Goodbye…

… and, hopefully, hello again.

Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are blocked by the Great Firewall of China. That means that once I go to Beijing in five weeks’ time, I won’t be able to blog.

That’s kind of spurred me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and get all of my blogging consolidated on a self-host server I’ve had for a while but haven’t been doing much with.

So: this blog is moving, and will continue at: http://burningpearl.com/jianghu/ – I’m still tinkering away like crazy behind the scenes with all kinds of configuration issues, so it’ll be a bit unsteady there for a while. Better to deal with them all – including issues that might arise with visitors and commenters – before I go to China, I think! I’ll be copying some of the content over – not much, but enough to test out various issues, such as embedding YouTube (which works differently on a self-hosted WordPress installation).

In any case, I’ll be back in Singapore soon enough, once the Beijing contract ends; I can always move back here then.

So… see you on the new blog, I hope!

Updated Feb 08 2008:

Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress seems to have broken subdomains on my host – so note the new URL (http://burningpearl.com/jianghu/)

Vlad the judoka

Interesting to see that Vladimir Putin has been able to take time out from turning Russia into an energy superpower in order to co-author a judo handbook:

My next obscure form…

What to do in Beijing? There’s no shortage of options, in terms of teachers, forms, and so on! On the other hand, I have a massive list of things that I need to get done while I’m in China – and most of them are career-related, rather than martial arts…

So, right now I’m starting to work out what I want to get done. Here’s a few thoughts:

• I’ve trained with Master Liu Jing Ru before, and would like to do so again. He’s very well spoken-of as being traditional in his styles. However, he lives far away from where I will be based, and his styles are different to what I’ve learned. Do I want to start a whole new set?
• Master Sun Zhi Jun is Madam Ge’s main teacher; he’s the one to go to if I want to maintain my current knowledge – namely, the ba mu zhang, the sword, and the needles. I’m hearing different things, though: some say he’s one of bagua’s best fighters, others say that his styles have too much xin pai (performance style) in them. He does live much closer to my base in Haidian than Master Liu, but it’s still quite far.
• Professor Huang Zhen Huan lives very close to where I’ll be, and I have his phone number. He was a student of Wu Tu Nan for twenty years, so I’m guessing he practices Wu style, rather than the Yang-based forms I know. On the other hand, I may well ask him to help me work on developing softness, and push hands…
• I am very tempted to learn another obscure form – bagua fan Here’s two examples from YouTube:

  I know that Zhang Sheng Li of the Beijing Milun School knows at least one fan form, and in any case I want to contact him to review the Long Xing form he taught me…

66. Wealth is like running water

Wealth is like running water, and giving like digging a well. Just as the deeper the well, the more water it holds, the more you give, the more wealth you have.

Master Sheng Yen

In Italian footsteps; Fujian revival

A little over four years ago, a book called A Fortune Teller Told Me was what convinced me to investigate meditation by going to Thailand for a 10-day retreat. The author was Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani, who died in 2004.

My original copy stayed with my then girlfriend when we split up, but I bought a second-hand copy last year, and I’m re-reading it now. I’m intrigued by something in one of the early chapters that meant very little to me before, but is rather more interesting now. Attending a meeting of the French École Française de l’Extreme Orient, he has this encounter:

One ethnologist gave a paper investigating the revival of occult Taoist practices in the Chinese province of Fukien. He told how one night, under a full moon, he had witnessed a ceremony in which a man immobilized by ropes had suddenly shot like an arrow across the rice fields, drawing after him the whole population of the village, including the local Communist Party secretary.

Since Terzani’s book was published in 1995, this event probably took place in the late 1980s. It must be about a tang-ki, whom I’ve encountered here in Singapore, and about whom I’m increasingly interested. Many of Singapore’s Chinese population have their family roots in Fujien province.

What is happening with this revival now, I wonder, twenty years after that ethnologist witnessed the ceremony he describes? Has it grown in strength, or vanished in the face of consumerism and rampant development? If anyone out there has any information, I would love to hear about it!

Emei zi and bagua bi

No mysterious strangers this week…. Last night’s class with Master Zhou was very interesting. We did a little bit of work on the form at the end of the class, but mostly we were working on fundamentals. In particular, he’s trying to teach me a series of stretching and softening exercises. These, he says, are essential for developing bagua’s power. My wrists and shoulders in particular need to loosen up a heck of a lot, and he’s given me some ways to work on that. Ouch, it’s painful!

He also expanded a bit more on what he said before about the bagua pens. I’d misunderstood his meaning on that occasion. He wasn’t saying that bagua pens had been adopted from an Emei style – he was saying that the weapons we were using in our course with Sun Laoshi are not actually bagua pens. The ones we have are 22cm long, with the ring to slip over the finger 5cm from the blunt end. The business end tapers to a blunt point, rather like the end of a pencil after it’s been used a few times. According to Master Zhou, this is actually an emei zi (I’m not sure of the meaning of zi in this context). A true bagua bi, according to him, is much longer, with the ring in the middle, and with the end flaring out before forming a point – more like the actual shape of a large Chinese brush-pen (to a western eye, one might say it looks kind of arrow-head shaped). This rings a bell, because in Frank Allen’s book Whirling Circles there’s a picture of Tina Zhou using one of these, and I had wondered to myself about the difference.

One thing bothered me a bit about this, though – everything I’d read suggested that bagua pens were designed to be concealed weapons for bodyguards, and I didn’t see how a weapon that’s basically a metal stick around 70cm long (that’s a rough estimate based on Master Zhou’s description) could be concealed in such a way that it would also be readily available for use. I could see that it might be stuck down the back of the trousers, but it seems that it might be difficult to draw them easily – apparently, though, this was one way they were carried. The other way was up the sleeves – it seemed unlikely to me, as wouldn’t the carrier then we walking around like a robot, with rigid, unbending arms? Heh. Yesterday happened to be a very rainy day, and I had with me one of those small, folding umbrellas. Master Zhou took that, extended it to about the length of the bagua pen, and put it up his sleeve – and could still bend his arm. How? Because the sleeves of his kung fu jacket are very wide. I’d been thinking of sleeves in terms of the clothes we wear today, in which the sleeves are very narrow tubes. In the Qing dynasty, the sleeves of court clothes for nobles and bodyguards alike were very, very wide and baggy – so there’s lots of room for movement around the pen. Suddenly it all made sense! Just goes to show, once again, you can’t really separate a martial art from the context and culture in which it was developed – every martial art’s moves were developed to meet the combat needs of a particular time and place.

Also, traditionally, clothes with long sleeves covering the hands meant you were rich; short sleeves leaving the arms bare meant you were a poor, working man. Heh.

Anyway, after this enlightening class, I went for solo practice, trying not to disturb the wild cats, which were dozing on the concrete around me. A couple of sets of CMC-37, several of what I will persist in calling my bagua pens even if they’re not, a couple of sets of ba mu zhang, and finally a half-hearted attempt at the bagua jian.

Anybody out there fancy chipping in with a bit more info about the emei zi?

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Triage

I’m starting to prepare for my move to Beijing. Over the weekend, I sent a couple of boxes of books to where I’ll be working; they should arrive around the same time as I do. I’m giving away dozens more books, and there’s still others that I want to keep, and will be leaving with friends – but a significant number of my friends are in a similar situation, to be honest, so I can’t leave much in Singapore.

That’s just the books; I have somehow managed to acquire a lot of stuff over the last two years, and it’s all got to leave my current apartment before, or as, I do… SO the question for each item is: do I want to take this to Beijing with me?

Wait… you can’t take it with you… I’ve heard that before, somewhere!

A few years ago, I read about a businessman, a consultant perhaps, who lived out of hotel rooms, with only the possessions he could carry in his luggage. At the time, I though that was crazy; now, I realize I’ve come to see it as an ideal. Part of this transition was finally selling my house in the UK; I’d come to hate the way it, and all the objects that filled it, controlled my ability to act on opportunities or take chances. The day I sold the house, having disposed of 95% of the contents, was a happy day indeed. I’m actually enjoying the process of reducing my belongings to a few bag- and box-fuls again.

As it happens, just before I started writing this, I saw evidence that I’m not alone in this POV – Cory Doctorow, he of the goggles, red cape, and balloon, writes on Boing Boing:

Since I left Toronto in 1999 (where I had an illegal, 2,000 sqft warehouse space), I’ve lived in progressively smaller apartments and flats, and I’ve come to love it. I think the key is to be absolutely ruthless about getting rid of stuff that you don’t need anymore — for example, I’ve started to give most of my books to thrift-stores when I’m done with them, buying them as a used book on Amazon for a few pennies if I need them again.

Hear, hear. Cease attachment to objects, and become free…

Week 1 roundup

The calendar in my old Nokia, the one I lost, showed which week it was in the calendar; I find that none of my remaining calendars (Google calendar, Windows, Mac, or ancient backup Nokia) have this function. So, I won’t be using the number of the week much in post headings, at least until I buy a new phone! Anyway, I know for sure that this has been the first week of 2008…

On New Year’s eve, I had an invitation to go to a barbeque. I was a bit dubious at first, as it was at the home of a friend-of-a-friend, and I wasn’t sure I felt up to being polite to strangers; I felt more like being contemplative. Plus, there was a taijigong class that evening. In the end, I decided to skip class and go to the barbie, since I was getting a bit too antisocial.  As it turned out, it was a really good evening, with quite a lot of people I knew or kind-of-knew, and we had a really good time with lots of friendly piss-taking and banter.

Round about 11, I said my farewells and headed up to the temple at Bright Hill. I went to their countdown last year, which wasn’t really to my taste, but I wanted to see in the New Year again to the sound of the 108 chimes of the bell. I got there at just the right time; I went to stand next  to the bell and, while I was debating where to stand, found that the crowd had sort of formed up around me. Next thing I knew, the monks had arrived, and I wound up pretty much facing the abbot as he rang the bell. What I didn’t know last year was that the crowd was largely composed of people who had spent the previous week on retreat at the temple, and this was the culmination of that.

I didn’t stay too long afterwards, and got a cab home. On New Year’s Day, Madam Ge had arranged a farewell meal for Sun Zhi Jun and Mi Jun Pei. We went to a fish restaurant on Marine Parade, and had a nice few hours. Most people had a buffet; as the sole veggie, I was brought a plate of vegetable noodles. There were lots of speeches of appreciation from various students (I was “persuaded” to make one as well, and almost died of embarrassment!), and gifts of tokens of esteem to all of our teachers. The evening finished off with karaoke. I have an deep dislike of karaoke  – I don’t like to sing, and I never know the words or, often, the tune – so I didn’t sing. Five years in Asia, and I’ve never yet sung in karaoke – and I don’t plan on breaking that precedent!

On Wednesday, I went for solo practice, and then to drink tea with Chin Woo friends. I’m trying to cut down on the beer for the new year… Thursday to taijigong class at the Nam Wah Association.

On Friday, Master Zhou took me through a lot of exercises designed to work on loosening up the shoulders, and developing explosive power. My power is currently more of a damp fizzle; more work needed. A good place to start is on getting my posture right; I almost gave myself whiplash at one point as trying to project force forwards from the shoulders shook my neck and head back and forth…

Last night, for the first time in over a year, there was no more baguazhang with Madam Ge. Instead, I headed down to Lavender for my first class in Zen Meditation at the Kwan Yin Chan Lin centre. It was a big class, with around forty students, though I don’t know how many were first-timers; quite a few were return students. There were quite a few foreigners.  It was a very calming session, as Ven. Chi Boon began to outline what Zen is about.

One thing that I found very interesting was when he asked us what Zen is. When some students tried to answer, he pointed out that by using words, we depart from the true nature of zen. How could we answer without using words? As we mulled this over, trying to discover some abstract way to achieve this, intellectualising the problem, an assistant standing behind us suddenly rapped the floor loudly with a stick. The surprise of the noise jerked us back into the moment. That was the answer all along… I found it interesting because I’ve read about this before, just as you are reading it now, and thought I understood – but there was an almost physical sensation as the mind returned, and I hadn’t expected that.

We began to practise seated meditation; I’m nowhere near flexible enough to sit in full lotus position, or even half-lotus. My ankles are very stiff. I suddenly realised that they used to be much looser; after the first meditation retreat I attended in Thailand, I was meditating regularly, and that really stretched my ankles. It was during that period that I first went to Beijing, and began to study baguazhang – I wonder if stopping regular meditation is why I seem to find mud-stepping harder these days? Stiffer ankles…?  Hmmm. The style of meditation we were using is all about breathing from the dantian, which is very good for me – I’ve been finding that difficult recently.
We also spent ten minutes last night in slow walking meditation, where practice in bagua stepping proved useful.  I’m looking forward to the rest of the course! I have a feeling that it will tie in much more closely than I expected with my work on taijigong and bagua…

The unexpected

It’s been an evening of unexpected meetings, news, and insights… Where to start? Well, at the beginning, of course!

I made it to Duxton Plain Park in good time for my lesson with Master Zhou. As I was doing my stretches, a Chin Woo student whose face I vaguely know came up to me to let me know that Master Zhou was running late, and would be there in about fifteen minutes. No problem at any time, but it was fortuitous tonight; just a moment later a monk walked past. I’ve seen him around on a number of occasions; he’s a tall Chinese, in the robes of the New Kadampa movement. I assumed then that the Odiyana Centre was growing, and had brought in a second monk. Up until this summer, I was attending the centre regularly to hear dharma talks delivered by Kelsang Wangchg – who is, like me, from South Wales, and is the same age as me, give or take a couple of months.

Anyhow, this evening the monk was accompanied by Kelsang Lamden, the resident nun, who said hi, so I went over to chat. The monk is Kelsang Tonglam; he’s from Hong Kong, but has lived for some time in the UK – with the accent to prove it! A very nice guy. The big shock for me was to hear that Wangchog has disrobed and returned to lay life. It’s perfectly acceptable in many (most?) Buddhist traditions for this to happen, so it’s not a bad thing, but I truly am astonished; Wangchog always seemed so happy and committed. Still, as Lamden said, people change. Apparently he’s still in Singapore; I’ll make an effort to catch up with him before I go to Beijing.

By this time Master Zhou had arrived, so I said goodbye and got on with the class. We did a lot of work with exercises to try to loosen my over-tight shoulders, and then worked on the form a bit more; mostly repetition, as I’d forgotten most of what I learned last week… Since filming Mi Lao Shi has proved so useful in remembering the bagua needles form, I asked Master Zhou if I could film him going through the set. He was OK with that, but unfortunately my batteries died halfway through. Doh! Next class, perhaps.

Following the class, I went elsewhere in the park, and practised solo. I spent most of the next hour and a half working on the bagua needles form, trying to get it into muscle memory. I still need to find the right diameter circle to walk, in order to finish where I started; sometimes I get it, other times not…. I also went through the CMC-37 a few times, plus the xuan xuan dao. I finished up with one last go at the needles set, and a walk through Zhang Sheng Li’s long xing set – the first bagua set I learned. During these last two, I vaguely noticed someone sit down on a nearby bench to watch; this happens often enough that I pay it no mind. After I’d finished, I was drinking water and getting ready to go meet friends, when I noticed the watcher coming over to talk to me. He was Chinese, a mainlander by his accent, and in his 30s or 40s. He only spoke to me in Chinese, and started correcting me a lot on my posture and stepping. Using slow, simple sentences, and lots of demonstrations, he talked a lot about the use and non-use of force in the internal arts, the use of body structure and angles, the right width of a stance, and a lot more. It was all really good, and he plainly knows his stuff. He was emphatic that I had to loosen up a lot, and was very soft in his applications – soft like a whip…. Very good feedback…. He wouldn’t tell me his name, or what he does. He says he’s a student only of taijiquan, but clearly knows quite a bit about bagua. He wouldn’t even name his taiji style; he said he doesn’t know it, he was just taught like this by a very old man back in China. Eventually, my friends started calling to see where I was. I ignored the calls, but then a search party arrived, and it was time for me to move on. My mysterious teacher then departed, saying only that we would meet again….