or pretense.

Fine Motor Control

Fine Motor Control and Gross Motor Control are not exact terms.  We hardly think, ok, now I’m going to use fine motor control to fix this thing.  But the terms do approximate something real.
Sgt. Rory Miller points out that fine motor control is highly unlikely to work in a high stress situation because the hormone cocktail released into our system shuts down fine motor control.
One useful way to think about internal martial arts is that we want to make our movement routines utilize gross motor control only.  Even the feet must be loose and floppy, as if your legs had become like jello from shaking.
Grabbing is one of those movements which could be fine motor or could be gross motor.
It’s important to teach people not to grab too much.
First, grabbing is often defensive.  It is done to limit the other persons movement. This kind of thinking puts you at a distinct disadvantage because your opponent is now free to hit you.  Of course it can work, especially if your grab is truly disabling, like a grab of the neck, or a grab with “bone crushing force,” or a quick yank intended to dislocate a joint.  Smaller people grabbing larger people doesn’t seem like a very good idea though.
The Second reason not to grab is that the center of the palm is supremely insensitive.  If someone touches my arm with their palm they simply won’t feel the punch coming.  Touching with the palm is usually defensive and ineffective.  Striking with the palm is a different story.  You don’t really need sensitivity when you are striking.

We tend to think of gross motor control as being insensitive but it is not.  Gross motor movement is just one big mass of sensitivity, the way babies move.  In that sense fine motor control is less sensitive because it effectively shuts out whole body movement in favor of local control and precision.

UPDATE:  I had a video here showing another teacher using palms in push-hands but I removed it because I couldn't think of anything nice to say and in all fairness each teacher should have the opportunity to explain their methods before being judged, even on youtube!

Listening vs Quiet

Everyone who has been reading my blog knows that strength reduces sensitivity.  If you are looking for reasons to quit your fitness routine, that's a great one.

But many people misunderstand this argument to imply that normal people don't have enough sensitivity.  This I don't believe.  Normal sensitivity is enough for the development of high level Internal Martial Arts.  We don't need to increase our sensitivity.  However, we do need to understand what we are feeling for.  We do need to know one type of feeling from another.

The Chinese phrase for sensitivity most often left untranslated in English is ting jin, or listening power.  George Xu has decided that this is misleading.  First of all, the term jin or jing, power, is not what he wants us to cultivate.  He wants us to cultivate shi, or potential power.  Secondly, listening implies an action.  George Xu says we should be internally active externally quiet.  It is this term quiet which he is using to replace listening.

In other words, listening is not enough, you actually have to stop your tongue from wiggling!  Your tongue must be completely relaxed, quiet.  This goes for all the voluntary muscles in the body.  All of them.  The calves must be quiet.  The eye muscles too.  They all have to stop talking!