Teaching Three Classes in Portland

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I'm teaching two workshops in Oregon at Portland Shaolin.  I'm also giving a lecture demo where I'm going to spill the beans on the last several years work figuring out the origins of Baguazhang.  This is mind blowing stuff, like nothing anyone has said before.  And the scholarship is strong if I do say so myself.  If you are anywhere near Portland, please come out.  The lecture/slideshow is free!  

The workshops are going to be amazing!  Everything is on this page, check it out!

May 13th, 14th and 15th.

The Creation of Wing Chun

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The Creation of Wing Chun

The Creation of Wing Chun, A Social History of the Southern Chinese Martial Arts, by blogger Ben Judkins and his Wing Chun teacher Jon Nielson, is the first work of its kind. Anyone interested in the history of Chinese martial arts must read it. Specifically, it is the first book to take an existing Chinese martial art and trace both its origins and its development to the present day.

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When Was Shaolin Temple Burned?

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When Was Shaolin Temple Burned?

This short piece by Adrian Chan-Wyles is worth reading:  "Why the Shaolin Temple was Burned in 1928."  I agree with everything he says, but I would add that toward the end of the Qing Dynasty there was a powerful movement to suppress religion.  It was pitched as the movement to replace temples with schools.  That intensified throughout the 20th century until the 1980s when things started to open up.  He also has a page of Shaolin Temple photos taken by Japanese tourists from before 1928.  

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Channelling Zhang Sanfeng

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Channelling Zhang Sanfeng

Manuals explaining secret martial arts techniques in China written before the 20th Century are rare.  A text translated by Paul Brennan, Explaining Taijiquan Principles, attributed to Yang Banhou [circa 1875] is a particularly interesting one.  But before I get into discussing it, I would like to frame it culturally.  

In China, learning to read and write was preparation for taking an exam that allowed one to become a government official.  Those jobs were extremely competitive and required full-time dedication to study.  It was not unusual for someone to spend forty years studying before getting an appointment, many people never got appointments, yet the possibility of getting one was valuable enough to keep studying.  

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Synesthesia

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Synesthesia

Sitting in the back seat of a relative's car, I picked up a copy of Oprah Magazine.  The magazine was filled with articles about how to have a happy-go-lucky life.  The first article I read was called, "How to Be More Creative."  The gist of the article is that creative people cultivate synesthesia.  Poets for instance, actually try to feel the sadness in rocks and trees, or the temperature of a rainbow.  (I couldn't find that article online, but I did find this excellent one about musician Pharrell Williams and his synesthesia.)  

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On Doing Research

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On Doing Research

Ben Judkins just had my friend Daniel Mroz write a piece on the doing martial arts research, check it out.

My first reaction to the title "Choosing a School: Affinity, Danger and Compliance," is that missing something.  That's because I memorized the Daodejing many years ago.  There is a chapter about the student teacher relationship that I will paraphrase below.

 

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    Chakras

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    Chakras

    This is a good read on Chakras from Tanrikstudies.org.  While the author doesn't go beyond Sanskrit texts, the back and forth between China and India between the 6th and 10th Centuries was vigorous.  Thus, it is not surprising that these ideas about a visualized and somaticized inner body transcending time and space would show up and develop at that time in both places with a huge variety of characteristics.  I might also point out that the so-called "emotions" he refers too could also be thought of as theatrical expressions of mood in the South Asian context.  That is, solo ritual expressions of mood were, like deity visualizations, connected to theater and dance as pervasive cultural narrative.   This post is just a teaser for my next big post on Monday...Oprah and Synesthesia.   

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    HAPPY YEAR OF THE FIRE MONKEY

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    HAPPY YEAR OF THE FIRE MONKEY

    I've been reading Daoism in the Twentieth Century, Between Eternity and Modernity, by David A. Palmer and Xun Liu.  It is excellent and deserves a full review in the coming weeks.  For today I have a juicy quote from the introduction which is by Kristofer Schipper:

    The linkage between communities that are established and reinforced through the institution of fengxiang[carrying incense ashes from one temple to another creating a network] are important, and many historical networks such as the Mazu temples of maritime merchants are clearly linked to China's commercial expansion.  But the economic role of temples was not limited to this function only

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