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!

San Huang

The Buddhist Channel has an interesting little piece about the San Huang retreat, near the Shaolin Temple. A 48 year-old reporter for the Sunday Times goes to Shaolin, endures a few days of agonizing training, then heads off for the peace and quiet of this small retreat community. Nice.

The absence of China

Like most bloggers, I keep an eye on my visitor statistics. It’s really interesting to see where my readers are from (hi Armenia! Hi, Iran!). It’s also fun looking at the latest visitors at various times of the day, to follow different countries appearing as the dateline moves, seeing who’s an early riser, and who’s a night owl. (OK, so this is really geeky, like you hadn’t worked out that I’m a geek?).

There’s one big hole, though: China. Very occasionally, someone will show up from Beijing or Guangzhou – but only once in a blue moon. When I went to Beijing on holiday, I couldn’t access WordPress at all – either to read, or to write. Guess the Chinese government doesn’t approve of what some WordPress bloggers have to say…

So: I suppose that before I move to Beijing, I need to migrate this blog to another host. For various reasons, I want to start getting back into geeky work, so I’m thinking of a self-hosted WordPress installation, probably hosted by John Companies. Any other suggestions for a reliable, secure, and affordable hosting company that’s accessible from China?

Only 20 in all of China

I’ve just discovered the blog of the Rev. Heng Sure, a Buddhist monk based in Berkeley, California, and have been surprised and saddened by this post. He and some monastic colleagues went on a trip to Manchuria to visit monks there. What he found is that:

The Cultural Revolution nearly wiped out two generations of Chinese monks. Currently across China there are approximately twenty surviving monks who are 80+ years old; everybody else in the Sangha is under 40 years of age, and ten years in robes, at the most.

Wow. I mean, obviously, I knew that the monastic system and heritage was badly damaged – but only 20 remaining ‘elder’ monks? In the whole of China? That’s truly sad.

Just FYI, I found the blog after hearing the URL in a podcast interview from Kusala Bhikshu’s Urban Dharma site. Check it out…

A Shanghai policeman and Cape Town gangsters

What’s the connection? Well, bear with me: I’m in the mood to ramble.

Empire Made Me is a fascinating book, which I really recommend reading. It’s the true story of an Englishman, a working-class veteran of the First World War who, unable to settle back into civilian life, signed up as a member of the Shanghai Municipal Police Force. Shanghai at that time was the Shanghai of legend: a British-dominated international city, where profit was god, life was cheap, and the rich mixed in all kinds of business and vice with chancers from all of the world, Chinese gangsters, and desperate Tsarist refugees.

The book’s main character, Richard Maurice Tinkler, arrived in this cauldron in 1919. Policemen such as him patrolled their beats alone, and depended on their authority to stay alive. Sometimes this wasn’t enough. This was a city that drew in fortune-seekers from all over China. Lots of them knew martial arts (the Jing Wu martial arts association had been formed in Shanghai only a few years earlier) – and many of those became members of the city’s powerful gangs. Outside the international enclave, Republican China was in chaos, with warlords defying the government, and weapons were everywhere. Within the city, White Russians trained in Western military skills were becoming increasingly destitute as their money began to run out. At the same time, the Japanese – with all of their own martial traditions – were becoming increasingly assertive and aggressive. In such an environment, the police needed to be able to stay alive when faced with desperate and skillful fighters.

Some men rose to the challenge. One of them was William Fairbairn, who eventually rose to become Shanghai’s Assistant Commisioner of Police and Tinkler’s superior. He survived hundreds of street fights – and learned from them. Studying the techniques used by people who were trying to kill him, he devised a training system for his police officers: a blunt, brutal, system that he called ‘defendu‘. The one and only purpose of this system was to stay alive. It was later said of Fairbairn that “he had an honest dislike for anything that smacked of decency in fighting“. He later trained British commandos during the Second World War, and his philosophy lives on in Special Forces training to this day.

The point that I found interesting in this story is that all ‘martial arts’ originated this way: trying to stay alive when people are trying to kill you in unfamiliar ways. In fact, ‘martial arts’ is a misnomer: ‘fighting systems’ is better. It’s only later that the philosophy is added in, and the focus shifts slightly from staying alive to staying alive and becoming a better human being.

And that’s why I find it interesting to see the emergence of a new fighting system: Piper. Inspired by Fairbairn, Piper’s developer Nigel February, did the same thing: he studied the techniques of the people who were trying to kill him on the street, and used what he learned to formulate a new system:

It’s not a martial art (yet): it’s a fighting system. South Africa is a violent society, where gangsters are drawing on ways of movement and fighting that are unfamiliar to most of us who train in Asian martial arts systems. Nigel and his colleagues have drawn a lot of flak from people who are getting hung up on what is or is not ‘African’, but let’s give them credit for what they are actually trying to do: stay alive on dangerous streets. What we’re seeing with them is what happened in the rural villages or unpoliced city streets of China many hundreds of years ago. Maybe sometime in the next year or two I’ll get the chance to go study with them….

Religion in China

• A visitor to the Shaolin temple is horrified by what appears to be exploitation of visitors by the temple administration, led by “Abbot Shi Yongxin [who] has good business skills. If he had not entered into religion, he would have become an entrepreneur or perhaps a high-level Communist Party leader … “
• However, Buddhism is China is thriving, and is no longer the religion of just old women and peasants. According to a study by Renmin University, Buddhism now has 100 million followers in the Middle Kingdom.
• I just found this by chance: the BBC has a radio program available online about Buddhism and Daoism in China. The reporter visits the Daoist White Cloud Temple in Beijing, and tries to visit the Shaolin Temple, but runs into obstacles. Some discussion of whether Shaolin is still authentic or a commercial venture. The file is available here in Realplayer format; the program appears to be part of a series, so I’m not sure how long that link will remain valid…

The mental states of martial arts

I’m gradually coming to understand that different martial arts require very different mental states in order to work properly. Longer-established practitioners will probably laugh that I’m only now coming to see this, but anyway, I’ll welcome any feedback.

Taijiquan, for example, is very meditative. It requires a still mind, in order to develop the fine-grained physical sensitivity that makes it really effective. In many ways, I find my taiji practice is at its best when I achieve a state very similar to vipassana meditation.

When I’m practicing baguazhang in depth, I find that I slip into the state that Erle Montaigue calls “eagle vision” (or something like that) – that’s to say, I’m highly aware of movement, with my concentration applied equally to a piercing focus on ‘the opponent’, and on peripheral movements; it’s a bit hard to describe. This mentality is highly focused on the beginnings of movements, and lining up to take immediate advantage of any mistakes.

Capoeira, on the other hand, develops a ‘playful’ attitude, in which performance, style, and trickery are as important the ‘defeat’ of your enemy. I know that capoeira is an effective fighting style, but the mindset is focussed on mind games as much as physical actions, or so it seems to me.

This difference is why I gave up capoeira – hopefully, only temporarily. I found I couldn’t keep the mindsets separate, largely because I was too inexperienced in both arts. Slipping into a ‘bagua’ mindset whilst playing capoeira made me too aggressive, and took the fun out of the roda for the other player. Practicing bagua with a capoeira frame of mind… hehehe, the mind boggles! I imagine it could be done, but at my level of ability, it just comes across as messing around and not taking the lesson seriously. I actually think that to have ability in both bagua and capoeira would be an extremely effective combination, but I would need to learn them consecutively, not concurrently.

I’m on this train of thought because of the upcoming xingyi classes. Xingyi also has a specific mindset: to singlemindedly advance , crushing the opponent. I recently linked to a page about Fu style bagua, which also has this to say about xingyi:

In order to screen the best practitioners for teaching positions at the Central Academy and in the provincial schools, General Li, General Zhang Zi Jiang, and General Fung Zu Ziang held the first full contact, national competition in 1928 in Nanjing. Hundreds of the best Chinese martial artists participated in san shou fighting, weapons and wrestling in a lei tai ring format.
[...]
This tournament is historically significant in China, but somewhat wicked to recall. After the first several days, the fighting competitions had to be halted because too many competitors were seriously maimed-two were killed. As some records have it, the Hsing-Yi practitioners were considered the most brutal fighters, displaying little or no conscience when they fought. Many BaGua Zhang practitioners were considered as skilled; however, they displayed more humanity when it came to all out combat.

I’m uncomfortably aware that I have this ability to focus my will on achieving results without regard for consequences. In fact, it’s got me through some tough times, but it’s also responsible for the periods that I most dislike about myself. One reason I’m so glad to have discovered meditation is that it enabled me to step away from that, and to become more compassionate. I’ll have to be careful that studying xingyi doesn’t re-awaken that aspect of myself.

I’ll be very interested to hear what other people think about this…

Oh, as an aside: when I first went to Beijing to study Mandarin, I made a couple of very good friends – a Norwegian guy, and an American woman (who became an item, and in fact are going to be married in the not-so-distant future!). Anyway, when our time in the language school ended, I came back to Singapore to start my MBA, and they went to Nanjing, where the woman was enrolling on a Master’s degree. The Norwegian was in the middle of an anthropology doctorate, and wanted to spend his time in China doing research on groups of people meeting up to practice martial arts and qigong. We all thought that Nanjing would be a great place for this – but it turned out that he really wasn’t able to find much. I wonder if it’s because martial arts in Nanjing is too closely associated with the Guomindang-period schools? Perhaps there were more than the usual number of purges or re-education campaigns there? Anybody know?

A curious photograph

I wandered down into Chinatown this afternoon, as I’d decided to indulge myself by playing tourist. I revisited all the ‘antique’ shops that were so exotic when I first visited Singapore; now, of course, having lived in China, I can see how almost nothing is authentic. In fact, I’ve noticed that the ‘antiques’ appear in waves; all the shops will suddenly have the same things; I guess it depends what the factories in China are turning out at the time. Having said that, there’s been a lot of consolidation and a move downmarket; when I first visited Singapore only six years ago there were a lot more antique shops, and they sold a lot more things.

Anyway, right now there are lots of paintings of traditional buildings in China. In amongst these, one shop had something a little unusual – old photographs from Imperial China. Not originals, of course: reprints, but still different. There seem to be only so many photographs from that era, and you tend to see the same ones over and over. I bought one that I’ve never seen before – and believe me, I’m a museum buff and went to all sorts of museums and whatnot in Beijing.

It’s a picture of three Mandarins inspecting a carriage-mounted Gatling gun, next to a large, waist-high ziggurat of cannon balls. The limber and shaft are next to the gun carriage, indicating that a team of horses has either recently moved the gun into position, or is soon to move it away. The scene appears to be in a paved street, next to a (whitewashed?) one-storey building. A little bit of Googling shows me that the US Army (or Marines?) used Gatling guns during the Boxer Rebellion – but it surprises me that I’ve never seen this picture before, even in the museums inside Beijing’s Dongbianmen watchtower, which saw heavy action during the rebellion. Perhaps someone will read this who can give me more information.

A modern tale of Shaolin

One topic that came up in my conversation with the nun and the Englishman was the difference between the types of Buddhism – Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, and Zen. This led on to a short discussion of Bodhidharma, and the Shaolin temple.

Of course, many people with a reasonable interest in martial arts and/or Buddhism will have some idea of the history of Shaolin. However, it seems very few people know much about the Shaolin temple of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I learned something about this while I was in China, about how Jet Li in the film The Shaolin Temple massively revived interest in the temple and its history, and how the place went from empty ruin to super-commercialized cash-in very rapidly. That was the story of the 80s and 90s.

In the late 90s, a controversial new abbot took charge. I heard widely different stories about Shi Yongxin, who cleared away all of the martial arts schools, and took a strong, MBA-style, management approach, including taking legal action against companies worldwide for infringing on the Shaolin copyright.

The Buddhist channel has a profile of him here. It highlights the two views: either he’s a well-connected traditionalist, who’s restoring the temple to its true Buddhist roots, or else he’s a shady, well-connected opportunist, living the high life whilst depriving others of their livelihood. I encountered both views while I was in China. I bought a book in the Dashanzi Art District, titled Monks in Shaolin by photographer Hei Ming. It’s strongly pro-Abbot. On the other hand, my friend and teacher Xiaoyan was very upset that the Abbot had driven away the martial arts schools, and had a low opinion of the abbot’s lifestyle.

Who can say? At least one person has written an eyewitness account. In Borders yesterday, I found a book by an American journalist, Matthew Polly, titled American Shaolin. He went to the Shaolin Temple in the early 90s, and studied martial arts full-time for a couple of years (I’m jealous!). At S$45, I didn’t buy it, though I may still do so. Anyway, I was interested enough to Google him, and through his site found that he’d written a 4-page article on Slate magazine. It’s about how he went back to Shaolin, ten years after leaving, and his reaction to the changes he encountered.  After reading that, I’m more in the abbot’s camp, to be honest: although I’m sure that Shi Yongxin will remain controversial, if he is actually restoring Shaolin as  Buddhist centre, and reclaiming the name from unconnected opportunists, I think he’s doing the right thing.

A shameless plug: Jinghua wushu

I thought I’d give a plug for the guy who taught me Chen style taijiquan in Beijing – Liu Xiaoyan, who went to one of the martial arts schools at the Shaolin temple at the age of 5 or so, and studied martial arts for twenty years – “at least 9-10 hours a day, 6 days a week, on the 7th day I was doing shows“.

Now living in Beijing with his French wife, Xiaoyan has started his own martial arts school, the Jinghua Wushu Association. I studied with him when he was just getting started; he would come up to Haidian, and we would train by the tennis courts in Hua Qing Jia Yuan, where I was living at the time. This was during my time at Tsinghua university; the winter semester, and eventually we had to stop training there, because it was just too exposed to the icy winds! We moved our training to Ritan Park (which was also where I first started learning bagua the year before, with the Milun school).

Anyway, if anyone is in China, or thinking of going there, and is looking for a martial arts school, I can personally recommend Xiaoyan. He knows a lot of different styles very well, and he’s always seeking to learn more and expand his knowledge. He speaks English, and he’s a really, really nice guy. He has a lot of personal contacts in the Shaolin temple, and in Chen village, which are useful for his students too!