Spockwa zhang

You know what? I could never do that “live long and prosper” thing until I started baguazhang.

(spockwa palm)

(bagua palm)

Wait… Spock knows bagua? As Neo would say: woah!!! 

Getting lost in details

We’re coming to the end of the bagua sword course, one lesson left, and I still have a long way to go before I’ve got the form down pat. Missing that one lesson when I was ill turns out to have been a real stumbling block. I’m gradually picking up the moves, but I’m having real trouble remembering how to string them together.

Plus, I really, really, really need to improve my Mandarin. I know, I know, I’ve been saying this for a long time now. But still: no being able to understand my teachers is a big problem. There’s no way I could have made as much progress as I have without the support and help of my fellow-students, who’ve translated and explained for me. Every once in a while, though, this hinders rather than helps, which was what happened last night. The form starts off linear, then goes into circle-walking, and reverts to a line at the end, and this last transition has been causing me big problems. I couldn’t understand what Madam Ge was trying to tell me, and was only being confused more by what the others were telling me – “go in a straight line”, “everyone decides for themself which way to go”. I wound up thinking that we were supposed to be going perpendicular to the arc of the circle, and then got even more confused and frustrated when I was going in a completely different direction to everyone else! Hehehe. Eventually someone said the magic words that made everything clear: “we’re trying to move back to the place where you started”.

Doh! Help on the details is always valued and welcome; sometimes the big picture needs to be explained first, though!

41. Deal with matters with wisdom

Deal with matters with wisdom, and care for people with compassion.

Master Sheng Yen

40: All the ups and downs of life

All the ups and downs of life are nourishing experiences for our growth.Master Sheng Yen

Week’s roundup

Phew, well, that was the first week of the new job. As you can imagine, things have been pretty busy – lots of people to meet, things to learn, new sleep patterns, etc etc, so I’ve not had much energy for blogging! I like the new job; it’s really interesting, and so are the people.

On the topics that concern this blog, the most important consequence was that I was too tired to attend the bagua spear class. That was the second in the sequence, and I’d missed the first because I was ill. That means I’ve missed too much, so I’ll wait for the next time Madam Ge runs this.

That reminds me, I lent Madam Ge my copy of The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter; I must remember to ask her what she thought of it…

It’s been a wet week – an unusual amount of rain for this time of year. I took a tumble while I was walking down a steep slope; the concrete was wet and greasy, and I landed quite hard. For a while I was worried that it was a rerun of two years ago, when I slipped on wet tiles on Orchard Road, and screwed up my achilles tendon. On this occasion, quite a few joints were wrenched, including a knee, but luckily nothing was serious. I’ve been out to practice my taijiquan and bagua in Duxton Plain Park a couple of times, but taking it a little easy while my joints still ache.

On Friday night I was practicing the bagua qigong set when some European (judging by his accent) guy came out onto the back stairs of one of the shophouses overlooking the spot where Ialways go; he was shouting “oi”, “hey you” and so on, trying to get me to move into a spot more convenient for him to take a photo. A**h**e. I’m not performing for your entertainment, and in any case is it so hard to ask politely?

Interesting to see that for the European launch of 300, they held the press conference in Second Life. That’s a little bit of synchronicity; I’ve just joined Second Life myself, as I think I’ll be using it a lot for the new job. I see that the film is stirring up controversy as people (try to) draw contemporary parallels…

39: Grasp opportune conditions

Grasp opportune conditions when they come, create them when there are none, and ere conditions ripen, never force a thing to be done.

Master Sheng Yen

8 goal roundup

My new job starts tomorrow, so my little break comes to an end. How did I do on the goals I set myself? Well, the result was mixed. I had a bad cold for one of the three weeks; I did try to practice once, but the cold just seemed to get worse and go deeper into my chest as a result, so I stopped until I’d shaken it off. Also, I was pleased that a number of social opportunities came up, so I had fewer free evenings to practice than I’d expected

So:

1. Yang 24-set: yes, made good progress on this, and can do it better than I could before.
2. Cheng Man Ching 37-move Taiji set: yes, relearned, and better than before.
3. Xuan Xuan Taiji broadsword set: yes, at least as good as before.
4. Yang 13-move Taiji broadsword set: no. I gave up on this. It’s too long since I was able to do this. Also, just before I left Beijing, I bought an instruction DVD for this form, but never watched it until now. It suggests that the way I learned before was flawed. I’ll have to come back to this in the future.
5. Bagua Turning-Spinning Qigong: yes, although I need to do more work to get the final turning section follow the ying-yang pattern more closely. I actually like this qigong set a lot.
6. Iron Shirt Neigong exercises: no. Didn’t have enough time. Still very high on my to-do list.
7. Bagua palm and sword sets:yes. These actually benefited a lot from the work I put into the taiji forms, particularly with regard to my posture and sinking my weight.
8. Vipassana meditation: oops, no. That’s surprising, given the boost in enthusiasm I got from my practice in Bangkok. This was what I had planned to do in the evenings, so it was most affected by my going out to meet friends. I’m not too worried about this: my social life took a bit of a battering due to my work situation over the last year, and it’s important to build it up again! The meditation remains a high priority, and I’m confident I’ll be able to do this.

There’s no room for complacency, though: I need to keep practicing in order to maintain the improvements I’ve made!

So, tomorrow, a whole new work and lifestyle situation begins. It’ll take a while to settle down, but I’m looking forward to it!

300 Spartans

Up to Plaza Singapura last night to watch 300. I’ve been waiting for this ever since I first saw an article about it way back in 2005, before I went to China!

First thing up: Golden Village suck (that’s the cinema chain, for non-Singaporean readers). I actually didn’t have much cash on me when I went to buy my ticket. No problem, right, because I’ve got my card, right? I couldn’t believe it when the girl on the ticket counter said “I’m sorry sir, your card is Mastercard. The ticket costs nine dollars, and we only accept Mastercard when you spend over fifty dollars“. The understanding I got was that Visa would be quite acceptable. In other words, she was quite prepared to refuse to sell me a ticket because my card comes from the wrong international banking consortium. Astonishing.

Anyway, fortunately for me, there was a manager nearby who saw me standing there stupefied, and gave the girl the nod to sell the ticket anyway. I made sure to thank him, but still – if he hadn’t been there, I would have had to walk away and miss the show, because that girl wouldn’t have sold me a ticket. Absolutely unbelievable.

Anyway, the film… Great. Loved it. Heroics, carnage, wonderful atmosphere, tremendous visual style… I’ll probably go to see it again!

However, let’s bear in mind that it’s just entertainment! It’s not the truth. Of course, we admire the courage,discipline, and sacrifice of the 300 Spartans, but the message of the film is a lie, and it makes me a little worried. It’s a fact that some people, in the US and elsewhere, are using this film as a metaphor for events in today’s world, which means that lies have power.

The Spartans talk about freedom a lot. They mock Xerxes for driving slaves into battle with whips, while they themselves are free men. This is a lie; a subtle one, but a lie. They were free only in the way that Xerxes himself was free. The Persian whips and slaves were on the field of battle; the Spartans had whips and slaves of their own, on the fields of grain that we see depicted so lovingly. Spartan society couldn’t have existed without the suffering of slaves. They had no moral advantage over the Persians.

And what was the Spartan society? An infanticidal master race, with no tolerance for softness or weakness, no space for dissent or diversity, no interest in the arts or entertainment, or speculative thought. I wouldn’t want to live there; neither would you, reader.

The film presents the Spartans as the protectors of free thought, resisting mysticism and tyranny, and as the roots of what became Western Civilization. This is also a lie. That role lay with the Athenians – who the Spartans dismiss as “philosophers and boy-lovers”. It was the Athenians who ultimately defeated Xerxes, though, at Salamis. Later, the Spartans, in their quest for power, conquered Athens themselves – so much for “Greek freedom”. Athenian culture, with its philosophy and mercantile focus, survived though – and became the source of Western culture. I rather think that if Leonidas hadn’t gone to Thermopylae, and Xerxes had added Greece to his empire, Athenian thought would still have prospered and, who knows, may have spread throughout, and come to influence, the largest empire of the ancient world…. Xerxes in the film actually speaks truth when he says”he is kind”: the Persian empire was (as I understand it) pretty tolerant of, and curious about, different religions, cultures, and ethnic groups.

I know that this is all very serious, and over the top for what’s just a film. But hey, among my other interests, I’m a history geek, and these ancient stories have fascinated me since I was a boy. Also, when anybody tries to stir up a call to war with appeals to ‘freedom’ and high ideals, I get suspicious.

It’s interesting to speculate what might have happened if Xerxes had won, though. Here’s one example: Buddhism wouldn’t exist in the forms we know it today.

Siddhārtha Gautama actually died just a few years before the events depicted in 300. The movement he founded would have continued as it did in the early days, with no change, throughout India, into south-east Asia, China, and so on. However, the first century or so after the Buddha’s death, Buddhists didn’t build statues of him. Historically, that only began when Alexander the Great’s army brought Greek culture, including statue-building, to Afghanistan and Northern India. If Xerxes had conquered Greece, Alexander’s empire wouldn’t have existed, so Buddhism would never have adopted statues – hard to imagine today!

The stage no nearer

Ho hum. I’ve written several times about Dreamforest, the media production company who run acting and performing classes. I’m interested in their “I can perform” course, which runs for several months, and covers singing, dancing, and hosting, in addition to the acting base. When I popped into their offices in January, I was told that the next course would kick off late February/early March. Although they said they would contact me, I never heard back from them or got any reply to emails, so I decided to follow up with a call today. I guess there hasn’t been much demand, as they are now looking at July/August…. Oh well.

Jump

I haven’t written about Parkour for a while, but I haven’t forgotten about it – nor have I gotten any closer to the level of fitness I would need to get involved in it! My new workplace has a lot of sports facilities, though, so once I start work there, I’ll maybe be able to use my lunch hours in the gym, etc… I wouldn’t mind giving parkour a try!

I’ve heard about Jump London, one of the seminal documentaries that kickstarted Parkour as a global phenomenon. The National Library service in Singapore has one copy of the DVD… which has been stolen So, I’ve never seen it.

Anyway, here’s the trailer:

Parkour’s a pretty liminal activity, right – just right for the bohemian jianghu ;-

The documentary, it turns out, was so successful, it spawned a sequel: Jump Britain – which can be viewed in its entirety (49 min) on Google Video. To be honest, I found the actual ‘parkour on notable buildings’ content to be pretty anticlimactic, but the earlier sections – showing the young enthusiasts, and their training, to be very enjoyable. It also turns out that this free, urban activity is being commoditised – the featured crew are being immortalised as characters in a video game… Well, why not, I guess.

At the very, very end of the film, there’s a segment showing parkouristas (what’s the correct collective noun, I wonder) from around the world – including a solitary Singaporean!

I still think that the first Parkour video I watched is the best I’ve seen, though!