21. Feel thankful

Feel thankful for the chances to hone ourselves; both good and ill fortune are our benfactors.

Master Sheng Yen

Monastic holidays in Korea

I don’t mean that the monks take holidays; there’s an interesting article in today’s IHT on how monasteries in Korea are allowing lay people to live as monks or nuns, as the case may be) for a short break. Take a look. There are a number of interesting snippets, for example:

Golgulsa Temple, for example, about five hours from Seoul on public transportation, was built by an Indian monk in the sixth century and is surrounded by ancient stone caves. Its program is more physically active than the other temples’, offering training in a Korean Buddhist martial art called sunmudo that incorporates traditional martial arts with yoga- like poses, weapons training and breathing exercises.

I’d never heard of “sunmodo”! And how gratifying that it’s a fellow Welsh person, Kayte Lowri Pritchard, who is quoted as saying:

“I came again and again every weekend, quickly preferring the temple and sunmudo training to the usual Saturday night activities, which involved drinking a lot of alcohol and feeling awful all day on Sunday”

20. Gratitude can make us grow

Gratitude can make us grow, and the resolve to return favours can help us succeed.Master Sheng Yen

19. Pursue only…

Pursue only what you can and should acquire. Never pursue what you can’t and shouldn’t acquire.

Master Shen Yen

Beijing Baguazhang

Since I’ve been posting a fair bit recently about the Beijing Milun School where I first started learning baguazhang, here’s another YouTube video of the Cheng-style derivative form developed by Zhang Sheng Li; it’s not the style I was taught there, but interesting nonetheless:

African stick fighting

I’ve mentioned before that I once lived for a year in the mountains of rural Africa. The area of Lesotho where I was based was pretty traditional culturally, though culture and economics both had to change to reflect that most of the men were in South Africa, working in the gold mines.

The “national weapons” of Lesotho are the double fighting sticks; on occasion I would see the boys at the local school performing dances with them. Since I was working with Outward Bound, I spent a fair bit of time up in the high mountains, where boys too young to go away to work would spend the summer looking after their village’s cattle. Obviously, there wasn’t too much to do up there, and they spent a lot of time smoking dope, playing on musical instruments improvised out of empty petrol of vegetable oil tins, and… fighting with sticks.

I hoped to bring back a pair of sticks as a souvenir, but never managed to get hold of some. Still, it was really interesting to have seen – but very, very, difficult to find out more information about it. I suppose there may have been obscure anthropological reports, but I’ve never seen any discussion of this African fighting tradition.

Well, that’s now changed: the guys who are researching the knife-fighting techniques of the Cape Town slums and prisons (calling it the Piper Style) have put up a really interesting piece about stick fighting. True, they’re talking about the Zulus and Xhosa rather than the Sotho, but then the Basotho nation was largely created from fragments of other tribes, and in any case the description fits well with my recollectionof what I saw in the mountains of Lesotho. Really interesting, check it out.

18. To increase our blessings

To increase our blessings we need to recognize blessings, cherish blessings, nurture blessings, and sow the seeds of blessings.

Master Sheng Yen

A Battle of Wits

Although I had more important things to do, I was in need of a bit of escapism last night – so, I popped up to Golden Village in Plaza Singapura to catch A Battle of Wits. It was entertaining enough; it did a good job of showing the nastiness of war; the political difficulties of trying to maintain order in a besieged city; the suffering, fear and confusion of the civilian population; and the brutality and bloodiness of sticking bits of sharpened steel into another human being. It was historically interesting: I learned that in ancient China, pre-Qin, a city’s population would be about 4,000 people.

Taken as a whole, though, I found it disappointing. The English subtitles were comically bad, to the point of actually being distracting. The film also suffers from most of its themes having done better in other films – the siege couldn’t escape from comparison of the similar scenes in Hero, and the subplot of the female cavalry general who falls in love with Andy Lau’s hero kept making me think of Wong Fei Hung and Aunt Yee in Once Upon a Time in China! (Made worse that, to me at least, Fan Bing Bing actually resembles a younger Rosamund Kwan quite strongly). And what was up with her character? She’s supposed to be a cavalry general but spends most of the film in civvies cooing over Ge Li…

Plus, as other reviews have noted, there are lots of plot holes, loose ends and unexplained backgrounds … Well, it was an OK bit of entertainment, but no classic. Some reviews I’d read had got me hoping for more, so I was a bit disappointed, but perhaps that’s just me. 5/10

17. When faced with any difficulty

When faced with any difficulty of life, resolve it by following these four steps: face it, accept it, deal with it, and then let it go.

Master Sheng Yen

I meet a living treasure

China has a title, “Living Treasure” that is awarded to someone who is an exemplar of one or more cultural traditions. There’s an episode of Kickass Kungfu, for example, where Chris Crudelli interviews a living treasure who’s a master of Daoist cooking skills, and of baguazhang. I’ve googled for more information about this title, but can’t find anything.

Singapore has something similar, with its Cultural Medallion award. A couple of weeks ago, while my bagua fellow-students and I were having one of our Sunday evening review sessions, an old lady walked past; Madam Bao knew her, and introduced her to the rest of us. Madam Phan Wait Hong is (IIRC) 93 years old, and a Medallion winner for Chinese Opera. She spoke with the others for a while in Mandarin, and then went on her way.

I met her again on Tuesday night; I was practising on my own in Duxton Plain Park, and she came along once more; recognising me, said “Ah, lian gong“, smiled, and went on. Heh.

Madam Phan will be performing next week as part of the celebrations surrounding the re-opening of the National Museum. Unfortunately, I know I have a work commitment at that time, and won’t be able to attend. It’s a real pity, as I’d love to see the show.