Sacrifice, and attachment

Up at 6 this morning, and off to Duxton Plain Park to practise bagua. Got a good hour or so in, and actually managed to rise before the dawn chorus. Early morning practice has been an aim of mine for a few months now, but has always yielded to just a bit longer in bed. Recently, though, life is getting busy, and if I don’t get up in the morning to practice, I’ll get nothing done at all.

When I got to the spot where I normally work out, I found something interesting: a pile of smouldering paper, though whether it was ‘hell money‘ or something else, I couldn’t tell. Next to the pyre were a number of polystyrene cartons containing cakes, a number of glasses containing a yellowish liquid (beer? tea?) and a lot of burned-out joss sticks. I have no idea what this was for; I think ghost month is over, although on Sunday night I was practising in the same spot and there was a wayang performance in the next street. The Jing Wun Men lads were out as well this morning, going through their routines; lots of poles, halberds and swords in evidence.

This evening, it was off to dharma class for me; Wangchog, the Welsh monk, is back from his trip to New York. He’s a very funny talker; I laughed out loud a number of times during the dharma talk. His theme for the evening was “Why we lack confidence”; in essence, because we are too attached, and emotionally involved in, the environment we live in – but we can’t control it. He’s been told by his spiritual teacher that it’s time for him to learn Chinese if he wants to be a proper dharma teacher in Chinese Asia. He runs a course on Buddhist teachings on Saturday afternoons, which I never go to; the class times are the same as my new Chinese class, though, which is held nearby. I suggested that I call in on my way to the MRT station (before going to bagua class), and we can spend a while going over our Mandarin together. Could be interesting!

When gods descend to earth

Just to follow up on my review of Margaret Chan’s Ritual is Theatre; Theatre is Ritual: if you’re interested in Asian martial arts, you should take a little while to watch the excerpts of Kickass Kung Fu on YouTube. It’s a BBC production presented by Chris Crudelli, which has been chopped up into short excerpts and posted on YouTube in a totally uncopyrightlicious manner – but it’s still good for the rest of us, who would otherwise never get to see it.

Chris speaks Mandarin and is an expert in a variety of martial arts. Some sections of Kickass Kung Fu veer away from the martial arts, however. In a couple of clips, he visits the ‘Vegetarian Festival’ in Thailand. This is actually a festival of the Chinese community, and is the same folk Daoist religion as Chan documents in Singapore, though with some different influences. Chan mentions it briefly; it got its name because many of the participants purify themselves for a couple of weeks beforehand, and avoid meat and alcohol.

It’s the same basic rite, though: gods possess the medium, and perform acts of mortification – which these clips show in some detail. What’s interesting is that the possessed mediums experience no pain, and don’t bleed. During the possession they are gods, not men, and gods can’t be hurt. It’s interesting that Haitian voudun is just the same; according to the literature, once a Haitian has been possessed by a loa, they can rub chopped chillies in their eyes, or drink potent alcohol, without effect.

The first clip shows men being possessed and going into a trance before being skewered, to Chris’ obvious horror. This is pretty graphic: you really, REALLY shouldn’t watch this if you’re squeamish.

The second is firewalking, over a foot-high pile of burning charcoal. At the beginning of this clip we see a couple of mediums in full regalia, looking like Chinese opera characters. The possessed mediums run across the charcoal without harm. The marshal of ceremonies is unhappy; he can see that Chris is not possessed, and tries to warn him away. Chris perseveres – and gets second-degree burns on the soles of his feet. (But heals mysteriously rapidly – perhaps because Chris is also an expert in qigong? Who knows…). Anyway, watch and enjoy, as the gods descend to earth.

New class: bagua jian

Back to bagua class with Ge Chun Yan tonight. I’m still rubbish; I got told off tonight for not defending strongly enough in the pair exercises, plus I still don’t stand straight. Bah. Anyway, good news: we’ll be starting bagua sword class in November; it’ll also be on Saturday night, after we finish the basic palm lesson.

Cool: this means I can use the bagua sword that I brought back at great inconvenience from Beijing. It wasn’t easy – it’s a big sword! I was convinced that they wouldn’t be available in Singapore, but I was wrong; there’s a shop in the Bras Basah Centre that sells bagua swords identical to mine…

… except for one small detail: mine was engraved on one side with my school’s details (so, sentimental value) and on the other with the Daoist seven stars symbol, representing the constellation of the Plough (Ursa Major; known to USians as the Big Dipper, and to Chinese as the Bushel). I never knew why that appeared so much in the Chinese internal martial arts until I read Margaret Chan’s Ritual is Theatre; Theatre is Ritual (which I recently reviewed) . It seems that in traditional Chinese thought, this constellation represents “the locus of yin and yang forces, and therefore the controller of all order in the universe“. Not a bad symbol to have on a sword, perhaps.

Circle walking

Yes, back from Malacca. I feel much better for a few days’ break, even if I did eat something that definitely disagreed with me, and despite the mosquitoes in my guest-house room. I have lots of bites; oddly, I have at least seven bites in a line on my left arm, and none at all on my right arm. Why, I wonder? Is it because the blood in the left arm comes straight from the heart? Are mosquitoes romantics?

Anyway, I went out to Duxton Plain Park to practice my circle walking, and managed an hour and half. I’ve noticed in the past that my circle tends to get smaller and smaller, so I’d bought some string and chalk, and actually marked one out; it made a big difference.

I feel very out of shape; in particular, my breathing is too shallow, and too high in my chest. Abdominal breathing, expanding and contracting the lower dan-tian, is very important in my experience of walking the circle. Get the breathing right, and the coccyx tucks under, the stomach tightens, the back goes more upright, and the walking just flows more easily. I worked on the ba mu zhang that Ge Chun Yan has taught us, as well as the bagua qigong set that I learned in Beijing (but haven’t done much since coming to Sinapore). Lots of repetitions of the single palm change, as well. I can feel the benefit; my legs ache, and I can feel the effects of stretching in my back and along my arms. More practice needed!

I need to be a little careful; my achilles tendon was very sore by the time I got home, a combination of the continuing after-effects of my fall last year, and bad habits in my gait.

Review Essay: Chinese Spirit Medium Worship in Singapore

A short while ago I noticed a book in the MPH store in Raffles City: “Ritual is Theatre; Theatre is Ritual”, subtitled “Tang-ki: Chinese Spirit Medium Worship”, with a cover photo of a tattooed medium, a sword piercing his cheeks, and twelve more skewering the flesh of his back. Written by Margaret Chan, a lecturer in theatre at Singapore Management University, it’s full of fascinating material, and I’ve been reading it with great enjoyment. I’ll refer to the book hereafter as “RiT:TiR”.

The well-written content covers three main themes. It gives a short history of the Hokkien people, an overview of traditional Chinese medium-based religion, and an investigation of contemporary folk religion in Singapore (with brief mention of other Hokkien-speaking regions).

The main focus of the book is the tang-ki – a medium possessed by the spirit of a god, who undertakes suffering on behalf of worshippers.

The Hokkien people

Most residents of Singapore will know that the largest Chinese dialect group here traditionally spoke Hokkien. This group originally came from Fujien province in south-east China. RiT:TiR fills in a lot more background detail, establishing the Hokkien people as the descendants of refugees from the collapse of the Tang dynasty who fled south from Shaanxi. This is reflected by interesting features of about the dialect - the term for China is “Tang Shan” (the mountain of the Tang), not “Zhong Guo” . Apparently, the dialect retains many features of ancient Chinese now lost from Mandarin.

The Hokkien were also the last of the Chinese to submit to the Manchu invaders who formed China’s last dynasty. The last truly Chinese dynasty were the Ming – and their last loyalist general was a Hokkien. Upon his defeat, he fled with with his remaining forces to Taiwan; the island previously hadn’t seen much migration from the mainland, and the settlement by the defeated Ming army forms the basis upon which China maintains its claim to sovereignty to this day. Back in Fujien, t the Manchu responded to Hokkien resistance by laying waste to the province, instigating a wave of emigration to South-East Asia, and contributing to the development of overseas Chinese communities throughout the region.

This thread of the book is relatively short, but is important for context – and, as a resident of Singapore, it’s very interesting for me to have the Hokkien established as traditionally being combative warriors. (This explains why National Service recruits of all races famously emerge from the army fluent in Hokkien expletives!)

Traditional Chinese religion

RiT:TiR also tries to set Chinese folk religion, or religious Daoism, into an historical context. For me, this is the weakest section; I can’t escape thinking of two other books as I went through this material: Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti, and Robert Graves’ The White Goddess.

RiT:TiR places modern-day trance mediums as descended from 5,000-year history, dating back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Chan tells us that many contemporary features of trance-mediums date from ancient dynastic religion. While this could be true, my ability to accept this is undermined by other elements of the narrative, particularly where we learn that rituals change dramatically to meet worshippers’ demands. There are also other points made by the author, such as claiming that “theatre made the gods” (p44), and asserting that religious theatre is only, and nothing more than, theatre (p140) which make me uneasy. This element of the book reads more like a semi-mythical account devised by a dramatist, as Graves was a poet rather than a historian when he wrote “a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth” in The White Goddess. While I remain to be convinced, I acknowledge the power of the idea and, in a Singapore searching for identity, can see the potential for this ‘origin myth’ to take root.

Chan is on much stronger ground describing the nature of spirit-possession, the role of the medium, and the roles of the different deities. It’s very interesting to compare the experience of possession in tang-ki worship to that of voudun as outlined by Deren. Tang-kis often become mediums unwillingly; possession is resisted, and the human is overcome by the demands of the gods. In many cases, it seems that tang-kis have ‘spirit bones’ – due to fate, or past lives, they are doomed to have a short life; they can only extend their time, and live fully, by becoming a vehicle for the gods.

The gods themselves are outlined in some detail; RiT:TiR introduces us to their back-stories, their appearance, their natures, and the reasons why worshippers follow them. Covering deities such as Justice Bao; the Baby God; Fazhugong; Guan Gong; Jigong the mad monk; Elder and Second Grandas; and others, this was a fascinating trove of information for me: I’ve seen statues and pictures of these gods in temples and shrines many times, and I’ve even been to ask questions of a medium possessed by the Monkey God, Qi Tian Da Sheng; this short introduction helps me to better understand what I see around me every day.

Contemporary folk religion

From its (mythical?) beginnings, Chinese medium worship has been the religion of the people. When the Emperor and his officials were the only ones authorized to pray to the state gods, tang-kis were the intermediaries between the powerless, excluded, poor and the “gods who can get things done”. In the cyberpunk novel Count Zero, William Gibson describes voudun as a “street religion, [come] out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago”, a description even more apt for the tang-kis.

RiT:TiR suggests that tang-ki worship survives in its purest form in Singapore because the Hokkien community here was established under British rule, which didn’t interfere in religion (unlike the Portugese, Dutch, or Communist Chinese). There is also a hint that modern-day Singapore parallels the model of Imperial China, and that the poor and ill-educated Hokkien of today has little more influence over the government and mandarins than his ancestors did over the Emperor. Of course, this may not have been the author’s intention, but it’s an interesting idea. However, even in Singapore, society’s growing affluence means its demands on the gods change: RiT:TiR notes how the focus is shifting from worshipping gods of war and security to those of “wealth without effort”.

In describing the detail of contemporary practice, RiT:TiR sheds light on a fascinating aspect of Singapore. I’ve seen for myself the processional outings of lion- and dragon-dancers, drumming from the backs of trucks; I’ve also seen the neon-coloured triangular flags lining the roadsides. After reading this book, I finally understand what it all means. I also finally found out more about the role of the puppet shows that so interested me when I first arrived in Singapore. We’re also given a glimpse of Singapore that most people never know about: the word-of-mouth gathering of worshippers at midnight in Jurong car parks, and guerrilla shrines in anonymous mass-housing estates – rich material for a film or novel.

As economic and social changes transform spirit-medium worship in Singapore, RiT:TiR also briefly looks at how it has evolved in other Hokkien communities, in Malaysia, Taiwan, and back in the Chinese mainland. We see how this Chinese tradition has responded to similar Malay and Indian religious practices. Finally RiT:TiR ponders the future of the spirit cult as better-educated and more affluent Chinese turn to more formal religious practices – and wonders whether there could be a revival of this more emotional, atavistic cult.

Ritual is Theatre: Theatre is Ritual, by Margaret Chan, published 2006 by the SNP International Publishing Pte Ltd (Singapore). 184pp, ISBN 981-248-115-X

Note: this review is cross-posted at my other blog.

Holiday!

It’s Deepavali this Saturday, so there’s no bagua class. I’ve decided to take a few days’ leave, and I’m going to head up to Malacca in Malaysia for some R&R. Malacca’s a quiet place, and my favourite haven when I need to get out of Singapore. I haven’t had a holiday since I went to Xi’an with some Tsinghua classmates last November. A LOT has happened since then, and I am definitely overdue for some downtime.

I should be going to capoeira tonight, but it will be an early start tomorrow, I need to pack, got things to do… still got unfinished business at Bantus, but it can wait.

Malacca, here I come!

News from the Buddhist channel

It’s been a while since I visited the Buddhist Channel, so I just note here some interesting articles:

•  The Singaporean government is interested in helping to revive the ancient Buddhist university of Nalanda in India;
• The Abbot of the Shaolin Temple wants the monks to learn English and I.T. skills. I’m not sure what’s really happening at Shaolin. One the one hand, some people say the Abbot is using intellectual property laws to reclaim the temple’s name and stop it from being associated with commercial tat. He also certainly wouldn’t be the only Abbot of a Buddhist temple to use MBAs and management techniques to run the temple effectively in the modern world. These are all laudable aims. On the other hand, I hear stories about gifts of expensive cars, and profits from all the tours and martial arts schools,  and I wonder how where the balance is between the role of a temple as haven for the sangha, and a state-blessed money-making leviathan. Hmm. Guess I don’t have enough reliable facts to judge.
• Jet Li has moved back home to Beijing to live, and is becoming more involved in promoting Buddhism.
• A distinctly American form of Buddhism has evolved over the past few decades.

Pride’s Deadly Fury

I linked a while ago to a Youtube clip of baguazhang. From the information supplied by whoever posted it, the clip is taken from an 80s martial arts film called Wulin Zhi, also known as Pride’s Deadly Fury, and The Honor of Dongfang Xu. I did a bit of searching around online, and it seemed that this film is pretty hard to get hold of these days. I asked some martial arts friends in Beijing about it, and they didn’t know anything about it, and said they’d never seen it in the shops.

Anyway, I sent the YouTube link to my classmate Jono, who looked at it and said “Do you realise who the older girl in the clip is?” And of course, it’s Ge Chun Yan, our teacher! Most of the actors are from the original Beijing Wushu Team, and are serious martial artists. Jono mentioned the film to Madam Ge and, lo and behold, at last night’s training she arrived with a fistful of copies of the film on VCD (with price stickers in RMB on the shrinkwrap, so obviously it is still on sale in Beijing).

==== (Added later) SPOILER ALERT ====
From the YouTube clip, of course, I had no idea what the film was about. It’s actually a variant of the story of Huo Yuan Jia and the episode in which he fought a number of Western and Japanese fighters – the story recently retold in Jet Li’s Fearless. In this version, the protaganist (Xu?) is a Baguazhang expert making a living with his family as wandering martial artists, giving demonstrations for money. They have a falling out with some students of Master He Da Hai(the Huo Yuan Jia role). He defeats the students, and then master He, who becomes involved to defend the honour of his school. However, when Xu is subsequently injured, M aster He and his senior students prove themselves to be moral, upright characters who give him money to live on. After this, Xu and his family are taken in by a baguazhang master who helps him to regain his strength, and trains him in bagua techniques (this is the section on YouTube).

Master He is engaged in a contest with three Western strongmen, who know Chinese kung fu as well as western boxing and wrestling. He defeats the first two, but time runs out, and the contest with the last and strongest westerner is postponed. Before it can be held, the Westerners and Japanese treacherously send a Chinese thug to smash master He on the head with a club swung from a moving carriage. Master He is incapacitated. Xu visits him in hospital, and returns the money He had previously given. To his suprise, Xu is named by He as He’s successor as head of the school, and asked to take on thefinal westerner. After a confrontation with some of He’s students, who refuse to accept the new head, Xu takes on the last Westerner, in a long and difficult fight, which he eventually wins with bagua techniques. As the crowd swirls around him, one of the dissident students tries to stab Xu in the back. Master He is nearby, sees the attempt and, pushing Xu out of the way, is stabbed himself and dies. Thus, the story keeps fairly close to the Huo Yuan Jia legend.

Ge Chun Yan has very little to do in the film except to look shocked a few times. I was getting ready to be disappointed, until very late in the film. There’s a fairly lame subplot, in which a little girl is kidnapped by thugs, and is rescued by Ge Chun Yan with the assistance of some of the students from the school (as well as the bagua master, who appears from nowhere). Anyway, Ge Chun Yan whups a lot of bad-guy ass with some impressive bagua moves!

I’m being vague on names, relationships, and detailed plot points because the film is naturally all in Mandarin, with no subtitles, so I missed a lot of detail (although I was pleasantly surprised at how much I could follow).

Great film, with some excellent fight scenes, wicked westerners, and a rare chance to see bagua being used properly in fight scenes (and no, Jet Li in The One doesn’t count!)

A matter of priorities

Sad to say, the talk I was due to give to students at Ngee Ann Polytechnic has been cancelled. I was supposed to be one of a group of people talking about our experiences of working around the world, and how it’s affected our views on identity and so on. As I mentioned before, I planned to focus on the time I spent in tribal regions of Southern Africa, and my experience of apartheid-era South Africa. However, the Ministry of Education has apparently given instructions that the students be given a talk on sex education, family, and having children, and the slot allocated for our talk was the only one that could be freed up. I’m not sure if this is related to the recent articles in the Straits Times about the rising levels of STDs amongst Singaporean teenagers, or perhaps to the need to produce more future citizens, which has also been much discussed over the past few months. Either way, it’s more important than our talks, I guess, so there goes my presentation.

Mud stepping and moon cakes

A couple more points occurred to me about the mud stepping:

1. Maybe we should just take the name literally. I think that if you’re fighting on a slippery surface, it’s a good step for keeping your balance whilst moving and turning fast – IF you can do it well. When I came back to Singapore from my first stay in China, I’d been practising the mud step for three months – in shoes, on dry, dusty ground. I tried to give a demonstration on the shiny floor of NTU’s sports hall with no shoes, just socks, slipped, and fell flat on my backside. (Alvin was there, and may remember!). Mud stepping is tough on a slippery surface, but if done well is perhaps better than other steps?
2. Both Madam Ge and Alex have taught me moves that involve ‘merging’ your body’s centre of gravity with your opponent’s, uprooting them, and flinging them off their feet so that they fall some distance away. You don’t know how your opponent is going to fall, nor do you know how quickly they will recover. What’s the best way to close the distance quickly without opening your guard or becoming unbalanced? A fast mud step seems to be one good option, one which keeps you balanced and on guard as you approach.

Just a couple of points that struck me; as always, I welcome comments and feedback.

Speaking of my mud stepping, Madam Ge chastised me last night for mine; she said it was clear that I’d been taught to move too fast, because I was bobbing up and down while I went through the single palm change. She emphasised the importance of practising slowly, slowly at first in order to get the shifts of balance correct. Personally, I totally agree. The place where I learned in Beijing, the Beijing Milun School, taught us to move as fast as possible from the very beginning, which always seemed to me to be a good way to get bad habits ingrained; mud stepping is easier when performed quickly. Incidentally, I notice the Milun school’s web site is down; perhaps the disputes and internal politics that were developing around the time I left finally reached breaking point. I’ve emailed Will Yorke, who was the school’s administrator, to find out what happened, but answering email never was his strong point!

Anyway, as usual, a group of Madam Ge’s students went to Duxton Plain Park this evening to review what we’ve done so far. As usual, we agreed 5:30 and, as usual, I was the only one to make it on time I was quite chuffed – Jono mentioned I’ve lost weight; I was practising as he approached, and he said he wasn’t sure at first if it was me or Guo Liang (who is at least 10 years younger than me!). However, if I have lost weight, that was undone by Aunty Bao, who turned up with a big bag full of mooncakes. We managed to practise for a while, and then gave in to temptation and tucked to them! There’s always lots of funny conversation in a mix of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English – and I have a feeling that there’s a campaign underway to teach me Cantonese by stealth! As we were eating, a couple of ladies stopped by to talk; they’d passed by earlier, seen us practising, and wanted to learn bagua. We gave them Madam Ge’s contact details; perhaps they’ll start attending the new Tuesday course.

Uncle Chong reappeared; he’s spent the last few weeks on a package tour to Xinjiang and Shaanxi in China (ie, the Chinese parts of the Silk Road). He showed us lots of pictures, and brought us back small gifts. Mine was a small bracelet with a small jade Chinese lion crouching flat. It doesn’t really have any buttocks, which apparently is lucky – we joked that it will bring both luck and constipation!

Then back to practise, with emphasis on the single palm change. Round about 8 we packed it in; the others headed off to a food court, and I came back home.