Stripping For the Dead?

I don't have much of a commentary on this yet, but it is a must read.  When people claim that a type of Kung Fu is 'just x' or 'just y' and it was 'originally just z' but then got mixed with 'a little p influence,' they are usually just repeating something they heard from someone who either didn't know, or was trying to cover something up.  The real history of religious Kung Fu theater ritual is itself an incredible treasure, way more interesting and complex than any of the spins we have heard yet.  This is the first I've heard of stripping for the d



ead, and I've been reading about this stuff for a long time.

Here is the Director/Anthropologist's website.

This article about the film is pretty good too.

Bagua Mud Walking

I’ve heard a lot of explanations of why Bagua mud walking has that name.  When the Buddha walked through mud lotus flowers came up in his foot steps.  Mud is strongly suggestive of the yin element.  Occasionally I hear the term “Pure” Yang Qi.  It’s a bit redundant because the category yang implies purity in the same way that yin implies impurity, a mix of stuff, water and earth, mud.

I’ve heard mud walking refers to waist high thick river mud that makes your legs heavy and forward progress difficult.  I’ve heard that it is the stickiness of surface mud which creates a delay of the foot finding the ground and mushing in and then holds it back when one tries to pick it up creating an opening and closing of the joints, particularly the hip (kua).

On my own I came up with the idea that Tai Chi is an ocean art and Bagua is a mountain art.  The Tai Chi body moves as if it was constantly re-balancing while standing up in a boat.  The Bagua body moves as if it was constantly re-balancing while walking along a mountain ledge.  In either case, if you tense up your belly you are in trouble.  On the ocean if you tense you will loose your balance and fall down.  I suspect that sea sickness happens because the length of an ocean swell is longer than we can hold and release tension.  The more chaotic the environment the more important it is that rebalancing happens continuously, a muscular on/off switch will fail under natural pressure.  When walking on mountain ledges you simply have to have the feeling of upwardness connected to continuous rebalancing or you will freak out every time you look down.  It is both a spacial presence and a letting go.

The more upright you are, the easier it is to relax the belly, and the more relaxed your belly is, the easier it is to continuously rebalance.
Walking in mud also has this ‘just drop the pretense of superiority’ tone to it.  After all, walking in mud is just a slip away from rolling in it!  In that sense walking in mud means giving up social conventions.  Walk like you really don’t care who is watching.  Discard all your style, swagger, swing, lilt, lithe, bounce, and strut.

Nearly every video I’ve put on Youtube has at sometime been criticized by some yabo who insists that a STREET FIGHT is the purpose and the meaning of life.  While humans have been leveling ground for many centuries, the ubiquity of street pavement is quite new.  150 years ago most fights and surprise attacks happened in mud or dust.  That was true on the battle field, in towns, and on country roads.  Of course there was snow too, and many other surfaces, some of them level some steep and rocky, but as often as not, the ground was slippery and unstable.

And on slippery ground, getting power from pushing against the ground (a so called ‘ground path’ strategy) doesn’t work.  What we in the martial arts world call “rooting” is simply a losing strategy.  It’s like when a football player hits you at full speed while you are just standing there.

So in my humble opinion, all these explanations of mud walking have their place, but the best explanation is that mud walking is walking on a very slippery surface.  A surface where you don’t rely in any way on either forward momentum which pushes off the back foot, nor on rebalancing by using the front foot as a brake.  The center of mass must stay over the feet without structural tension, without engaging any posture correcting muscles.  In Bagua, the center of mass spins like a top to maintain uprightness with momentum.

Below is mud, all around is water; the body is like a pebble landing in a still pond, sending out ripples of pure yang qi-- the substance of inspiration.
Now go get dirty.

The Meaning of Kung Fu

For years I went with "something of great quality which takes time to develop" as my definition of Kung Fu.   Then I switched to using Kristopher Schipper's definition of Kung Fu  in Taoism and the Arts of China, he said it used to mean "Meritorious Action!"  Now master linguist Victor Mair has committed a heck of a lot of words to explaining the meaning of Kung Fu, particularly as it relates to Tea.  Enjoy.

Getting it Right

One of the greatest things about the study of Traditional Chinese internal Martial Arts is that when you hit on some new ability concept that is correct, you know it with great confidence. Why? Well partly because it’s testable. That’s just satisfying. You get the idea, your practice it, then you test it, and it works. Yeah. But that’s more or less true in many fields. In the internal arts you also know it is correct because it is more relaxing, because it heals you, because stress and strain just evaporate.

Torture and the Martial Arts

There is some percentage of people, perhaps it is one in a hundred, who in the midst of being tortured suddenly realize that it is only their body which is being tortured and not their mind.  We have a mythology about this in our culture.  The first time I heard about it I was a kid.  One of my neighbors was from Nebraska and he had moved to San Francisco when his father died.  His father had been an archaeologist and told him that there were many accounts of Indians being tortured or burned at the stake in the 1800’s who would just laugh at their torturers.  I’ve since heard many such stories, people who just stopped being effected by torture and in the midst of it noticed that their true nature was freedom.

It’s as if their body was already dead and they had no attachment to it.  The name for this quality in Chinese is Xu.  Wang Xiangzai said, Xu Kong Ling Tong:  Body as if dead (Xu),  emptiness inside (Kong), lively elasticity of the spacial mind outside (Ling), and body functioning as a single liquid mass (Tong).  So simply having Xu would not be enough, but it would be a heck of a head start.

It’s my theory that some of the founders of great martial arts systems were tortured or had torturous experiences which showed them that they could separate their spacial mind from their physical body in such a way that pain had no effect.  And by no effect I mean that they didn’t feel the need to contract, recoil, or tense up in response to it.

And that brings us to Systema.  I haven’t written about systema, or seen much in person or played around with anyone who swore by it, and I keep forgetting to order the book.  But it has a lot of devotees and you can watch hours of Systema videos on Youtube.

The founders of Systema were members of the Russian special forces.  From first hand accounts I’ve heard, hazing is a constant in the Russian military.  So it wouldn't be too surprising to learn that the founders of Systema were tortured at some point.  The Russian Orthodox Church kind of has a history of that too.  It is my suspicion that they were among those rare individuals who happen to find torture liberating, in the sense that it freed them from fear of body inflicted pain.



Systema training has a lot of different types of hitting and beating, with small sticks, with big sticks, various objects and with hands of course.  They have a whole thing about how you have to release the fear with the breath.

We could posit that there is a martial arts history of torturing people to perfection.

Gay Daoists!

Help get me to the top of Google!  I recently noticed that one of my top referring searches from Google was from people typing in "Gay Daoists."  Go ahead, try it!  And then click on the link to my site and I'll be movin' up that ladder.  When you do it, it will take you to this awesome post that I wrote about Sex and the key Daoist terms Jing and Qi.  I was thinking about reviewing that material anyway but you all might get a jump on me.

OH, go ahead and check out this silly site while your at it!  Look at this... Hipster.

Bite Me vs. Don't Bite Me

Bite Me!

This is a simple post.  I just want to say that fighting is an animal thing.  At times it is a form of base communication.  The line between fighting and communicating is unconscious and blurry.  Most of the violence people in the modern world have experience with is fighting 'as communication.'  Think: bar fights, domestic violence, siblings, gang wars, arguments gone bad, police submission holds, and ring fighting.

When someone you don't know creeps up behind you and hits you with a big club it could be communication.  Often times it isn't, but if one tribe is trying to communicate to  another tribe that you have crossed into their territory, then it was indeed an attempt at communication--it's just that they don't care if you personally understand, since you have a high probability of dying.

Likewise if you see the knife before they stick it in, there is a good chance that some form of communication is intended.  If you don't see it, it may simply be a killing for pleasure, or survival, or to rob you. But it could also be that your death is meant to send a message to you boss.

Don't Bite Me!

My question is, can you tell by the person's posture if they are trying to communicate?  Rory Miller pointed out that there are certain types of predators who want you to believe they are communicating because it keeps you in your social mind.  At least some of these predators are able to fake the physicality of communication.  Their goal is to get you in a very vulnerable position.

But that leads to another question, can we train to recognize when we are personally taking on the physicality of communicating?  To me this is a way of defining a "go" button.  A "go" button is a line of behavior or circumstance that you have pre-thought out in your mind so that when you see it, you go straight to fighting mode.

Bite Me!

If you start fighting while you are still communicating, you are probably stopping yourself from using full power.

The two base communication poses in fighting are "bite me" and "don't bite me," they are ancestral dominance and submission gestures. The "don't bite me" pose is actually a good flinch response if you are being pounced on by an animal with a big mouth trying to bite your neck.

The twist in the neck or torso of the "bite me" pose is supposed to vulnerable.  That's the point of it, but it is unconscious, so if you think you are dominating in a fight you're probably doing the "bite me" pose-- and it's de-powering you.

Even training a form all by yourself, the "bite me" and "don't bite me" communication poses are likely to creep into your movement all the time.  That's the simple reason so many martial arts schools are constantly repeating the need to sink your shoulders.  They are saying in effect "Drop the 'don't bite me' message because it is reducing your power."

I might even go a little further.  The physicality of Wuwei communicates nothing.

Public Criticism in the Martial Arts

What do people think?  When, if ever, is it appropriate to offer precise criticisms of another martial artist or teacher on the Internet?  By criticism, I mean pointing out what you think is wrong about the way they train and the results of their training, not moral or social stuff.

Does it cause more problems than it is worth?  Is offering criticism a valuable method for improving everyone's skill through the heat of debate?  Does the sting of criticism cause us to reflect and correct or is it more likely to drive us back into our shells?  Under what circumstances does criticism simply shut down the debate, leaving us all poorer and less informed?

I don't know the answer.  I also don't know where the 'do not cross' lines should be.  I mean talking about somebody's mama is probably over the line, surely civility is of prime importance, but it's pretty easy for honesty to come into direct conflict with being nice.

So what do you think?  Just how far can we go in criticizing other martial artists in public?

________________________________

I'm guessing most readers already know my default stance.  I was raised by wolves who believed that nobody ever changes their behavior unless they are forced to confront moral outrage.  My wolf family trained me to argue from absolute truth.  If a table full of people covered in beards and books are all arguing their various positions, each as if he or she had sole access to absolute truth, then a whole lot of heat and light is created.  Everyone has a chance to view everyone else's ideas in the sharpest possible contrast.  Everyone is equal.  Everyone is free to add or subtract from everyone else's idea.

If a person doesn't have this training, however, it can be a bit overwhelming.  But for me it's the best way to learn.  That's probably why I've bonded with George Xu over the years.  He loves criticism.  He likes being blindsided by a challenging critique.  A lot of people tell me that's a rare trait in the martial arts world.  Too bad.  Sharp criticisms have the power to cause people to think, change and adapt.  Even if it turns out I'm totally off base in my criticism, the person being criticized may be inspired to come up with a new way of explaining themselves, or demonstrating their skill, in order to convince me to drop my objections.  George Xu has always done this with me, even when I've roamed into areas I really have no place being, like the definition of a Chinese word.  And no doubt, sometimes there is more heat than light, but in the long run, I think, the art itself is better for it.

Meeting Tabby Cat

I have much neglected writing about my meeting with Billionaire Genius Tabby Cat.  First off I should say that in person he is warm, worldly, charming, thoughtful, generous, agreeable, and a great conversationalist.  I am truly delighted to make his acquaintance.  We fully agree on 99% of everything!  But as I’m sure my readers are aware the fiercest, most contentious arguments happen with people you very nearly agree with.  That 1% of difference starts to seem like the key to everything.  So I will take the liberty, in the interest of furthering the evolution of all human knowledge, and trusting that he will do the same for me, of making my case raw, without niceties.

It was 8:30 AM on a warm Thursday.  After about 20 seconds of friendly posturing, we squared off for some fixed foot push hands.  Seconds after contact I found my hand around the front of his neck, slowly and gently lifting him backwards.  “We could do that,” he said and then proceeded to jump around like a feather weight boxer.  “No, no,” I said, “I want to learn your game.”

The base idea of Tabby Cat’s theory is that push hands is not a game, it is a single attribute training drill.  The attribute it trains is so key to Tai Chi, that until you acquire this attribute, nothing else matters (except money and sex).  Before we discuss what that attribute is, lets address the consequences of this type of view.

Since historically speaking it is quite clear that the serious fun of martial arts developed in a social environment with theater, religious ritual, health ideas, and a wide range of prowess inspiring everyday problems, both social and asocial--the notion that a single attribute drill could be at the center of what defines Tai Chi is a profoundly Modern notion.

We tend to think of people like Yang Chengfu and his student, Zheng Man Qing, and his student, Ben Lo (Tabby’s teacher) as representatives of tradition.  But Yang Chengfu most likely saw himself as a modernizer, and Zheng Man Qing even more so.

The idea that a profuse, weirdly complex, theatrical fighting art like Chen style Tai Chi could be whittled down to just an attribute drill and a simplified 37 move form with, as Ben Lo put it, “Fair-ladies hands,” could only have come about as the result of a Dr. Spock-like inspired purging of all irrational impurities.

Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  But it gets weird when all your students think you are the representative of a long and stable tradition.  When in fact you represent only a small part of it.  When in fact you were just playing around with language, trying to find words to describe your practice which were clear, simple and direct.  The huge problem here is that words get stale.  “Go with the flow,” was a great expression when it was first uttered, but now it is cracked and tasteless.  The instruction, “Just relax,” has become as polysemous as “You’re so spiritual.”
So there we are in the park and I’m trying to understand what this single attribute is and how I can tweak the game of push hands in order to use it as a tool for acquiring this all important attribute.  We cross hands again, this time I ignore the fact that Tabby is curving his chest inward making his head and neck vulnerable to any upward expanding movement.  I let him lead me around and then suddenly he pushes me and I move my foot.  I lose.  We do it again, I lose again, and again.  He says, “See, you’re really tense.”  I reply, “Should I try to melt my tension when you push on me suddenly?”  “Yes," he says.  I try it, it doesn’t work.  Then I push him without giving him a chance to lead me around.  It works, I win.  He says, “You can’t do it that way.”  I’m confused, I say,  “Your attacks are all straight forward and sudden.  Can you do them slowly?”  “Okay, he says.”  When he attacks even a little bit slower, I have time to melt, and he has a much harder time getting me at all.  His slower attacks sometimes reveal a connection to the ground and I win.  But mostly I lose.
He clearly has a special attribute.  The attribute is a wave, or surge that hits me before I feel his mass pushing me.  But only just before, which is why he can’t do it slowly.  If the wave could hit me a full second before his mass did, it would be way more impressive.  The surge comes forward from belly height and seems to have influence all the way down to the feet.  But it comes in the same way every time, so when it’s slow, or if I’m allowed to move my foot or if I attack any part of his body besides his belly or chest, the “attribute” doesn’t work.
I point this out and challenge him to do push hands flank to flank.  He says, “The point of the drill is to acquire the attribute and then you can do anything you want with it.”  “Okay,” I say, lets do it on the ground then.  “Systema has drills like this, in every possible position and angle.”  (Later I learn that he literally wrote the book on Systema!)

He doesn’t want to do it on the ground, so I offer, “I clearly see that you have acquired a valuable attribute, but for it to have any martial significance it would have to work in a surprise attack, in which you begin to fight from a terrible position.  Can you do it if I’m grabbing you from behind?”  I circle in slowly for the kill but he retreats to, “Ben Lo can do it from any position.”  He describes a bunch of examples, but if I understand him correctly, Ben Lo is generally attacking fast.

I’m a little disappointed, I really want to be literally ‘blown away!’  I venture that what he is actually doing is leading me around until I make a mistake and reveal some structure or tension at which point he suddenly attacks.  He agrees that he is basically doing this.  I counter that it is quite divergent from fighting because in a fight, action trumps inaction.  He asserts that it is an essential attribute drill which, once mastered, creates a quantum shift in movement and understanding.
I spend the rest of my time with Tabby in the park trying to do exactly what he is doing.  I figure, I might as well try to learn as much as I can right there and then.  His preferred position is one hand on my elbow and one hand reaching for my chest.  I match this, as well as the inward curve of his chest.  He says, “That’s a better position.”  We push some more and then he treats me to a wonderful breakfast and an even better extended conversation on everything under the sun.

It’s been about three months since our meeting and I must say that in the process of deeply considering Tabby Cat’s ideas and developing my critic of them, I think I’ve improved a lot.  I've been learning from both of our mistakes.

What was happening?
The idea of a single attribute drill is a brilliant Modern innovation.  But shouldn’t there be some kind of limit on how long it takes a person to learn it?  I mean at least with single attribute zazen, the practice of sitting still is the fruition, so there isn’t much pressure to prove you are enlightened.  But with Tai Chi there is a reasonable expectation that at some point some serious ass kicking attributes will kick in.  Really, if the single attribute takes more than ten years to acquire is it worth it?  If it were only two years of training we were talking about I’d be like, “Yeah that’s the way to go.  Attribute drills baby!  Drill baby drill!”

But we are talking about less than a handful of Ben Lo’s students having acquired it over a period of 50 years.  Yikes.  Tabby mentioned that two students were super achievers, Terry Li (recently deceased) and Lenzie Williams.  I have yet to meet them, but even if these guys are the cats meow, they are only two in how many 1000's of students?
Zheng Man Qing promoted Tai Chi for health, entertainment, and the cultivation of wuwei generally, and that’s awesome wonderfulness.  I’m right there with him.  I am not promoting the idea that there is anything special about me or that learning Tai Chi will make us superheros or enlightened or even better people.  Tai Chi is art, Tai Chi is beauty.  I'm with anyone who recognizes that.  But as promoters of beauty we have a duty to make plain our flaws, and to correct them.

The five training principles Tabby promotes are simply inadequate to communicate the internal aspects of the art.  They are:

1. Relax


2. Body Upright


3. Separate Weight


4. Turn the waist


5. Beautiful Lady's Hand

To illustrate this I will describe two problems Ben Lo has had teaching that I learned about talking with Tabby.
After years of teaching push hands, Ben Lo realized his students were getting worse.  Students were simultaneously searching for tension in their opponent, when he found it, he would suddenly blast his opponent.  This caused the loser to fear the sudden shock and develop chronic defensive tension.  Meanwhile the winner was being rewarded for being more aggressive (more on why this is a problem below).  Ben’s solution was to create a new game.  He gave each partner a different role, one would only try to look for tension and the other would only try to evade it, after twenty minutes they would reverse.  This resulted in improved yielding skills but it didn’t solve the problem.  (The first time I pushed hands with a 5 year student of Ben Lo’s, I put my hand on top of his head and he yielded all the way to the ground!  We were playing a completely different game.)

The second problem was that two types of students were coming to him, the jocks with “tense” full chests, and nerds with “collapsed” chests.  Neither one was relaxed and he told them so, but after a while the “tense” students started to become collapsed too.

Here is what’s going on.

We have two bodies.  An outer body, the thing with muscles that most people normally think of as a body,  and an inner body.  The inner body feels like empty space in the torso.  I suspect that the inner body is more primitive in the evolutionary sense.  Obviously this implies a composite body theory. The inner body is clumsy, very strong and innocent.  It is somewhat like Freud’s Id.  It has very simple primal desires.  It lacks artifice, memory, and preferences.

Anyway, all normal human activity is a war between these two bodies.

The jock type of movement uses a tough outer body shape with a lifted chest in order to limit, direct, and constrain the inner body; however, the jock type uses the inner body for power.  In the battle between the bodies the jock type of movement represents the inner body overpowering the outer body.

The nerd type of movement uses a collapsed but tense chest in order to de-power the arms by disconnecting them from the liquid mass of muscle.  This is necessary for fine motor control.  The nerd type of body has a strong collapsed chest and weak arms (the chest and arms have different liquid densities).  In the nerd type of movement the inner body is sneaky and fairly quiet, but it can also manoever all around evading and repositioning to get to tricky angles.  In the battle between the bodies the nerd type movement represents the outer body overpowering the inner.

What we actually want to cultivate in “internal arts” is each body doing a separate job, working together, but completely distilled from each other.  So the outer body is dead, totally quiet and devoid of intent.  The internal body is totally active and free.  The internal body is moved indirectly by the spacial mind moving around in space.  Once you have this conceptual framework it is easy to see Tabby Cat’s mistake.

Tabby Cat actually has a dead external body and a free internal body.  That part he is doing correct, but he moves his internal body by keeping his mind in his belly.  The more he can expand out from his belly in the direction of the ground and his opponent, the more effective his push is.  The more his spacial mind extends down, the more force he has to float his opponent. To the extent that his spacial mind extends past his own hands into or beyond the opponent he can move the opponent without them feeling any structure in the attack.  This is what we call internal power (neijing).  Because his mind stays in his belly it is always pushing his mass, and given a moment to adjust to the unfelt attack, the secondary mass attack is easy to deflect.  In fact, if the secondary attack is resisted and he presses it anyway, he will reveal a structure.  And structure once revealed, can be crushed.

To use different language, he has huajing (transforming power), but he doesn’t know how to use it (not much ling--inner agility, intelligence).  So when he goes to attack he sometimes uses huajing by accident but mostly retreats to anjing (hidden power).  In the brief moment his mass is being pushed forward by his mind inside his dantian, he is exposing his jin, his structure and his root.  This is why he can not attack slowly. This means that although he has reached the level where he can completely distill jing and qi in solo movement, he still mixes them under pressure.

What he should be doing is keeping his mind outside the body all the time.  This will eliminate the initial need to lead the opponent around because the only way an opponent can go directly against outside the body force is if they have the same mind-outside-the-body skill set.  His mistake is that he is leading his internal body in a direct way, when in fact he should be leading it in an indirect way.

The strongest indicator that this is Tabby’s problem is that even though it is on his list of 5 training principles above, he doesn’t have a clear upright posture.  An upright posture comes from another related force called Central Equilibrium power (Zhongdingjin).

To practice Central Equilibrium power by oneself simply requires that one's liquid mass adjusts in relationship to the the center of liquid mass as any force goes out in any direction.  It’s not very complex, but the outer body has to be dead-weight relaxed (xu) in order to do it.  If the outer body is not dead-weight-relaxed, posture correcting muscles will be activated to bring the mass back on center, thus pitting the external body against the internal body in a battle.  If central equilibrium is maintained exclusively by changes in the spacial mind, in Daoist terms, jing and qi remain distilled.

To apply Central Equilibrium power while fighting, the opponent’s mass must instantaneously be included in one’s liquid mass adjustment.  When done correctly, the opponent’s incoming force is dispersed automatically and instantaneously by a continuously adjusting spacial mind.  Thus, there is no advantage in evading by yielding the chest and neglecting uprightness.

In other words, yielding the chest is fundamentally an aggressive act because it is a set up for an outward attack (Lu into Ji in classic push hands terms). When we hit someone using Central Equilibrium power we never shoot out to a single point; as our mass spirals and expands to hit, it is moving equally in other directions.  To use Wang Xiangzai’s language, “Power never comes out to a point, the body never breaks the qi egg.”  Although the opponent gets clobbered, the body doesn't take on the experience of aggression.   That's not much consolation for the injured party, but it's an interesting idea.  No?

Tabby Cat has been doing a bit of writing lately and I recommend reading it.

I learned a lot from the exchange, and I have more to write about still.  I'm still open to the idea of a single attribute drill that would eliminate a lot of wasted time.  But in this case I would have to say it failed.   There is so much detail to the internal martial arts that putting off learning it in hopes of some holy grail of power ultimately means never learning that detail at all.  And Tabby is the case that proves the point, he studied Systema in hopes that it would fill in the gaps, and in the end he has retreated to Western Boxing and Yoga to supplement his Tai Chi.  In this case, I think, even Modernity has failed.

Robert W. Smith

Rum Soaked Fist is reporting that Robert W. Smith has passed away.  I have not seen any obituaries yet, but he was one of the earliest Westerners to train and write about Asian martial arts.  His devotion to the practical and historical study of martial arts and internal martial arts opened up tens of thousands of doors for others to walk through.  He will be greatly missed.