Medicine, Martial Arts and Bandits

I'm on a writing retreat, working with a new draft of my book, exciting.

I got in a discussion on hoax/outrage central, ie. Facebook.  It quickly became an appeal to authority, boring.  So as a way of backing out I posted this reading list, I thought my readers would enjoy:

The standard definition of Six Harmonies is as follows: 

• Three external, wrists-ankles, elbows-knees, shoulders-hips.  
• Three internal, jing, qi, shen.  

In the interest of clarifying what relationship Chinese medicine might have to Six Harmonies I thought I would offer a short reading list:

This is a superb place to start because it goes from broad to narrow, and past to present, in attempting to give us an understanding of Chinese historic concepts of the body.  It also deals with seeing the body in art, which is a smart way in.  The Expressiveness of the Body  

Next I recommend this one, by Unschuld.  He taught an entire generation of scholars on the History of Chinese Medicine.  This book is from his public lectures, it is not the arcane historic discussion of his other works.  His conclusions are profound: What Is Medicine?  

Third, Unschuld's student Elisabtheth Hsu's work is exceptional and shows the range of ideas that jostle in the 20th Century around medicine and movement arts: The Transimission of Chinese Medicine 

Forth, this book is indispensable for understanding the current milieu: Qigong Fever 

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I also have another recommendation on the topic of Bandits in China.  The book title is, Chinese Femininities/ Chinese Masculinitites.  With a title like that, it is hardly surprising that it came out in 2002 and I never noticed it! (The picture on the front is also a turn off.)  It is a collection of essays, most of which are about historical gender issues, which is just weird.  But the article by Matthew H. Sommer titled:  Dangerous Males, Vulnerable Males, and Polluted Males: The Regulationof Masculinitiy in Qing Dynasty Law, deals with how professional martial artists and actors were viewed and treated by the law.  It doesn't actually discuss martial arts directly but the subject is implicit in the material.  Anyway, essential reading.  

Even better is an essay by David Ownby titled: Approximations of Chinese Bandits: Perverse Rebels, Romantic Heroes, or Frustrated Bachelors?  This essay also does not discuss martial arts directly, but what else could it be about with a title like that?  It is in fact an excellent summary of the issues. This one essay and its references are worth the price of the book, it is like getting ten books in just one essay!  High praise.

Snake Daoyin

This is Daoyin from Vietnam.  Elsewhere I have explained that the Daoyin Paulie Zink does has about twenty animals, it was a Daoist religious theatrical martial training system for animal role specialists.  Paulie Zink was explicitly being taught monkey kungfu (or Tai Sheng, which means Great Sage which is another name for the Monkey King).  All the animals were at times framed as being supportive training for learning the difficult parts of the various monkey roles (there are five of them).  Another way to understand it is that monkey is just the most developed role of the twenty animal roles.  That's how he explained it to me one afternoon, but I don't have that in writing or anything.

That is why I was delighted to find this video on Youtube.  It is almost certainly the same system, the snake movements are the same, but this woman has the full blown snake role.  I would love to know if she has little bits of all the other animals or if she just learned this one?  In any event, if this type of Animal Role Specialist Daoyin is old, like 500 years old, I'm betting there were at one time experts for every single animal.  Are there any other high quality masters of animal daoyin out there?  Experts in an animal other than snake or monkey?  I know there are dog kungfu experts but that appears to be a lesser amateur style.  Are there any pig masters for instance? How about crab masters?  Or frog masters?  Send me the links if you find them!  Please.  Also I'm taking a break from Facebook so if you comment there, please comment here too.  Thanks.

Sex is Dangerous

Historically, in English speaking countries anyway, there has been a gradual covering over of the idea that sex is dangerous.  Thus, most readers are probably unaware that 8 out of 10 mating dances also happen to be martial arts.  Nearly all mating dances were developed by people who had to deal with levels of violence that are frankly unimaginable for most people today. 

I first heard the idea that sex is dangerous expressed in an essay by Pat Califia* in about 1992. The essay was in the form of a photocopy that a friend handed to me, this was one of the ways people used to spread ideas before the internet. In the essay Pat Califia methodically went over all the ways sex has been dangerous from STD's to Romeo and Juliet.  

Historically sex has been dangerous in nearly every culture, but that hasn’t stopped most people from trying it, and at times (to understate the case) enjoying it.  (Since I am a contrarian, even to myself, readers may find this essay interesting as a counter point, “It’s Only a Penis.”)

One of the most brilliant and culturally transcendent ideas invented to make sex a little safer is the mating dance.  Saying that mating dances are an idea is somewhat problematic in that a great many animals do them too, peacocks come quickly to mind.  But humans have certainly attached all manner of rituals, protocols, visions, designs and ancillary purposes to the “idea” of learning and performing mating dances.   

People are often reluctant to communicate verbally about their sexual needs.  Speaking broadly across cultural realms, the range of what is considered sexual communication is mind bogglingly diverse.  What is thought of as sacred and what is taboo, what is ideal, and what is frightening, are literally all over the map.  

Dances have historically and evolutionarily played an important role in courting.  Dances were used to help teach adolescents how to behave around the opposite sex and how to communicate.  Men have a tendency to fight over women, and women often pick their mates base on the outcomes of these violent performances.  Women also compete over men, although they come to blows less often.

There is also a historic developmental link between mating dances and competitive dances that display martial prowess in front of a king.  This happened because part of the purpose of these dances was to honor the king and so when communities wanted to honor a woman coming of age they would do similar dances for them.  

We could go deeper into the many cultural purposes of mating dances, there is an enormous literature in socio-cultural anthropology to that effect.  But our subject is martial arts.  

Mating dances usually teach elements of competitive social violence and asocial violence.  Even rather stately mating dances like the Waltz teach one a lot about taking control of centrical momentum, which is one of the master keys for reversing the odds in a surprise attack.  Today when most people think of the waltz they are imagining staged prudery and pomp, that is not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about the Waltz as a folk art. I’m talking about spinning around and around for hours on end by the light of the moon on ever increasing amounts of alcohol, and then stumbling home in the dark.

Italian country dance is a great example of a martial art hidden inside of a social dance.  A great many of the Italian country dances are knife fighting games.  We can find similar examples in countless other cultures.

Many mating dances have extraordinary footwork which is directly transferable to weapons fighting, as well as drop steps for power generation.  Many mating dances have well developed elbow strikes, or hands raised to keep the spray of blood out of ones eyes.  

Nearly all mating dances were developed by people who had to deal with levels of violence that are frankly unimaginable for most people today.  These dances teach people to fight in the thrall of the heart fluttering hormones of sexual passion, fear, and other mind altering conditions.  As practical martial arts they are far more realistic than most “traditional” or “pure” martial arts when it comes to understanding how social violence happens and how asocial predators attack.  

Samba is a mating dance from Brazil that has it all.  It has superb defenses for attacks from behind, awesome footwork, fantastic body slam combinations, elbow strikes in all directions, vital target evasion, tripping, head attacks, and brilliant escapes. 

Watch this whole video but especially check out the guy in blue pants at the 4:03 minute mark.  Now imagine having someone attack you from behind and responding with that movement.

The inspiration for this post came from the fact that I was roped into teaching a dance class based on the song ‘What Does the Fox Say?’  After watching the videos and listing to the music for a few minutes I realized it was a Samba, so I went in and taught Samba to the kids.  I had extraordinarily good training in Samba from an important dance teacher of mine named Alicia Pierce.  Teaching the class to kids got me exploring Samba as a martial art and I was blown away by how effective it is.

No dance is usable as a martial art unless one conditions responses in a martial way.  That takes some time, but not more than about 40 hours.  The dance itself takes a lot longer to learn. Samba is a highly functional and practical self-defense system, but it has to be re-focused to that purpose.

A key concept in self-defense is the idea that when we encounter asocial violence it is usually a surprise and a new experience which causes us to freeze.  So one of the most important skills to develop is breaking the freeze.  The current convention is to teach students to do a single action like shouting or moving, or a single structurally solid martial technique like the S.P.E.A.R. or Dracula’s Cape.  And because under extreme stress we might freeze again or deceive ourselves by imaging we just moved when in fact we were still frozen, we want to condition ourselves to do the same action twice, or to do two structurally related actions one after the other.

But I’ve been doing some experiments and I’m nearly convinced that busting out a sudden dance pattern is a better way to break the freeze than the standard counter assault stances.  If you have mastered a fast dance pattern which was designed to deal with an attack from behind, I suspect that is a superior way to break the freeze and neutralize the threat.  

The term for the basic dance step in Samba is called ginga, which is the same name for the basic stepping pattern used in Capoeira, even thought these are technically different steps.  The term probably referred to the action of a sweep-oar moving back and forth propelling a boat forward from the stern of a river boat, but in practice ginga means something much more profound.  It means to have mojo, to have cashé, to have hidden power.  It means to have a twisted-up disambiguated poly-rythmic body.  It means being in more than one place at the same time.  It is a feeling.  It is a performance of other worldly access.  

A friend of mine ran a theater program in a Brazillian barrio.  One of his comments has stuck with me.  He said Brazilian kids don't wear clothes like other kids, they move their bodies around inside of them.  

I was recently watching a bunch of Lindy-Hop dancers, and they all had great technical skill, some of it quite impressive to watch.  But it just looked wrong to me, they didn’t have swing.  Swing is a word like ginga that refers to the African traditions of tricknology.  Lindy-hop was one of the first cross-over dances, one of the first African-American dances that White people started doing.  But despite being ‘good’ dancers, more often than not, they didn’t get it.  That is the origin of the jazz standard, ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!”

Take it away Ella:

Here is a link to the Lindy-Hop, it is a 15 minutes video and there are some great moves by many of the performing couples, but only the first couple has some swing.  Can you see it?

So back to martial arts. Awesome mating dances have that swing feeling, or ginga or whatever they call it locally.  It is the juice a person needs to make their dance into a martial art.  It isn’t a rhythmic pattern or a dance combination, it is a feeling of otherworldly connection, a type of access, an ability to come un-hinged.  

It is also one of the sexiest things in the world. 

 *Pat Califia used to be a woman but she has now swung over to being a man.

Mixing Styles of Kungfu

I'm headed out to teach in Chicago and then Traverse City for 10 days, if anyone wants to try and meet me, send an email.

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This post is just a quick follow up on the previous post: Performative.

There has long been an injunction against studying more than one martial arts style at a time.  The common explanation is that styles will conflict and the student will end up with a mixed style that doesn't represent either style well.  Let me put aside the problem that the student might be just a dabbler, of course if you want to learn real gongfu (kungfu) you have to dedicated hours everyday.  This discussion is for and about serious students of the arts.

In the dance world, students dedicate every day to dance.  But in the dance world the problem is exactly the opposite of the martial arts world.  People who learn many dance styles are versatile and adaptive.  The people who have exclusively studied one style tend to find it harder to dance in other styles.  The most notorious example is classically trained ballet dancers who find it hard to do african dance, they end up looking stiff.  And on the other end there are dancers who do everything with too much flow.  I'm not a fan of the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance," by the way, because they make this claim that the dancers are doing a wide variety of dances, but in reality I see ballet and some "poppie" hip-hop moves in almost every dance.  It should be called, "So You Think You Know What Dance is Because You Watch It On TV?"

Anyway back to martial arts.  The reason some serious students end up blending their arts together is because they think of the different arts in terms of how each art generates power.  So in practice they end up using one style's ideas about how to generate power in the techniques of another style.  

This problem does not come up if the teacher uses the concept of Performative Arts that I outlined in the previous post.  A given art is performed a specific way.  The same way a dance has a specific quality and character.  Each martial art has a performance standard, that is what you are learning.  Using martial arts to learn power generation is a mistake.  That should be an after thought.  

Rory Miller claims to be able to improve most people's power generation in a two day workshop whether they have ten years of experience or ten days.  It simply isn't very difficult to develop power.

I would also argue that the unique types of power any particular style has are entirely accessible through the performative aspects of the art.  

In the end what have you got?  Gravity, structure, unity of mass, and momentum.  No matter how tricky you get, it is always going to come back to these four.

Performative

Let's talk about the power of words.  Words can become stand-ins for whole ideas, even whole histories, which makes certain words really powerful.  But strangely these power-words have a half-life, a point at which they lose any actual meaning.  At that point they become simply markers of identity or tribe, if they maintain power it is the power to exclude or ridicule.

Here are some easy examples: sustainable, capitalism, embodiment, spiritual, relax. Feel free to add your own examples in the comments and to devise poems out of them.

After a word has journeyed to meaninglessness it can sometimes be reclaimed.  'Elightenment' is a good example of this.  The word got so over used that it hit the point of self-parody.  But I discovered that if I started using it to mean something real, immediate, present and available, people had to stop and try to figure out what I was talking about.  Suddenly the word had power again, not the same power it once had but at least the power to trigger a deeper conversation.

The paper I wrote last spring which is hopefully going to be published next year is called:  "Cracking the Code, Taijiquan as Enlightenment Theater."  At the same time as I came up with that title I realized the power of another word: Performative. 

The word 'performative' has been framing my teachings and arguments for about six months, it is a powerful word.  Of course I know it is going to become meaningless eventually, but while it still has power I'm trying to get as much use out of it as I can.

The word highjacked my vocabulary because the most common (and effective) argument against the notion that martial arts, theater and religion are a single subject is that performance is differnt from real fighting. 

There are many versions of this argument, for example, "The way people fight on stage is different than the way they fight in real life, therefore performing artists need to train differently than martial artists do."

My response is, no, that is a misconception, a blind spot.  In fact that mistaken view creates training artifacts which prioritize the illusion of utility.  If we start from the correct historically accurate assumption that martial arts are performative, then we won't create false answers to the "why" questions that constantly come from students who don't have experience with lethal violence.  (Another way for teachers to avoid this problem is simply to admit they don't know.  Hey, a guy can hope can't he?)

There is a lot packed into that last paragraph, let me try to unpack it a little.  What is the basic structure of martial arts, be they from Chinese theater or (to take an outlier example), Japanese operant conditioning for living in a castle where assassination is a regular threat?  The basic structure of martial arts is that we train the body to be able to perform certain operations which can be executed under extreme stress (be it the immediacy of a threat or the rigors of physically staying in-character for six hours at a time).  A prince living in a castle has to learn highly specific ritual responses with his body, when to bow, how to bow, what to do with his eyes,  what to do with his sleeves, how to walk into a room.  In Japan, operant conditioning was simply integrated into these exacting protocols.  If someone draws a sword from the left while you are sitting, you do this.  If you both draw at the same time you do this.  If the attack is at this distance you do this, if it starts closer in, do this instead.  It is performative.  It is exacting.  It is all in response to specific "what if's." But it is also part of a much larger performance.  It is the basic training for performing a prince.  

My favorite "why-question" training artifact to make fun of is "the chambered fist!"  This is the idea that the reason people pull their fist back to their hip is so that it will be cocked and loaded, ready to fire!  The real purpose of that whole body posture with the fist at the hip is performative.  As operative conditioning it is a position one fights to, not a position one fights from. As theatrical training it is the base for performing a character.  The core skill one needs to be able to physically stay in character is the ability to keep returning to the same exact body shapes but with specific communicative variations, like context specific walks, mimed actions, or altered facial expressions.  

Enlightenment is perfromative too.  One of the big misconceptions about enlightenment is that it is some sort of process, some type of reactive or responsive way of seeing the world and then acting in it.  I would even argue that the most important element of enlightenment is its performative nature.  Enlightenment is immediate, that is, it is completely un-mediated by any process, it is instantaneous.  

The same is true for gender.  Gender is completely performative.  I can perforom as a woman or a man if I practice those gender norms.  Performing like a woman won't actually change my sex or my biology but it can be liberating to question what is performance and what is biology.  

Identity isn't real; performance is.  "Reality-Based" martial arts aren't real; performance is.  Earthly hierarchies of superiority aren't real; performance is. 

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Now for fun try replacing various subject words from the classic "mystical" chapter 6 of the Daodejing with variations of the word "performance":

The Valley Spirit is Deathless,

It is called the Dark Mare,

The door of the Dark Mare is the root of heaven and earth,

Lingering, it only seems to exist,

Yet in use, it is inexhaustible.  

--Laozi, Chapter 6

Translation by Ellen M. Chen, In Praise of Nothing; 2011: p. 93.

Shadow Yoga

Shandor Remete, Shadow Yoga, Chaya Yoga : The Principles of Hatha Yoga. North Atlantic Books, 2011.

I'm taking a greater interest in yoga lately, especially since I started my, Daoist Circus Yoga for Kids, the funnest yoga class for kids ever. (Scroll to the bottom of the link.)

This book is small, elegant and I got a lot out of it.  That surprised me because frankly, most books are just personal spin, and reiteration, especially books about movement and spirituality.

This quote in the introductions shows his commitment:

“I have also studied other disciplines: martial arts and the ancient Kathakali and Bharatanatyam dance forms of southern India.  What has become apparent to me is that there is a common basis in the  preparatory forms of all of these disciplines.” 

Zander (as his students call him) often recommends his students study martial arts because they are too WEAK!  And as irony would have it, quite a few talented and dedicated students of his have come to me to study or exchange ideas.  I really should have read this book a few years ago, but better late than never.

On the primary goal of yoga he has this to say:

“Yoga is a spiritual system that deals practically with the process of enlightenment.  The final goal is to differentiate the soul from everything that is not the soul.  The method of yoga teaches the individual to discriminate, or to see the differences between these two things.”

I find that a bit troubling, mostly because he doesn't define soul and the word is so loaded with meaning in English.  He doesn't even translate it back into Sanskrit as atman, although I think that is what he means.  After thinking more deeply about the totality of the text, I started to think that when he says soul he means what we call in Chinese the three Hun, and this would be differentiated from the seven Pö.  But more on that below.

He explains the the process is about skillfully reducing fixed patterns, and that if this end goal is kept in mind, the steps on the path will be self-revealing.  

This was probably my favorite quote from the book:

“It is little understood that flexibility of the whole body can be achieved through the proper manipulation of the ankles, wrists, and neck.  When these five regions are flexible the entire system softens and gains elasticity.”

By stating this he is suggesting that flexibility is always available and that mostly people practicing yoga are profoundly misunderstanding the subject.  His biggest complaint is that people do not practice, nor do they comprehend the importance of, the preliminaries.

He has quite a bit of stuff about out-side the body perception and practice.  This seems a bit rigid and formulaic to me, but else where he explains that the order and content of learning is not inherent and can be skipped by some people.  Micro-macrocosm stuff like this planet is connected to your liver, can be read as jindan (golden elixir) instructions, but in the modern era I think we can skip right to talking about these visualizations as having a function in the perception action chain of motivations for movement.  We agree on the importance of this kind of content but disagree on how to present it.

Zander describes a three body system which is like the Chinese one:  the Causal Body karana sharira, the Subtle Body sukshama sharira, the Gross/Physical Body sthula sharira. I think this corrisponds to shen, qi and jing.

He describes kosha which are traps (or perhaps cavities?) which interweave the three bodies together, there are 7 of them according to a yoga text he references.  These are what hold the 7 shadow bodies together.

Zander explains the very complex relationship between breathing and posture, but then says that all of this is preliminary to breathing without any fixed pattern.  

There is a chapter on Nauli kriya which was outside my knowledge base. On further consideration I noticed it looks a lot like the chair pose in Paulie Zink's daoyin, and a lot like one of the basic movements of Tibetan trulkhor. I hadn't considered this type of yoga before but it might prove very useful for people differentiating the dantian from the kua.  

The title of the book comes from this quote:

"The appearance of the body is nothing but frozen shadows.” --  Allama Prabhudeva.

“The shadows are seven in number: the shadow of joy, the shadow of the intellect, the shadow of the mundane mind, the power of principle, the gross structure, the luster of the skin, and the shadow on the ground.  Each shadow is a blockage of light.”  

Elsewhere he describes them differently, so I don’t think he intended this list to pin it down.  They are all obstacles, but they are the obstacles we happen to have to work with.  I could plumb these further: luster of the skin is probably radiance, shadow on the ground is probably pure earth power, the power of principle is probably bio-mechanics and jin or ground-path power, intellect is probably having preferences, the shadow of joy has me a bit stumped but I'm guessing it is unconsciously obscuring our animal nature with nice-ness.

I thought of hun and pö as a translation of soul and shadow bodies into Chinese. In Chinese cosmology, the hun and pö exist as a form of polarity holding us together during our life, and they disperse at death.  The hun are said to disperse within the first three days (they go up!), but even in a normal death the pö can take up to seven years to disperse (they go down!).  This is why proper funerals are so important in Chinese culture, there is a danger of creating a ghost if the pö don't fully disperse.  In a sense we can think of the pö as unresolved conflicting emotions and weak or desperate desires.  If a grandparent dies really wanting a cigarette, there is a chance they can pass on that conflicted emotion to a child as some quirky behavior.  That is a psychological "ghost" but there are other types.  A desire for power or revenge would tend to be more demonic than ghostly, but essentially made of the same ephemeral stuff.

An immoral, or xian, in Daoist cosmology is a person who has a complete death at the moment of death. That is, their hun and pö completely disperse instantly because they have already completely differentiated them (like Zander is suggesting is the goal of yoga: to differentiate the souls from the shadow bodies).  Thus great immortals like Zhang Daoling rose up in broad daylight with their dogs and chickens at the moment of death.  

Zander offers a translation of the term samadhi as “absorption."  I think that is exactly the way to translate it if we are talking about a movement tradition like daoyin, theater, or martial arts.

Anyway it is a small elegant book and I recommend it!

Hitting the Road

I'm headed to the University of Connecticut to deliver a paper on Daoyin.  It compares Tibetan, Orthodox Daoist, and Animal Role Specialist Opera styles of Daoyin, exploring the commonalities in view, method and fruition.

I'm then headed up to Vermont to work with Paulie Zink's youngest advanced student, Damon Honeycutt.  

Then I'm going to Montreal for fun.

And then I'm goign to be teaching for a week in Ottawa with Daniel Mroz.  

As usual if there is someone you want me to meet, beat, or have intellectual intercourse with drop me a line!  I'm much nicer and more dangerous in person than I seem on the blog.  

Here is my schedule 2014:  

• Connecticut Oct 4th
• Vermont Oct 6th
• Montreal Oct 10th
• Ottawa Oct 13th
• Back in Boulder Oct 19th

And then I'm going to Chicago to teach Daoyin and Internal Martial Arts in a graduate level Shiatsu Progarm, followed by a week in Traverse City for some workshops.

• Chicago Nov 6th
• Traverse City Nov 11th
• Back in Boulder Colorado Nov 17th

I Bought an iPad Mini

I bought an iPad Mini with a case that has handles, a tripod attachment, two lenses, and a directional microphone.  I took these four videos and then I took it back to the store so I could get more Gigabits.  The new one is on order and I should get it in a couple of days.  It is pretty fun. Getting good video is likely to be key to running a martial arts business, so I'm upping my game.  Let me know if you want me to video anything specific, you know me fighting a bunch of ninjas with nunchucks or whatever.  

If you add comments at the bottom that is great, it is also great if you put comments on the Youtube channel because that seems to spread the videos faster.  You can also subscribe to my Youtube channel, I'm trying to bust 500 subscriptions and I'm at around 450.  And of course if you share one on Tumblr or Facebook, or Google Plus or your own blog, that is probably even better.  More to come.