Mongol Ship Found in Japan

No way!
Wreck of 13th century Mongol invasion ship discovered

Here is more on the Archeology

The Glorious Kidneys

Autumn is the season for clearing heat from the lungs and refining technique.  One of the best foods for clearing heat from the lungs is the pear. The skin of the pear is used if the condition is medical.  So eat pears raw or lightly stewed with a dribble of honey.  The Classic of Medicine (Neijing) says clearing heat from the lungs protects against fevers in Winter.  Not sure what the mechanism is there, but I love pears so I'm sharing.  The suggestion to refine technique is a message about efficiency, the Autumn is about toning it down and taking time to integrate all the wild experimentation of the past two seasons.

And if you've been doing that, in about four weeks you will be ready to start transitioning into Winter practice.  In Winter we store Qi, water the root, and nourish the kidneys. So what does this mean?  In the days before industrial commerce made food cheap and plentiful, to the average peasant it probably meant eat whatever rich foods you can find.  The best way to do that in our era is with nutrient rich bone stock that you make yourself.  If you want organic stock bones, in my part of the country, you are in direct competition with the massive pampered dog population.  However, if you buy bones in bulk it's a little more reasonable.  We filled up our freezer with bones for the Winter for about $60.  'Watering the root' basically means drinking nutrient rich broth the way most of our ancestors did.  Think stews.

The Daodejing says, "to be full, hollow out," thus in order to store Qi one must first cultivate emptiness.  Once emptiness is established, storing Qi is automatic.

Well, not totally automatic.  You must also nourish the kidneys.  How does one do that?  Hold that thought.

Hopefully none of my readers were paying attention last year when I had an argument on the insane internal martial arts discussion website Rum Soaked Fist about whether the terms jin 勁 and jing 精 actually mean the same thing.  As my Indian Dance teacher used to say, "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

Jin is translated by Louis Swaim (I'm doing this from memory) as 'power which resembles the flowing of underground streams.'  Jin is an expression used in compound forms like pengjin (wardoff), mingjin (obvious power), or tingjin (skillful sensitivity), to mean a specific type of power which requires skill and time to develop.

Jing on the other hand is a much bigger and harder to explain key concept in Chinese cosmology.  It is usually translated 'essence,' because of it's association with purification.  But it generally refers to stuff that reproduces itself.  In quasi-medical terms it is sperm and eggs, scabs, what clots the blood, and when it is strong in the body--a full head of hair and strong finger nails.  In Daoism Jing is the most solid and substantial form of Qi. If we posit that the entire cosmos is one giant mind form, then jing is its memory function.  Stay with me...

Any first year Chinese Medicine student will tell you that Jing is stored in the kidneys.  They will also tell you that sex, drugs and rock'n'roll will deplete it.  Daoism has a precept against wasting jing or qi.  The term is pretty amorphous as you may have deduced by now.  In is particular Daoist precept the distinction is that qi wasting is unnecessary effort, while jing wasting is depletion to the point of injury.  So to damage ones body is to damage ones jing.  Why? because the moment injury happens, the kidneys start to release jing-- jing is released from the kidneys because it is what repairs us.

Obviously, jing is one of those concepts which, as Roger T. Ames might put it, offends against the most basic  notions of Western categorical thinking--it is simultaneously an event, a substance, a trend, and an action.  Jing repairs (verb), it is what repairs (noun), it is visible only indirectly and is measured by that which it repairs so to some degree it is the substantive aspect of our bodies.  Jing is the shape of our eye, and the dark circles that accumulate around them after years of not enough sleep.  Jing is the markings of age.  Jing as a substance decreases in either quantity or quality as we age.  But as a substance it remains pure.

Tension in our bodies is simply qi concentrated by the mind.  Disperse the qi and the tension will be gone.  But chronic tension is qi concentrated in the same location day after day.  Qi is pure and has no memory function, the tension's location is remembered by jing.  So chronic tension is regularly drawing jing out of the kidneys where the mind mixes it with qi.  Because jing and qi are both pure, they naturally separate, like oil and water.  For chronic tension to happen at all takes considerable and regular effort.

I would never have gotten into the argument at Rum Soaked Fist if I hadn't been repeating what I heard from George Xu: "Jing and jin are the same."

"What?" I asked, "How could that be, they are different characters in Chinese?"  (精 and 勁)

"It doesn't matter," he said, "They were once the same term and the same character."

Remember way up at the top of this post I asked the question, "How does one nourish the kidneys?"  We're getting there.  The kidneys love sleep.  They love sleep because they love stillness.  The kidneys are like a very fine instrument measuring vibration, shock, tension and fatigue.  If we can feel our kidneys they will indicate when we are exerting effort or experiencing strain.  And...They will tell us when we are using power. Ah hah! You say, power, you mean jin right?  Yes, young Skywalker, any trained or refined gathering of power or release of force is called jin, in Modern Chinese.  The kidneys experience all jin as stress, as a loss of jing.

Thus pure internal (martial arts) should be defined as not using jin/jing.  If an art uses jin, then it is mixing jing and qi.  It is exerting some strain on the kidneys.  The basic Tai Chi adage goes:  "The body follows the qi and the qi follows the mind."  If the mind causes jing to be released from the kidneys, qi will mix with jing in the body, and the mind will move the three all at once--thus destroying the mind-then-qi-then-body order of movement.  On the other hand, if the body is totally quiet, as measured by no loss of jing from the kidneys, then the qi will automatically float off of the body and the mind will easily lead it.  If the whole torso is also empty, it will naturally fill with qi.

And that is what it means to nourish the glorious kidneys.

Conference in Genova, June 2011

Like I needed an excuse to go to Italy in June?

1^st IMACSSS International Conference

Game, Drama, Ritual in Martial Arts and Combat Sports

8th-10th June 2012, Genova, Italy

IMACSSS stands for The International Martial Arts and Combat Sports Scientific
Society.

Guidelines for topics:

1) Philosophical conceptions, general theories, terminology
and systematics in MA&CS
2) Pedagogy and diactic methodology in MA&CS
3) Kinesiological and physiological aspects of MA&CS
4) Technical and tactical issues in MA&CS
5) Psychological, artistic and spiritual dimensions of MA&CS
6) Historical and socio-cultural aspects about MA&CS.

Does anybody know anything else about this conference?  It seems a bit short. At least for me, I want time for combat and shmoozing.  George Xu has been telling me great things about the way Italians cooperate around learning martial arts.  I might even remember some Italiano from high school (don't laugh, I did attend high school, a little).  This could be really exciting.

Tibetan Yogis

I enjoyed this short 3 part video series on Tibetan Yogis. Watch when the guys jump down into lotus position and then bounce out of it. Daoyin has these same moves. Also notice that they are on a deer skin. Keep it wild.

Formosa Mambo

Formosa Mambo is a new film written by Wang Chi-tsai which is showing as part of Taiwan Film Days, a festival which runs October 14-16th, 2011 at:

SF Film Society | New People Cinema
1746 Post Street, in San Francisco

This is a Gangster Drama about the making of a demon king. I say this not because there are any big hints of what is unseen in the spirit world of the film. The film is all earthly and secular.  It’s just that the film is difficult to give context to. It is about how a good man becomes bad in a universe of relative badness. Or I could say relative goodness. Everybody knows that the meaning of ethical decisions can change depending on perspective. The film suggests that ethics are driven by a person's social proximity to what ever harm he or she may be triggering (or perpetrating).  Thus we duel within our own tribe, we hunt and ambush outside of our tribe.

One of the attributes of religion is often an attempt to expand a groups' notion of tribe to cover some larger social body or institution; believe in our god, follow our precepts, marry one of us, and you become an insider.   On the other hand, a demon king is someone who expands the group of potential victims, while simultaneously enlarging the boundaries of the in-tribe.  So, if you follow the logic, instead of victimizing Taiwanese who we might know, let's jack up the Mainlanders!

Social networking and computers in general are an intense localizing force, as are things like McDonald's, Whole Foods, and Ikea. This feeds a strong desire for a more authentic local.   A huge number of products are now marketed as “feels local” or “localish.” Even Film festivals are in on this “local flavor for sale” movement.  I mean think about it, we are all so close together these days we are breathing down each others necks!  I have to be careful what I write on my blog lest I offend a German reader living in Taiwan that I’ve never met? Will we all be so socially close some day there will be no one left to cheat?

All of that is just to give context to the film.  No one actually uses the term "demon king," but I believe many people in Taiwan will recognize the idea.

Formosa Mambo is not about dance, but the sound track is pretty catchy.

The film juxtaposes two plots: Desperate, stupid kidnappers who want to be friends with the kid they steal, and a group of sophisticated sexy scammers who steal lots of money from vulnerable people using a combination of high and low tech strategies. The protagonist of the story starts out down on his luck and slowly transforms into a man willing to destroy peoples lives for profit.  Stealing and hurting people in Taiwan turns out to be too much for him because he feels a strong sense of social connection to other Taiwanese.  But low and behold, he realizes that these scams will work just as well on Mainlanders!  Problem solved!  That’s how it ends anyway. It’s a cute little film about a very serious subject in a chaotic cheek by cheek world.
Check it!

Head is Spinning!

After you watch the video, check this guy's channel there's all kinds of crazy hip hop on the international scene.  The influence of African dance and music on the world stage is profound.  As martial artists we should at least consider that this evolved from a form of head and neck conditioning used for head attacks.  We might even speculate that if the event of being killed, or defeated in a duel, by a head attack had particular significance socially--perhaps causing a loss of status, rank, or inclusion in a group-- or even changed ones status after death, then perhaps the spectacle of spinning on the head was an extraordinary display of martial prowess.  In the book Fighting For Honor, which I reviewed a few days ago, the author Obi explains that in certain parts of Zaire-Angola the religious cosmology posits that the ancestors live on the other side of a great body of water and that everything there happens upside down, and so those ritual specialists capable of communicating with the ancestors do that by dancing upside down.  Wow! Take it away Aichi, Boom and Lazer!

Don't Sleep There Are Snakes!

Perhaps you have heard the saying, 'cultures are mutually incomprehensible.'  To start off, most people in the world have not had an immersion experience with another culture.  Most people do not have the experience to say whether or not they are capable of comprehending another culture.  Secondly, culture is not so easy to define.  The English language is certainly functional for talking about business and air traffic control in most parts of the world.  So certain aspects of culture can transcend culture, either because there is something similar in both cultures, or because a roughly equivalent concept can be carved out of a group of concepts, and function in translation.  It's also conceivable that culture can change, but that is controversial because the norm is almost certainly that cultures change very slowly.  An individual, however, can change, and even a whole group of people can adopt a new culture, or (controversial again) a hybrid culture.  Certainly there are people who are truly bi- or even poly-lingual.  But absolute fluency almost certainly requires being raised in that culture from day one.  Some cultures, like the United States, can be very welcoming of people from other cultures, as long as they pick up their trash and generally follow our written laws, we happily tolerate their odd behaviors until they assimilate...even if they are Canadian.

The complexity of the question, 'What is culture?' is further muddied by the notion that there are cultural groups with fuzzy lines between them, sometimes marked with war, geography, new languages, new religions, new political entities, and now, new tools for communication.

There is a culture in the Amazon Jungle in Brazil where, when a person wants to stop talking at night and go to a separate hut, instead of saying "good night" or "sleep tight," they say, "Don't sleep, there are snakes!"  And that is the title of a wonderful book I read recently about this particular tribe and a missionary's attempt to learn their language over a period of twenty years of immersion.  If you like thinking about the question, "What is culture?" or have ever wondered why anyone would suggest that culture is mutually incomprehensible, then this is the book for you.  It's very well written, it's fun, and it's full of cultural zingers.  Like that the Pirahã (the cultural group he lived with) don't have numbers at all.  It's stunning.  They also won't talk about a memory or story of any kind unless the person who witnessed it is still living.  This even applies to dreams.  They hardly make anything that we would call art, and everything they make seems to be intentionally impermanent.

If a culture has many simularities to our culture, it's quite possible for us to convince ourselves that we understand what is happening in that other culture, we may even acquire a new concept like "wuwei" from the Chinese to help explain their behavior.  But when the simularities are few it becomes more obvious that we are almost always peering at another culture through the lens of our culture.  Anyway, I recommend it!  I would also recommend it as a teaching tool for inspiring students to think about the nature of culture.

Don't Sleep There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, by Daniel L. Everett.  (Pantheon, 2008)

History of Boxing

This article wet my appetite for a thorough cultural history of competitive fighting.

Boxing’s beginnings in America go back to slave days, when plantation owners pitted slaves against one another and wagered on the outcomes. One freed slave, Tom Molineaux, even fought overseas against the British champion, Tom Cribb—and probably would have won their 1810 match, had Cribb’s desperate supporters not intervened just as Molineaux seized a decisive advantage. Boxing then was conducted with bare fists, under the old London Prize Ring Rules, which stipulated fights to the finish—that is, until one man could not continue. The rules also permitted wrestling holds and other tactics, and rounds ended only with “falls,” when one man went down, whether from a punch or a throw or sheer exhaustion. Before the Civil War, boxing enjoyed a brief vogue in New York, where fighters often associated with the Tammany Hall machine rose to prominence. But the war interrupted the sport’s momentum.

African Martial Arts

The following is a review of Fighting for Honor, The history of African Martial Arts Traditions in the Atlantic World, by T. J. Desch Obi.
The book breaks a lot of new scholarly ground, it really challenged me to think about culture and history in new ways.  It’s not light reading.
Obi begins with a Japanese definition of Marital arts as an exacting movement transmission of routines, movement qualities, and techniques which are taught generation to generation and which are used to instill ethics.  African martial arts and dance generally meet this definition.
He then goes into a detailed history of several different peoples from Central and West Africa and explains the cultural origins of their specific martial arts traditions.  The details are fascinating.  For instance Kandeka boys of Angola were taught to slap fight from early childhood.  By 6 or 7 they were left with older boys in charge of young calves, while the women went off to farm and the men took the full grown cows and bulls to distant grazing areas.  The boys learned to socially dominate the calves using head butts, and by the time they were adults they would have complete control of the herds by this method.  He later explains that this extraordinary skill becomes the preferred method of execution used by Capoeirista secret slave societies (bonded communities?) in Brazil.
The Kandeka boys also learned stick fighting.  They would begin with leaf covered branches to slow the fight down, as the leaves fell off, the fight would become faster.  As skill in avoiding injury developed the sticks would get thicker.  Adult men would carry these sticks or clubs in their belts at all times and were experts at throwing them as well.
This same group, made extensive use of inverted kicking in puberty rituals, in duels and other contexts.  He makes a very good case that this is the origin of Capoeira’s most distinctive fighting techniques.
In discussing the history of Nigeria, he explains that secret societies played a key roll in maintaining order and regulating violence.  Knowledge of wrestling and head butting was very widespread in the form of competitive games, it was used for settling disputes of honor.  There were also some extraordinary defense oriented groups on the border regions who made taking a head in battle a prerequisite of adulthood, which Obi contrasts with the interior groups who had strong rules against bloodshed.

The second part of the book deals with North America.  Obi did extensive research and fieldwork in South Carolina, and he sheds new light on the Seminole/Gullah Wars.  I loved this part of the book.  He succeeded in reframing North American slavery in my mind.  I really didn’t know that the Gullah fought a 50 year war, set up a strong hold in Mexico and after the Civil War were invited to join the US Cavalry as “the Buffalo Soldiers” made world famous by Bob Marley.  I certainly didn’t know that they used a style of inverted high kicking!
There is so much in this book to think about.  Obi, after months of trying to find African Martial Artists in South Carolina, and being told that nothing of the sort exists, is finally excepted as a student by the first person he had originally asked.  The fact that he was Nigerian and already knew a style of competitive leg wrestling did eventually help him break in to the secret society.  He was told that his (Nigerian) style of wrestling had been very popular a generation ago, with many champions the locals could name, but at the same time it was totally secret.  If you weren’t an insider, you didn’t know about it, you couldn’t know about.
The third part of the book deals with Francophone parts of the Caribbean, and the forth part of the book deals with Brazil.  There are tons of cool details here, like his discussion of folding blades held with the toes.
Obi raises three striking controversies.  The first is a challenge to the Albion Seed Theory.  The second is a challenge to the notion that slaves weren’t able or allowed to fight.  And the third is that the martial traditions of honor and secret societies allowed Africans in the Americas to maintain their martial arts traditions through dance, ritual, and games.
There are two main theories of cultural development in the United States.  The first is the melting pot theory which holds that we are a mix of a bunch of different cultures.  The other is the Albion Seed theory which holds that there are four primary folkways which all come from England and which have been totally dominant in determining American values and behavior.  Long time readers know that I’m a fan of the Albion Seed theory (given that name by it’s primary proponent David Hackett Fischer).  Obi challenges Fischer’s scholarship of fighting traditions.  First he says that boxing was a much later development, and didn’t exist in early America.  Second he says that “gouging” was the primary fighting style of the English who came here.  That is not a big departure from Fischer’s “rough and tumble rasseling,” they are essentially talking about the same art. But Obi asserts that its primary characteristic was eye “gouging” and that it usually went by that name.  The friendlier style of stand up grappling, “catch as catch can” was also prominent.  This is very important because it leads to Obi’s assertion that African-Americans had unique ways of fighting.  At the meta level, he seems to be a supporter of the Albion Seed approach, namely that there are a few base cultural folkways which dominate over the centuries.  However, he argues that there are clearly a few African cultures which have remained stable cultural influences to this day.
African Americans continued to train slap fighting, as anyone who went to an urban public school in the U.S. like I did, can attest.  They also practiced “knocking” or head butting, kicking and distinctive styles of wrestling.  The knocking is particularly interesting.  The history of American Football is nearly always described as a development of the Ivy League schools.  But it seems fair to ask why the American version of Football/Rugby developed with direct head to head smashing and no other Euro-origin country has developed anything like it.  Obi gives examples of African American Sailors sharing the art of head butting as both a martial art and a form of entertainment.  Obi does not come out and say this, but I will.  Football has some African Cultural roots.
Okay, did bonded people fight?  Obi is utterly convincing on this account.  They did.  It’s true that they were often forbidden to fight under the rules of slavery and there was a death penalty for attacking a white person, but that simply didn’t stop them.  They fought each other a lot, and they fought whites too and sometimes got away with it, particularly because whites would have been embarrassed to admit they weren’t in control and because slaves were valuable so there was a strong impetus to try and resolve problems.
African-Americans maintained their culture through secret societies and what Obi calls Tricknology!  That is, the art and culture of hiding your culture, of subsuming it, obscuring it, and of pretending it isn’t happening when it actually is.  Celebrations with dance, and singing, are obvious places where this happened, and where ritual and cultural values were passed on.  He argues that fighting culture played a key role in the transmission of culture, but that it was well hidden.
And that leads us to Honor.  Bonded people dealt with the humiliation and loss of autonomy by maintaining a very strong sense of honor.  Fighting style was and still is a key element in the maintenance of this sense of honor.  Who, what, when, where and how a person fights, are all factors which determine a person's honor with in a society.  When you train to fight through dance and play, it has a profound effect on the way you move and interact, the way you make judgements, and the way you make friends.  It forms your world view.

I am deeply appreciative of T. J. Desch Obi for all his research and scholarship.

All of this is very personal for me for numerous reasons including that I studied Congolese Dance with Malonga Casquelourd for about 3 years, about 20 years ago.  I also studied Katherine Dunham’s technique for teaching Haitian Dance for about 4 years around the same time.  It was a very intense training period for learning Chinese Martial Arts too, as I steadily increased the number of hours I was training gongfu from about 3 a day to 6 a day.
Katherine Dunham invited Malonga to come teach in the United States in the early 70’s.  Malonga’s father was a military leader, so he was able to travel around the Congo a lot as a child and learned the dances from many different regions- from soldiers.  Malonga was sent to military officer training in Maoist China in the 1960’s, where of course he learned Mandarin.
Malonga danced with extraordinary martial skill and power.  All of his dance was functional.  He didn’t teach it that way in class, but he freely showed me stuff when we were joking around in the halls.  The spirit of fighting was very real for him and he could turn it on.  Because of my Chinese training, I can still fight with my Congolese dance, they are of course different, but that difference is getting smaller the better I get.  (I plan on doing more videos about this, but for now you can still watch these antiques from 2005 --African Bagua, Part 2.)

Circus Martial Arts

I just saw "City Under Siege" a film by Benny Chan at the Hong Kong Film Festival.  The best line in the film is this exchange:

Question: "Do you practice a lot of martial arts here?"

Answer:  "No, it's just a circus."

If you've been reading this blog you know that the Chinese circus tradition is Martial Arts.  To my delight the film's makers are strongly rooted in the gongfu theater tradition and share a historically informed ironic love of it.

Here is the plot.  While on tour the mean circus crew and the one nice guy clown happen into some biological warfare and are given a dose of mutating virus which makes them act like they are on a million doses of PCP.  The mean guys and one girl get meaner and go on a robbing and beating up police spree, the nice guy gets some confidence and fights back.  The physical comedy is top notch.  So is the gongfu.  And so is the physical embodiment of evil.

Here is the second best line in the film:  "Even acupuncture doesn't work!"  It is delivered by a doctor super cop brought in  from "The Mainland" with his super cop half wife lover side kick.  (Yes, I said half wife--he has nick named her "Tai," half of what you call a married woman: Taitai).  He is pickled cucumber cool and she is Sichuan pepper hot.

Did I mention the steel whips and nine section staff work?  Yea, it's great.  And this movie takes it's flying daggers really seriously!  If at all possible you should bring a date to this movie because the mandatory love interest scenes are actually touching and sexy at the same time!

The fighting sets are inspiring and modern.  The morality of the story is classic and timeless, almost Faustian:   Vanity, greed, power and desire create a hell realm on earth.

Unfortunately last night was the last showing at the Festival but if this film doesn't get a wider release my faith in humanity has been misplaced.  Keep your eyes out for it, or have it beamed directly into your central nervous system by satillite if you have that service.

Great news:  The San Francisco Film Society has gotten it's hands on the theater in the basement of the New People Building in Japan Town.  It's a great place to see a film and they have a lot of interesting stuff coming up, including a showing of the new Shaolin movie this weekend.