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?

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….

What a stiff(ness)!

Wow, it’s been a pretty intense week martial arts-wise!

At the Nam Wah Taijigong Association, we’re working on the Yang-24 sequence now; for me it’s much-needed revision, as I haven’t practiced this for a long time. My practice of the sequence has also gotten a bit mixed up, as Nam Wah’s sequence is small-frame, whereas in Beijing I learned the large-frame version. We’re moving very slowly through the new moves, holding each position for what feels like very long periods! It isn’t really for very long, but a lot of muscles and tendons aren’t used to even short pauses in these positions, and complain vociferously!

As I mentioned, I’m now also studying twice a week with Master Zhou. I think he feels that this will give us plenty of time to finish the form, so last night we tried something new. Next to where we practice, there’s a trio of heavy upright wooden poles, set in a triangle and supporting metal bars for pullups. When I first started studying with Madam Ge, I used these to try to work out the applications for the moves; I stopped that fairly soon, after I was reminded that I needed to work more on the basics first. (Looking back on that post with hindsight is pretty interesting; I now know that Mr Ng was taught bagua by Master Zhou’s twin brother!).

Anyway, last night, Master Zhou decided to focus solely on applications. Normally, although he shows me a lot of these, we don’t do much repetition, so I tend to forget them. This time, he showed me a sequence of moves, and I just did them again and again, circling one of the poles and using it as my target, to a chorus of “Hit the eyes! Hit the eyes! Hit the balls! Hit the chest!” Etc, etc…. Hehehe, my contribution was to teach Master Zhou the English word “balls”, which he’s very pleased to add to his vocabulary of what to hit and how to do it!

This, as you can imagine, gathered a lot of attention from passers-by! We were joined for a lot of the lesson by a very tall, striking woman from Dalian and her small son, about six years old I would guess, who was totally fascinated by this! (The son, I mean, the mother less so). Master Zhou’s very good with kids, and chatted away happily to them as I kept on circling and striking… Later, the Chin Woo Lion Dancers started drumming away nearby; the boy really wanted to see this, so off they went to watch… After class, as I went down to where I practice solo, I passed the drummers and they were still there, the mother talking to Chin Woo students, the little boy doing gymnastics… They wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t stopped to watch my practice; I wonder whether something has been set in motion that will change that little boy’s life, however slightly? It would be nice to think so!

So, then it was time for solo practice. Most of this was working on the needles form, trying to drill it into muscle memory, and getting it into the circle walking. Thank goodness I took that video of Mi Lao Shi – there’s absolutely no way I would have remembered this. With repeat views of the video, though, I think I’m getting it, and was eventually finishing the form in the same spot that I’d started in. After that, I wound down with some sets of CMC-37 taijiquan, and xuan xuan dao, before going to meet some of the Chin Woo folks in a coffee shop on Keong Saik Road.

This morning…. oh my…. my ankles and leg tendons ache from holding the Yang-24 positions…. my back and shoulders ache from the whirling and twisting of the needles form… my palms, shoulders , back of my heel and sole of my foot ache from hitting and kicking those poles! Ouch! Ouch!

Achoo!

I’m coughing, sneezing, and spluttering in the early days of a cold, with ear-ache building up… Yesterday I found myself in the office wearing a jacket and warm cap to insulate myself from the aircon, and still having massive sneezes come out of nowhere to leave important documents decorated in green (sorry, I know you didn’t need that image!).

I figured that I’ve learned my lesson; training with a cold is a  bad idea, so I called Master Zhou to tell him I couldn’t make it to class. After work, I took the MRT home, and stopped off at the supermarket to buy comfort food (pizza and red wine) so that I could fight off the cold before an early night. The walk home from there took me through the park where I train, and lo and behold there was Master Zhou on his own, warming up for training. This was before our normal class time – I’ve never seen him there so early, in all the time we’ve been meeting!

So, I stopped for a chat. At that point, I wasn’t sneezing heavily, so I’m sure he thinks I was skiving, but I really am ill! I told him about the news, and we agreed that it’s a short time in which to finish. The upshot is that we’re probably going to start meeting twice a week now, on Wednesdays as well as Fridays, and we’ll focus less on applications and more on just learning the form properly.

Pens, balls, and other sensitive parts

I’ve had a lot of insomnia recently and, when I did sleep, strange, disturbing dreams that have left me feeling unrested. I just mention this as the leadup to saying that I’m tired; spaced-out tired. I had an invitation to go to a pretty high-profile design industry event last night, but I just didn’t feel up to schmoozing and smalltalk; I reckoned that going to train as usual would tire me out physically, and perhaps let me sleep a bit better.

So, I went to class with Master Zhou. Because of the state I was in, my reactions were incredibly slow, so that when he demonstrated one attack, I didn’t ride it well and got thrown on my backside. I actually landed on the top of my coccyx, which hurt like crazy at the time, and is throbbing now as I write. Anyway, it certainly woke me up.

I mentioned to him that I plan to study the Judge’s Pen form with Master Sun Zhijun, and he laughed uproariously, which suprised me. It was only later that I realised I’d used the wrong tone. Mandarin-speakers will guess what I’d actually said… He also mentioned that the pen/needle comes from the Emei bagua tradition, not from the Beijing or Shanghai lineages, and that it’s been imported into the Cheng/Yin lines. Anybody able to comment on that?

Briefly, it was another great lesson. I learned a few new moves – though whether I will remember them is another issue – and applications, including a very nasty spin and backwards kick…bagua fighting really does go for the soft and painful parts, doesn’t it!

In The Matrix Reloaded, the character Seraph tells Neo that to know someone, you have to fight them. At the time, I thought that sounded like pseudo-philosophical bs, but now I begin to wonder. The parts of each class where Master Zhou demonstrates the applications of the moves we’ve just learned, and I try to defend myself are actually quite revealing. So are the parts where I try to apply them against him… I’m learning that I really don’t have the instinct, or mindset, to attack someone if I don’t have to. I always hesitate, or try to pull my blow, or deflect it so that it doesn’t land heavily. (OTOH, I have had a couple of experiences in the past when I had to use a move for real and didn’t hesitate at all, so maybe the necessity is the issue here). I’m noticing that when I’m defending, I’m instinctively using taiji principles and movements, softness, stickiness, deflection. Intellectually, of course, I know that I can’t compete with Master Zhou on strength or speed, but I’m not rationalizing that way when I’m under pressure. Interesting… When we’re practising repetitions of moves, I tire rapidly; if I want to progress, I need to do a lot on strength and stamina. And when I do successfully perform a move, he’ll always do a couple of rapid attacks back , just to make sure I don’t get too smug…

I asked Master Zhou to show me the rest of the form, what I still have remaining… and, oops, there’s a lot. I think I might be able to finish it before I go to Beijing, but we’re going to have to pick up the pace a bit. Apparently, there’s no-one in Beijing who could teach me this form; it’s Shanghai-based. So, lots of work to come…

After the class, I went to practice solo, as usual. I had a lot on my mind, so I decided to focus on taiji, and did seven or eight reps of the CMC-37 set over the next hour and a half, taking it slow…

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.

Drying up the rivers and lakes

This being Saturday morning, I am of course in pain! Today, it’s mainly my shoulder. Master Zhou had me working on a shoulder strike, and was demonstrating several ways it could be used. At one point, I thought he was indicating that I should try it out on him – but in fact, he was preparing another demonstration… so our shoulders collided hard when I tried to slam him just as he slammed me. Ouch! Of course, he’s ok. Me… hehehe, I’m slapping on lots of Tiger Balm!

He was emphasizing the need for stretching, especially when we worked on a move which went from swooping down into a low crouch, then rising up into a jump and a kick. This is new to me, and I really felt it in my knees! He went on to point out that the form we’re working on – the Rising Dragon – is relatively straightforward, and that the later forms – Monkey, Bear, Horse, Chicken, etc – need much more speed and flexibility. He demonstrated a few of them and, well, I see what he means! Of course, I won’t get the chance to study these with him for a long time, if at all. I just want to get the Dragon form finished before I leave..

After class I did some solo training, but it didn’t go too well. My mind was too busy, and I found it really difficult to empty my thoughts… so my taiji was useless. Eventually, I managed it to an extent, and went through some bagua, which worked up a good sweat.

I moved on to Keong Saik Road, and got talking to the owner of the coffeeshop. I asked him how he thought it had changed over the years. He looked around, bent down, and whispered “less prostitutes!“. I mentioned previously that the area is getting gentrified, and of course I can understand why people who live and work there would prefer higher-value passing trade…. but it’s still a little sad for me to see one of Singapore’s historically ‘colourful’ areas losing its character.

Heh, I was thinking of this when I looked again at Wikipedia’s entry for Jianghu. The older version, the one that inspired me to use “Jianghu” as the name for this blog, said:

“jiang hu” is ‘not a physical place or geographic location but the wild and romanticized domain of secret societies, gangs, fighters, entertainers, prostitutes, assassins, thieves, actors, beggars, and wanderers that is roughly the Chinese equivalent to the English terms “bohemian” and “the underworld”‘.

It looks as if the entry’s been revised pretty recently, and now it reads:

The Jiānghú (江湖; Cantonese: gong woo) world is the milieu, environment, or sub-community, often fictional, in which many Chinese classical wuxia stories are set. The term can be translated literally as “rivers and lakes”. Jianghu is an alternative universe coexisting with the actual historical one in which the context of the wuxia genre was set.

Well… yes, true, fair enough… but dry. Academic.. yes, I know it’s meant to be authoritative, a reference source… but it’s still less alive, less evocative. Symptomatic in a small way of a world increasingly ordered and run by bureaucrats and policemen…

And speaking of policemen – but no, I’ll save that story for another time…

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The Yin and Yang of a wushu student

A few more musings on last night’s lesson that I want to jot down…

It was a very warm and humid evening; a few of the Chin Woo instructors a little further down the park commented on it as I passed them later on, but I didn’t need to be told: I was drenched in sweat after my lesson. Master Zhou was wearing a silk wushu outfit, so he didn’t suffer too much, but I was in cotton. T-shirt and trousers alike were soaked, with just the loose part of my trousers around my ankles still undarkened…

This led to one doh! moment… We were practicing an upward-rising punch to the ribs; Master Zhou was using one of his hand to shield the impact as I hit him. Unfortunately, both his hand and my arm were slick with humidity-induced sweat… so my fist slid off his hand and continued upwards… my forearm, frictionless, followed… and suddenly I realized I’d just socked my teacher with a heavy uppercut to the jaw! To his credit, Master Zhou was OK about it. He wasn’t hurt, and just laughed – and possibly ruminated that there’s no-one so dangerous as a beginner who doesn’t know what he’s doing…

He was glad to hear that I’m romantically involved again. He thinks it’s a good thing for a wushu student to be attached, as it balances things out – “for the student, the sifu is the yang, the woman the yin – you shouldn’t be like a monk”. Heh. As I’ve said before, he’s pretty old-school!

After the class, I went for solo practice. I was worn out, so only managed an hour rather than my usual 90 minutes, but got some good work done, I think. The moon was close to full, and the rabbit stood out clearly. (I have never, ever, been able to see a man in the moon). Light clouds came and went. The feral cats stretched, slept, explored and prowled around me as I worked on my taiji and bagua. I love these tropical nights when the moon is full and golden.