External Internal Mixes

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Just wanted to share this video of one of my class mates from the early 90's.  Stan was a strange kid, about 17 in this video, I remember him having some mental development problems that made him a bit shy and awkward in conversation, but he was fun to practice with.

And here is Shifu Qing Zhong Bao, George Xu's main teacher before George left China around 1980.  He is 95 years old in the video.  Lanshou, the system he is a master of, and the one Stan is demonstrating above, is considered a mixed internal and external system.  Whatever right?  Looks like it is pretty good for health in old age as well as training young people for maximum versatility.  

Theory and Metaphor in Martial Arts

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I’ve been trying to write about theory for a few weeks.  The problem is simple, but explaining the problem is not. The problem is that martial arts theories are built on metaphors.  Notice that in the previous sentence we have three metaphors.  “Built” is the most obvious one here, implying that a foundation is laid followed by a construction project.  Another metaphor in the sentence is “problem,” implying perhaps a puzzle requiring contemplation, or alternately an agent causing systematic disruption.  In addition we have “martial” and “arts” nagging for explication, “martial” implying war, and “arts” implying the harnessing of beauty while piling up skills.   

But if we look back at that sentence the most challenging term is “metaphors.”  All theory is built on metaphors, mental constructs in place of actual experiences.  Someone might protest at this point that martial arts can only be based on physics.  But physics is made up of metaphors too; we are a liquid body of mass filled with solids of various densities, structured along lines of potential force and contained by a semi-porous wrapping with an elastic surface tension.  To make that description of the human body useful in martial arts practice it has to be both simplified and abstracted so that possibilities and probabilities can be measured and predicted.  It is a lot more efficient and useful to just say, “Your finger on the end of your arm is the pool cue, and his eye is the ball.”

Metaphors are always imperfect because kinesthetic experiences are far more complex than language.  I suppose someone might want to challenge that statement, but even if we could speak in a language as complex as kinesthetic experience it would have to be robust enough to survive the learning and testing process.  And then there are mundane concepts like communication breakdown.  

So it follows that if we clearly understand a metaphor and we diligently put it into practice, it will fail.  It will fail because it was imperfect to begin with.  It was an inaccurate description of form, method and fruition.  A quick example: Many martial arts schools use the metaphor of circulation, but all the substances which are known to circulate in the body circulate too slowly to be useful outside of passive processes.  If in this case circulate is meant to refer to forces from an opponent being returned to the opponent, the liquid aspect of the metaphor “circulate” is an inadequate description of the aspects of structure and mind necessary to accomplish this function.

The majority of Tai Chi classes are containers for the trivial.  I recently heard about a teacher who had created three “new” tai chi forms, one for diabetes, one for Alzheimer's, and one for Parkinson's disease.  My first thought was, “Wow, cute.”  No doubt there is some talismanic effect from self-selecting to learn and practice a form which has a specific health benefit.  Unless of course you are that person who thinks, “Hey, I did my my diabetes form today, bust out the triple chocolate cake!”

In most of these trivial classes the students simply follow the teacher through the form and get an occasional posture correction.  The same metaphors are repeated ad nauseum; relax, root, flow, spiral, sink, be stable like a mountain, flow like a river.   

The same is true for most martial arts classes.  There is very little metaphor analysis going on.  Some schools frown on talking in class at all.  Some students just want exercise, their base metaphor being, “I am a machine that gets rusty and needs motion and heat (oil?) to maintain optimal functioning.”  Some schools cater to parents metaphorical expectations that their child will become either a robotic fighting machine or a caring disciplined servant of all that is true and good.  Some schools take enormous pride in maintaining the same metaphors over time.  Some schools are proud of their simplicity, others of their clarity.  The more systematic the approach, the more entrenched the metaphors will be.  Rotary Engine

Thus, those of us who can actually think kinesthetically are constantly changing the metaphors we use.  We need to use one metaphor to test another.  The process involves continuously reformulating and refining the metaphors we use, while also pairing and juxtaposing them to birth new metaphors and kill off old ones.

The process of training should allow metaphors to be replaced by precise feelings and experiences.  But both the maintenance of skills as well as the teaching of skills requires that metaphors function as containers for kinesthetic knowledge.  The same is true for those metaphors which define our identity.  The freer we are, the freer we are to change and adapt the metaphors we live by.  

The identity piece is also important because the martial arts we practice transit between cultures which often have different deeply embedded metaphors which can act either as  lubricants or friction in the transmission of ideas.  (For example Chinese language posits that time is a man facing backwards, while English posits time is a man facing forwards.)

I know for sure that if a teacher can describe a kinesthetic experience with perfect clarity it is wrong and it will fail.  It may however, be very, very useful.  Lion's Head Meatballs

Playing with Majia and swords yesterday, she offered the metaphor that if you put your arm too far out to the side it will get ground up in a blender.  Metaphors are so much fun.  George Xu has a similar one; cut off your opponent’s arm with your spinning airplane propeller.  He has a whole bunch of new and unusual metaphors, as well as reformulated and recycled ones.  For instance, be a giant meatball hanging in the sky.  (I believe he is referring to Lion’s Head Meatballs, yum!)  Or, be a tree trunk falling on your opponent when you chop.  Also, use your rotary engine against his piston engine.  And, punch him with three heads and six arms while being empty like Romeo staring at Juliet as it begins to snow.  

Please share your favorite martial arts metaphors.

Thogs

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Thogs are unfinished thoughts.  I could let these percilate for a few weeks and perhaps they would turn into full on thoughts, but I've got lot's of other matterial to slice and dice so I'll just toss these ones to the crowd.  

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First up, Neanderthal Martia Arts!  Yes, I know what you are thinking, MMA right?  But no I mean the real thing.  And there are some intreging links about pre-historic giants with popeye arms in the article if you get into it.  

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Then there is Camille Paglia, always a hoot.

My friend Elijah Siegler writing about David Cronenberg and Religion.

This intersting website of temptation.  How do I get a copy of this?

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According to Stanley Fish, there are two types of intellegence, Foxes and Hedgehogs.  Hedgehogs are experts in one thing, one type of thinking.  Foxes are broad thinkers who know a little about a lot of things.  The problem is our current era is creating a lot of fake foxes and imposter hedgehogs!  When you can Facebook-google-Youtube-blog your knowledge it is possilbe to appear to have a type of intellegence you don't really have, at least for a few minutes.  True foxes are very rare.  What is the implication of this for matial arts?

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Look, a free book on Taoist Alchemy!

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If the toughest things about fighting happen after the fight, what can we do to prepare for this?  Does this question lead to a good explanation for the development of internal martial arts and their connection to meditation?

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Vector force from the ground to the point of impact does not contribute to mass unity.  We just can’t get away (whether thinking about avoiding self injury or fighting) from the idea that mass plus velocity equals force.  The larger and more unified the mass, the less it has to gain in velocity to effect an equal amount of force.  Momentum is mass plus acceleration, acceleration is the rate which velocity increases over time, so the more mass unity, the less time or velocity is necessary to exert the same amount of force.  Therefore:  Pushing off the ground with the foot reduces power if it reduces mass unity, which it does if force travels along a line (or a curve) through the body.

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Balance is Key

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If someone gives me a surprise shove I will likely do a quick jump or stumble and quickly recover my balance on two feet.  The same is true for most people, it’s not a special skill.  No other animal can stand on two feet and take a shove with out falling down, even bears have a high falling down rate.  When we learn to walk as toddlers we naturally train our dantian’s to do this complex job.  The recovery of balance is lightning fast.  If I contemplate the physics of it, there must be an internal counterbalance functioning unconsciously.  Somehow my mass absorbs all the momentum of the push and moves my center of mass very quickly back and forth, up and down and left and right until it is directly above my feet again.  Again, it is too fast to perceive.  What I am aware of is the space around me, perhaps sharp objects, the surface of the ground, a wall or a tree.  My guess is that if I misperceived a slanted wall as vertical, or a sloping ground as level, I might actually fall down or stumble for a bit longer.  But a functioning spatial mind can make corrections very quickly.  In fact, it might actually function better at high speeds.  How else could we explain the ability to run through a forest down a steep hill.  The spatial mind controls the dantian, as a counterweight, unconsciously and instantaneously, bringing us back to balance.  

This basic function of the dantian can be transferred to higher order skills like skiing, carrying a long ladder through an obstacle course, rock climbing or gymnastics.  Of course, all animals have a similar skill which they use on four feet or in the air if they are birds.  

Normal humans however, only use the dantian for this one type of task.  When we throw a ball, or pick up a pen to write our name, we are using our brains in a very different way.  Or, like when we are rock climbing, we use the same set of balance and vertical orientation skills simply applied in a different context.  

Pure Internal Martial Arts are unique because they use the dantian to respond to forces other than gravity.  To paraphrase George Xu, “When you touch any part of my body, you are touching the dantian.”  The best video demonstration of this I know of is this one by Ma Yue Liang:

 

Not everyone can learn internal martial arts (that would be communism), but proof that nearly everyone has a functioning dantian is apparent in our natural ability to recover our balance.  

 

Basic Theory

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Mike Sigman has a new blog, check it out.

His basic theory is quite good.  When you read it note that "san waihe" (three external harmonies) is a description of the way the body should be organized not how it should move or be motivated.  The external body he describes needs to be empty (xu) of intent and effort.  The movement of the external body can then become unconscious.  

The internal body (what he calls "san neihe" and will hopefully deal with in future posts) needs to do a different job than the external body.  As I have said many times, the internal body is moved by changes of the spatial mind.  The external body must be completely within the spatial mind and unconscious, any spatial mind inside the body will break the system.  If the internal body does the same movement as the external body it is still possible to have some internal strength, but it is so much cooler if the internal body goes a different direction and moves in a totally different way.  The internal body should attack the opponent directly, not through the external body, not through the limbs.

You can download a video of Mike doing some basic movement here. 

He embedded this video of Chen Bing doing simple stuff.

Chen Bing Reeling Silk from John Prince on Vimeo.

 

At around 3 minutes he uses the term "tong bu" which is translated as "synchronized." There is another tong 通 (first tone instead of second tone) which refers to emptiness passing through the gates.  I don't think he is making a translation error here, I just don't think "synchronized" is helpful because the dantain is not doing the same job in the same direction, it's doing something quite different.  Tong 通 is implied in his statement that the hand must remain "alive" (ling).  When you have the feeling that the hand is inside the dantian it is much easier to keep the gates (at the shoulders) open.  

I know all this stuff I just said is probably hard to follow, perhaps impossible.  That's why I appreciate Mike's blog post, it is fairly easy to follow, it is a clear beginning.  He suggests that forms should come later, after learning these basics and he has a good argument to back it up.  That's not traditional but it might work better.

The other thing I like is how clear he is about the central importance of up/down power.  He calls it gravity and power from the ground.  Most people, most trained martial artists, can not fully use up/down power because they are in a trance.  They try to replace gravity with strength & control thereby losing whole body mass, they end up carrying themselves instead of making their opponent carry them.  They also loose upward power by arcing it forward through their limbs as vectors into their opponent.  Ahhh, in praise of simple up and down.  

A Revisionist History of Footbinding

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Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, by Dorothy Ko.

I don’t know if my readers have much interest in the history of footbinding, but this is certainly a great book to read if you are interested.  I must admit that I didn’t know much about footbinding myself before I read this, it’s been out for about 7 years and I hadn’t gotten around to reading it because I picked up a feminist vibe from the cover the first few times I saw it.

Ko’s premise is that all the histories written to date are actually histories of anti-footbinding.  For the benefit of my readers I will focus on ideas in this book which are important to the hidden history of martial arts.  The first is that she decided to write the history backwards.  Although I had never thought of it, that made a lot of sense to me.  Footbinding like martial arts has so many potential beginnings, reasons for existing, influences from different parts of society and meanings over a thousand years that there is no convincing beginning!  Better to start from the present and work back along the various strands of time.  

Christians have been in China since the Tang Dynasty, but they were minor players fading in and out along the borders.  The Jesuits and Franciscans who spent time in China during the Ming and early Ching Dynasties were minor influences, but the ideas they brought back to Europe changed the rest of the world.  After the Second Opium War Christians including Protestants, started to make large inroads into the Chinese heartland.  These missionaries brought education, medicine, and all the elements of modernity including new ideas, technologies and international commerce.  

Besides medicine and modernity the accommodations of the Second Opium War gave foreign Christian leaders a way to circumvent the old Magistrate Bureaucracy.  Parish leaders could appeal directly to the Imperial Court via their embassies, effectively giving significant advantages to Chinese Christians.  

The period between 1890 and 1910 was intense.  Christian converts stopped attending theater and stopped paying for it too.  Why?  Because as regular readers may already know, the martial arts theater movement tradition known in the west as ‘opera’ was clearly understood as a religious institution.  The local communities that put on these “opera” performances used them to raise money for education, repairing roads, building bridges and stuff like that.  In other words, putting on these religious performances was the context in which local taxes were collected!  This created a lot of resentment and is certainly one of the causes of the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900), which was a roving mob, dressed as characters from opera like the Monkey King and General Guangong, responsible for killing thousands of Chinese Christians and burning their communities.  

Christian missionaries really disliked footbinding and used it at the center of their critic of Chinese cultural barbarity and backwardness.  However, it was in this twenty year period that Chinese voices against footbinding grew and in a very short time succeeded in ending what had been an extremely widespread practice.  Not that it was a single practice, that is one of the main points of the book, there was a lot of variation in the techniques.  For instance some women may have had good enough mobility to practice martial arts.  One of the origins of footbinding hundreds of years ago was not all that different from the wrapping that ballet dancers do for point shoes.  It also appears that footbinding done early enough (at age 3 or 4) was not painful and probably allowed women to have some ability to run.  Certainly one of the reasons for footbinding was the beauty of the movement it could create.  And obviously, the arguments against footbinding were overwhelmingly convincing.

The dominant metaphor offered by Chinese voices for the elimination of footbinding was that it decreased circulation and that what Chinese needed more than anything was more circulation!  Circulation in women’s feet was paralleled with circulation of modern ideas, commerce and technology around the world.  It sounds funny to our ears today because we think of China as the home of Tai Chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine and Fengshui, all of which center around the metaphor of circulation.  But it is likely that this argument was really China’s way of claiming modernity for itself!  “Modernity with Chinese characteristics!” The project of ‘nationalizing’ modernity absurdly included attempts to claim Chinese origins of the Anti-footbinding movement.  

Think about it, this is the same twenty years in which Tai Chi, Bagua and Xingyi “came out” as public arts to be recognized by the entire population.  Tai Chi eventually became a way to claim ‘generic’ Chinese-ness as opposed to ‘ethnic-minority-Chinese-ness’. 

Unbinding ones feet was a bit of a nightmare.  If you were past the age of puberty there was little chance your feet would be normal.  It took months of slow, careful and painful adjustments to “let out” the feet. Tai Chi may have gotten it’s original reputation as a health practice because it was recommended that women letting their feet out practice Tai Chi as they were learning how to move on their feet in various stages of unboundedness.  It must have been a profound moment in gender integration too.  

The rural regions around Suzhou for some reason did not bind their feet.  Many non-Han ethnic groups did not bind either, the Hakka for instance did not.  However, in most regions, even poor families were likely to bind at least the oldest girl child, the younger daughters being more likely to be sold into servitude were likely to need big feet.  That’s a pretty dark thought all around.  Of course I’m trying to imagine this kind of world and the difficulty I have causes me to have doubts.  

Footbinding started as a status symbol of the elite.  It may have spread inadvertently as an act of rebellion because the Manchu ethnic rulers of the Ching Dynasty made ineffective but widespread attempts to ban it.  Having come across this theory rebelious agency some time ago, along with a poem I came across about the potency of women with bound feet, led me to a thesis about bound feet representing potential power just as relaxed tai chi feet gather potential power by not pushing out the balls of the feet or the heels.  (You can read more of my theory here.)  The book doesn’t offer any direct support for my theory except that it promotes the notion that footbinding has multiple origins, reasons, and methods.

Another sidenote of particular interest is that up until the later part of the Tang Dynasty Chinese were barefoot in formal situations, especially at court.  In less formal situations they wore socks.  Shoes and such were for the outdoors, the way Japan was up until the 1980’s.  During the late Tang Dynasty (around 900 CE) the practice of wearing boots became formal, perhaps because it was the custom of some ethnic generals attending court.  Gradually socks and even small shoes became hidden underwear and bare feet became hidden in darkness.  Ko points out that foot binding is unlikely to have happened until the Song Dynasty when people were sitting in chairs which could display their feet.  

 This change in footwear and thus in peoples relationship to the ground, must have been a necessary step in changing the well documented “seated” Daoyin internal body transformation methods into stand-up Shaolin and the various internal martial arts.  

And finally we have a question.  To what extent did women performers have bound feet?  From what I’ve been able to gather about performers in general, both men and women, where in a moral category which made them available for sex.  I gather that prostitution was understood as a type of entertainment usually coupled with singing and or dancing.  So female prostitutes most likely were able to dance and had bound feet.  As we have learned from other texts women sometimes performed in male troops (for an extra fee) but generally theater troupes were either all male or all female.  In both cases women warrior roles were very popular.  According to Ko’s sources, in Beijing and Shanxi men playing warrior women wore tiny stilts to make it appear that their feet were bound.  Did women who specialized in male martial roles have unbound feet?  Or did they wear fake foot enlargers to play those roles?  In any event we know what we know about this because there were laws written around 1900 in Shanxi banning actors from wearing these tiny stilts. It was thought that they were setting a bad example within the changing standards of femininity.  Warrior femininity that is.  

Here is a dissertation that deals with the same issues: Women in Tianjin, 1898-1911

Christian Missionaries in China, 1891  

Working Backwards

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One of my problems as a teacher lately is that I’m having trouble finding the beginning.  I can start a child where I started with Northern Shaolin, that is simple enough, but even with a child I’m doing all kinds of adaptation depending on aptitude and interest.  We can go in a more acrobatic direction, or a more dance-theater way, or we can move toward a kinesthetic-emotional conversation about, identity, change and ethics.  

With adults it is profoundly more challenging.  20 years ago I knew exactly what to teach and how to teach it.  Now there are so many potential jumping off places, each one feels like a beginning.  Choosing a beginning implies choosing a path, a curriculum.  Choosing a beginning is made 10,000 times more difficult because the end result, the fruition of practice, is in contention.  

What will you get out of it?  What will you be at the end?  Is there really an end?  How will you know when you get there?  How could you know?  

If the subject were, “speaking French fluently” we have a pretty good idea what that might mean. You’d be able to talk to people, to get ideas across and understand complexity, perhaps get a job where you speak and write to people in French.  But understanding a language doesn’t guarantee you’ll find anyone worth talking to, or that you’ll be able hear, or think clearly.  It certainly doesn’t mean that you will be comfortable drinking wine and smoking cigarettes while discussing philosophy in the wee hours of the night!  Especially if you hate wine.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the lost beginning.

So let’s talk about some possible endings.  

I recently read Gavin DeBecker’s The Gift of Fear. I highly recommend it. It has lot’s of good lists to contemplate.  It has a couple  of dark sections and I suspect that is why they put the word fear in the title.  But it is a truly optimistic book about intuition.  It could easily have been titled: ‘Intuition, Your Best Friend.’   

Intuition is an amazingly powerful and instantaneous.  Through intuition we know things before we know how we know them.  Could intuition be the fruition of practice?

The active aspect of intuition is qi, we don’t know where it comes from.  It just happens!  Qi has no pattern or memory.  There is an inactive aspect of intuition too, it is our body's natural ability to heal and reproduce itself, called "jing" in tradtional Chinese terms.  Jing is that unconscious aspect of our body which stores all patterns of growth, healing, injury and change.  Rational actions and rationales are mixed, that is, they mix qi with jing.  By mixing qi with jing, we create a way of storing qi in the body as tension.  All fantasy requires this mixing of jing and qi.  When jing and qi distill, as the result of internal arts practices, memory and fantasy have nothing to cling to, rational thought likewise has noting to build on.

So the “end” of learning internal martial arts is not even a state of consciousness or a trance, it’s movement without body memory which has no intent, no conditioning, and no restraint.  Think about that.  If a movement is unconditioned why would you remember it?  If a movement has no resistance and no restriction, how could it be stored in the body?  

This doesn’t preclude that we might have certain spontaneous creative, destructive or survival oriented ‘drives.’  It also doesn’t preclude perception or awareness.  Our intuition about where the wall is behind us, how many people are in the room, and what can fit inside of a box, are all operative without having to remember them.

Even while fighting you’d have no sense of ‘acting’ or forcing.  That’s the meaning of the Daoist term wuwei.  

So what kind of beginning does this suggest?  What kind of path?  What kind of practice?  Yikes, I’m lost!   

Wait, I have an idea.  Oops, I lost it.  Oh no, there it is again.  

Practice is finding what your body remembers and unraveling it, emptying it, cleaning it.  The more one trains along this path the more etherial our movement memories become.