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…

Piper comes to Singapore

Wow – I just heard that Lloyd de Jongh and Nigel February will be visiting Singapore in January 2008. Excellent!

Nigel and Lloyd are the guys behind the Piper System, a technique that puts together and formalizes the knife-fighting techniques of South African convicts and gangsters (specifically, Cape Town). I’ve blogged about them several times, which led to an email conversation with the two of them. As I’ve mentioned before, I spent time in Africa when I was younger, and find it interesting to hear more about combatives based on African culture and rhythms of movement; it’s also very interesting to see someone studying a previously undocumented subculture to create a new fighting art…

No news yet as to whether there will be any public demos (the guys will be here for business, not pleasure), but I’ll be looking forward to catching up and finally meeting in the flesh.

Lessons from random surfing

I’ve been doing a bit of surfing tonight, following up various bagua links, and found some very good stuff at a site I haven’t seen before: wudanginternal.com.

The first is a YouTube clip:

I have to say, this reminds me of my training with Master Zhou, who is all about application, and really knows about the real-life use of bagua. (The main difference is that I’m nowhere near as good as the students in this clip!).

The second find is a quote from wudanginternal’s FAQ section:

‘There is a famous martial art proverb”When your kungfu is good, finding a better teacher is not as good as visiting your martial art friends”.

This is profoundly true: I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my fellow-students, without whom I would never have benefited so much from what my masters have to teach.

Questions

Here are some of the people I’ve studied under during the last few years – some of them for periods of months, some for just a few hours.

• Nam Wah Pai (Taijiquan, Singapore)
• Nam Wah Taijigong Association (Taijiquan, Singapore)
• Rennie Chong (Taijiquan, Singapore)
• Madam Ge Chun Yan (Baguazhang, Singapore)
• Master Zhou Yue Wen (Baguazhang, Singapore)
• Alex Kozma (Baguazhang, Singapore)
• Master Liu Jing Ru (Baguazhang, Beijing)
• Zhang Sheng Li (Baguazhang, Beijing)
• Jinghua Wushu Association (Taijiquan, Beijing)

If you could ask them questions, what would you want to know?

That temple in Henan

Sorry, seems like it’s Shaolin week here on Jianghu! Here’s a few links that it seemed appropriate to throw in, since fate obviously wanted to draw them to my attention…

I was looking for something else entirely, but came across this YouTube clip. It’s a Nokia advert, featuring Justin Guariglia – the photographer who’s published the book on the Shaolin Temple, which I wrote about just a couple of days ago. What are the odds on that happpening?

Also in a strange coincidence, I came across a very interesting article from Kung Fu magazine, the edition on the shelves right now (at the time of writing) it turns out. The article is about Hai Deng, a ‘controversial’ Shaolin monk who was one of the first to visit the US. His life story is pretty interesting, as is the tale of his interaction with the Western-born American monks – one of whom was Rev. Heng Sure, whose blog I only just discovered this week!

How much authentic Shaolin martial arts are left? Controversial question, I know. I know that many so-called “Shaolin” styles really have nothing to do with the temple.I do know that there are still people teaching, and training, in the ‘old’ Shaolin styles that haven’t been reformed into “official” performance styles. What I wonder is how much is left of the context and culture of the old Shaolin, where the martial arts were a part of ordinary temple life – when there wasn’t the current division between ‘martial arts monks’ and ‘meditation monks’. Or was there always this distinction?

Anyway, it made me wonder whether the ‘old ways’ might have been preserved outside China, so I was checking up on Korean Sunmudo…

Life at Shaolin

Photo: Justin Guariglia

Photo: Justin Guariglia

Pern Yiau of the Nam Wah Taijigong Association gave me a call the other day; he’d read something in the Chinese-language paper about an exhibition of pictures about the life of the monks in the Shaolin Temple, and – correctly – thought I might be interested. The exhibition was apparently at the Page One bookshop in one of the malls near where I live, and was only on for a few days. So, the gf and I headed on down to take a look.

It turned out that it wasn’t really an exhibition as such; it was a display to promote a new coffee-table book, Shaolin: Temple of Zen. The display pictures were prints of the promotional pictures you can see on the book’s page on Amazon; I’ve ripped two of them above. The book itself is very nicely done, and the photographs are beautiful. At S$63, it’s perhaps for the Shaolin completist, but it does convey the skill, dedication, and tranquility that is the monks’ ideal.

The book is very nice indeed, taken simply on its own terms. It’s more interesting when taken as a part of the Temple’s campaign to take control once more of its own image, in order to re-establish Shaolin as a true seat of Buddhist thought and meditation – rather than as a place where funny chaps in orange robes shout at each other loudly and hit harder.

I referred to this once before, when I had just noticed Matthew Polly‘s book American Shaolin. I subsequently bought that book and really enjoyed it; I also learned what I hadn’t known when I wrote that post, that Polly is actually a formal disciple of the Shaolin Abbot, Shi Yong Xin. I’m not sure if this significant: the Abbot writes an introduction to Shaolin: Temple of Zen, while Polly writes an accompanying essay. I’m not sure if this is the result of their relationship, or whether the publisher simply decided that Polly was the natural choice to write some content.

In any case, it’s a very good-looking book, with some beautiful photographs. I still prefer the small book I bought in Beijing, Monks in Shaolin by Chinese photographer Hei Ming. That book shows only individual monks against a white background, removing them from their environment to focus on their characters, which I like. This new book keeps them in their context, which may suit other people’s taste better.

Battle without honour or humanity

It’s Saturday morning, and my knuckles hurt. My wrist is very tender when moved or touched, and is beginning to develop blotchy bruises. My legs hurt, my neck is stiff, and I have a faint headache. Yes, I went training with Master Zhou again last night! (I don’t think the headache is his fault, that’s down to recent insomnia).

We attracted quite a crowd. He was showing me another set of applications – including some that would most definitely bring tears to your eyes if used in anger. Oh yes, lots of tears. Usually, he’ll demonstrate on me (not full force, of course), and then I have a go; with one of these techniques in particular, it took me a while before I could bring myself to try it, it’s so nasty. And no, I’m not going to tell you what it was; I wouldn’t want to be blamed for an outbreak of wide-eyed victims who are suddenly walking a bit funny. So anyway, yes, we acquired a fair number of sarong-clad Indian foreign workers who hung around to watch. I hope they don’t try any of what they saw on the building site..

I wrote once before about William Fairbairn, who was once the Assistant Commissioner of the Shanghai Municipal Police, in the legendary inter-war period. As I wrote then, he learned from the experiences he had on the street, and used them to develop a system of unarmed combat for his officers – a system that prompted someone to say of him “he had an honest dislike for anything that smacked of decency in fighting“. Hehehe, Master Zhou trained in Shanghai, and the technique I was working on last night give me a better insight into the sort of thing that so shocked Fairbairn’s prim and proper contemporaries. Perhaps he’d encountered some of Master Zhou’s forebears!

Speaking of which, we got to talking about taijiquan, which he also knows. I mentioned that the first style I learned, back in the UK, was the Cheng Man Ching style. It turns out that Master Zhou’s own master in Yang Style taijiquan was Fu Zhong Wen – who was a student of Yang Chengfu at the same time as Cheng, and of roughly equal seniority. I think he was also trying to tell me something else, but my Mandarin wasn’t up to it, and I couldn’t follow. In any case, I’m increasingly fascinated by how many famous lineages are represented here in Singapore.

This is Fu Zhong Wen:

Things change, and we move on

Life has got in the way of blogging lately, as it’s wont to do! I think this is a moment of big shifts – things from now on are not going to be the way they have for the last year  or so. Here’s a quick roundup:

• Events, lectures, meetings and wotnot have prevented me from meeting Master Zhou for the last three weeks. It’s a big pity, but unavoidable. On the other hand, I’ve been practicing his form on my own, and it’s taking root – I think, and at last! I’m looking forward to class next week…
• I’ve been attending the qigong classes  at the Nam Wah Association regularly, and feeling more and more benefits every time. My posture is noticeably improving (to me, at any rate).
• Big changes with my Saturday night bagua: we are now moving into a purely revision mode. I’ve already mentioned that I’m re-doing the sword form for revision. The empty palm class is now stopping new work, though. Any class will naturally suffer attrition, and there are very few of us left from the group that started together in August last year. Some have joined from other classes, and that’s kept our numbers up. However, a few are coming less and less regularly, and with me due to leave next year, I think Madam Ge has decided that the class numbers have dropped below critical mass. So, we’re moving to a revision program until February, by which time a class that started after us will have caught up to where we’ve reached, and the two groups can merge and move on together. I, of course, won’t be here then.
• I may not do much more even of the revision schedule, though. I’ve just noticed that the Korean Zen school down at Lavender, which I’ve visited a few times, will be running a new course on Zen Meditation (link to PDF file) from early January. These don’t happen all that often; I’ve wanted to take part before, but always decided to stick with the bagua classes instead. I’d like to take this one though – I don’t know when I’ll get another chance!
• My Drunken Broadsword teacher is still not well, so classes haven’t resumed. I’ve never been very good at this, and i suspect that once he’s better I would be starting from scratch again. I think that I may not start again – at least until after I get back from Beijing next year… Partly it’s that I have so much to do in preparation and partly…
• … I’m getting more and more keen on a certain lady, and weekends are pretty much the only time we get to meet…

So, much is about to change. Where it goes from here, I’ll have to wait and see…

Mind and body

I’ve been thinking more about my ankles. I’m finding in my taiji practice that it’s very difficult to really relax them, and thus sink my weight properly. That has a lot of knock-on consequences, as the weight is then taken by my knees and lower back – which of course, aren’t meant to be load-bearing. I’ve been doing this for a long time without realizing it! This has led my thoughts along a very interesting route.

Now, the question is, why are my ankles so stiff, and reluctant to take my weight? I’ve come up with three answers to this.

The first, which only came to me this week, is that this is the consequence of hiking. I’ve really only taken up the internal martial arts as my main non-work activity in the last few years, since I moved to Asia. All the way through my twenties and early thirties, my main hobby was hill-walking in north and west Wales. That meant for most of every weekend day during those years, my feet were strapped tightly into boots that were specifically designed to limit ankle movement. I suspect that must have had an effect…

The second is one that I mentioned before – the fall I had on Orchard Road just over two years ago that trashed my left Achilles Tendon, and injured most of the foot’s soft connecting tissue. It’s all gradually healed up, particularly thanks to some therapeutic massage in Beijing (material there for another post). Practising the IMA has actually been of huge benefit in this process. Still, it’s only this year, in the last few months really, that I’ve found I don’t wake up in pain from the tendon on a daily basis – and that it now actually feels pretty normal, except for the odd twinge. Perhaps that ongoing pain changed the way I carry my weight…

The third derives from the second, and is what I’m finding the most interesting. As I’ve been working on this issue over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been paying very close attention to what happens as I sink my weight down. I’ve found that as my weight approaches my ankles, there’s a very clear mental hesitation, and even resistance. This is not a conscious response; my active will is directing the weight down, but it meets a deeply, deeply ingrained and powerful barrier. This all happens very subtly, and I’ve had to think about it and repeat it a lot, but it’s become clear that my intent is meeting a very strong, remembered fear of pain, that’s intimately bound up with a physical location in my tendon. In other words, even though the tendon is now healed and perfectly capable of load-bearing, the memory of the extreme pain from the time when it was injured is subconsciously still there, tied very specifically to that tissue, and still have an identifiable impact on my actions. That action is very clear – changing the whole way I carry myself – but the cause is very subtle, and I’ve only found it after a lot of work. And even then, there were a lot of clear signposts…

Many of you will see where I’m going with this… For me, this is a clear vindication of what many Buddhist and Daoist teachers tell us, that memory is intimately tied up with, and stored in, the body – in the organs, muscles, and fascia. Intense experiences, moments of strong emotion, and the like, are stored in the body and have a strong but subtle effect on our subsequent behaviour. With meditation and/or inward study of the body through qigong and the IMA, we can gradually identify where these powerful emotions are stored, soften the body, and rid ourselves of their influence.

As I’ve written before, I’d already had powerful experiences of this before – once through intense practice of taijiquan, once through Vipassana meditation. This week’s experience, though, is the first time that I’ve actually found myself identifying the physical location where a strong fear is stored. Very, very interesting… Now I have to work hard to root it out and escape its influence. I wonder whether something like this, long, long ago, was the root from which someone wise conceived of Vipassana..? In any case, it shows clearly how mind, memory, and behaviour are inextricably bound up with the state of the body…