Cultivation and compassion

An interesting post from Scott Phillips showed up in my RSS feeds overnight: Pretense. Tongue firmly in cheek, he suggests that the real reason we study martial arts is simply because we want to look good. Well, hehehe, that might work for some, but my waistline is proof that taijiquan is not the way for those who want to look buff! Still, there’s something to what he says, though not perhaps in the way he intended.

For me, the study of martial arts is a part of my attempt to “cultivate my person”, in the Confucian sense:

“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy”.

Kong Fu Zi

Through the practice of martial arts, and the internal forms in particular, we learn to govern our bodies as well as our minds. Having learned to govern ourselves, we can treat others with openness and respect since, if we truly can understand and control our own selves, we need not waste  our energy on negative emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, and so on. Having no negative elements in our behaviour towards others, we automatically  become more likeable and attractive: we are, in fact, cultivating “inner beauty”. So Scott’s got it right!

This attitude reminds me of the answer many Buddhist masters give when they are asked how, if they claim to desire to free the world from the chains of attachment, they can justify going on long meditation retreats in which they don’t interact with any other people at all! Their answer is that to help others become free, they must  have compassion for them. To have compassion for others, you must first have compassion for yourself. How can you help others to free themselves if you cannot free yourself? Therefore, being able to understand, and regulate, your own mind and feelings through meditation is the key first step to liberation for yourself and others.

This takes us back to martial arts. As my Chinese tutor explained to me, the term “wu shu“ is derived from the ancient characters meaning “no spear”, and has the sense of “the absence of conflict”. This is very interesting: why is that?

The most obvious interpretation is that if everyone  is trained in martial arts then there will be no conflict; no-one would start a fight because they would know that their opponent could defend themselves. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in the martial arts world, of course, will know that this theory simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny! There seems to be an endless supply of meatheads who just love to fight for its own sake…

I think that the answer lies with the aim of the role of martial arts in self-cultivation. Using martial skills to beat up your opponent, to overcome them with strength and leave them crushed, is a very primitive application of martial arts learning, and really is only the beginners. Don’t get me wrong here: I know from my own learning that it’s far from easy even to master this level of skill, to be able to beat someone in a fight. I’m nowhere near even this level of achievement.

I think, though, that we need to aim higher. We need to use the self-cultivation aspects of our martial arts training to reach the  point where, through our skill, our  understanding of ourselves, and thereby our understanding  of our opponent, we can not just defeat them but also transform them – that is, to defeat them but not harm them, thus demonstrating the futility of violence and the value of self-cultivation. Thus, a world “wu shu”, of the absence of war, is one person closer.

I know that we’ve all seen this idea a thousand times in cheesy kung fu movies, and that it  risks losing its force because it becomes a cliche, but it’s a pretty good reason for studying  martial arts all the same!

As the hero of the “Eight Diagram Pole Fighter” puts it:  “Brothers! We monks should not kill – but we must also defeat evil!”.

An aging wushu student laments…

… or, a slacker whinges, depends who you ask.

I’ve had to prioritize lately; I’m doing too much, and losing ground all round.

The big casualty is xingyi; I’ve told Madam Ge that I won’t be attending classes any more. The training ground is just too far away for me to get there easily after work; on top of that, I’ve missed classes due to holidays and meetings, and there are other holidays and meetings coming up, so I’ve just fallen too far behind. This is the second time it’s happened – I had stop attending classes with Victor Chong because of time constraints during my MBA. It seems I’m fated never to learn xingyi!

Perhaps it’s the weather (it’s the monsoon season, so torrential rain, overcast, and cold – for Singapore anyway, about 23-24C maybe), perhaps it’s the Hungry Ghost Festival (ooh, I forgot to blog about that…) but I’ve been feeling a bit old lately… I mean, I’m hardly decrepit, but I’m not 20 any more, you know what I mean? Actually, it’s more likely due to the fact that my ribs still hurt. They were healing, until a sceptical friend thought it would be hilarious to land a punch there. Ha effing ha. Back to square one. I’m going to go and see a Chinese doctor about them soon, to see if acupuncture or massage will help. But believe me, shooting pains in the ribs and back do make you feel old

Even so, I’m thinking that I really need to be making my studies count, to be learning something useful – and somehow do that around earning a crust, paying rent, and other such tedious requirements.

Anyway, as if on cue, I’ve seen two relevant posts from other students, one on each end of the IMA spectrum.

“Tabby cat”, a mysterious yoga and martial arts student, is taking an intensive one-month yiquan course in Beijing. In his latest post, he comments on what he’s really looking for:

Since I am getting long in the tooth, I have to do my surveys intensively now, making every hour count, rather than taking slower years – cause I don’t have ‘years’ anymore! I’m gonna be out of this fucking vale of tears soon enough. So I have to make every golden hour with its 60 jeweled minutes, do the work that once the draggy long years did. The Search for the Missing Basic!

The Missing Basic – the one practice method, a single basic drill that is The Most Ultimately Optimal for developing The Power Formerly Known As Qi.

Aahh, qi…

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a post from Kenny, a student of Joanna Zorya. Joanna doesn’t believe that there is any such thing as qi, at all. Her approach to the IMA is all about the combat, and that’s what Kenny muses about:

I was thinking about this on my very short drive home and I have only one regret. That is that due to my age I will never be a fighter (as in competition fighter) In a way I wish that there had been someone to teach me this style of fighting 20 years ago, when there may have been a chance that I could of become a fighter.

Well, I’m in the middle here. As far as I’m concerned, qi exists and, like Tabby Cat, I’m looking for effective ways to develop and use it. Like Kenny though, I also want to be able to use the martial arts I’m learning, not just ‘dance’ through the forms. Yeah, wish I’d started learning from a good teacher 20 years ago. I put it that way because I did actually start learning taijiquan 20 years ago… oh my, I only just realized, that’s scary.

Did I ever mention how I got into the IMA? You’ll laugh… I did a bit of judo at school, but I can’t say I ever got into it… What really happened was that just before I went to Lesotho I watched Apocalypse Now: there’s a sequence in the lost Cambodian wat that has become Kurtz’s headquarters, where Martin Sheen is being held prisoner, and Kurtz is explaining why he has become a renegade. In the background, just for a couple of seconds, we see one of Kurtz’s tribesmen performing taiji. For some reason, after all the craziness and violence earlier in the film, the stillness and harmony of those couple of seconds really had an impact on me and I thought “Wow, I want to learn that!”.

While I was in Africa, I picked up the China Foreign Language Press’s book on Wu style in a shop in Johannesburg, but never did much with it. During my second year at university, I found Paul Crompton’s “Chinese Soft Exercise: A Tai Chi Workbook”, and used that to teach myself the Cheng Man Ching form – badly, with many mistakes, but I did feel the qi flow Wow, was that all really two decades ago???

Oh, and thanks to YouTube, here’s the clip. The moment that had such an impact on me is about 1’30″ in:

Film Review: Summer Palace

Yiheyuan, 2006. Dir: Ye Lou

I can see why this film was received well at Cannes: it has a Gallic approach to questioning love, life, and what’s it all about, in drawn-out sequences of talking, lovemaking, or both.

Four main characters drive the story: a woman who can’t show affection except through sex, a guy who can’t stay faithful, a woman who won’t let anyone show love for her, and a disengaged man who doesn’t show his emotions. Although there is potentially lots to work with here, the film rushes through events too quickly, without really letting us get to know the characters well enough; the result is that we don’t really engage with them, to the extent that a ‘shock’ death late in the film doesn’t really move the audience.

The action of the film takes place in two broad chapters, with a short preamble that introduces us to the character who is the film’s prime focus. In the first section, the four are all young students at one of China’s top two universities, Beijing University [my own university, Tsinghua, is the other, and plainly the better of the two ]. Here, they cope with freedom, new experiences, and exploration of themselves and their own development. This process of growth takes place against the backdrop of a period of debate and political engagement, that eventually ends with the massacre in the summer of 1989.

Graduating that same summer, the foursome split up. The female lead begins a slow downward slide into poverty and emotional isolation; the others go to newly post-Wall Berlin, where they spend most of the next decade in arty, bohemian circles (what exactly they were doing wasn’t clear). Eventually, the male lead decides to return to China in order to seek some stability in his life. This sets in motion a chain of events that leads to a death, and to a new encounter with his unhappy ex-lover.

The film was shot on a small budget, and it shows in several ways. In an effort to keep out anachronisms, many of the outdoor scenes in the Beijing sequences are shot close-up; this has the unfortunate effect of giving us hardly any sense of the city – even the Summer Palace isn’t really shown, except for the lake. The budget issue also shows up in some of the sequences during the clampdown on the student protests; some sections here – such as the burning truck – do look a bit cheap. (To be fair, this may not have been a budget issue: obviously, a film touching on a topic which is still officially taboo would have to be shot quickly and without drawing too much attention).

The biggest problem with the film was the pacing, though; it was a bit too draggy, and spread over too long a time period. The repeated use of subtitles to summarize what happened during several years between scenes was a bit clunky, and not particularly engaging. Even so, the film dragged on rather too long; quite a few people walked out of the viewing I went to, and despite my best efforts, my attention wandered quite a few times.

So was there anything good about this film? In fact, quite a lot. The acting was natural, and I certainly know quite a lot of people just like these characters. Each of the two ‘chapters’ was strong. The university period had a very, very strong sense of place and period when the action moved into the crowded university dormitories, and to the student bars where political talk and activism rubbed shoulders with pool games, 80s disco, and folk music. There was a real feeling of idealistic youth discovering themselves and groping to discover the world. The second, more mature, segment, also had strong settings, and the melancholic feeling of getting a bit older, realizing that life hasn’t turned out as we imagined, and wondering what to do about it.

Unfortunately, neither segment was really given time to develop or breathe, and that’s the real failing of the film. The characters, settings and themes are strong enough to work; ideally, this would be two films – a Chinese version of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (and I love those films, so the comparison is a vote of confidence in Ye Lou’s basic material).

Overall: a good concept, that doesn’t quite work. I think I would like to see it again, as fragments of the music, of the conversation, and faces (especially actress Hu Ling!) keep on resurfacing. Don’t go to see it with too-high expectations, but do see it if – like me – you’re an angsty thirty-something with an interest in China!

Poetry evening at the National Library

Last Thursday night I decided to pop down to the Subtext poetry reading at the National Library. It was pretty good; there were four performers:

• Cyril Wong, who read from his latest collection on the gay scene in Singapore. It  was an interesting view from a not-so-well known side of Singapore, but I felt that he used a few too many cliches in his writing.
• Koh Tsin Yen, who wrote meditative pieces on her New England experiences
• Shamini Flint, a very witty speaker, who read extracts from her locally-set murder mystery
• Ray McNiece, an American Tom Waits soundalike, who gave performance pieces on his life as a travelling poet.

I’m glad I’ve finally got myself together to start attending cultural events like this, although I don’t really have the skillset to really appreciate them, I guess. Who knows, though: perhaps attending a few more will inspire me to try to write something myself…

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!

3 weeks, 8 goals

Seeing as I wasn’t able to access my funds from Thailand, I’ve got most of of my holiday budget left to play with. So, yesterday, I finally got round to buying Yang Jwing-Ming’s Emei Baguazhang book. I’ve heard good things about it, but I’ve always been put off a) by the high price (S$79!) and b) because it’s usually shrinkwrapped, so I couldn’t see what I’d be getting for my money. Yesterday, I found an unwrapped copy in Borders, and after looking through it for a while, decided I definitely needed it in my bookcase!

Right now I’m in between jobs; in fact there’s a gap of a month. With one week gone in Thailand, what to do with the rest of my time?

Partially inspired by Mike Garofalo’s list of 11 things to do in 1001 days, here are my goals for the remaining 3 (well, 2 1/2 now) weeks:

1. I will re-learn the Yang 24-move Taiji short form, and surpass my previous level
2. I will re-learn the Cheng Man Ching 37-move Taiji short form, and surpass my previous level
3. I will work on the Xuan Xuan Taiji broadsword set, and achieve my previous level
4. I will re-learn the Yang 13-move Taiji broadsword set, and surpass my previous level.
5. I will learn the Bagua Turning-Spinning Qigong set from the Emei Bagua book, and memorize it
6. I will continue to learn the Iron Shirt Neigong exercises
7. I will continue to practise the Bagua palm and sword sets I’m learning from Madam Ge
8. I will practise vipassana meditation regularly.

Sounds like a lot, but it’s actually quite possible, I think – I’m not coming at any of these from a standing start, except for 5 and 6. 1 is already almost done, I’m making good progress on 5, 7 and 8, and slow progress on 3 – and that’s just since I came back from Bangkok! Wish me luck

Angulimala

It may not be obvious to all readers of this blog that I am actually a very angry person. Not all the time, of course! Usually, it won’t be apparent in my behaviour. Much of the time, even I won’t be aware of it. But deep down, there’s always anger, bubbling away, looking for a reason to explode.

Where does this anger have its roots? Back in the UK, the circles I moved in were extremely political, and I found it a very unpleasant experience. It’s high-pressure, very manipulative, and ego-driven. Without really being aware of how it had happened, I suddenly realised that it had changed me, and that I’d become quite an unpleasant person. Even I didn’t like myself.

I managed to undo the damage. Fate, or perhaps good karma, enabled me to get out of the environment that was locking me into that behaviour. That was the start. What really changed me for the better was attending a 10-day meditation retreat organised by the Goenka Foundation. This had a tremendously positive effect on me; afterwards, I felt totally cleansed, emotionally and spiritually. My anger was completely gone, and I felt transformed. This ‘small enlightenment’ was instrumental in my eventually becoming a Buddhist, and led me to change what I planned to do after my MBA – which was about to start.

Unfortunately, the MBA is also a high-pressure, ego-driven environment, and old habits resurfaced. Gradually, I wasn’t able to keep up the meditation, and began to react to events again with anger and frustration. The lessons and benefits of the meditation didn’t entirely go away, and continued to help me – plus, I was able to attend classes at Odiyana, which helped. So, I never became as nasty as I had been before.

But.. the year post-MBA has been very stressful, and that negativity has been boiling away behind the scenes. Some events over the last few days have stoked the fire, and last night, I just lost it; I wound up being a real asshole to someone who had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just rudeness, nothing more, but they didn’t deserve it and I feel remorseful, not that I can do much to remedy it now.

I suppose that if I can’t undo it, I can at least try to learn from it. Lesson one is meditate, meditate, meditate. Meditation regularly increases awareness of sensations, and teaches disengagement from them; recognising the stirring of negative feelings, and learning not to let them take hold. If I had been stronger in my practice, I wouldn’t have accumulated so much rage, and I would had have been able to control my temper. Secondly, the importance of sangha – that is, engagement in the Buddhist community, to learn from others and benefit from their support. Trying to learn and practice alone is much harder.

So why am I blogging about it? Well, if I can look at this action of mine, and take lessons from it that help me to be a better person, perhaps the message will help someone else to avoid making the same mistake. Secondly, putting it out there may help me stick to my resolve to practise more seriously.

It’s perhaps the right time; I was told that the the Year of the Dog was going to be unlucky for me, and it’s certainly been far from my best year ever. Maybe this is its parting shot. The Year of the Pig should be better, and I’ll try to get it off to a good start by trying to reform. And the title? Well, if even Angulimala, through effort, could become enlightened then I, through effort, should at least be able to be less obnoxious.

On this night of stars….

… OK, so it’s an Evita quote, so sue me. Actually, the tale of how I wound up going to see Evita in the company of a wildly eccentric Spanish artiste is a whole other story that shall not be told here. I use the quote to make the point that I have had the most amazing evening…

I went out to work on my taiji and bagua in Duxton Plain Park, as usual. I decided to try out my new approach to bagua practice, and discovered that I’m on the right path. I just concentrated on two things: 1) breathe from the tantien 2) keep facing the centre of the circle. I don’t say that I managed to do both of these all the time, or even most of the time. But when I did, everything else just worked. The stepping, the posture, everything just fell into place. Tonight was more difficult than it ought to have been, because I was also breaking in a new pair of shoes (in the shop, and in my apartment, I was able to mud-step very smoothly, but when worn on concrete they suddenly became super-grippy). All the same: I really feel like I’ve made a breakthrough.

As if to reward me for getting it right, a number of other things fell into place. Mr Wang, who I’ve mentioned before, came along again – but this time he was in a chatty mood. He said that he’s 56 now, and he started learning yinfu style bagua when he was 6 years old; he was taught by his father, who was also a yinfu style expert. We talked for some time. I can’t call it a conversation; my Mandarin is so bad that I wasn’t so much answering him, as trying to use any vocabulary I have in order to say something that might be tangentially related to what I thought he might have said. Nevertheless, he gave a demonstration of his bagua, comparing it to the Cheng style that I know.

Since I was just finishing as he came along, we walked along the park together until we came to where the Chin Woo (Jing Wu Men in Mandarin) were practicing; they were out in force tonight, with maybe thirty people there. This was where I was meeting a friend, so we parted company at that point. Through my friend, I know quite a few of the Chin Woo people, so I got talking to one of the senior instructors. It turned out that they had a special guest instructor visiting from Shanghai, so I was introduced to him… and it turned out that he knew me and wanted to talk to me: he was one of the two guys who stopped to watch me working on my bagua on Monday night – the one I didn’t talk to on that occasion. He also knows bagua, and gave me a demo. I really had trouble with his Shanghainese accent, and couldn’t understand much of what he said, to my shame, but it looked a lot like the Fu style I’ve previously seen at Chin Woo. I liked him immediately; he came across as a really nice guy, the kind of upright, straight-talking martial artist you just have to respect.

I arranged to meet my friend at the coffee shop I mentioned on Monday; when I got there, who did I see but Mr Ng (who I’ve often written about here), who is also part of Chin Woo, and also knows bagua. He was hanging out with a group of friends who, from what I caught of their conversation, are also martial artists. I got talking to the waitress I mentioned before; she’s from Shandong province.

I know that these words won’t convey as much to you as I would like them to. Understand that when I was still living in Wales, colleagues and ‘friends’ would see me practising taiji, and say to me “You’re into some weird stuff, aren’t you”, in the kind of voice that meant ‘We think you might be a serial killer’. To have moved to Singapore and get so much martial arts goodness in one night, I really think I must have done something double-plus good in a previous life! Which is also a kick up the backside to remind me that I need to get started on doing good things in this life, because I would appear to be well overdue on that account. Still… I have two important take-aways from tonight. Firstly, it’s to recognise how amazingly open and friendly people can be once you’ve established that you’re serious about practicing martial arts. Secondly, it’s that I must, must, must improve my Mandarin, because without good Chinese I’m crippled.

All the world’s a stage…

I once saw an empty doorframe, standing upright on a beach.

A few years ago, in what for me were the bad old days, I was walking along a beach just before dawn. It was a pebble beach, not sand, and kind of near town but still a bit out of the way. It was on my way home, though, and that’s where I was going. I’d spent the night out with friends: drinking, partying, talking about all kinds of stuff, and – this being a cold autumn – occasionally hiding out in public shelters to avoid the rain showers, and singing hymns because the signs on the wall said HYMN SINGING ON SUNDAYS.

So anyway, I got tired and decided to go home and, as I said, I had to walk along this beach to get home. There was nobody else anywhere nearby, this being 4 or 5 in the morning and all, and there was that eerie, otherworldy feeling you get when there’s no sound at all except the breakers and the hissing of the water pulling back through the rocks and your head’s full of silence and hymns. And, behold, there was this doorframe, standing upright and empty, in the middle of the beach and facing the waves and the great wide horizon.

If I had stepped through it, would I have been in the same place? If I was in the same place, would I have been the same person? I don’t know. I didn’t step through it. These are questions worth asking, though. They’re worth asking, because a doorway in the midst of wilderness taps deeply into our sense of myth, and draws upon our millenia as a species of asking questions about what on earth is really going on here. It doesn’t belong – but why not, and why is it there? If it’s here, maybe it’s for a reason. Maybe it hasn’t just been washed up by the sea and put upright by who knows who. Because our reality is artificial and constricted. William Gibson described cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination” but the description is just as apt for “the real world”… whatever that is. It’s a liminal experience.

A solitary doorway on the tideline challenges the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and about the world we live in. We act according to unconscious streams of thought, and sometimes we encounter something that resonates, and we feel compelled to act without really knowing why.

That’s why I feel that I need to take, ahem, acting classes. I’ve known for a long time that very little is real – or, at least, as real as we like to think it is. Like all of us, I have several narrative versions of who I am; some are mutually incompatible, but they are all true, none the less. (I put it down to reading Michael Moorcock‘s Jerry Cornelius quartet at a young age).

Where do these stories come from, and what lies underneath? Studying baguazhang and taijiquan has helped, and is helping, to discipline and understand my body and, through the body, my mind. Studying Buddhism and meditation helps me to understand the mind and, through the mind, my body.  What’s lacking is a way of systematically examining the ways in which I interpret myself to the world, and the ways and means I employ to sway and motivate other people.  Seeing an advert for acting classes has triggered a response: I think this could be a really useful experience in terms of personal development and give me insight tools that I’m lacking(and, to be clear, my less-spiritual MBA self also sees advantages).  What do you think? Details are here.

Becoming a monk in Thailand

An interesting post on the Life Coaches Blog today: Alvin writes about his friend who has gone to Thailand to become a Buddhist monk. The friend, now known as Phra Abhi-Bhun-Noo Paiboon, writes a short description of the process of taking on this new identity. I’ve already read descriptions of this in Phra Farang, the memoir written by an Englishman who became a monk, set up a charity to provide education for Thai children, and subsequently returned to lay life to run it. Still, I hope that Phra Paiboon will continue to contribute blog entries on his new life.