Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin

A while back I wrote a post called, why sit-ups make you fat.  Now from Time Magazine there is a nice article called Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin. It's written in a meandering first-person "why me" kind of voice-- like so many articles about health these days-- (ok, even I do that sometimes) still it's one of the best popular articles I've seen in a while.  Make sure you read the whole thing because this was from page 4:

Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes. Because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles but the brain's self-control "muscle" as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym. This explains why exercise could make you heavier — or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren't eliminating all my fat. It's likely that I am more sedentary during my nonexercise hours than I would be if I didn't exercise with such Puritan fury. If I exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito.

The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we've come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity — the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented — may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."

The article makes it clear that exercise is linked to appetite, and it even suggests that exercise is linked to rest.  It doesn't explain that exercise is linked to sleep or our appetite for stillness.  Chinese Martial Arts, Health, Daoism 101 tells us that exercise, food, rest and sleep function as four interacting appetites.  Change one, and you change the others.  The quickest, most effective way to stimulate hunger is to exercise.  So yeah, intense vigorous exercise is likely to make you want to eat more.  It's also likely to make you crave stillness and help you sleep. These four regulate each other!

The article talks about people forcing themselves to run or do short bursts of burn and sweat at the gym.  In my book, that's a sure sign of a problem.  Exercise should be something you have an appetite for.  If you're healthy, your body will tell you how much exercise you need and how vigorous it should be.  I pop out of bed in the morning with an appetite to stand still for an hour in the dark cool air, followed by a couple hours of qigong and baguazhang.  If that's not enough my body will tell me by giving me ants-in-my-pants later in the day.

Burning-out your muscles three or four days a week at the gym will de-regulate your appetites!  Similarly, if you stay up late and drinking beer, the next morning you'll want to move less.  I don't mean to make it sound simple or easy.  We humans have social appetites too!  And competitive appetites, and most of us have an occasional craving for the taste of risk and danger.  How we manage all of this stuff together, as a single subject, is the field of study.  Chinese Martial Arts is social, and sometimes dangerous.  It helps us find our natural appitite for stillness and it gives us a context for cultivating it.  It enlivens our sensitivity to how different foods make us feel, move, and sleep.

How intense should a workout be?  It's a tough question to answer because it has to match up with everything else you are doing.  From age 18 to 30 I worked out 8 hours a day:  Kungfu, dance and bicycle riding in between.  I did that much because I wanted to, because it felt like the right amount of movement.  But would it have been possible to focus all that energy into something more conventional like working the floor of the Stock Market?  Maybe.

The beauty of Internal Martial Arts is that as we get older, we can still get the intensity of circulation and whole body stimulation without sweating.  That's right, I try not to sweat three month out of the year.  Traditionally, Spring time is the only season internal martial artists break a sweat.  The muscles and sinews can all be moved around and animated without having to scrunch up your face with exertion, strain or pain.

I like that the author of the Time article mentions her tendency toward "Puritan fury."  We ignore our ideas about what we think we are at our own peril.  If you have an appetite for self-torture, for instance, it's a lot healthier to get that out of the way in a poorly aligned horse stance between 6 and 7 AM than it is to bring it with you to your job, or take it home to your kids.

Taoism in the News

Here is an article from the NYT about Daoist music at Carnege Hall.

Here is an article from Taiwan News titled Daoism in Taiwan Undergoes Transformation.   I personally found the article frustrating.  It starts off saying Daoism is the hot new thing, then tells us it was hot a long time ago, then it says it's always been kind'a hot under the radar, then is says it's gotten too hot is some ways.  All true I guess but each point is only interesting if investigated in depth.

This one is also from the Taiwan News about a Palanquin builder and carver who is competing with cheaper mass produced palanquins.  This Summer I really enjoyed walking around the neighborhood they describe in the article.  There were tons of people carving deities and the work was exquisite.  (I got some of it on video too.) These articles about how a traditional skill is being lost are not that convincing.  First of all, if it made it into the 21st Century, it's doing pretty good for itself.  Seems like there is still a market.  Second of all, if a mass produced one will do, then a mass produced one will do.  What's the big deal?  Take that incredible skill and carve something else that people want to buy and treasure.

It's funny too.  One of the key metaphors in the Daodejing is that of the Uncarved Block of Wood.  Hey, leave that block of wood in a potential state, at least until you need it.  It was recognized 2500 years ago that the process of carving wood expands the part of your mind dedicated to your arms, fingers and shoulders.  Carving causes stress.  It forces things into being.  What would happen if we just left the gods inside the blocks of wood?  Would we still be human?

Steamy Woman, Watery Woman, Icy Woman

The practice of Taijqiquan push-hands is a feminine art.  Even when practiced by men, it unleashes feminine qualities.  For the fun of it, we could compare it to ballet.  Even though most people are familiar with a few famous male ballet dancers like Nijinsky, Nureyev, and Baryshnikov, everyone thinks of ballet as a feminine art.

The first level of practice is called "Icy Woman."  At this level we develop a root so that when pushed the opponent's force is directed through our body down to the ground.  As the Icy Woman's structure improves she is able to keep this rooted quality continuously during dynamic movement.  If played as a game, both people will try to keep even pressure on their opponent's root.  The moment the pressure is broken either partner can move to sever their opponent's root. The game can also be won root-to-root.  In this case each person uses a blend of twisting, wrapping, expanding and condensing to improve the integration of their root.  Root against root, the better root will win.

There are two side tracks many teachers take with the Icy Woman.  The first side track is technique.  90% of the push-hands on youtube is a demonstration of this.  Techniques include tricks, grappling, striking, pushing, plucking martial applications and so on.  The other side track is trying to develop sensitivity.  This confusion arises when an Icy Woman has a broken or ineffective structure or an inferior root, and yet still wants desperately to win.  Sensitivity does not need to be developed.  Sensitivity is innate, we are born with it, no assembly required.  The only way to reduce sensitivity is with aggression.  The Daodejing makes this point on the first page, (the concept is called wuwei).

In innocence we can feel the subtle essences.

When possessed of desire we can feel only the yearned-for manifest.

The second level of practice is called "Watery Woman."  At this level it is necessary to become weak.  If played as a game, the goal is to try and find some ice in your opponent.  Ice is either structure or rootedness.  The Watery Woman does not attempt to compete structure-against-structure nor does she try to uproot her opponent.  She gives up rootedness and structure for fluid movement and weight.  The Watery Woman sloshes her weight in and around her opponent, she only wins when her opponent makes a mistake--the mistake of becoming icy.

The Watery Woman is not hard to achieve, because it is also an innate human quality.  Many people get stuck with the Watery Woman because they try to fall back on Icy Woman skills and techniques when they are losing.  A heavier Water Woman has a huge advantage over a waifish one.  A half-frozen Icy Woman can beat a half-dried Watery Woman.  Being an Watery Woman is not an advantage in and of itself.  One can get stuck at this level by developing very effective mixed ice and water techniques, including vibrating, bouncing, or shaking oneself.  If it only moves fast, it isn't water.

When the Watery Woman becomes comfortable, lively and uninhibited-- the pleasure of the experience  becomes steamy.

The third level of practice is called "Steamy Woman."  At this level her body becomes cloud-like.  Empty and full at the same time.  When the Steamy Woman meets ice or water in her opponents she simply floats them out of the way.  Her mind is not on her body at all, but all around it at play with the elements of volume, momentum, and density.  Inside a steam-like feeling moves around freely without regard to purpose or concept.  Like a cloud, it has no agenda.  Outside the game is played by the shifts and swirls of presence.

For those of you who have been following my discussions for sometime, you will probably see the three Daoist "views" permeating the practice of push-hands:  Wuwei (effortless, natural, return), Transcendence (perfection, enlightenment), and Shamanism (contracts with, or sacrifices to, powerful allies,--in this case female super hero allies.)  Push-hands is a method which can be practiced using any of these views, but each view will produce a unique type fruition.

No doubt, some of my readers are thinking, "Where did you get this Woman thing from."  Here, I must admit that the Chinese term I'm referring to is ren, or "human," and it has no gender.  However, when George Xu, for instance, explains these three types of people, he makes the opposite mistake and calls them Ice Men, Water Men, and Steam Men.  I chose to use the female pronoun because it's consistent with Daoist thinking and practice.  Another key idea of the Daodejing is the centrality of our feminine nature. (Chapter 6)

The Valley Spirit is Deathless it is called the Dark Feminine.

The door of the Dark Feminine, is called the root of Heaven and Earth.

Subtle, it seems only tenuously to exist, and yet drawn upon it is inexhaustible.

I have been told there is a Fourth level, the "Void-like Woman."  It is effortless, and innate, it happens automatically with a completely resolved death.  Perhaps it is possible to reach this level while one is still breathing?

OK a little off topic, but pretty Icy!

The Era of Roller Derby has Arrived

Wielding thighs of steel and a thirst for competition, the B.ay A.rea D.erby Girls are a full contact, all female, flat-track roller derby league consisting of three teams: The San Francisco ShEvil Dead, The Oakland Outlaws, and The Richmond Wrecking Belles. The B.A.D. Girls pursue a mission to provide amateur athletic entertainment, and to skate competitively on a regional and national level. Driven by a passionate love for the sport, and aided by a national sisterhood of like-minded and dedicated women, the B.A.D. Girls are a skater owned and operated 501 (c)(3) non-profit league with a commitment to helping other grassroots organizations in the Bay Area.

Short Skirts, Shorter Fuses

The B.A.D. Girls were founded in August of 2004 by a couple of girls with delusions of grandeur after one too many late-night cocktails. Inspired by dozens of burgeoning neo-derby leagues in cities like Austin, Phoenix, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York, these ladies decided the Bay Area had to be next on the roster.

BAD Gang Currently, the B.A.D. Girls have 70+ full-time league members and continue to grow by the season. As members of the national Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), a skater-run organization of flat-track female derby leagues, they have participated as a Division 1 league in multiple tournaments and intra-league bouts, placing fifth in the Western Region.

Notice that in the picture to the right, the woman with the star on her helmet (the "Jammer") is airborne after a booty whack.  That is not a foul.  You have to use a leg, an elbow or a forearm to get a foul.  After getting caught for fouling 4 times, you have to sit out for 60 seconds.  It's a really fun game to watch and I have rarely been in the presence of so many empowered, backslapping,  bawdy women.  This was last Saturday night, and there were about 2500 people at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.  The entrance fee was $10.  Beer on tap with a shot of whiskey was going for $5. There were enough of kids, dogs and people showing off their bruises to forever change the meaning of "Bad Ass" in my mind.

If this is what the future looks like, if this is the new ethic/aesthetic of American hotness-- then martial arts teachers are going to benefit big time.

There is a lot of funny and exiting stuff on their website.  Feel the freedom.

Wing Chun Kung Fu Opera

In China, the traveling theater functioned as a subversive organizing tool and a way to hide martial arts training.  It was a religious devotional act, watched by the gods (they would literally carry the statues of the gods out of the temples to watch the performances), it was sometimes a ritual exorcism too.  The theater was the source of most people's knowledge of history, and it's characters were both gods and heroic ancestors.

There are various versions of the origins of Wing Chun Kuen but no-one knows for sure as there are no written records as the legend was passed down verbally from master to student.

During the Qing Dynasty period Southern China was in turmoil and many rebellious groups hid there and concealed their true identities from the ruling Qing government. These rebellious groups where supporters of the old Ming Emperors and their descendants, and they sought to overthrow the Qing. Many of them were the survivors of the armies, trained in Shaolin Kung Ku, that were defeated by the Qing. These rebels formed Unions / Associations / Societies as a cover for there activities. One of these Associations was called Hung Fa Wei Gun. This group had a large northern element, including the Hakka people, it was these that started an Opera Troop so they could travel around the country without causing suspicion. They taught the southern people Opera and their Shaolin Kung Fu.  After a time the Qing government found out about this and closed the Association down forcibly. It was many years before the people dared to start an Opera Troop again. They eventually did and called the Association “King Fa Wei Gun”. This became a centre for Opera and Martial Arts training.  After a few years the King Fa Wei Gun purchased two Junks for the Opera troops to travel around the country.

The rest of the article is here, and there is some more here. (hat tip to Emlyn at Jianghu)

The Contentious Origins of Baguazhang

I started a new debate thread on Rum Soaked Fist by linking to a blog post I did last year challenging the common disregard for Dong Haichuan's claim that he learned Baguazhang from two Daoist hermits in the mountains.  Most people claim that Dong Haichuan invented Bagua himself by putting together some common martial arts scraps he found laying around.  You know, like those scientific contraptions with spinning coconuts and flapping palm leaves The Professor from Gilligan's Island would put together.

One person, Josh, acknowledged that Daoist ritual and ritual theater are possible sources of martial prowess which have not been explored yet, the rest of the crew have devolved into arguing about whose lineage is the most authentic.  One guy, using my favorite metaphor of the car, says that Dong Haichuan was driving a Model T Ford and that our baguazhang machines have been getting steadily more complex until now in 2009, we are driving a Lexus.

We could just as easily flip that metaphor.  Dong Haichuan drove into Beijing in 1870 driving a Lotus tricked out with every imaginable James Bond contraption.  He was happy to let his students watch him put gas in the tank and he would pop the hood and let them check the oil.  But his car died with him.  His students were left trying to reverse engineer a working car.  Some of them studied engineering and some of them were able to find working parts from other cars.  But everyone had to build their own car.  And each of the cars look quite different.  Now-a-days, there are people saying that cars don't need gas, because they've tried it and it doesn't work.  The reality is that their spark plugs are fouled or they need a new alternator.  Yet they seem content to push their car on the hills and tell everyone else they aren't working hard enough.

I may be driving a beat-up 1981 Toyota pickup truck art car, with feathers and fake tiger fur glued to the body, and green onions growing out of the flat bed, and yes, the brakes are a little squeaky, but at least it has an engine that works!

Perhaps the car isn't such a great metaphor.  Baguazhang was a flag ship in a fleet of ships that got caught in a horrible storm.  70% of the fleet when down to Davey Jones locker.  Each ship had to decide what to throw into the sea.  Now that the storm is over, Jetsum (the stuff that sinks), if it was thrown overboard, is now lost forever.  Floatsum (the stuff that floats), can be pulled back aboard by whichever ship gets to it first.  Most of the captains are dead, and most of the crew can't read.  There are a few ships' logs being passed around and pirates are arguing about what lays on the bottom and which floatsum belongs to whom.  Most of the fleet is hobbled and lashed together.  A few boats are getting tows, and no one seems to know where they are going.

Isn't it obvious at this point that we are looking at the wrong thing?  Dong Haichuan wasn't teaching a method.  It isn't clear whether he developed a curriculum or not.  He was teaching a view, an approach, a feeling, a way of understanding what a human being is. Yeah, he shouted, "Bu hao!" (no good) a lot, then he would slap his students with a "Ho, ho, ho, and a' feel my Dantian."

Many martial arts teachers have lineage disease.  If your lineage has become just a method, it needs to be treated with a coarse of anti-biotics and then flushed down the toilet.  The reason I've kept my relationship with George Xu all these years is because he is the best reverse engineer I've ever met.  He's been taking the methods and pulling them apart to see how they work.  His baguazhang lineage is quite unremarkable, but his single palm change is undefeatable.  He understood from the beginning that he had to make his own car.

But I have a different task.  My task is to recover the original ideas and world view which inspired the creation of these arts in the first place.

Anyone in the teaching profession today knows that there are a number of different standard forms used to evaluate and compare classes:

1. Class Plans (An outline of what happens in a given class built around a teaching objective)


2. Class summaries (A narrative description of what actually happened in a given class)


3. Curriculum Overviews (A phrase or sentence for each class in a given semester which describes the objective and/or activity of that class)


4. Curriculum Standards  (An external measure of teaching results or goals that everyone in the field can agree on)


5. Coarse descriptions  (One or two paragraphs that describe the topic, feel, and content of the course)


6. Teaching outcome goals  (What students are expected to learn and how the teacher will varify that they have learned it)


7. Syllabi  (A week by week description of class activities)


8. Program integration analysis  (How what is learned in the class is meaningful or useful in relationship to the other classes in a program and the program as a whole)

If you are going to argue about whose teaching is better, you would do well to use the same standard form, otherwise your arguments will be incoherent.  But people! if you can't tap the original inspiration for the accumulation of your particular body of knowledge in the first place, well, you're going to have to use charisma to keep your students around, because methods are hooks without a worm.

The big problem, and I mean huge, is that people bring their own story, their own view, their own inspiration, or their own paranoia, to the method they have inherited.  When you do this the results, the fruition if you will, becomes skewed.  Inspiration creates methods, methods produce fruition.  If you don't know the original inspiration that created your method, you may have already achieve it's fruition and you might not even have noticed. You could be staring the perfect fruition in the eye and think it's a failure.  If you don't share the same inspiration as the founder of your style, you are likely missing the fruition, but you are also probably working with a method that isn't doing a very good job of producing the results you want.

And that me hearties, is why connecting with history matters to our everyday practice.

Masters of Internal Arts

Adam Hsu said in his last book that many traditional Shaolin systems have high kicks which are non-functional because they come from Chinese Opera.  In fact he calls them Opera Kicks.  Since the traditional Northern Shaolin system I learned has many different types of high Chinese Opera kick, I might be inclined to argue that they do indeed have a function.

For instance I might say that they increase the size of your martial frame, ultimately allowing for the development of superior power.  Or I could say that the great flexibility that these practice kicks develop makes all lower kicks safer.  Or I could say if you can kick high with power and control, your low kicks will have even more power and control.  Or I could say high kicks force you to use the correct muscle groups, accomplishing the same thing that other schools achieve by having students hold their legs in the air at waist level while distributing qi to all the extremities.

Yes I could make all those arguments, but I don't think they would get anywhere with someone who has decided that the traditional arts need to be repaired because they have become degraded by theatrical development.  (No one knows exactly when this degradation was supposed to have happened but somewhere between the great Han (200 BCE) and the fall of the Qing (1908)).  Their argument is actually hard to follow.  It requires that you believe there was a time in the past in which people practiced pure martial arts when in fact evidence for such an era is scanty at best.

However, I'm not going to make those arguments.  Instead I would like to argue from my own experience.  I live in a time of great peace.  In an era where wealth and hygene are taken for granted.  In my 20's I was part of a milieu which was enthralled with ideas about how to create improvisational theater and dance--developing methods and practices of mind which would enable us to adapt spontaneously to anything anyone threw at us.  That experience, urban public school, and perhaps my Jewish home style of ferocious passionate argumentation, gave me a set of skills that has made it nearly impossible for me to get in a real fight.  Believe me, it's not from lack of willingness to fight.  I spent several years under George Xu, where I was walking around seeing other people's movement in slow motion, watching their bodies for weaknesses I could exploit, the way my mom would look at a chicken before pulling off its limbs.

So here is my argument.  I've been practicing Northern Shaolin for over 30 years and I've been teaching it for 17.  I took the summer off from teaching children and I've recently started back up again.  My advanced students have already learned the lowest stances of any martial arts tradition, and most of the high kicks and airborne kicks that I teach.  But they need polishing.  I have each of them working on their own short routine this week.  I call it 3-2-1.  Three kicks, two stances held with fire in the eyes for 3-5 seconds, and one sudden unpredictable change in direction.  They can put it together anyway they want and I'll add more elements to the task next week.  At 42 years of age, I'm still doing these kinds of high kicks, like barrel turn slap the foot above your head into a sudden butterfly kick and then into a spinning double jump in the opposite direction of momentum---how is it that I am not getting injured?

I'll tell you how.  Because I'm doing taijiquan, xingyiquan and Baguazhang.  I'm doing internal arts when I do these high kicks.  Sure, it looks like Shaolin, but if it wasn't the purest internal practice I can pull off, my muscles would be ripping, my ligament falling off the bone.  It's not that it would be impossible to do this kind of practice externally at my age, it's just that the risk of injury is so high, and the healing time for even minor injuries is so long, that I couldn't possibly teach or perform.

And that's my argument.  There is more reason for a 40 to 60 year old performer to make their martial displays internal than there is for any bodyguard or officer in the military.  The incentive is just better.


It's not that I can't see the other argument.  Seeing real combat against drilled and tested troops doesn't inspire much need for cultivating qi.  But imagine an officer with 10,000 troops on the boarder for 10 years and nothing to do, because just his presence on the boarder is keeping the peace--yes I can imagine him developing internal arts.  He has to practice anyway because he might even see some action if things go badly.  But most likely he is going to end up back in his home village, perhaps  working on a farm.  There is some incentive, but it isn't a very strong one.

The same lack of strong incentive is probably true for caravan guards but I don't honestly know how this business worked.  I'd think that it was mostly a numbers game.  More guards than bandits and you're safe; fewer and you start to look like a car with "The Club" but no alarm.  A deterrent perhaps, but not enough to dissuade bandits who are pretty sure you've got treasure.

But I have no doubt that bodyguards, officers in the military, and Chinese theatrical performers-- all practiced internal martial  arts.  They all contributed something.  Each of these lifestyles would attract kinesthetic people like me, who get high on working out, playing rough, and looking for extraordinary beauty in motion.  The question I'm asking is, who of the three had the strongest incentive to develop internal martial arts?

Tell me what you think of my theory.

Okay, we didn't talk about the heath-nut contribution to internal martial arts.  Can we save that for another day?

History in Three Keys

A review of:  History in Three Keys, The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth, by Paul A. Cohen, Columbia University Press, 1997.

So I was doing a little workshop with George Xu last month and he was talking about using Spiritual Fist.  Spiritual Fist is what we might call an unconscious level of mastery.  Once all the internal and external types of integration, embodiment, differentiation and liveliness are in the right order, they are harmonized by the spirit.  That is, we experience the motivation for movement coming from outside the body.  This is called Spiritual Fist, or Shen Quan in Chinese.

So I said, "Shenquan?  Isn't that what the Boxers called themselves before the Boxer Rebellion?"

"Yes," said George, "That is what they called themselves.  True.  But all Chinese arts are called Shen at the most advanced levels."  And then after thinking for a moment (we were practicing some circular explosive movement during this conversation) he said, "The Boxer's problem was that they lacked Harmony.  Right?"

Harmony, I thought to myself, what?  Then it occurred to me and I said, "That's what they changed their name to, Yihequan, literally --One Harmony Fist."

George looked perhaps flustered for a moment, but he quickly dropped the issue and moved on to showing us another inner secret.

It was a stunning reminder that ways of knowing and understanding history often do not transcend culture and language.  I have no idea what harmony could mean in that context.  (Yihequan is sometimes translated, Fists United in Righteousness.  Did he mean they weren't righteous? enough?)

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The Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1900 was a bloody uprising in north China against native Christians and foreign missionaries and at times Ching Dynasty Troops.  They dressed in Chinese Opera costumes and claimed to be invincible to bullets.  Using swords, spears and magic, they took to burning large parts of Beijing, Tianjin and other cities.  The boxers were finally put down by foreign troops who took the opportunity to demand concessions and loot the imperial palace.

__________

Paul A. Cohen's book, History in Three Keys, has a simple enough premise which he uses to divided his book into three parts.  The first part is his best shot at what actually happened.  The facts and documents sorted in such a way as to give the most likely account of what happened.  The second part of the book is an account of what people said and thought about the event at the time.  The third part of the book is about how the memory of the events lived on and were manipulated in political debates over the next 80 years.

The first section is only 42 pages long and starts off pointing out that, most people know more details about the Boxer Uprising than they do about the Taiping rebelion, even though the scale of the Taiping Rebelion (20 Million dead over 20 years) dwarfs that of the Boxer Uprising (10's of thousands dead over a year or two), and Taiping was led by a man claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ.  He then recommends people read Esherick's Book, The Boxer Uprising, because Esherick did such a good job of showing the local development of the Boxer Movement.  But Cohen puts together an excellent summary of the events and adds to Esherick's take details about the wider effects of the event particularly in the far north.  He also includes details on the large numbers of Chinese Christians killed by the Boxers.  The largest Christian groups in China were, ironically like the Boxers, both anti-foreiner and participants in mass possession rituals.

The second section attempts to delve into the mindset and experiences of the people who participated and witnessed the Boxer Movement.  In order to do this, my regular readers will love this! he dives into studies of African religion.  He does this, of course, as a way to gain perspective on Chinese popular religious practices of possession and trance.  (I'm feeling an African Bagua part 3 coming on!)

The entire second section is great.  He presents an enormous amount of evidence that, although the Boxer Uprising was a unique event, it's defining characteristics were far from rare.  Theatrical presentations were the most widespread form of religious activity in China.  So called Chinese Opera is a type of martial arts training.  Accounts of trance based forms of conditioning against bladed weapons are found through out the Ching Dynasty.  Possession rituals were much easier to do and more common in the north than they were in the south (which explains why Taiwan is not a good model for understanding north China).

In chapter 4 titled, Magic and Female Pollution, he explores the boxer beliefs about women and the wider exceptance of those beliefs across northern China.  For instance, when boxers actually got shot and died, or when they tried to burn down a single house they said was owned by Christians and it spread to everyone elses house too, they claimed it was because a woman contaminated the scene.  (I can see how this kind of thinking gets started, whenever I have trouble finding something like my keys or a book, I right away blame my half-wife.  I mean who else could it be, right?)

The book explores how the Boxers' were viewed by other Chinese at the time in many complex and interesting ways.  However, it is safe to say that belief in their magical powers and martial prowess was widespread.  Ideas which connect religious devotion, theatrical (Opera) characters, magic, and martial arts were not only widely held; they were the stuff daily life was made of.

The Boxers regularly attributed the casualties they suffered in fighting with foreigners in Tianjin to the latter's placement of naked women in the midst or in front of their forces, which broke the power of the Boxers' magic.  The story was also circulated and widely believed by the populace that a naked woman straddled each of the many cannon mounted in the foreign buildings in Zizhulin, making it impossible for the "gunfire-repelling magic" (bipao zhi fa) of the Boxers to work properly....

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Dirty water, as a dextroyer of magic, was unquestionably related in Boxer minds to the most powerful magic-inhibitor of all: women, and more particularly uncleanness in women, a category that, for the Boxers, included everything from menstrual or fetal blood to nakedness to pubic hair.  Water was of course a symbol of yin, the primeval female principle in China, and there was a long-held belief that the symbolic representation of yin could be used to overcome the effects of such phenomena as fire (including gunfire), which was symbolic of the male principle, yang.  Several groups of rebels in the late Ming had used women to suppress the firepower of government troops.  During the insurgency of 1774 in Shandong, Wang Lun's forces used and array of magical techniques, including strange incantations and women soldiers waving white fans, in their assault on Linqing.  the imperial defenders of the city were at first frustrated by the effectiveness of the rebels' fighting tactics.  An old soldier, however, came to the rescue with this advice: "Let a prostitute go up on the wall and take off her underclothing...we will use yin power to counter their spells."  When this proposal was carried out and proved effective, the government side adopted additional measures of a like sort, including, as later recounted by Wang Lun himself, "women wearing red clothing but naked from the waist down, bleeding and urinating in order to destroy our power."

Such magic-destroying strategies were clearly well established in Chinese minds.  The nurse who took care of the famous writer Lu Xun when he was a little boy once told him the following story about her experience with the Taiping rebels:  "When gorvernment troops came to attack the city, the Long Hairs [the Taiping] would make us take off our trousers and stand in a line on the city wall, for then the army's cannon could not be fired.  If they fired then, the cannon would burst!"

Paul A. Cohen does not appear to be a martial artist or a person with a performing background, so he doesn't go into depth with either of these.  However, he makes it clear that martial arts and theater were always part of the mix.  Here is an excerpt from an article about a famous martial artist whose martial arts family were leaders of the Boxers.  That means that in addition to being Traditional Chinese Medical Doctors, bodyguards and caravan guards, they performed magical spells to protect themselves while killing Chinese Christians, while dressed in Chinese Opera costumes, possessed by hero-gods of the theater.

Pei Xirong was born in 1913 in Raoyang county in Hebei province. His father was a core member of the Yi He Tuan [the Boxers], and his mother had also participated in the ‘Red Lantern’ movement [the female part of the Boxers movement, dealt with extensively in Cohen's book]. His uncle, Qi Dalong, was a bodyguard in the caravan agency established by Li Cunyi who guarded caravans traveling between Tianjin and Gubeikou. When the Allied Forces invaded Tianjin, he and Li Cunyi battled against the invaders at Laolongtou Train Station. He fought courageously, sustaining several wounds.

The third part of Cohen's book is also good.  (I quoted from it twice in my review of Rovere's book about xingyi in the Chinese army.)  It deals extensively with the process of internalization and self-torturous humiliation that came to produce the modern ideas about pure Martial Arts and the guoshu movement (national arts).

One reason this is personal to me is that in the period directly after the Boxer Uprising, my first teacher's teacher, Kuo Lien-ying studied and performed the roll of monkey in Chinese Opera as a teen-ager.  The character/god of monkey was one of the most common gods to possess the Boxers during battle. Kuo also competed in Leitai fights (staged on a platfrom), he could still sing Opera parts 70 years later, and he was still doing drunken monkey gongfu too. Kuo was part of the pure martial arts movement, and guoshu, and an early student of Wang Xiangzhai. He worked as a bodyguard too. And he could tie a rope dart around his chest under his coat and shake in such a way that the dart would fly out and stick into a tree. And he could tie up any of his actively resisting students with the same technique.  None of his students learned the rope dart. And the one student who learned drunken monkey no longer practices. I think we owe it to the last generation, who brought these fantastic arts to us, to try an recover as much of the full picture as we can.

The last section of Cohen's book deals with the Cultural Revolution.  It has a few interesting facts.  Probably the most prominent cultural reference to the Boxers during that time, a time when George Xu was fighting in the streets on a daily basis, was a play called Shen Quan, Spiritual Fist.

If we are ever going to have a chance of understanding what the origins of Chinese Martial arts are, we are going to have to drop the stories of purely rational martial tough guys.  There is still so much that can be recovered from these arts, because they were designed as storehouses of knowlege.  Perhaps, once upon a time, there were legitmate arguments for dicarding central aspects of the tradition, but now, that time has passed.  Nobody believes anymore that womens' underpants can protect them from bullets.  It's time to see the whole thing for what it is and what is was---a deeply religious, theatrical, health sustaining, fighting arts tradition.

Blogs, a Forum, Some News and Reviews

I'm finally pulling myself away from the forum Rum Soaked Fist where my comments were the center of controversy on two threads.  One now has over 100 posts, the other is at about 50 posts.

Here are some new blogs I've discovered:
Forum for Traditional Wu Tai Chi Chuan
Hao style Tai Chi Chuan Blog
eastpaw's yeast pause
The Tai Chi Notebook

and Masters of the IMA could keep you busy for a while.

I ran across this article on Stem Cell Experiments:

As military doctors in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen more horrific injuries involving skin, nerve, vascular and bone losses from explosions, they have tried to think of what more could be done for the victims besides bandaging things up and hoping for the best.

Maybe they could regrow the tissue: Grow the cartilage, grow the blood vessels, grow the nerves and even grow the bone.

If you're in San Francisco this Saturday and you want to see some Kabuki with a lecture, check this out.

And I'm going to try to catch God Man Dog at the Taiwan Film Festival.

Meanwhile, I saw Whip It! I think Drew Barrymore is the greatest film maker alive.  I pronounce her King of the Date Movie! Why did I have to come of age in a world without Roller Derby?  What did I do to deserve that.  God, are you listening?  If we are going to win hearts and minds in the Middle East, we've got to put together an Arab/Persian Roller Derby Team (any suggestions for a name?)

I also saw Zombieland, and if you often have the feeling that you are surrounded by zombies and only occasionally meet a human, this is the movie for you.  Fun stuff.

And I also saw Jennifer's Body, I don't know why people say it's full of metaphors, I think it was written by someone I went to high school with.  That's exactly how I remember it.

Oh and District 9, great story, and it makes fun of protesters.

Invitation to Nude Beach Olympics II

If you happen to be in San Francisco this weekend....

Saturday, October 10, 2009, Noon , Baker Beach North (clothing optional-- Golden Gate Bridge end of beach)
Look for 4’ white Olympic Torch
Free event

"Athletes must compete nude. Athletes are competing for honor and a wreath. Spectators are clothing optional. More musicians with acoustic instruments are welcome. Gamblers are invited to bet on contests.

Olympic Champion chosen by highest individual total points....

Ancient Greek wrestling. Getting opponent’s buttocks, back, or shoulder on the ground within the ring is a win. 2 out of 3 falls. No slugging, kicking, biting, or gouging.

Sumo wrestling. Getting any part of opponents body on the ground outside of the ring is a win. 2 out of 3 matches. No slugging, kicking, biting, or gouging.

Discus. Closest Frisbee to target wins.

Broad jump. Athlete’s choice on approach distance or style of jump.

Volleyball. 2 out of 3 wins in 21 point sets. This year, teams chosen by team captains in rotation from a pool of players. (This issue has already come up. In future years, based on athletes’ preferences, we may or may not have competitions with intact teams who have trained and played together.)

Touch football (?). Requests have been made to play touch football. If a minimum of 10 players sign up, someone claims to be an impartial knowledgeable referee, and someone brings a football, there will be a game.

Kickboxing exhibition. One out-of-state athlete is looking for an opponent. Telephone us, if you exist......"

(Read the whole thing)

Video from Nude Beach Olympics I at www.freebodyculture.blip.tv

Look for me if you go...I'll be the one wearing three pairs of long underwear under my pants with a haramaki, a wool shirt scarf and hat!

If you like this stuff you'll also like this one on Turkish Wrestling.