Cook Ding's Kitchen

Beginning Anew

2012-01-29T08:00:00.005-05:00

Another excellent article at the Classical Budoka. An excerpt is below. The whole article may be read here. Martial arts isn't about organizations or styles, but the people who study, teach and practice them.

For several years, I didn’t have any formal connections to any iaido organization. Since the death of my main iai teacher in Japan several years ago, things got weird real fast in the home dojo, and the local kendo/iaido group that my club once happily worked with also got weird on us. Nobody wanted us all of a sudden.

For several years, I felt cast adrift. There was so much more left to learn in my iai system. Friends offered ideas to help me out of my dilemma and even opportunities to join their systems, but I was never quite satisfied with their solutions until this past December. I got back together with a fellow student of my iai teacher. He had an advanced degree, faced the same problems, and found his own solutions.

The Gangs of Chinatown

2012-01-26T08:00:00.004-05:00

A friend sent me this article. An excerpt is posted below. The full article may be read here. Check out the rest of the tabs.

# SAN FRANCISCO'S CHINATOWN TRIADS

Introduction

The streets of San Francisco Chinatown seem like a regular tourist spot to most people. People gather there to eat, shop, or just sightsee. All this is very common in the daytime, but during the night, it’s a completely different scene. If you ever go to Chinatown during the daytime, you most likely see a lot of old Chinese people going grocery shopping or tourists looking around, but by 7 pm or so, the stores are closed and the streets are nearly deserted. The reason for this is that at night, the street gangs of Chinatown start to get active. There is a lot of history in San Francisco’s Chinatown that not too many people know about. Chinatown wasn’t the safe place everyone thought it was.

Origin of Gangs

It all started when Tongs started to form in Chinatown. A Tong is the term used for a type of secret society found among Chinese American immigrants. Tongs started forming during the 1850’s during the California Gold Rush when many Chinese immigrants started flocking to the city they called “Gold Mountain.” They went to California thinking they were going to be able to make a fortune but many Chinese found themselves unwelcomed. Some were being robbed, and some were being taken advantaged of by the early settlers such as the Irish or Italians. They felt like they couldn’t go to the local law enforcement because a lot of the police were of Irish descent. The Chinese needed some sort of protection, the kind they had in their homeland, which led to the forming of Tongs. Tongs were created for mutual support and protection, especially from groups hostile towards the Chinese immigration. Industries and families formed their own Tongs and built meeting halls. Each Tong was a form of self government that looked after themselves. “If you were a shoemaker, there would be a shoemaker tong. If you were a seamstress, you would be in a seamstress tong.” There would also be tongs that were formed from last names. For example if a persons last name was Wong, they would be in the Wong tong. The Tongs were, and are today, a lifesaver to many hardworking immigrants.

The Tongs also had another side to them. Some Tongs use their power to extort local merchants, both legitimate and illegal. Tongs also recruited gangsters to do their dirty work. “Some of the tongs actually have a separate branch of gangsters that work for them. Who would enforce the rules and regulations.” The FBI has kept a list of criminally influence tongs. One of the major tongs was named “The Hop Sing Tong.”

Raymond Chow and the Hop Sing Tong
Raymond Chow was one of Chinatowns most notorious criminals. Chow was born in Hong Kong in 1960. At the age of 9, he joined a gang. “I just want to be the best gangster, best fighter, and party, making money, and also selling a lot of drugs.” In 1976, Chows family moved to San Francisco where he enrolled in high school. He was in school for about two months when he got picked on for being a foreigner. To retaliate, Chow shot a classmate in the leg. He dropped out of school and spent all his time practicing martial arts. He practiced in a well known Chinese playground where a lot of gangsters hung out. One gang in particular caught Chows eyes which was the “Hop Sing Boys.” He joined the Hop Sing Tong because of their culture, loyalty, trust, and honor.

The Hop Sing Tong was one of the criminally influenced tongs that the FBI had a list of. “If you say that the Hop Sing Tong is a criminal organization, you’re wrong, because there are some members in there that are not criminals.” Raymond Chow began working for the Hop Sing Tong in 1976. At that time, there were two gangs that were employed under the Hop Sing Tong, which were the Hop Sing Boys and the “Wah Ching.” These two gangs made sure that the rules of the Hop Sing Tong were enforced.

Enter the Dragon

2012-01-23T08:00:00.005-05:00

Today begins Chinese New Year. This is the Year of the Dragon. Specifically, the is the year of the Water Dragon.

Metal Animation has a great article on Chinese Dragons, as well as pictures of some outstanding sculptures. I've copied a portion of the article below. The picture is of one of their sculptures. Follow this link for read the whole thing.

Chinese Imperial Water Dragon - Mythology

In Chinese mythology there are five types of dragon:-

1. Those guarding the gods and emperors

2. Those controlling the wind and rain
3. Earthly dragons which deepened the rivers and seas
4. Guardians of hidden treasure
5. The first dragon

The First dragon appeared to the mythical emperor Fu-hsi, and filled the hole in the sky made by the monster Kung Kung. Its waking, sleeping and breathing determined day and night. Season and weather.

There are many differences between the classical dragon and the Chinese dragon, these include the ability to fly even without wings, shape-shifting abilities, and of course the general benevolent behaviour to the populace.

The Chinese dragon is made up of nine entities. The head of camel, the eyes of a demon, the ears of a cow, the horns of a stag, the neck & body of a snake, It's claws that of an eagle, while the soles of his feet are that of a tiger, and the scales that cover it's body are that of a carp.

The Chinese dragon has four claws as standard, but the Imperial dragon has five, this is to identify it above the lesser classes. Anyone other than the emperor using the 5 claw motif was put to death.

The Writer's Block Suite

2012-01-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

Since I had been invited to have Cook Ding's Kitchen on a Poetry Blog ranking, I thought it would be appropriate to interject my own stuff from time to time, in between my regular posts.

So here it goes (drum roll please), I give you ... The Writer's Block Suite:

Writer’s Block I

Wordless.

Struggling to find

Just one cohesive though.

At a blank piece of paper

I stare.

Writer’s Block II

I have nothing I can say

And I don’t know what to do.

No emotion is welling up.

I feel no words are coming through.

My pen has gone bone dry

There is nothing on my mind.

Nothing weighs upon my thoughts

Must have left my feelings behind.

There is nothing that excites me

I was missed by the lightning.

A dull, lackluster day

I have nothing I can say.

Writer’s Block III

Pen over paper

Poised to express ideas

That never come

Now back to your regularly scheduled postings ...

The 48 Laws of Power, #1: Never Outshine the Master

2012-01-20T08:00:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite books on strategy is The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers. Where The Art of War, by Sun Tzu is written as an overview of the whole topic of strategy, seeking to provide an overall understanding of the subject; and The 36 Strategies tries to impart the knack of strategic thinking through 36 maxims related to well known Chinese folk stories, Mr. Greene focuses on how we influence and manipulate one another, ie "power".

Mr. Greene draws from both Eastern and Western history and literature as his source material. Sun Tzu and Machiavelli as cited as much as wonderful stories of famous con men. Among my favorites is about a scrap metal dealer thinking he bought the Eiffel Tower.

Each of the 48 Laws carries many examples, along with counter examples where it is appropriate that they be noted, and even reversals.

It is a very thorough study of the subject and the hardback version is beautifully produced.

The first law is: Never Outshine the Master.

Law 1 Never Outshine the Master

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

That is, don't give your boss cause to feel threatened by outshining him. Unless of course, you're about to push him out of the way to get ahead.

A Resource for Japanese Martial Arts

2012-01-18T08:00:00.002-05:00

Here is a link for Gottsupedia. Gottsupedia is a wiki which is a source of information about Japan and related topics, with an emphasis on history and the martial arts, particularly Aikido. "Gottsupedia" stands simply for "Gottsuiiyan Encyclopedia".

Below is an excerpt from their article on Yoshinkan Aikido. Please pay a visit.

Emphasis on basics

Yoshinkan Aikido has some 150 basic techniques which are practiced repeatedly, enabling the student to master the remaining ones, which total some 3000 overall. The syllabus contains no weapons forms, although they are practiced as an adjunct to the open hand techniques. Like many styles of aikido, Yoshinkan eschews competition; instead, it emphasizes practicality and self defense applications. Yoshinkan aikido is one of the martial arts that is taught to the Tokyo police

Distinctively, Yoshinkan places heavy emphasis on basic movements, which are practiced in the form of kata. The reason for this, in Shioda Gozo's own words, is;

"Today's Aikido is so dimension less. It's hollow, empty on the inside. People try to reach the highest levels without even paying their dues. That's why it seems so much like a dance these days. You have to master the very basics solidly, with your body, and then proceed to develop to the higher levels.... Now we see nothing but copying or imitation without any grasp of the real thing...."

Yoshinkan aikido methodology is based on the idea that proper form leads to effective aikido technique and is the key to "kokyuu ryoku"; Yoshinkan's emphasis on basics and instilling them in students through repeated drills is a direct product of the difficulties encountered when Yoshinkan first began teaching exceptionally large groups, such the Tokyo police. Another reason for Yoshinkan's teaching methods, which Shioda points out in his book Shugyo, is that because modern people think more in terms of logic, no one would respond to Ueshiba Morihei's style of intuitive teaching. Ueshiba did not give exact instruction, instead he would show a technique and let everyone figure it out saying "That's fine, that's fine" to everyone's way of doing it. He would also exclaim "Become one with heaven and earth", which Shioda says would be nearly impossible to swallow for people nowadays. Shioda points out that unless precise and systematic instruction is given, people will be unable to grasp techniques, will fail to progess, and soon quit.

Another difference between Yoshinkan and Aikikai and other styles is the position of feet and hips. Most aikido styles use a kamae (generally translated as "stance", but can also be interpreted to mean "ready" or mental and physical "attitude") with the front foot pointing straight forward, the back foot at a 90 degree angle to the front foot, and the hips on a slight angle to the side. In the Yoshinkan kamae, the hips are square to the opponent (partner), and both the front and back feet are angled outwards at approximately 45 degrees (and on a 90 degree angle to each other). The Yoshinkan kamae is not intended as a combat stance, rather it is to instill and reinforce the body's "centre line" (中心線：chuushinsen).

Yoshinkan's main interest is in teaching a form of Aikido based on the sharp and clear pre-war aikido techniques of Ueshiba Morihei. In establishing the Yoshinkan Dojo, Shioda did away with much of the esoteric components that had been a part of Ueshiba's teachings, however "spirit" and attitude were strongly emphasized in Shioda's teaching.

The name "Yoshinkan" comes from the dojo his father owned - "Yo" means cultivate; "shin" means spirit ("Shin" uses the same Chinese character as "kami," which means divine, deity or god(s) - however it is generally interpreted to mean one's own "spirit" or "mind", rather than anything to do with deities in this case), "kan" means house. Thus "Yoshinkan" is the house for the cultivation of the spirit. Shioda's, and subsequently most of his disciples', teaching style is focused in the physical realm of Aikido techniques, and techniques are spoken of in terms of Centre Power (中心: chuushinryoku）, Focused Power (集中力 : shuuchuuryoku), and Breath Power (呼吸力：　kokyuuroku), and less in metaphysical. Yoshinkan will talk about energy flow and power in terms of "chikara" ("力" literally strength or power) rather than in metaphysical terms such as "ki". Despite not adhering to the religious aspects of Ueshiba's teachings, however, the Yoshinkan honbu dojo does have a kamidana at the shomen (front) of the dojo.

The Warrior Poet

2012-01-15T08:00:00.004-05:00

Having just come in from shoveling snow (there's not enough to warrant the snow thrower), what better time to contemplate cage fighting and poetry?

Below is an excerpt from a book review of Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet by Cameron Conaway. After reading the review, I looked the book up at Amazon and saw that the Kindle version was 2.99. I bought it. I haven't finished reading it yet, but so far I am enjoying it. The full review may be read here.

Arthur Rosenfeld

Tai Chi Master, Author, Teacher, Speaker

Caged -- A Book Review

Posted: 12/22/11 05:09 PM ET

The link between the warrior and the scholar is an old one, and in the cultures as diverse as ancient Greece and China, one as august as any. These days soldiers who become statesmen, or scholars who teach at military colleges exemplify the tradition best. While those folks are often in the news, there is amongst us a quieter, no less thoughtful philosophical pugilist. His name is Cameron Conaway, and he is an experienced MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter who also happens to be an award-winning poet who teaches Shakespeare for Ottawa University and was the University of Arizona's Poet-in-residence. Caged is the memoir of his still short, but already exceptional life.

His exquisitely written story is the work of a bard with blood on his hands, his own and that of his opponents. It's a sometimes gristly, sometimes soaring piece of work that begins with trenchant descriptions of a broken home and abusive father. It plumbs the mines of the father-son relationships and psychology, as Conaway bares his feelings when it comes to the agony of his estrangement from his dad, and much else too.

Books on Strategy

2012-01-12T08:00:00.005-05:00

My friend Michael Hom recently published an article at Jade Dragon on book selections on strategy and leadership. Below is an excerpt. The whole post may be read here.

2012 Suggestions for the Strategically Minded By M.E. Hom, Compass360Consulting.com
	Here is an updated New Year's list of books for those who are looking to start the year out with a mindset towards strategy and leadership. We believe that these books should be in the library of everyone who is interested in the Asian strategic mind. Sunzi Art of War Let's start with the premier book on Chinese strategic mindset—Sunzi (or Sun Tzu) Art of War.

According to Amazon.com:

"The Art of War is the Swiss army knife of military theory—a different tool for any situation. Folded into this small package are compact views on resourcefulness, momentum, cunning, the profit motive, flexibility, integrity, secrecy, speed, positioning, surprise, deception, manipulation, responsibility, and practicality. Most passages, however, are the pinnacle of succinct clarity: Lure them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion” or Invincibility is in one's self; vulnerability is in the opponent. Sun Tzu's maxims are widely applicable beyond the military because they speak directly to the exigencies of survival. Your new tools will serve you well, but don't flaunt them. Remember Sun Tzu's advice: Though effective, appear to be ineffective."
– Brian Bruya, Amazon.com

One of our favorite suggestions to new readers is The Complete Art of War. The first book is Sun Tzu: The Art of War. Millions of copies of this book have been sold in many languages around the world. Lost for more than 2,000 years and only recently recovered, Sun Pin: Military Methods (History & Warfare) (by Sun Tzu's great-grandson) is a brilliant elaboration on his ancestor's work.
The Complete Art of War brings the wisdom of these two ancient sages into a single volume and gives the reader a unique opportunity to master the essentials of Chinese thought on strategy, organization, and leadership. Our other favorite interpretations of Sunzi's The Art of War are shown below:

Unplugged

2012-01-09T08:00:00.004-05:00

A friend sent me this article from which an excerpt is below. The full article may be read here.

January 1, 2012, 1:42 pm

Disruptions: Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone

By NICK BILTON

Nick Bilton/The New York Times

Last week, I drove to Pacifica, a beach community just south of San Francisco, where I climbed a large rocky hill as the sun descended on the horizon. It painted a typically astounding California sunset across the Pacific Ocean. What did I do next?

What any normal person would do in 2011: I pulled out my iPhone and began snapping pictures to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

I spent 10 minutes trying to compose the perfect shot, moving my phone from side to side, adjusting light settings and picking the perfect filter.

Then, I stopped. Here I was, watching this magnificent sunset, and all I could do is peer at it through a tiny four-inch screen.

“What’s wrong with me?” I thought. “I can’t seem to enjoy anything without trying to digitally capture it or spew it onto the Internet.”

Hence my New Year’s resolution: In 2012, I plan to spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone. Without Internet, Twitter, Facebook and my iPad. Spending a half-hour a day without electronics might sound easy for most, but for me, 30 unconnected minutes produces the same anxious feelings of a child left accidentally at the mall.

I made this resolution out of a sense that I habitually reached for the iPhone even when I really didn’t need to, when I might have just enjoyed an experience, like the sunset, without any technology. And after talking to people who do research on subjects like this, I realized that there were some good reasons to give up a little tech.

Five Levels of Skill

2012-01-06T08:00:00.005-05:00

Over at Be Not Defeated by the Rain, there was recently posted an excellent article by one of the top Taijiquan masters in the world, Chen Xiao Wang. Below in an excerpt. The full article may be read here.

The Five Levels of Skill
by Chen Xiao Wang translated by Tan Lee-Peng, Ph.D.

Learning taijiquan is in principle similar to educating oneself; progressing from primary to university level, where one gradually gathers more and more knowledge. Without the foundation from primary and secondary education, one will not be able to follow the courses at university level. To learn taijiquan one has to begin from the elementary and gradually progress to the advanced stage, level by level in a systematic manner. If one goes against this principle thinking he could take a quick way out, he will not succeed. The whole progress of learning taijiquan, from the beginning to achieving success consists of five stages or five levels of martial/combat skill (kung fu). There are objective standards for each level of kung fu. The highest is achieved in the fifth level.

The standard and martial skill requirements for each level of kung fu will be described in the following sections. It is hoped that with these, the many taijiquan enthusiasts all over the world will be able to 'assess' on their own their current level of attainment. They will then know what they need to learn next and advance further step-by-step.

Chinese Swords and Swordsmanship

2012-01-03T08:00:00.001-05:00

It's high time to discuss swords again, don't you think? Below is an excerpt from a post at appeared at Be Not Defeated by the Rain. The full post may be read here.

I wanted to spend a little promoting this website. ChineseLongsword.com is a research and translation project of ancient Chinese sword manuals led by the Historical Combat Association (Singapore). Their goal is to preserve the ancient wisdom contained in these manuals for future generations. Their founder Jack Chen has also been in correspondence with my Sifu. Their efforts should be deeply commended and appreciated by the martial arts community. I hope that I can meet with them next time I am in Singapore.

The first manual they worked on was 單刀法選 "Dan Dao Fa Xuan", a Chinese swordsmanship manual, written and drawn by 程宗猷 (Cheng Zong You) during the Ming Dynasty, when the Japanese pirates fought with the Ming soldiers. He was taught by 劉雲峰 (Liu Yun Feng), who learned Japanese swordsmanship (Kenjutsu) directly from the Japanese.

This has since expanded to include writers such as 俞大猷 (Yu Da-You) a famous Ming-Dynasty General who defend China against the Japanese pirate invasions. Legend has it that General Yu visited Shaolin Temple, and improved on the monks' Staff techniques with his own teachings. He later wrote and compiled 正氣堂集 (Zheng Qi Tang Ji), "Compilation of Vital Energy". In his book, is a section called 劍經 (Jian Jing), "Sword Treatise" Other authors cover the spear, shaolin staff, shield and wolf brush and many others.

Now

2012-01-01T00:01:00.003-05:00

First of all, Happy New Year. I hope that it is a healthy, happy and prosperous one for you and yours.

Kung fu is defined as a skill that is developed over a long period of practice.

I notice that with the new year, that there is a resurgence of the "10,000 hour" meme. Malcolm Gladwell, in his outstanding book Outliers, notes a common trait among people who are at the top of their profession - they've practiced a lot. I mean a LOT. Like acquiring over 10,000 hours of practice and performance over their careers.

If you're like me, when you read this you start coming up with complex training schemes in order to accumulate 10,000 hours of practice in the shortest amount of calendar time. Then when the Universe reminds you that you are not in as much control as you think, you become frustrated.

I think the emphasis on 10,000 is worth noting, but is misplaced. What goes into those 10,000 hours is what matters.

For 2012, I'm not going to think about acquiring 10,000 hours of practice. I will think about today. This practice session. This repetition. Now.

If I practice one continuous Now, the 10,000 hours will take care of themselves.

What is the Chinese Language?

2011-12-31T08:00:00.001-05:00

How better to end the year than to contemplate differing visions of the Chinese language?

A friend sent me a link to an article in The Economist which may be read here. As it's a very brief article, I've copied it whole below. The questions raised will surely provoke many comments, so I'd recommend visiting the original to see how they develop.

Chinese

What is the Chinese language?

Dec 13th 2011, 21:34 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK

I HAVE exercised Chinese commenters with a few posts that were seen as either simplistic or biased. So let me offer two competing visions of Chinese that help explain what the two sides disagree on. These are archetypes which few partisans may agree with every word of. But they are the basic poles of thinking about Chinese, I think. I submit them for the good of commenters, who should debate them to shreds.

In brief, Chinese traditionalists believe

1) Chinese is one language with dialects.

2) Chinese is best written in the character-based hanzi system.

3) All Chinese read and share the same writing system, despite speaking in different ways.

Western linguists tend to respond

1) Chinese is not a language but a family; the "dialects" are not dialects but languages.

2) Hanzi-based writing is unnecessarily difficult; the characters do not represent "ideas" but "morphemes" (small and combinable units of meaning, like the morphemes of any language). Pinyin (the standard Roman system) could just as easily be used for Chinese. Puns, wordplay and etymology might be sacrificed, but ease of use would be enhanced.

3) Modern hanzi writing is basically Mandarin with the old characters in a form modified by the People's Republic. Everyone else (Cantonese speakers, say) must either write Mandarin or significantly alter the system to write their own "Chinese".

There are so many arguments packed into these two ideas that it's hard to start, much less finish, in a blog post. Since I'm (really) on holiday, I'll leave it to commenters to enlighten each other, and me on my return.

China Resources Page

2011-12-28T08:00:00.003-05:00

I just Stumbled onto Jordan's China Resource Page. There's all kinds of good stuff there. Please pay him a visit.

Below is an excerpt from an essay on the Five Elements.

1. Introduction

Traditional Chinese thought about nature often involves a set of five xíng 行, named after natural entities (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water). The word xíng, which usually means "walking" or "moving," is sometimes translated "elements" when speaking of the five xíng, but many authors prefer translations like "forces," "natures," "phases," or "transformations" in order to capture the idea that the xíng are in dynamic interaction with each other, i.e., that they are in some sense "walking." Despite its misleadingly concrete implications, I still prefer the translation "elements," since it fits best with the basic terms always used for them: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. (It is hard for an English speaker to think of wood as a "phase.")

Underlying the utility (or, some would say, wackiness) of the concept are a number of additional assumptions:

Each of the five elements has a wide number of correspondences with other parts of the natural world. Thus the element wood corresponds with the color blue, the direction east, and the flavor sour. In general, anything that can be subdivided into five categories, can be aligned to the five elements.
Each of the five elements tends to strengthen, support, feed, give way to, or create one of the others. For example, wood/blue/east tends to support or strengthen fire/scarlet/south.
(Mnemonic: Wood burns to create fire; fire creates ash/earth; it is from earth that we get metal; metal can be heated to produce liquid/water; water poured on a seedling allows it to grow into wood.)
Each of the five elements also tends to weaken, undercut, or destroy one of the others. Thus wood/blue/east tends to weaken earth/yellow/center.
(Mnenomic: Wood can grow through earth; fire can melt metal, earth can absorb water, metal tools can cut through wood, water can put out a fire.)
A deficiency or an excess of any element tends to exert unnatural strengthening or weaking influence on other elements, potentially causing illness or distress.
Illness and misfortune can be corrected by restoring the element that is too strong or weak. One way to do this is to supplement those elements that will tend to strengthen or diminish the unbalanced element. Usual applications are in religious ritual (including geomancy) and in medicine.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T08:00:00.009-05:00

Merry Christmas.

" Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him. He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!"

Winter Soltice

2011-12-22T08:00:00.006-05:00

Today is the Winter Soltice.

We're heading into winter. The amount of reading I get through increases during the winter.

A couple of books I've read recently that I've really enjoyed are - Chinese Texts and Philosophical Contexts: Essays Dedicated to Angus C. Graham, edited by Henry Rosemont Jr and The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein.

"Chinese Texts" is a scholarly one. The first few chapters were way over my head as they had to do with fine points of translating Classical Chinese, but the rest of the book was very interesting.Some of the essays had to do with things like who compiled the Zhuang Zi, and when was the first reference of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuang Zi together and referred to as a "school" or that the word "elements" in the "Five Elements" is used altogether in a different sense than modern westerners would use that word.

The Art of Racing in the Rain is a novel told from the point of view of a dog who has grown old with his family, is not nearing the end of his life and is now looking back on things. The dog's owner is a race car driver and the observations the dog makes about him and the way his lives his life resonates with the applications of Daoism and Zen in our everyday lives. It's a very good read.

I'm currently rereading Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. It's simply a classic.

Distance is a Relationship

2011-12-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

Over at The Classical Budoka, there was an excellent post on the importance of studying distance in martial arts. Below is an excerpt. The whole article may be read here.

44. Ma: Fluid Space in Budo

December 12, 2011

In budo, like other physical endeavors, the interconnected factors of space and time (rhythm and timing) are crucial. In Japanese, the term for “space,” in between objects and opponents is “ma,” and the character can also be pronounced “aida,” as in “in between.” It is the space “in between” yourself and your opponent, the empty field that defines the potential of attack and defense, the ma-ai(the “meeting” space). Like music, however, “empty space” between notes or opponents aren’t “empty” in a sense that there’s nothing there. Potential is there. Fullness is there. Emptiness is necessary for fullness. Spaces between individual notes creates a song, its tension and melody. Space between adversaries define the field in which they fight, and the person who can control the space (and time) best is the one who wins.

An understanding of ma-ai (the proper distancing) is important, but many martial artists of even respectively high levels in their specific art aren’t aware of it beyond their particular specializations. Worse, kata-based training (especially when done individually, such as in karate kata and iaido) may make a person ignorant of proper ma-ai.

...

There’s an article that Diane Skoss, of Koryu Books, wrote about being a woman training in koryu budo. She made a comment that, even after years of aikido, she never understood mai-ai very well until she started weapons work in koryu. Then all of a sudden, she had to deal with opponents who came at her with short staffs, long staffs, naginata, spears, swords and all sorts of weapons, long and short.

Such training gave her an innate understanding of the elastic, variable nature of ma-ai, dependant on the situation, attacker, angle and weapon.

That is why, I suspect, that Okinawan karate and aikido included some kind of weapons training in their curriculum. Even Kodokan Judo had weapons work, but discarded them as it evolved into more of a specialized sport, and less of a martial system. If you don’t get out of your comfort zone in ma-ai, you won’t understand proper distancing. So this is an argument, in a way, for studying weapons if you are primarily a grappler or puncher-kicker.

In classical systems, there are various terms to explain ma-ai. The most common are the three different terms of toh-ma, uchi-ma, and chika-ma to denote the three basic distances. Depending on the weapons (or lack thereof), toh-ma is when the distance is too far (toh- is from the word for “far away,” toh-i) for you or the opponent to strike, unless you take steps to close the gap. Although you can begin to engage the enemy at that distance, you won’t be struck easily.

...

The problem with ma-ai is that there are so many variables. Not just in terms of weaponry, but also in terms of rhythm and timing, angles of attack and positioning of the attacker and you. All of these will affect proper ma-ai. Space and time are not separate entities. They interact with each other.

While we’ve been discussing the physical tactics of handling space, we can’t also forget the mental/psychological and psychic overlay of spacing. In esoteric doctrines in some sword schools, even standing at a distance, you have a kind of mental uchi-ma; i.e., you can still be too far for a quick strike with your sword, but if your spirit and energy is strong enough, you can already attack the opponent.

The 300 Tang Dynasty Poems, #43: A Song of Changgan

2011-12-18T08:00:00.012-05:00

One of the worlds' literary treasures is an anthology of the greatest poems of the Tang Dynasty of China. The Tang Dynasty was a high water mark in culture in ancient China and poetry was especially esteemed. The 300 Tang Dynasty Poems may be found here. Below is poem #43: A Song of Changgan.

043

Li Bai

A SONG OF CHANGGAN

My hair had hardly covered my forehead.
I was picking flowers, paying by my door,
When you, my lover, on a bamboo horse,
Came trotting in circles and throwing green plums.
We lived near together on a lane in Ch'ang-kan,
Both of us young and happy-hearted.
...At fourteen I became your wife,
So bashful that I dared not smile,
And I lowered my head toward a dark corner
And would not turn to your thousand calls;
But at fifteen I straightened my brows and laughed,
Learning that no dust could ever seal our love,
That even unto death I would await you by my post
And would never lose heart in the tower of silent watching.
...Then when I was sixteen, you left on a long journey
Through the Gorges of Ch'u-t'ang, of rock and whirling water.
And then came the Fifth-month, more than I could bear,
And I tried to hear the monkeys in your lofty far-off sky.
Your footprints by our door, where I had watched you go,
Were hidden, every one of them, under green moss,
Hidden under moss too deep to sweep away.
And the first autumn wind added fallen leaves.
And now, in the Eighth-month, yellowing butterflies
Hover, two by two, in our west-garden grasses
And, because of all this, my heart is breaking
And I fear for my bright cheeks, lest they fade.
...Oh, at last, when you return through the three Pa districts,
Send me a message home ahead!
And I will come and meet you and will never mind the distance,
All the way to Chang-feng Sha.

Practicing in a Small Space

2011-12-15T08:00:00.004-05:00

We should not give up...our goal...But...we should not be discouraged even though we cannot have it. So actually, as long as we are making effort, that is actual goal. – Shunryu Suzuki

If we wait until conditions are perfect in order to practice, we’ll usually find that we’ll be waiting a long time indeed. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Not all of us can set aside a specific time and location regularly. In that case, we have to practice what we can when time and space allows and ask ourselves “what can I do right here, right now to move the ball forward.”

One of the constraints we frequently face is space. I have always liked the standing practice, Zhan Zhuang, because it takes so little space; in fact nothing special. We only need time. Zhan Zhuang is very adaptable to time - if you have less time, you can hold a lower stance.

Practicing the Taijiquan form can be somewhat challenging. The long form covers quite a bit of ground and to set aside a block of 30 to 40 minutes for one run through isn’t always convenient. You can do things however, that are still useful to your development, like isolating and practicing individual sequences and really hone them.

The Five Elements from Xingyiquan covers a lot of ground, too. Each of the individual Five Elements forms can be done as a stationary practice. This sort of practice may not be “complete”, but it’s still useful.

Even the kihon dosa, the basic movements of the Aikido I learned can be practiced in a relatively small space and regular practice of these movements have a direct positive impact on one’s technique.

Below is an extract from an article at 24 Fighting Chickens about how to practice one's Karate kata in a small space. The full article may be found here.

How to Practice Kata in Your Room
by Rob Redmond - July 12, 2011

Considerable floor space is required to perform a kata. 100 square meters gives one adult male the ability to perform just about any kata without running into a wall. When the dojo gets crowded, though, sometimes some shortcuts are necessary to make the kata fit the room. As you approach the wall, you pull back your front foot and then step forward with your other foot so that you take the next step without actually traveling anywhere. Then when turning back in the other direction, cut the step again to put yourself in the correct spot in three dimensional space.

But what if you want to practice at home? The driveway works well, unless your neighbors are close by and you don’t like them thinking you are a crazy karate sociopath.

So it’s off to the gym for some of you. Luckily the aerobics room is empty during lunch, so a gym nearby the office is a good thing. For students in school, there may be dance rooms on campus to use during free periods. There may be an empty tennis court for those of you in more temperate climates. The tennis ladies may not approve.

Public parks and fields work well for some of you. Others find those places a little too dangerous.

Besides, karate training doesn’t look like tai chi training. Tai Chi, for some reason, gives the impression that you are a harmless hippie best ignored. Practicing karate kata seems to invite a lot of unfriendly attention out in too public of an arena in the wrong neighborhood. A racquetball court can work – sometimes.

Indoors you go, and your house or apartment is not that big. What now?

Chinese Folk Tales: The Sons of the Dragon

2011-12-12T08:00:00.006-05:00

I received this link from a friend. It's now it the "Links" Section.

It's a website of Chinese Folk Tales. Below is one of them. Enjoy.

From Taiwanese Folk Beliefs: The Sons of the Dragon.

3. Sons of the Dragon

A dragon has nine sons.

The first son loves loud noises, so bells are adorned with the images of dragons.

The second son loves music, so musical instruments are adorned with images of dragons.

The third son loves to drink, so drinking vessels are adorned with images of dragons.

The fourth son loves mountain peaks, so the tops of tall buildings or other structures or places are adorned with images of dragons.

The fifth son loves weaponry, so weapons are adorned with images of dragons.

The sixth son loves literature, so images of dragons are found on movable type.

The seventh son loves litigation, so images of dragons are found in courtrooms.

The eighth son loves sitting, so chairs are decorated with the images of dragons.

The ninth son loves heavy objects, so the images of dragons may be found on plinths.

The China Challenge

2011-12-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

Below is an excerpt from an article on the book, On China, by Dr. Henry Kissinger. The full article may be read here.

The China Challenge

By HENRY KISSINGER

Societies and nations tend to think of themselves as eternal. They also cherish a tale of their origin. A special feature of Chinese civilization is that it seems to have no beginning. It appears in history less as a conventional nation-state than as a permanent natural phenomenon. In the tale of the Yellow Emperor, revered by many Chinese as the legendary founding ruler, China seems already to exist.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, special assistant to President Nixon is toasted by Chinese Premier Chou En-laii Monday night, February 21, 1972 as the Nixon party was quest at a state dinner in Peking.

The Yellow Emperor has gone down in history as a founding hero; yet in the founding myth, he is re-establishing, not creating, an empire. China predated him; it strides into the historical consciousness as an established state requiring only restoration, not creation.

In general, Chinese statesmanship exhibits a tendency to view the entire strategic landscape as part of a single whole: good and evil, near and far, strength and weakness, past and future all interrelated. In contrast to the Western approach of treating history as a process of modernity achieving a series of absolute victories over evil and backwardness, the traditional Chinese view of history emphasized a cyclical process of decay and rectification, in which nature and the world could be understood but not completely mastered.

For China's classical sages, the world could never be conquered; wise rulers could hope only to harmonize with its trends. There was no New World to populate, no redemption awaiting mankind on distant shores. The promised land was China, and the Chinese were already there. The blessings of the Middle Kingdom's culture might theoretically be extended, by China's superior example, to the foreigners on the empire's periphery. But there was no glory to be found in venturing across the seas to convert "heathens" to Chinese ways; the customs of the Celestial Dynasty were plainly beyond the attainment of the far barbarians.

The most dramatic event of the Nixon presidency occurred in near obscurity. Nixon had decided that for a diplomatic mission to Beijing to succeed, it would have to take place in secrecy. A public mission would have set off a complicated internal clearance project within the U.S. government and insistent demands for consultations from around the world, including Taiwan (still recognized as the government of China). This would have mortgaged our prospects with Beijing, whose attitudes we were being sent to discover. Transparency is an essential objective, but historic opportunities for building a more peaceful international order have imperatives as well.

So my team set off to Beijing via Saigon, Bangkok, New Delhi and Rawalpindi on an announced fact-finding journey on behalf of the president. My party included a broader set of American officials, as well as a core group destined for Beijing—myself, as national security adviser, three aides and two Secret Service agents. The dramatic denouement required us to go through tiring stops at each city designed to be so boringly matter-of-fact that the media would stop tracking our movements. In Rawalpindi, we disappeared for 48 hours for an ostensible rest (I had feigned illness) in a Pakistani hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas—but our real destination was Beijing. In Washington, only the president and Col. (later Gen.) Alexander Haig, my top aide, knew our actual mission.

When the American delegation arrived in Beijing on July 9, 1971, we had experienced the subtlety of Chinese communication but not the way Beijing conducted actual negotiations, still less the Chinese style of receiving visitors. American experience with Communist diplomacy was based on contacts with Soviet leaders, principally Andrei Gromyko, who had a tendency to turn diplomacy into a test of bureaucratic will; he was impeccably correct in negotiation but implacable on substance—sometimes, one sensed, straining his self-discipline.

Strain was nowhere apparent in the Chinese reception of the secret visit or during the dialogue that followed. In all the preliminary maneuvers, we had been sometimes puzzled by the erratic pauses between their messages, which we assumed had something to do with the Cultural Revolution.

Nothing now seemed to disturb the serene aplomb of our hosts, who acted as if welcoming the special emissary of the American president for the first time in the history of the People's Republic of China was the most natural occurrence.

Who Needs Fiction: What Would Zhuang Zi Do?

2011-12-06T05:00:00.002-05:00

A very old Chinese Taoist story describes a farmer in a poor country village. His neighbors considered him very well-to-do. He owned a horse which he used for plowing and for transportation. One day his horse ran away. All his neighbors exclaimed how terrible this way, but the farmer simply said "Maybe."

A few days later the horse returned and brought two wild horses with it. The neighbors all rejoiced at his good fortune, but the farmer just said "Maybe."

The next day the farmer's son tried to ride one of the wild horses. The horse threw him and the son broke his leg. The neighbors all offered their sympathy for his misfortune, but the farmer again said "Maybe."

The next week conscription officers came to the village to take young men for the army. They rejected the farmer's son because of his broken leg. When the neighbors told him how lucky he was, the farmer replied "Maybe."

A friend sent me a news story which I've posted below. The original article may be read here. Read the news story, think about the folk story and put yourself in the subject's place.

My brother found himself in a somewhat similar position. He found a suitcase in the street in front of his house. He opened it, hoping to find some sort of identification to return it to it's owner. It was full of jewelry.

The thought of keeping it passed in a moment as he considered all of the possible bad things that could happen as a result of his keeping the suitcase. He turned it into the police.

It turned out to belong to a local jewelry store. I don't remember the explanation of how it got into the street, but the jewelry store gave him a cash reward of something like $500 or $1000 (this is over 30 years ago). Certainly enough to be a reward, but not enough to be another burden.

For myself, I think winning the Lottery would be one of life's greatest calamities.

Man finds $150K in his backyard, turns it in

By Kelsey Williams, SFGate.com:

On Monday, Wayne Sabaj, 49, an unemployed carpenter living in McHenry County, Ill., (about 60 miles northwest of Chicago) found some green stuff in his garden-about $150,000 worth, stuffed into two duffel bags.

The Chicago Tribune reports: "[Sabaj] contemplated his position for about a half hour, then - fearing that the money might have come from a bank robbery and someone might come back looking for it-he called the McHenry County Sheriff's Department."

Sabaj, clearly a realistic sort, did not toast his good fortune at the load of dough that literally appeared in his backyard, but said to his father, "We have enough problems, now we got another problem. Look what I found in the garden."

At this point the police are baffled by the discovery, and for all they know, it could be that a leprechaun has traded in pots-of-gold for duffels of cash. Still they are examining the bags and their contents for clues and say they will work with Sabaj to see if he can keep the money if no true owner or explanation is found.

All I want to know: What kind of fertilizer does Sabaj use?

The 48 Law of Power: a Review

2011-12-03T05:00:00.000-05:00

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers is one of my favorite books on strategy. First of all, the hardcover is a beautifully produced book. Mr. Effers is an artist who was responsible for the presentation of the material.

Where The Art of War by Sun Tzu is an overview and basically a textbook on the subject, and the 36 Strategies tries to impart the knack of strategic thinking by way of a number of maxims, the 48 Laws of Power is more focused on the psychology of personal interaction; what Greene calls "Power".

Greene illustrates each of the "Laws" with example drawn from both Eastern and Western history and literature. Among my favorite examples are those of famous con-men and con-jobs, such as the swindler who posed as an official of the French government and sold the Eiffel Tower to a scrap dealer. Green also includes counter examples for most of the Laws depicting situations where the Law simply wouldn't work, or a reversal of the Law would be more in order.

Below is an extract from a book review a friend sent me. The whole review may be read here.

American Apparel's in-house guru shows a lighter side

'48 Laws' author Robert Greene acts as chief Dov Charney's informal older brother, preaching 'crush your enemy' but practicing tolerance. His books are big with rappers, executives and prison inmates.

August 30, 2011|By Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times

When author Robert Greene wrote his bestselling book "The 48 Laws of Power," his win-at-all-costs message turned him into a cult hero with the hip-hop set, Hollywood elite and prison inmates alike.

Crush your enemy totally, he wrote in Law 15. Play a sucker to catch a sucker, he said in another. Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit.

Greene's warrior-like take on the quest for power, written more than a decade ago, would eventually attract another devotee: Dov Charney, the provocative and sometimes impish chief executive of Los Angeles clothing company American Apparel Inc.

The 52-year-old Greene — a former screenwriter who speaks five languages and worked 80 jobs before writing "The 48 Laws" — has become Charney's guru, a trusted confidant to the 42-year-old entrepreneur and, insiders say, a voice of reason on American Apparel's board of directors.

"There's definitely an older-brother, younger-brother dynamic," said Allan Mayer, a public relations man and fellow board member. "Dov is a very brilliant, creative guy and he can also be mercurial and very impulsive, which are excellent qualities, but sometimes he needs to be reined in. If Robert says,
'Well, hold on, buddy,' Dov generally will."

Charney refers to his close friend alternately as a genius, El Señor and Jesus. The American Apparel founder says he was hooked on "The 48 Laws" the moment he opened its burnt orange cover, with its straightforward philosophies of Machiavelli, the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and others. He's handed out hundreds of copies to friends and employees, and readily quotes the laws during board meetings.

One of Charney's favorites: "Enter action with boldness" — Law 28.

"Everybody practices it every day," he said of the book's principles during a recent dinner of Korean barbecue and beer with Greene in downtown Los Angeles. "These are the rules that govern human interactions.... Robert's book is as much a documentation of your flaws — you just score yourself on each one."

The Red Leaves Cut

2011-11-30T08:00:00.001-05:00

How could we possibly think of heading into winter without considering not only the fading beauty of autumn, but also Japanese Swordsmanship?

Below is an excerpt from the Ichijoji blog. The full post is at Autumn Leaves and Their Symbolism. Please pay a visit.

Momiji Uchi - The red leaves cut
Those interested in swordsmanship will probably be aware of its use in Miyamoto Musashi's Gorin no Sho - in the Water chapter is a section describing the Red Leaves Cut. As noted by Victor Harris in his translation, "Presumably Musashi is alluding here to falling, dying leaves." As the technique refers to knocking down the enemy's sword, knocking it out of his hands in fact, this seems very likely.

It seems that Musashi was not the only person to use this term to denote a technique. According to the respected researcher and historian Watatani Kiyoshi, it was used in the Kyo-hachi-ryu... a term that is generally thought to refer to the 8 principle schools taught in the Kyoto area during the Muromachi period, and probably including the Yoshioka school, which, as we know, Musashi and his father both had dealings with. In fact, Watatani identifies it as being specific to the Kyoto area - as Musashi spent some time in the city, this makes it quite likely that he adopted a term already in use.

This is fairly common practice - many schools share terms for similar and sometimes quite different techniques. Some of these clearly share a common origin, while in others, the connection is not so clear.

However, the common name suggests the possibility that the name itself shared a common referent, and possibly included an additional layer of symbolism.

A Comparison of the Cultural Differences in Japanese and Chinese Martial Arts

2011-11-27T08:00:00.009-05:00

Bernard Kwan is the proprietor of the excellent blog, Be Not Defeated by the Rain. Mr. Kwan is in a unique position to comment on the cultural similarities and differences in Japanese and Chinese martial arts.

He is Chinese, lives in Hong Kong and not only studies a traditional Chinese martial art, but a Japanese martial art as well.

He was kind enough to provide this guest post. Please pay his blog, Be Not Defeated by the Rain , a visit.

I have been practicing martial arts since 1999, and came rather late into the game so to speak (in my mid 20s), as my parents did not want me to learn martial arts when I was young in case I accidentally killed my brother as we fought a lot. My first experience was learning Aikido in Philadelphia under Henry Smith, 7th dan Aikikai as well as some Yagyu Shin Kage Ryu under Paul Manogue Sensei who taught on the weekends in the Aikido studio. After leaving the US, I spent a lot of time practicing yoga under various "famous" teachers, and also studied Yang Taiji under Chen Han Bing (a wushu instructor in Taiwan), Chen Taiji under KK Chan (a disciple of Zhu Tian Cai) and finally settling on studying Baguazhang and Yiquan under CS Tang in Hong Kong and became a formal disciple earlier this year. I also resumed my Aikido studies under Hitoshi Nagai, 4th Dan, a deshi of Endo Seishiro, 8th Dan.

I was recently asked by Rick Matz of Cook Ding's Kitchen as to what I felt were the differences between Chinese and Japanese Budo and I wrote a couple of posts regarding similarities, in terms of the ideal of the scholar warrior and a code of ethics, but I believe there are several key differences.

1) The Individual versus the Collective

Although China has been unified for most of its history, there have been long periods of time when the country has been separated into different states. There are many regional differences, and even now there are conflicts between Shanghai and Beijing in the Chinese government. Due to the huge expanse of space, many regions were loosely administered from the center, especially towards the end of each dynasty, as corruption increased and areas descended into warlordism. Hence there was a lot of freedom for the development of the individual to take matters into his own hands, rather than rely on the state as the "Emperor was far away". Indeed in martial arts novels, many of the martial artists are inhabitants of Jiang Hu, living by their own code of justice, righting wrongs perpetrated by corrupt officials. Martial artists were often viewed with suspicion by the state, and martial arts suppressed during many periods in history, and many martial arts schools along with religious cults were hotbeds of revolutionary activity plotting to overthrow the government.

This can be contrasted against the long rule of the Tokugawa state, which has been described as the longest lasting totalitarian state in history. The daimyos were closely monitored and bankrupted by having to spend a great deal of time in the capital away from their domains. Travel and thought were closely monitored and restricted and the country was effectively closed from the outside world. An ideology of loyalty was instilled in the population and the group was promoted over the individual and social mores were rigidly enforced within each community. Hence when you read texts like the Hagakure absolute loyalty was paramount and even minor transgressions could lead to a show of contrition through seppuku. The Samurai were bound to the state by awarding them status and privileges, such as their own names and ability to carry swords and kill with impunity. Although Ronin (masterless Samurai) existed they were seen as beyond the pale and not ideals to be emulated. Miyamoto Mushashi is perhaps the exception that proves the rule.

2) Taoism versus Buddhism

D.T. Suzuki has written much on the role of Zen Buddhism in Japanese culture and indeed the role of Zen is pervades many of the Japanese arts such as tea ceremony, flower arranging, etc. Its spartan ascetic, its meditative discipline and attitude towards impermanence and death has informed the Samurai culture and is captured in many books such as Takuan Soho's "The Unfettered Mind". The role of Esoteric Buddhism is also important, if less widely known as Samurai would ask certain Gods to protect them in battle and may also have inscribed talismans and chanted mantras for protection. Ever since Buddhism came to Japan in the 800s it has remained a national religion alongside Shintoism.

In China, the role of Buddhism declined after the Tang dynasty and never regained its prominence as a national religion. Although the Zen schools originated and flourished in China during the Sung dynasty, they also went into almost terminal decline. While Shaolin is a Buddhist based martial art it has been Taoism that has been the more influential philosophy behind martial arts, especially in the internal arts. Aphorisms such as being like water, or the hard overcoming the soft, or Wu wei all stem from Taoism. Indeed in Chinese culture bagua, taiji and the five elements are pervasive through the Chinese arts such as music, medicine, feng shui, chess,, statecraft and the art of war.

3) Importance of Lineage

In the Japanese Koryu a great deal of effort is placed in preserving the art exactly as was handed down by the previous generation without any scope for substantive innovation. This is the same for many traditional Japanese handicrafts such as pottery, or sword making. In this respect the Soke or headmaster of the school is the ultimate authority on orthodoxy and the student is to defer to Sensei is all respects. Before the second world war there was still sufficient scope to be somewhat innovative as a menkyo kaiden or license to teach could be obtained after 3-6 years of diligent practice. Post war, it may take 10 or more years to obtain such a license and it may only be awarded to one or two individuals each generation making it difficult to have the authority to innovate within a school. Even in Aikido, the third Doshu is trying his best to standardize Aikido teaching at Hombu so most of the newer Shihan look the same.

In China, due to the cultural revolution the relationship between the teacher and student has become less rigid with the decline of traditional mores and broken lines, and lineage has also become a trickier subject due to the Chinese diaspora into Hong Kong and Taiwan. But even in the past, the evolution of Taiji into different schools has shown that there is room to evolve and change. In a more modern school like Yiquan, the marked difference in the styles of the various students of the founder attest to a much looser mechanism for enforcing conformity and as long as the basic principles are adhered to there is a great deal of room for innovation and change.

4) Gaman versus Heart Method

There is a emphasis and glorification within the Japanese character of the ability to "endure". Thus it is not uncommon for a student of Japanese Budo to repeat a basic exercise without question until the Sensei tells him to stop. This relentless focus on the fundamentals shows in the craftmanship of their products and also the basic skills of the Japanese players in sports where they excel, such as baseball and the the recent win by their football team in the Women's World Cup.

For Chinese students there is a corollary in that one should "eat bitter" in order to master an art. But for ever student that eats bitter, there are 10 students who would rather find out the "heart method" or short cut. Hence the glorification of stealing the martial arts manuals in wushu literature and killing your Sifu to learn his secrets.

5) Personal Experiences
In my personal experience with a Chinese and Japanese Sensei, my relationship with Chinese Sifu is more like a father and son, where I can question and challenge, but I defer to his authority and he encourages me to explore and innovate. My Japanese Sensei, will allow me some room to explore, but he brooks no argument in matters of authority and his word is the final word. He often emphasizes that the Dojo is not a sports club. I understand that not all teachers are like that and some Chinese are authority figures akin to Japanese. But on the flip side the Japanese dojo is a collective endeavor where there is a hierarchy but yet people are encouraged to progress together and to socialize together, whereas the Chinese way is a more lonely endeavor where we come together to train, but progress at our own pace and different students are taught different things according to their strengths and interests.

These are by necessity broad brush strokes but would be interested to see if other people share the same thoughts as me.

Links:

http://benotdefeatedbytherain.blogspot.com/
http://cstang.www3.50megs.com/
http://www.aikidodoyukai.com/
http://aikidophiladelphia.org/

Giving Thanks for Your Training

2011-11-24T08:00:00.005-05:00

The excerpt below is from a post at The Classical Budoka. The full post may be read here.

So the tagai no rei is done throughout a class. It hopefully develops proper respect for each other. You want to train hard, but you want to train with people who respect you enough that they won’t deliberately try to maim or hurt you because they have no regard for you as a human being. They respect you, and you should respect them. Budo is dangerous enough as a physical training system without having to deal with a psychopath as your partner. The tagai no rei ritualizes that respect. For some people, that ritualization may not mean all that much. They may still look at you as merely a punching bag at their disposal, but at least the form of respect tries to embody respect. It’s better than showing no respect at all. And if you find such a fellow student, just avoid the jerk.

Dao De Jing #41: Following

2011-11-21T08:00:00.009-05:00

In addition to being one of the foundational documents of philosophical Daoist thought, the Dao De Jing is one of the worlds' literary classics. A full on line version of this timeless work may be found here. Below is verse 41, Following:

41. Following

When the great man learns the Way, he follows it with diligence;
When the common man learns the Way, he follows it on occasion;
When the mean man learns the Way, he laughs out loud;
Those who do not laugh, do not learn at all.

Therefore it is said:
Who understands the Way seems foolish;
Who progresses on the Way seems to fail;
Who follows the Way seems to wander.

For the finest harmony appears plain;
The brightest truth appears coloured;
The richest character appears incomplete;
The bravest heart appears meek;
The simplest nature appears inconstant.

The square, perfected, has no corner;
Music, perfected, has no melody;
Love, perfected, has no climax;
Art, perfected, has no meaning.

The Way can be neither sensed nor known:
It transmits sensation and transcends knowledge.

Why Practice Slow?

2011-11-18T08:00:00.001-05:00

Below is an excerpt from an article which was posted at The Better Movement blog. The full article may be read here.

Why Slow Movement Builds Coordination

January 17, 2010 by Todd Hargrove 31 Comments

I’ve written quite a bit on this blog about the benefits of moving slowly for improving coordination. Of course, my two favorite movement practices, the Feldenkrais Method and Z-Health rely to a great extent on slow mindful movement as a primary means to develop coordination. Many people will look at very slow and gentle movements and think – how can these possibly do anything? Isn’t harder and faster better than slower and softer? This post is an answer to that question.

There are several excellent reasons to use slow and gentle movement as a means to develop coordination. Probably the most interesting reason (I’ll start with that one) is based on an obscure principle called the Weber Fechner rule. The Weber Fechner rule describes the relationship between the magnitude of a particular stimulus and the brain’s ability to sense differences in the amount of the stimulus. The basic rule is that as you increase the stimulus, the ability to tell a difference in the amount of the stimulus decreases. This is a very common sense idea. Imagine you are in a dark room with only one candle lit. It will be very easy to sense the difference when one additional candle is lit. But if you are in a room with two hundred candles, you will have no idea when an extra candle comes on.

This rule works for all varieties of sensory perception, including sensations of muscular effort. So, imagine you are holding a one pound potato in your hand while blindfolded. If a fly landed on the weight you would not know the difference, but if a little bird landed you would know. Now imagine holding a fifty pound potato. You wouldn’t be able to feel the little bird landing. It would have to be an eagle. The point is that when you increase the weight from one pound to fifty pounds, you become about fifty times less sensitive to changes in the amount of muscular force you are using to lift the weight.

Why do we care? Because if you want to make your movement more efficient, you have to be aware of when you are working too hard. If you slow down and thereby increase your ability to sense differences in muscular effort level, you increase the brain’s ability to sense and correct any potential excess and unnecessary effort. Imagine that every time you try to extend the hip, you are at the same time slightly contracting the hip flexors instead of relaxing them. This means that your muscles are cross-motivated – the flexors are fighting the extensors a little in their effort to extend the leg, making them work harder. You will be much better able to sense and inhibit this inefficient co-contraction by moving very slowly and easily. By contrast, if you move fast and hard, you will never be able to sense and correct the problem.

The Daoist Piano Mover

2011-11-15T08:00:00.000-05:00

Have you ever moved a piano? They are heavy and awkward. There's nothing good about moving pianos.

Mr. Gong was a piano mover. His method of moving pianos exemplified the principle of wu-wei. Zhuang Zi would have appreciated the way he went about this business.

Perhaps the world's premier piano mover has passed away. Below is an excerpt from an article about him. The full article may be read here. Below that is a video about him and below that is another video about moving pianos that you might enjoy.

Edward Gong, who moved 7,000 pianos, dies

Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Legendary for his moving piano technique, Edward Gong of Berkeley was admired not for how he interpreted Mozart or played a concerto, but for how he moved pianos. Literally.

He did it single-handedly, although he sometimes called upon his astonished clients to roll a dolly or grip a corner.

"Almost everyone I know in Berkeley has used him or knows about him," wrote "Rinky N." on Yelp's urban legends section. "Years ago he moved a roommate's piano using the three of us weaklings as pivot points. It's like watching Superman or an optical illusion!"

"It's physics," Mr. Gong, who had a degree in that subject from UC Berkeley, would explain.

Mr. Gong died at 85 at the Veterans Home of Yountville, where he'd gone to live last year. He moved pianos until age 80 - more than 7,000 of them over 45 years - said his niece Miko Lee.

"He was the epitome of the word eccentric," she said, fondly recalling the man with the "serious giggle" she called Unc.

On the Berkeley Parents Network site, "Nicole" wrote: "He arrives with a little pickup truck and an amazing stair contraption, and uses brains and leverage to move these amazingly heavy and awkward objects. He's goofy as heck, and he chats a mile a minute ... but always manages to get the piano where it needs to go."

His piano-moving outfit consisted of checkered polyester shorts, gum-sole shoes and the bulging muscles he'd hone for hours, bench-pressing at the gym. When not working, Mr. Gong favored bedroom slippers, once showing up in snowy Munich carrying luggage filled with books but no shoes besides the pantofles on his feet.

He had gone to Europe for the World's Fair because he adored fairs, often hanging out for hours to watch a calf being born. He also danced ballet, sang opera, played instruments and studied Mandarin and drawing, making up in enthusiasm what he lacked in skill, Lee said with a laugh.

And despite limited funds, Mr. Gong attended stellar performances - often inviting his young relatives - by serving as an usher at the ballet, opera and Cal Performances.

Born Aug. 9, 1926, Mr. Gong was one of 11 children whose parents ran a laundry in Madera. An Army private in World War II, he served as a medical aide and chauffeur at Presidio Hospital in San Francisco.

Mr. Gong joined his family in Berkeley in 1947, where they opened the Victory Market at 1443 San Pablo Ave. to pay tuition at Cal for Mr. Gong and his siblings. His brothers and sisters raised families, went into business or became professors, scientists or teachers.

Mr. Gong did his own version of those things, too.

In 1988, The Chronicle followed Mr. Gong, then 62, as he maneuvered - in five minutes - a 400-pound upright piano from the rear room of a house into his pickup using a dolly, a wood box wrapped in an old rug, and an iron tube he'd laid across the truck bed.

For his second move, the story said Mr. Gong "stood on a stone step with 500 pounds of piano in his thick arms while three men half his age tried clumsily to wedge the dolly under the other end" as he schooled them in tilt and torque.

"He lived a remarkable life," said Harry Yoon, a Los Angeles film editor who shot an 11-minute short, "7,000 Pianos," about Mr. Gong at 75 in 2002.

The Warrior Ethos: The Lord of Discipline

2011-11-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

The excerpt below is from a post at Steven Pressfield's blog. Mr. Pressfield is the author of many great books, including one of my favorites, Gates of Fire. The full post may be read here.

One of his recent books is The Warrior Ethos.

Chapter 26 The Lord of Discipline
In the Gita, the warrior Arjuna is commanded to slay the “foes” that constitute his own baser being.

That is, to eradicate those vices and inner demons that would sabotage his path to becoming his best and highest self.

How is Arjuna instructed to do this? By the practice of self-discipline. In other words, by the interior exercise of his exterior Warrior Ethos.

Arjuna’s divine instructor (one of whose titles in Sanskrit is “Lord of Discipline”) charges his disciple to:

Fix your mind upon its object.
Hold to this, unswerving,
Disowning fear and hope,
Advance only upon this goal.

Here is the Warrior Ethos directed inward, employing the same virtues used to overcome external enemies—courage, patience, will, selflessness, the capacity to endure adversity—but enlisting these qualities now in the cause of the inner struggle for integrity, maturity and the honorable life.

Hard and Soft in Karate

2011-11-09T08:00:00.001-05:00

Today we have a guest article by Matt Apsokardu, from Ikigaiway. Please pay his blog a visit.

Karate’s Hard/Soft Way

I’ve noticed something as I’ve continued to research, study, and watch karate grow. In general, the art is becoming more and more rigid, snappy, and formulaic.

Attend any karate tournament and you’ll likely see deep stances accompanied by high kicks, lung punches, and extended kiai. Even among traditional circles the focus is often on body conditioning, toughness, and impact.

Interestingly, in its early years karate was intended to be a combination of both hard and soft methods. Indeed, one of karate’s branches (Goju Ryu) was originally named with such a concept in mind.

Consider some of the major influences on karate, most notably those from China. Chinese arts such as White Crane, Bagua, and Wushu utilize flowing motions. Those arts stress a relaxed body wherein impact comes from a whip-like motion as the body’s force comes together.

In the early days of Okinawa, many Chinese emissaries and merchants traveled and shared their experiences with the higher Okinawan classes. As such, we see serious influence on early karate from Chinese resources.

When one researches early karate texts and views some of the old practitioners the softness of their methods is unmistakable. However, due to a combination of social, military, and business agendas, the harder aspects of karate became favored and received overwhelming focus.

Once Japan caught wind of karate’s practice, it decided to try and integrate the art as part of their school system. Their agenda was to strengthen the youth of their nation as well as engender a sense of militarism, behavior, and nationalism early on.

America, which experienced karate mostly through military personnel in the early days, had a similar experience where tough soldiers saw and took the toughest aspects of what they perceived karate to be.

Back in the states, the most visually impressive and marketable parts of karate were those hard, board breaking, punches and kicks. It took little time for American artists with entrepreneurial spirit to bend what they saw into a salable product.

Now, with the improvement of communication and technology, it’s possible for more and more artists to see what else is out there, to view videos of the old masters, and interact with practitioners of older, non-marketed karate methods.

It’s my hope that the curtain of “hard only” on karate is slowly being lifted, and some of the more “soft” methods come back to help make more people’s karate complete once again.

---------------------------------

Matthew Apsokardu is a practitioner of Okinawa Kenpo Karate and Kobudo. He is the author of IkigaiWay – Martial ArtsBlog.

Beautiful Capoeira Video

2011-11-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

I stumbled on to this:

Courage

2011-11-03T08:00:00.004-04:00

Below are excerpts from an article at The New York Times. The full article may be read here.

The Good Short Life

By DUDLEY CLENDINEN

BALTIMORE

I HAVE wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of hand-crafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

I loved him for that.

I love them all. I am acutely lucky in my family and friends, and in my daughter, my work and my life. But I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., more kindly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, for the great Yankee hitter and first baseman who was told he had it in 1939, accepted the verdict with such famous grace, and died less than two years later. He was almost 38.

I sometimes call it Lou, in his honor, and because the familiar feels less threatening. But it is not a kind disease. The nerves and muscles pulse and twitch, and progressively, they die. From the outside, it looks like the ripple of piano keys in the muscles under my skin. From the inside, it feels like anxious butterflies, trying to get out. It starts in the hands and feet and works its way up and in, or it begins in the muscles of the mouth and throat and chest and abdomen, and works its way down and out. The second way is called bulbar, and that’s the way it is with me. We don’t live as long, because it affects our ability to breathe early on, and it just gets worse.

At the moment, for 66, I look pretty good. I’ve lost 20 pounds. My face is thinner. I even get some “Hey, there, Big Boy,” looks, which I like. I think of it as my cosmetic phase. But it’s hard to smile, and chew. I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.

There is no meaningful treatment. No cure. There is one medication, Rilutek, which might make a few months’ difference. It retails for about $14,000 a year. That doesn’t seem worthwhile to me. If I let this run the whole course, with all the human, medical, technological and loving support I will start to need just months from now, it will leave me, in 5 or 8 or 12 or more years, a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self. Maintained by feeding and waste tubes, breathing and suctioning machines.
--
I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.

And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.

--

Last month, an old friend brought me a recording of the greatest concert he’d ever heard, Leonard Cohen, live, in London, three years ago. It’s powerful, haunting music, by a poet, composer and singer whose life has been as tough and sinewy and loving as an old tree.

The song that transfixed me, words and music, was “Dance Me to the End of Love.” That’s the way I feel about this time. I’m dancing, spinning around, happy in the last rhythms of the life I love. When the music stops — when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this — I’ll know that Life is over.

It’s time to be gone.

Halloween

2011-10-31T08:00:00.005-04:00

A delightful mix of a few of my favorites ...

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein hasn't been one of my favorite horror books. However, the movie "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" is my favorite film version of the story. Robert DiNiro as The Creature highlights just what a range Mr. DeNiro has an an actor. I've also seen Helen Bonham Carter in many movies and I think her best scene anywhere, hands down is in this film.

Ms. Carter plays Victor Frankenstein's love interest, Elizabeth. She is killed by The Creature and Doctor Frankenstein attempts to ressurect her. The best scene in the whole movie is where Elizabeth begins "coming to" after the procedure and it slowly begins to dawn on her what Frankenstein did, until she comes to the full realization of what has become of her.

My favorite Halloween book is Dracula by Bram Stoker. I love annotated books and one of the ones annotated by Leonard Wolf (he has several) is my favorite. Of the movies, the classic Dracula starring Bela Lugosi is the standard by which the others are judged. Another of my favorites is Bram Stoker's Dracula, starring Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder. Finally, Mel Brooks did a great job with his spoof, Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

The Way of the Warrior

2011-10-28T08:00:00.001-04:00

In the early 1980's, the BBC did an eight part documentary on Asian Martial Arts. You can find segments of this documentary on YouTube. Below is an excerpt from The Soft Way, showing the practice of XingYiQuan in Taiwan as taught by the legendary Hong YiXiang.

Strategy: How the Underdog Prevails

2011-10-25T08:00:00.003-04:00

How does the underdog prevail? I posted previously on the Strategy of Yin. First, by changing the rules of the game that the favorite is playing. Below is an excerpt from an article by Malcolm Gladwell which discusses this topic. The whole article may be read here, and it's fascinating.

I'm also going to post an excerpt from an article analyzing the chances the Amazon Fire has against the Apple iPad. When Apple introduced the iPad, there was an avalanche of tablets which were "me too" products. Not one of them has been successful.

But the Fire; that's a product to watch. Amazon isn't making an iPad knockoff; they are changing the rules of the game. That whole article may be read here.

Finally, here are some insights into what the basketball coach might have done at The Dao of Strategy blog.

How David Beats Goliath
May 11, 2009
Annals of Innovation
When underdogs break the rules.

1.

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali's basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A's end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent's attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent's end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren't all that tall. They couldn't shoot. They weren't particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, "little blond girls" from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. "It was really random," Anjali Ranadivé said. "I mean, my father had never played basketball before."

2.

David's victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. "I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it," he said (in Robert Alter's translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David's winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath's rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, "even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn't."

Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.

But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina "on the defensive, immobile." There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.

The Bedouins under Lawrence's command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them "an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle." But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer. "Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,"
Lawrence wrote. "Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage." The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence's troops were all legs. In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited eleven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twice on April 6th.

Lawrence's masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. "This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes," Lawrence writes in "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" of one stage in the journey:

We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence's band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks, and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence's great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

------------

Comparing Apples and Fire: iPad Vs. Kindle

Published September 30, 2011 | The Kim Komando Show

...

Even when comparing only to iPad 2's Wi-Fi version, the Apple product offers so much more: a 9.7-inch screen, a minimum of 16GB of storage, two cameras and a microphone, for starters. Battery life is slightly better at 8.5 hours. When the iPad 3 debuts, it will widen the hardware gap even more.

If Amazon isn't taking aim at the iPad, what's the Fire all about?

Amazon is using the Fire to take on Apple. This is Amazon's opening salvo on Apple's mobile business as a whole.

Apple's dominance in the mobile arena isn't just about the iPhone and iPad's hardware. It's about Apple's entire ecosystem. The iPhone and iPad are portals to iTunes, where you can get movies, music, books, apps and more.

The cloud-based nature of the ecosystem means it's both simple and powerful. That's why no other tablet can beat the iPad 2. Many other gadgets have better software and hardware. But they don't have that cohesive ecosystem.

That's why Amazon has set its sights on Apple's ecosystem. Amazon already has instant movie streaming and a music store. It has the Android app store and, of course, the Kindle book store. Plus, Amazon has a massive cloud-based network for processing information. All it needs is a mobile gadget to tie everything together.

Book Review: Ancient Chinese Warfare

2011-10-22T08:00:00.004-04:00

Below is an excerpt from a review of the book Ancient Chinese Warfare by Ralph Sawyer. The whole review may be read here.

Ralph D. Sawyer, Ancient Chinese Warfare. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Pp. xiv, 554. ISBN 978–
0–465–02145–1.
Review by David A. Graff, Kansas State University (dgraff@k-state.edu).

A consultant and independent scholar based in Massachusetts, Ralph Sawyer is best known to both academic historians and a wider public for his path-breaking 1993 translation (with Mei-chün Lee Sawyer) of the Seven Military Classics (Wu jing qi shu);1 although “Sun Tzu’s Art of War” (Sunzi bingfa) had often been translated, several of the less celebrated works in the eleventh-century collection were for the first time made accessible to a non-specialist Western audience.

Sawyer has since published several Chinese military and philosophical texts in translation as well as other books on the Chinese military tradition.2 The latter consist largely of passages translated from traditional Chinese writings, arranged chronologically and interspersed with Sawyer’s commentary; the overall flavor is very similar to the compendia (leishu) produced by Chinese scholars in the Qing dynasty and earlier. The book under review here is rather different; it is the
first of at least two comprehensive volumes on the military history of early China, a work that has been decades in the making.

Ancient Chinese Warfare begins at the beginning, with the archaeological remains from Neolithic times and the early myths and legends that may shed light on their military and political significance. It concludes shortly before the demise of the Shang dynasty in (probably) 1045 BCE.

The Zhou conquest of the Shang and the climactic battle of Muye will figure in Sawyer’s second volume, which will deal with the Zhou dynasty up to ca. 771 BCE.

Although filled with many lesser claims and assertions, this first volume does not argue for any central thesis beyond the obvious one that armed conflict has had a very large role in Chinese history—something misleadingly downplayed by earlier generations of Chinese scholars and Western Sinologists.3 In reaction, Sawyer here addresses almost every conceivable aspect of war, with a level of detail as exhaustive as the extant sources (and the publisher’s bottom line) allow.

To judge by his extensive bibliography and ninety-one pages of notes, Sawyer has collected and digested every relevant book and article in English, Chinese, and, apparently, Japanese, including even obscure, dry-as-dust Chinese excavation reports. The great virtue of this volume is that it makes the refined gist of that material more immediately accessible for both specialists and non-Sinologists. However, every virtue has a concomitant vice. While Ancient Chinese Warfare is
certainly an indispensable reference tool, it is far from a sprightly narrative history to be read cover-to-cover for enjoyment.

The 300 Tang Dynasty Poems, #42: BALLADS OF FOUR SEASONS: WINTER

2011-10-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

From the University of Virginia Chinese Text Initiative:

In Chinese literature, the Tang period (618-907) is considered the golden age of Chinese poetry. Tang Shi San Bai Shou [300 Tang Poems] is a compilation of poems from this period made around 1763 by Heng-tang-tui-shi [Sun Zhu] of the Qing dynasty. Sun's motivation for compiling the collection sprang from his dissatisfaction with the then popular textbook, the Qian Jia Shi [Poems by A Thousand Poets], an earlier collection from the Tang and Sung (960-1279) periods . Sun made his own selection of Tang poems based on their popularity and effectiveness in cultivating character. Because it represented equally well each of the classical poetic forms and because it represented the best works by the most prominent Tang poets, Sun's collection became a "best seller" soon after its publication. It has been used for centuries since to teach elementary students to read and write, and also in cultivating character. Sun's collection is still a classic today, its popularity undiminished. Nearly every Chinese household owns a copy of Tang Shi and poems from it are still included in textbooks and to be memorized by students. We would like to make this World Wide Web version of the poems as a testimony to its compiler's intent : " Learning Tang poems three hundred by heart, you can chant poems though you know not the art ."

Here is #42, BALLADS OF FOUR SEASONS: WINTER

The courier will depart next day, she's told.
She sews a warrior's gown all night.
Her fingers feel the needle cold.
How can she hold the scissors tight?
The work is done, she sends it far away.
When will it reach the town where warriors stay?

Another Year Rolls Around

2011-10-16T08:00:00.018-04:00

Another year has rolled around again. Won't you help me celebrate?

My youngest was home for the summer from school and I enjoyed every minute of it. She moved back into an apartment with a year-round lease. The plan is that she'll work out there next summer, or get an internship. That means she'll never really be "home" again.

Sure, she'll be home for weekends, Christmas break and what not. When she graduates, she may move home for a while until she finds work and gets going, but it will be a temporary situation and we know there will be an expiration date.

Turn another page.

One of the things she wanted to do over the summer was start working out again and get back into shape. She had drifted away from that last year at school.

With the amount of hours she was working, she had a hard time getting off of top dead center. However, it came to be that she had a week off and her plan was to get started then. Coincidentally, a co-worker of the Mrs gave her a guest pass to a Women's Fitness Bootcamp, which she passed along.

My youngest really impressed me by getting up every morning to work out HARD starting at 5:30 in the morning until nearly the time she was going to move. She got herself back into really good shape.

Good stuff.

My oldest has been working at her new job for about a year, so that's going well. She's pulling her own weight (ie off of Dad's payroll), living on her own and working on her masters' degree.

As she doesn't really have a lot of responsibilities now, she's taking advantage and doing some traveling; visiting friends who have moved around the country.

The Mrs took a new job this summer. She basically runs the office for a small accounting firm. They told her when she went for the interview that the busy time of year is during tax season and that she'll have time on her hands the rest of the year, so feel free to bring a book or to surf the internet.

She bought herself an iPad2 and has learned how to use it. Where she used to have a big desk blotter sized month at a glance calendar filled with microscopic notes, she now has everything on the iPad calendar and in her notes. She's having a blast with it.

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that it’s been a dream of mine to someday have a modest place on a lake. I’m not into water related sports (although I’d like to take up fishing), but I find the water relaxing and enjoy the sounds and wild life. My idea is to reenact a typical Corona beer commercial.

We didn’t quite make it on the waters’ edge, but did pick up a nice modular home at a very good price one block off of Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes, near a small town in the Michigan’s Thumb area. It’s an easy two hour drive from home that puts it within the limits of a place we could reasonably get away to after work on a Friday. I can live without seeing the lake from my deck (for now). With a modular home we could always move it if we find some likely property somewhere else.

This is a lifestyle change and it’s not without some friction. Furnishing the place is progressing over time. We have to either rent a truck to take up major pieces or buy at the nearest large town and schedule a delivery when we’re there. I’ve had to keep up on the work I do around my home during the week to leave the weekends open.

There’s very little I have to do there. Basically the place needs to be vacuumed and dusted. The landscaping is mostly maintenance free.Of course, having said that the Mrs wants me to paint the interior.

I have to work a little more frantically on the one hand to relax more completely on the other. The same amount of work needs to be done; I just have to move the piles around differently. It’s the yin-yang of things.

Actually, I’ve been here before. When the kids were little, before they started their own activities, we used to have a motor home that we took camping nearly every weekend during the season. We sold the motor home when we built our house because we knew we wouldn’t use it as much. There was a lot to do with a new house and the kids were old enough to become active doing things (Girl Scouts, soccer, volleyball, dance, etc). Indeed the most recent period was when my youngest played travel volleyball and we traveled with her nearly every weekend during the season for several years.

Ultimately, it’s all good. The Mrs and I get away up there. The kids have gone up there with friends. We have friends come and stay with us for a weekend at a time. We spend a lot of time by the water. When the weather makes the lake less inviting, we explore the nearby small towns.

You have to be somewhere and you have to be doing something. This is a lot better than a sharp stick in the eye.

One of my daughters asked me what I wanted for my birthday. After my usual response that I'd like an Amazon gift certificate wrapped around a Snickers Ice Cream bar, I said that what I really wanted was that the four of us (plus the dog) would spend a weekend together at the cottage.

She arranged it. We'll all be there together in a couple of weeks. The weather this time of year may not encourage us to spend much time at the beach, but as a family maybe we'll get through a stack of DVDs that we've all been meaning to watch, or play a few board games. Whatever we do, it will be awesome.

I’d like to bring up a good book that I recently read: The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi. The book is about art, particularly everyday objects meant for daily use which were mass produced before the age of machinery. Mr. Yanagi presents some insights into art, Zen and Daoism in the most practical everyday sense as he describes objects whose great beauty derives from anonymous craftsmen simply doing their work without “trying” to make the objects beautiful or to avoid ugliness.

Last year I reported that I had lost about 20 lbs. Now it's 30. I actually lost a bit more but it was too much.

Shortly after my birthday post last year, I started another new job.

It was kind of funny. I was talking to someone I've known since high school who is the chief engineer and COO of his company. I mentioned that I was a bit frustrated that I had doubled the sales for the products that I was responsible for, but wasn't really making anymore money for it.

He said "why don't you work for me?"

Now I do.

I'm more or less a Field Application Engineer. I'm basically the intermediary between our customers and engineering. I support sales.

I enjoy what I'm doing, I like the company and the people I work with. It is my hope to be able to stay here until I someday retire.

Before enlightenment: chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment: drink beer and eat pizza.

I may not be enlightened, but I like to drink beer and eat pizza.

My practice has been strong and my mind is clear. It's been a good year.

Missing People in Japan

2011-10-15T08:00:00.001-04:00

Over at the Japan Subculture Research Center, Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) writes a review of People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.

An excerpt is below. The full article may be read here.

People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman*
By Richard Lloyd Parry (Jonathan Cape 404pp £17.99)

When the disappearance of Lucie Blackman made the news, I was covering it as a reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper. By necessity rather than by choice, I was already familiar with the darker side of the country: I had spent 1999 to 2000 as a police reporter assigned to the 4th District, home of Japan’s largest adult entertainment area, Kabukicho. Despite being from different papers, Richard Lloyd Parry and I worked the story together, exchanging information, contacts and tips. There was a chance that Lucie might still be alive, being held captive somewhere.

The hope that reporting on it might make a difference superseded any journalistic rivalry. Now Parry has written a compelling book about the depravity of man, the difficult pursuit of justice, and how we deal with the wrongful deaths of those whom we loved.

Lucie, a young English woman, came to Japan to have fun and make money as a hostess in order to pay off her debts. She never went home. Her alleged killer, Joji Obara, is a clever man and a graduate of the law department of an elite Japanese university. I write ‘alleged’ because, despite all the circumstantial evidence that he was responsible for her death, the Japanese courts have only convicted him of dismembering her corpse. The charges were of rape resulting in death, but they have not yet been proven to the satisfaction of the judiciary. Obara knows that without a full confession, the Japanese police are handicapped, and prosecutors loathe such a case. He also knew enough of the law to prey on foreign hostesses. Hostessing is not allowed on foreign visas. If foreign hostesses go to the police as victims of sexual assault, they themselves are arrested and often deported, and no charges are generally brought against their assailants. (For years, human traffickers in Japan exploited this same fact.)

Every year, roughly 80,000 people go missing in Japan. The police don’t investigate each disappearance, or even a significant fraction of them. Perhaps if Tim Blackman, Lucie’s father, hadn’t raised hell, the case would never have been seriously investigated.

The 1000 Day Challenge

2011-10-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

Every year, I throw the Lenten Challenge out to my martial arts buddies. It's a challenge to train every day without fail for about 40 days. I've seen other people issue challenges for 100 days, or for a season. There's also the 100 Man Kumite.

Nothing beats this challenge. Below is an excerpt from an article on Wikipedia. The whole article may be read here.

Only 46 men have completed this challenge since 1585.

The Kaihōgyō (回峰行^?) is a set of the ascetic physical endurance trainings for which the Japanese ‘marathon monks’ of Mt. Hiei are known. These Japanese Monks are from the Tendai school of Buddhism, a denomination brought to Japan by the Monk Saicho in 806 from China.

Part of Tendai Buddhism's teaching is that enlightenment can be attained in the current life. It is through the process of self denial that this can be achieved, and the Kaihōgyō is seen as the ultimate expression of this desire.

There are many serving priests at the Temple on Mt Hiei, but very few of them have completed the Kaihōgyō. Many who have completed it come from outside of the Order.

The selection process for the Kaihōgyō is after the first 100 days of running, the Gyoja (trainee Monk) will petition the senior Monks to complete the remaining 900 days. In the first 100 days, withdrawal from the challenge is possible, but from day 101 onwards the Monk is no longer allowed to withdraw; he must either complete the course or take his own life. The mountain has many unmarked graves from those who have failed in their quest, although none date from the 20th/21st century.
...

The ultimate achievement is the completion of the 1,000-day challenge, which would rank among the most demanding physical and mental challenges in the world. Only 46 men have completed the 1,000-day challenge since 1585.^[1]

The Kaihogyo takes seven years to complete, as the monks must undergo other Buddhist training in meditation and calligraphy, and perform general duties within the temple.
...
Author John Stevens, in his book, The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei describes the running style which dates back over a thousand years. 'Eyes focused about 100 feet ahead while moving in a steady rhythm, keeping the head level, the shoulders relaxed, the back straight, and the nose aligned with the navel.'

Good Monk, Bad Monk

2011-10-10T08:00:00.005-04:00

Below is an excerpt from Kung Fu Magazine. The original article may be read here.

The article is about the Chinese martial arts actor, Gordon Liu Chia Hui. Although already famous for his many Chinese martial arts films, those of us in the west may know him best from the Kill Bill movies, where he played the Monk Bai Mei.

Gordon Liu Chia Hui

Good Monk, Bad Monk
by Dr. Craig Reid

Gordon Liu Chia Hui (Cantonese Lau Kar Fai) is one of the coolest kung fu stars you will ever meet.

Though perhaps the most recognized and popular Shaolin-righteous-monk character from the Old School Shaw Brothers kung-fu films, he doesn't promote himself as such, or flaunt himself in "look at me" fashion design, or try to be the next "Hong Kong star" vying for Hollywood's attention. Instead, he's an unassuming man, simple in nature, sincere in spirit and open in heart.

I met up with Liu in the lobby of the Le Meridian Hotel in Beverly Hills, just a few hours after he had finished a few day's stint, dubbing his Monk Bai Mei character from KILL BILL: VOLUME 2. If you've seen his films, his eyes are intense, his body taut, his posture proud, because he's the hero that will save China (or at least part of it). But in real life, he's dressed in dark blue and gray, sporting a gray woolen hat shaped like his bald head, and he has a gentle smile and soft eyes - clearly a man at peace.

We drive to Monterey Park to meet up with a family member and partake in an afternoon of yum cha (dim sum). I politely mention that I'm not into chicken feet and pig ears. Moments later we're surrounded by every waitress and bus boy at the restaurant. None ask for autographs, but just stare and smile, not in awe, but with familiarity. I ask if he's uncomfortable and would he like to go somewhere else. Liu happily smiles, shakes his head, then laughingly orders chicken feet.

Liu doesn't come across eager to please - or full of himself - like so many other Hong Kong imports.

And why? Because he's not opera, he's not flash, he's a real kung-fu man top to bottom, in mind, body and spirit. His life and background as a martial artist is not about entertainment or sport; it's a way of life, the way real martial artists should be: spirited calm, enlightened with humbleness...a dying art.

"I find it sad that most people and kids in Hong Kong nowadays are not interested in practicing martial arts like we used to," Liu laments. "And it's also one of the reasons why the Hong Kong film industry is dying, because nobody wishes to put themselves through the rigorous training like we used to do.

Mastery

2011-10-07T08:00:00.012-04:00

Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past):

We do not receive wisdom,
we must discover it for ourselves,
after a journey through the wilderness
which no one else can make for us,
which no one can spare us,
for our wisdom is the point of view
from which we come at last to regard the world.
The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you,
have not been shaped by a paterfamilas or a schoolmaster,
they have sprung from very different beginnings,
having been influenced
by everything evil or commonplace
that prevailed round about them.
They represent a struggle and a victory.

Views of Mount Fuji

2011-10-04T08:00:00.001-04:00

Below is an excerpt from a site entitled "24 Views of Mount Fuji" with the art of Hokusai Katsushika, of whom I've posted previously. If you click here, you will be directed to the site where you will find 24 beautiful woodblock prints by the famous Japanese artist.

The woodblock that accompanies this is "Red Fuji Southern Wind Clear Morning".

Hokusai Katsushika was a prolific and influential artist of 19th century Japan, particularly well known for his ukiyo-e woodblock prints. In 1827 Hokusai began producing his most famous work, the series of prints known as "36 Views of Mount Fuji". Another 10 prints were later added to the series.

In 1985 Roger Zelazny wrote "24 Views of Mount Fuji, by Hokusai", for which he won a Hugo award in 1986. The story was inspired by the protean face of the mountains near his Santa Fe home, and on an abridged collection of Hokusai's prints with which he was familiar. The novella is divided into 24 chapters, each named after one of the prints, and each the setting for the chapter's events. The effect is a sort of literary pavan; lyrical, graceful, and tragic.

Having read and appreciated the story, I became intensely curious concerning the prints themselves, and resolved to locate as many of them as I could on the internet. After considerable searching, I succeeded in finding all twenty-four prints. These I present below, along with the titles cum chapter headings.

Who Needs Fiction or Strategy #1: Deceive the Heavens to Cross the Ocean

2011-10-01T08:00:00.004-04:00

A friend sent me an article from which I've posted an excerpt below. The full article may be read here.

Strategy #1 from The 36 Strategies, "Deceive the Heavens to Cross the Ocean" involves using a ruse, which is just what our Romeo did.

The story which goes along with this strategy goes something like this:

This stratagem references an episode in 643 AD, when Emperor Taizong of Tang, balked from crossing the sea to a campaign against Koguryo. His general Xue Rengui thought of a stratagem to get the emperor across and allay his fear of seasickness: on a clear day, the emperor was invited to meet a wise man. They entered through a dark tunnel into a hall where they feasted. After feasting several days, the Emperor heard the sound of waves and realised that he had been lured onto a ship! General Xue drew aside the curtains to reveal the ocean and confessed that they had already crossed the sea: Upon discovering this, the emperor decided to carry on and later completed the successful campaign.

Hitman falls in love with target and fakes her murder with tomato sauce

by Greig Box-Turnbull, Daily Mirror

With a gag in her mouth, a machete in her side and covered in “blood” this woman looks like the victim of a brutal murder.

But Iranildes Araujo did not suffer a cruel end – her death was faked with tomato sauce after a hitman fell in love with her.

Hired killer Carlos de Jesus was paid £345 to murder Iranildes by Maria Simoes who thought she was having an affair with her husband.

But when de Jesus saw his intended target he fell head over heels and confessed to her.

The pair then conjured up a plan to fool his employer into believing he carried out the hit.
Iranildes said: “I tore my shirt, put the knife by my side, then he tied me up and smothered me with tomato ketchup.”

The former convict then sent the sham photo of Iranildes to his client.

But the ruse was discovered three days later when Maria saw them kissing.

Amazingly she went to police to complain she had been conned out of her money.

How Much Can You Say?

2011-09-28T08:00:00.004-04:00

A friend sent me an article from which I've posted an extract below. The full article may be read here.

Twitter users around the world share one thing in common: the 140-character limit. The figure may be constant regardless of where you tweet, it's not the same: How much you can say in 140 characters varies greatly language to language. For Germanic and Romance languages that require many prepositions and contain sounds requiring more than one letter (such as "sch" or "cht" in German), the character limit has given way to all sorts of creative abbreviations. But for logographic (or mostly logographic) languages -- like Chinese and Japanese, in which one symbol can represent an entire word -- 140 characters is quite spacious. As Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei once said, "In the Chinese language, 140 characters is a novella." (Twitter itself is banned in China, but a similar service, Weibo, has the same character limit.)

How much more can you tweet in a logographic language than in English? One British IT consultant created a tool that hooked up Twitter to Google Translate and ran twitter feeds from different languages to compare their lengths once they were translated into English. Of course, any computer generated translation is at best a rough estimation of what a human would produce, but the results of his little test still give us a little clue about the information contained per tweet. He found that the Japanese tweets he surveyed averaged out to 260 English characters each. Thai tweets were also quite long, at 184. And these tweets weren't all 140 characters in their original language to begin with!

Medieval Lives

2011-09-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

Below is an excerpt. The whole article, including links to all the episodes may be found here.

Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

Terry Jones' Medieval Lives is a BBC documentary series presented by Terry Jones, looking at the Medieval world with the intent of finding out what it was really like. The series consists of eight episodes, each of which examines a particular Medieval personality: the peasant, the monk, the damsel, the minstrel, the knight, the philosopher, the outlaw and the king. The series reveals that what most people believe life was like in the Middle Ages is totally wrong. For example, the medieval knight were far more interested in the fine arts of killing people and profiting from war than romantic notions of chivalry.

An Important Resource for Internal Martial Artists

2011-09-22T08:00:00.003-04:00

Some years ago, Dan Miller printed a magazine called the Pa Kua Chang Journal. While focused on Pa Kua Chang (aka BaGua Zhang), it also dealt to a lesser extent, with Xing Yi Quan and TaiJiQuan.

The magazine has been out of print for years, but the back issues are available on CD-ROM at Mr. Miller's website.

A letter to the readers written from the perspective of many years accompanies the CD-ROM. The letter is below.

A Note from Pa Kua Chang Journal Editor Dan Miller

During the seven years (1990-1997) I spent publishing this Journal I was completely consumed with the research, study, and practice of Ba Gua Zhang. During that time I made six extended trips to Asia-visiting mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong-specifically to research this art. In total, I conducted in-depth multi-part interviews with over 75 Ba Gua Zhang teachers throughout Asia and the United States. Additionally, I had over 50 magazine articles and dozens of books on Ba Gua Zhang, which were written in Chinese, translated into English. This research, and my own practice and study of the art, formed the base of my knowledge and the resultant opinions I expressed in the Journal regarding Ba Gua Zhang.

Many of my personal opinions regarding Ba Gua Zhang were conveyed to readers in a series of editorials which ran in various issues. These articles related to topics such as the definition of Ba Gua Zhang, what comprised complete systems of Ba Gua Zhang, and how Ba Gua Zhang was practiced and trained in the old tradition. Many years have passed since I wrote those articles and many of the ideas I previously held about the study and practice of Ba Gua Zhang have changed and/or deepened over those years. Thirteen years have passed since I published the first issue of the Pa Kua Chang Journal and six years have passed since I published the final issue. I learned a lot about Ba Gua during the seven years I spent publishing the Journal, yet I have probably learned even more in the years since the last issue was published.

Let me use some philosophy from the ba gua (eight trigrams) to try and help explain my evolution of learning in Ba Gua Zhang over the past twenty years: the philosophy inherent in Ba Gua Zhang is a model for (among numerous other things) the cyclical nature of naturally occurring phenomenon. For instance, in relating the King Wen (later heaven) arrangement of the ba gua to the cycle of seasons in nature we find that Spring can represent the initiation of an idea and the nurturing of that idea, Summer can represent that idea coming to fruition, Fall can represent reaping the benefits of the growth and maturation that has occurred in the Spring and Summer, and the Winter can represent an inward reflection and contemplative atonement of that which was grown, matured, and cultivated. Winter is most often related to digestion, stillness, rest, and inward processing.

While I was publishing the Pa Kua Chang Journal, I spent seven years in the intense mode of gathering, collecting, and disseminating information. Everything that I gathered was quickly digested and either written about in the Journal, written about in a book I was writing or editing, and/or taught to my students. After writing on one topic, I would then move quickly on to gather the next bit of information so that I could have something new to print in the next issue or book. I felt as though the cycles of learning that I was involved in during that sevenyear period were a bit lop-sided as they consisted of a long Spring (making contacts, formulating ideas, and processing new information), a shortened Summer (lack of time necessary for the ideas, information, and relationships to mature and flower), a long Fall (gathering, collecting, and "harvesting" the less-than-ripened information) and then a very brief Winter (no time for deep reflection before the next group of ideas were formed).

While I feel the information I reported was accurate and true, I also feel that my internal processing of the information, as it would relate to my own personal practice and advancement in the art, was out of balance to some degree.

In other words, I collected and processed a lot of information during the years I published the Journal, but I did not allow sufficient time for that information to mature during the "summer months" and I did not have any time to let that information settle during the "winter months" so that I could understand it on a deeper and more contemplative level. Every other month I had a new issue of the Journal to put out and so I had to necessarily move on to something new for every issue. In that regard I was a good journalist, but perhaps a poor practitioner of the arts. Since it was my job to be a good journalist, that was necessarily my focus at the time. I had gathered notebook upon notebook of information, filled dozens of cassette tapes with interviews, collected hundreds of photographs, and shot hours and hours of video tape-yet I never really had the time to explore all of this information to the degree of depth which it merited. I processed the information on the intellectual level, and I feel like I did bring forth a true representation of the material on that level. However, I feel that with something as deep and rich as Ba Gua Zhang, long hours of repetitive practice and contemplation are required in order to really begin to grasp all that it has to offer.

Part of my reason for deciding to stop publishing the Pa Kua Chang Journal was the frustration I was feeling in my own practice of Ba Gua. I practiced every day, but my mind was always filled with notions of how I might explain what I was doing and discovering about the art in the Journal or to my students. The focus on writing and teaching caused me to approach Ba Gua Zhang on an intellectual and technical level. I was practicing for what I could teach and tell others, and thus I felt my personal growth within the art and my own inward exploration of the art was stagnating to some degree due to this overly mental approach to the art.

When I decided to quit publishing the Journal in 1997, things improved a bit, but I was still teaching students at my school every evening and thus a lot of the time I had available for the practice of Ba Gua was spent teaching others instead of practicing for myself. In 1998 I decided to make a big change. I closed my school in California, bought ten acres of land on a secluded mountain top in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and built a new house. I completely isolated myself from the outside world of martial arts publications, teachers, books, students, and practitioners. In doing this, I finally got the chance to purposefully enter a deeply contemplative phase of my Ba Gua Zhang training. I was no longer a martial arts journalist, teacher, or publisher. I simply became a student of the art.

During the past five years I have done nothing relating to martial arts except practice for myself. I have spent this time carefully processing all of the information that I worked to collect during the seven years that I published the Pa Kua Chang Journal. I have studied what all the teachers I had the good fortune to interview and study with taught me and told me. I have worked to analyze all of the common threads that exist in all major lineages of Ba Gua Zhang and I have tried to incorporate into my practice those elements of Ba Gua Zhang that I believe are the most important, but were missing from my practice during the years I was publishing the Journal and teaching my students. In order to clarify that last statement I will have to back-track a little and tell you of my background in the martial arts.

I came to the study of internal martial arts after being a long distance runner most of my early life. Just prior to embarking on my study of the internal martial arts, I had also started practicing sitting meditation from the East Indian yogic tradition. I was a competitive distance runner from the time I entered high school (age 14 in 1974) through the time I graduated college (age 22 in 1982). During that period of time there was nothing that I enjoyed more than taking long runs by myself in the woods. Luckily, there was a 5 mile wooded running trail around a lake near my boyhood home and I was able to enjoy daily runs in the solitude and tranquility of this wooded trail.

Later, when I was in college, I built a rustic cabin in the mountains of West Virginia and spent time there alone during the summer months and on long weekends taking long runs down isolated dirt roads in the mountains. For me, the long runs in these secluded wooded areas were very centering and peaceful. The solitude, combined with the rhythm and repetitiveness of the running, put my mind in a "zone" that was very meditative.

During my senior year in college I suffered severe stress fractures in both shins. The doctors told me that I could not run for 8 weeks. After that I tried to return to running, but each time I would try to build up my mileage, my shins would begin to ache. To make a long story short, I went to many different doctors over the next year or so and nothing they recommended seemed to help. In an attempt to regain the feeling and "groove" that I got from running, I tried to take up long distance biking, but it was not the same. The rhythm was different, the roads were different, and the feeling was different. From there I turned to meditation.

In 1983 I met a very wonderful meditation teacher-someone with whom I still maintain contact, respect highly, and study with to this day. He has been my mentor and teacher for 20 years. He teaches the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobino and I began studying this philosophy and meditative practice regularly in 1983. The meditation in this tradition consists of seated meditation practice. I loved practicing seated meditation, but since I had grown up having my body integrally involved in my meditative practice (running), I was craving this same type of integration into my new meditation practice. I was discussing my frustration with a friend of mine and he said, "Have you ever thought about studying Tai Ji Quan or Qi Gong?"

At the time I had never heard of Tai Ji or Qi Gong. My friend had numerous books and videos on both subjects. He lent me the books and we began practicing together in about 1983. That is when my training in these arts began. I was in the Marine Corps at the time and I moved every two years from 1982 until 1992 when I left the service. From 1983 through 1992 I studied either Tai Ji, Xing Yi, or Ba Gua with whoever I could find in the various areas of the country where I was stationed. I would typically search out the best instructor I could find and then study whatever art he was most proficient in teaching.

I relate that brief part of my martial background to give you an understanding of what led me to be interested in the martial arts. I did not come from another martial arts style and I did not take up this practice because I was initially interested in self-defense. I started studying the internal martial arts because I was interested in cultivating that quiet, centered, meditative quality that comes from a calming of the mind and integration of mind, body, and spirit. Thoughout this essay my use of the words spirit and spiritual are not in any way associated with any form of organized religion. Instead, I use these terms to define internal experience which is associated with a sense of self beyond the physical and mental being and its connection with that which is greater than the individual self.

Those of you who are reading this and are familiar with the Pa Kua Chang Journal-or any of the books I either wrote, edited, or compiled on internal martial arts topics-may be a little surprised that my original purpose in approaching these arts was more along the lines of self-cultivation than self-defense. During the years I published the Journal I shied away from those topics relating to internal cultivation along spiritual lines and the meditative practices as they pertained to that cultivation. I instead focused on the subtle physical components of the internal martial arts without allowing much discussion of qi cultivation or the connection to spirit.

My first few Tai Ji and Ba Gua instructors were heavily into qi cultivation and their notion of the "spiritual" aspect of internal arts practice. I did learn Tai Ji and Ba Gua forms from these instructors, but much of the practice involved mental imagery and visualization aimed at linking body, mind, and spirit and enhancing qi develop. That may sound like it was great. However, typical of "new agers," the instructors I had were not very good at teaching these methods in the context of internal martial arts. Their teaching mostly consisted of a "new age" mixed bag of "esoteric" practices that were haphazardly mixed with Tai Ji and Ba Gua forms and exercises. The teaching was not systematic nor authentic, nor were the vital subtleties of the physical practice taught correctly. The focus of these instructors was so heavily weighted on the energetic aspects of the practice that the physical aspects - correct body alignments, vital internal physical connections, proper development of internal strength, etc. - were either ignored (due to the instructor’s lack of knowledge of these things) or not taught correctly when the attempt was made. These teachers had simply learned a variety of meditations, awareness exercises, and mental visualization practices from various sources and were hanging it all on the framework of studying Ba Gua or Tai Ji. As a result, it just wasn’t working for me, or any of my fellow students, and I was becoming very disillusioned with these instructors and the practice.

The hodge-podge, haphazard approach to training that I received from various instructors was not the only problem I encountered in my early years of training. I later discovered that even if their instruction relating to the development of qi and refinement of the energetic qualities of the arts had been correct and true, it would not have been completely effective because I had not first obtained a solid internal, or external, martial arts foundation upon which I could build the more subtle energetic aspects. Without a solid physical base, I did not posses the physical skills necessary to support the energetic development. It would be analogous to trying to play soulful, inspired music on a musical instrument that you really weren’t very adept at playing. Good intention cannot take the place of fundamental and practical skill.

I had grown up playing a variety of Western sports and thus I had a certain degree of strength, flexibility, and coordination. However, the physical aspects of internal martial arts practice are far more demanding than what is required in your average Western sport. Even though I was physically strong and coordinated in the Western sense, I was lacking the physical foundation in the subtleties of internal martial movements during my early years of study. My teachers were too involved in the "energy" aspects of the arts to present their students with the physical aspects of training, which are critical prerequisites for the deeper aspects of energy training.

Because of my early experience with these teachers, I came to believe that the inner cultivation, development, and refinement of qi, using internal martial arts as the vehicle, requires that you first obtain a good martial arts foundation and become skilled at the physical aspects of the internal martial arts before the inner cultivation and qi development can begin in earnest. I became convinced that the physical aspects of the art were vital in supporting the energetic aspects and unless the physical skills were cultivated to a high degree, the energetic aspects would never be able to reach their full potential and flourish in the context of these arts.

This realization came to me about the time I first started publishing the Pa Kua Chang Journal in 1990 and the catalyst for this change of thought was brought about by studying with my first Xing Yi instructor, Ken Fish. With my previous instructors "the qi" had been everything. There was little practical training in these schools for the development of naturally aligned strength, subtle internal physical connections and body alignments, or the development of "gong li" (trained strength). My past teachers thought that they were teaching these things and thought that they knew what they were doing. However, I found that their ideas regarding the physical areas of training were clouded over by their impression that "the qi" could do everything. There was no systematic training method for the correct development and refinement of real "internal" physical skills.

In Ken Fish’s school, practice of the rigorous repetitive drills that develop the physical skills required to build an internal martial arts foundation is all we did. There was little mention of qi, or spirit, or inner cultivation. It was the exact opposite of where I had come from; however, I felt that it was exactly what I needed at the time. During the first year of practice with Ken Fish, the focus of my martial arts training did a complete 180 degree turn from qi development and self-cultivation to physical development and self-defense.

About a year after I started studying with Ken, he introduced me to Park Bok Nam and I began training Ba Gua Zhang with Park. About a year after I met Park, I also began studying Xing Yi Quan with Vince Black. Both Park and Vince Black have developed very thorough, step-by-step, graduated training methods that encompass all aspects of internal martial arts training and do so in a very complete and systematic manner. I was, and remain, very impressed with their teaching methods and training curriculums. Both Park’s and Vince Black’s systems necessarily begin the practitioner with the building of a very strong martial arts foundation by first developing solid physical skills. What I began learning from Park and Vince Black completely fit my line of thinking at the time. I continued to focus my efforts on the refinement of my physical skills through a repetitive practice of basic drills, forms, and exercises during the years I studied with Park and Vince Black.

During the seven years that I published the Pa Kua Chang Journal, my focus remained on the development of highly refined physical internal martial arts skills and application of those skills in self-defense. The skilled practitioners that I met in Taiwan and mainland China also taught and practiced along these lines. Thus this was the thrust of most of the editorial articles that I wrote for the Journal. I focused on the physical aspects and shied away from the more energetic aspects. I still believed in the energetic aspects; but my belief, based on my experience, was that it would be very difficult for anyone to get very far along the qi cultivation and refinement path, using internal martial arts as their vehicle, without first having developed a sufficient level of physical skill in the arts. If the physical body has not been sufficiently developed in terms of internal strength; internal and external physical alignments; efficiency, continuity, and fluidity in motion; and highly refined and practiced timing and coordination, then the body would not be able to properly support high levels of development and refinement of internal energy. I still maintain that view in some respects, although my perspective has shifted over the past four or five years.

The focus of my personal training for the past four years has been to strive to infuse every single movement that I make in the practice of Ba Gua Zhang with fullness of energy and attention to spirit. I try to allow the energy around me and the energy inside me to fuse as one energetic continuum and let every physical movement flow in that moment as if I am not the source of that movement, but as if I am being guided by a union of inner and outer forces working in harmony. I try to address this practice with respect and reverence, viewing it less as a physical exercise and more as a spiritual ritual and a journey towards the discovery of the One great energy and spirit that unites all things. I realize that this description of Ba Gua practice may sound like "new age mystical mumbo-jumbo," and it is definitely the kind of statement that I would have avoided making at all costs during the years that I published the Pa Kua Chang Journal for fear of being labeled a "new age crackpot." However, I now believe that without this kind of attitude towards practice, Ba Gua becomes little more than a physical exercise and thus, in this context, the aspects of the art that can bring the greatest long-term personal rewards will never be able to mature. I guess I’ve done another 180.

In a sense my practice has come full circle in that the focus of my practice is now back to that which is more energetic and spiritual as opposed to that which is more physical. I feel that the years that I spent focusing on the more physical aspects were well worth the time and effort because I now have a substantial physical framework and skill-base on which to hang the energetic and spiritual work. However, I now can’t help but wonder if the two approaches couldn’t be successfully integrated and combined from the very beginning of one’s exposure to the art. Without having spent eight years of my training focused on the subtle physical aspects of the internal martial arts I might not have been able to effectively shift my focus to the more energetic aspects of the art and reap the same benefits. But, looking back, I wonder what the result would have been had I had been able to effectively train all of the necessary physical aspects while simultaneously maintaining a closer connection to the refinement of the energetic aspects.

Having traced this circular practice path over the past 20 years, I look back now at the places that I have been and the lessons that I have learned and realize that if I had it to do all over again, there are a number of things that my 43-year-old self would like to tell my 23- year-old self in order to help save some time and effort in the process of learning the internal martial arts. (Isn’t this always the way! I’m sure that my 63-year-old self will also have things to tell my 43 year-old self that completely elude me at the present time.) Along those same lines, there are some things that I wrote in the Pa Kua Chang Journal that I would write differently if given the chance. With this release of the Pa Kua Chang Journal back issues on CD-ROM, I feel like I have that chance. I am not going to change anything that was written in the Journal. I will present all 38 issues on this CD-ROM as they were originally published. However, I also feel compelled to provide you with some new perspectives. I want to have the opportunity to modify and expand a few of the editorials that I published in the Journal and provide you with my updated views on the practice and study of Ba Gua Zhang. The vehicle I will use to do this is a website: PaKuaChangJournal.com.

For the past five years I have been the editor and publisher of an acoustic guitar publication called Flatpicking Guitar Magazine. During that time I have had the opportunity to interview dozens of the top acoustic guitar players in this country. Inevitably the conversation will turn to the art of improvisation in music. Because the music these guitar players engage in is highly improvisational, I have learned a great deal from them regarding the differences between art based on the use of "technique" or "technical skill" and art based on a connection with the inner self - the "heart and soul" of individual expression. The insights that I have gained from these talented musicians easily translate to the practice of Ba Gua Zhang, or for that matter, any other form of art. I will also add some of these insights, which I lacked while publishing the Pa Kua Chang Journal, to the information on my website.

One of the musicians I recently interviewed expressed his views on learning to play music improvisationally and I found that his ideas reflected my experience in the study of Ba Gua Zhang. He said that he felt like the path to being an improvisational player was circular: when one first picks up an instrument they feel inspired to create something fresh and unique, but they do not posses the technical skill on the instrument that is required to be able to express themselves freely. First they have to study the fundamentals of the instrument. They practice with a metronome to improve their timing; they practice scales, arpeggios, and chord forms to familiarize themselves with their instrument; and they develop left and right hand techniques that help them improve their tone, timbre, note clarity, and dynamics. They also repetitively practice arrangements of tunes that others have created in order to develop a sense of style and work within the parameters of melody and genre. After all this work has been completed the musician then has the fundamental skills needed in order to begin free expression within the context of the art form.

This explanation made perfect sense to me because it is exactly what had happened to me in the study of Ba Gua Zhang. The frustration that occurred in my early practice was due to the fact that I was trying to achieve and cultivate a soulful expression of the art when I was lacking the fundamental skills necessary for the development of such an expression. After pondering my development in the internal arts in this light, I felt that I had done the right thing in abandoning the qi cultivation and spiritual refinement aspects of the art for seven or eight years and focusing on the fundamental physical skills of the art. I also felt satisfied and fulfilled in my more recent practice of integrating the energetic and spiritual aspects of the art into the physical foundation that I had worked years to develop. However, it was in my search to become a better guitar player and musician that I also began to realize that my practice of Ba Gua Zhang through the years might have been better served if I had worked to address the physical, energetic, mental, and spiritual aspects of Ba Gua Zhang with equal attention during that period of time when my primary focus had been on the physical.

In addition to interviewing guitar players and practicing the guitar on my own, I have read several good books written by musicians which were related to the topics of improvisation and soulful musical expression. These books opened my eyes to an approach to Ba Gua Zhang training that I had not fully realized in the past (I will discuss some of these ideas and concepts in the section of my website which relates to the improvisational aspects of Ba Gua Zhang).

As time rolls on, perspectives constantly shift based on our experiences with our practice and in our life. If you had asked me five, ten, or fifteen years ago if I was integrating the energetic aspects, the spiritual aspects, and the physical aspects of Ba Gua Zhang in my practice, I would have told you that I was indeed doing that and I could have told you all about the importance of such things. However, in honest reflection, I can say that today my idea of all of the component parts of Ba Gua Zhang practice - and their multi-dimensional aspects - is much different than it was five, ten, or fifteen years ago. As the depth and breadth of my experience, knowledge, and understanding of art, and life in general, have continued to deepen and mature over the years, I have found that my definition of "internal" as it relates to the martial arts and my idea of how to integrate the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and energetic aspects of this art have continually matured. Hopefully, if I am able to continue to approach my practice with an open mind and a sense of awe and wonder, I will continue to grow and mature. Thus what I offer to you on my website is simply my current approach and perspective. Check back with my website every once in a while and we can share all of the new discoveries that we have both made along the Way.

Early on in my martial arts career, someone told me that in China the difference between the internal martial arts and the external martial arts was not in the level of skill attained, the techniques used, or the movements of the body because at the highest martial skill levels these arts were all very much the same. The difference was described as one having to do with the training process. In the beginning levels of training, external artists focused more on the external physical skills while the internal martial artists focused equally on both the internal and external aspects. I "knew" this years ago and in the Pa Kua Chang Journal I even wrote about the importance of integrating wai gong, nei gong, and qi gong in one’s training program, emphasizing that they were mutually supportive of each other at every level of training. However, until the last two or three years of my practice I don’t think I really understood the full weight and depth of this important concept. The articles I post on my website will serve as a statement of my current, but ever changing, ideas regarding the study of the art of Ba Gua Zhang. If you are interested, please visit PaKuaChangJournal.com

"The existence of things is like a galloping horse. There is no movement through which they do not become modified, no time when they are not changed."
- Zhuang Zi

I hope you enjoy the CD-ROM version of back issues of the Pa Kua Chang Journal, and I wish you success in your research, study, and practice of Ba Gua Zhang.

Dan Miller
October, 2002

http://pakuachangjournal.com/editorsNote.php

Dao De Jing #40: Motion and Use

2011-09-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

One of the foundations of philosophical Daoism is the Dao De Jing. It is also one of the world's literary treasures. A free online version may be found here.

#40: Motion and Use

The motion of the Way is to return;
The use of the Way is to accept;
All things come from the Way,
And the Way comes from nothing.

The Mirror Image of Will Adams

2011-09-16T08:00:00.004-04:00

One of my favorite books is Shogun by James Clavell. It is a work of historical fiction set in the early 1600's in Japan, just before a huge war was about to break out which in fact resulted in the Tokugawa Shogunate (Toranaga in the book).

The protagonist in the book is John Blackthorn, and Englishman who was shipwrecked on the shores of Japan and becomes close to the warlord who would eventually become the Shogun, even becoming a samurai along the way.

The book is based on a real life person named Will Adams who was indeed shipwrecked in Japan, became close to Ieyasu Tokugawa and become a samurai. My previous post on Will Adams may be read here.

Before Admiral Perry opened up Japan, a teenaged Japanese boy was fishing far off shore when his shipped was wrecked and was picked up by an American whaler. At that time anyone who left Japan and tried to come back would immediately be executed.

Manjiro Nakahama undertook many adventures in his lifetime, eventually making his way back to Japan where he eventually became a samurai in direct service to the Shogun, was an interpreter when Admiral Perry arrived and continued to serve Japan with distinction in it's affairs in the new world with which it found itself.

Here are links to a couple of books. This one is a biography written for young readers, and this one is a work of historical fiction based on the life and times of Manjiro Nakahama.

The Dragon Motif

2011-09-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

Previously, I had posted an excerpt of a review of The Propensity of Things by Francois Jullien. Below is an excerpt from the book which particularly caught my eye.

Conclusion II: The Dragon Motif

The body of the dragon concentrates energy in its sinuous curves, and coils and uncoils to move along more quickly. It is a symbol of all the potential with which form can be charged, a potential that never ceases to be actualized The dragon now lurks in watery depths, now streaks aloft to the highest heavens, and its very gait is a continuous undulation. It presents an image of energy constantly recharged through oscillation from one pole to the other.

The dragon is a constantly evolving creature with no fixed form; it can never be immobilized or penned in, never grasped. It symbolizes a dynamism never visible in concrete form and thus unfathomable. Finally, merging with the clouds and mists, the dragon's impetus makes the surrounding world vibrate: it is the very image of an energy that diffuses itself through space, intensifying its environment and enriching itself by that aura.

--

Shortly after reading The Propensity of Things, I read Lectures on the I Ching by Dr. Richard Wilhelm.

How to go about studying the I Ching has always been somewhat of a puzzle to me. From his lectures, I got some idea of the underlying structure of how the I Ching is put together and how hexagrams are evaluated.

Throwing some coins then looking up one’s fortune, like breaking open a fortune cookie it is not.

September 11th ... 1683

2011-09-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

Below is an excerpt from a post I made a few September 11ths' ago. The original post may be read here.

Over 300 years ago, Western Civilization was nearly overrun by Islam. The seeming unstoppable tide of Islam paused at Vienna. On September 11th, 1683, the king of Poland, John Sobieski, at the head of his Winged Hussars, the last heavy calvary in Europe, led an army down upon the besiegers. They swept the Muslim army from the field, and from that day, the grip of Islam upon Eastern Europe weakened. This battle was the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Who Needs Fiction: Be Careful Whom You Fight

2011-09-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

Sun Tzu would admonish us about picking the wrong opponent to fight. Below is an excerpt from an article which appeared in the Associated Press. You may read the whole article here.

We should certainly learn from the mistakes of others.

California man killed by armed bird at cockfight

Monday, February 7, 2011

(02-07) 15:09 PST Delano, Calif. (AP) --

A Kern County man attending a cockfight died after being stabbed in the leg by a bird that had a knife attached to its own limb.

The coroner says 35-year-old Jose Luis Ochoa was declared dead at the hospital about two hours after he suffered the injury in neighboring Tulare County on Jan. 30.

Bully Medicine

2011-09-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

An article recently was published by Yahoo from which I am posting an excerpt below. It has to do with kids and bullies. The whole article may be read here.

As Real As It Gets: Bullying Victims Can Fight Back With Help From Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Royalty

Wednesday, August 24, 2011 1:17 am

Written by: Steve Henson

FC 134 in Rio de Janeiro this weekend will rightly include homage to the iconic Gracie family, creators of Brazilian jiu-jitsu nearly 100 years ago, creators of the Ultimate Fighting Championship nearly 20 years ago, creators of legendary family fighting figures and jiu-jitsu instructors that span the globe.

But the Gracies' most positive impact might be felt at a middle school in a Denver suburb where a seventh grader is unafraid of bullies for the first time since he can remember.
Martin Hendricks, 12, spent a week this summer at the Gracie Academy in Torrance, Calif., in an intensive program designed to make him "Bullyproof." He learned as many jiu-jitsu self-defense techniques as a kid can absorb in five days, he memorized a blueprint for dealing with a bully fairly and squarely, and he gained self-confidence. The first week of school he put the lessons into practice.

"I'm still a little nervous but it all went well," Hendricks said quietly in a phone call to Rener Gracie, his personal instructor at the academy. "He'll never bother me again. Let me tell you about it."

Why I Train in Martial Arts

2011-09-04T08:00:00.006-04:00

In this day and age, I think the main reason for most of us to train in martial arts isn't to fight, but to cultivate a calm, clear mind.

I am nearly 54 and haven't been in a fight since my early 20's. I do however find that I have an opportunity to show the advantage of a calm,clear mind nearly every day.

Take yesterday for example.

I was on the freeway with my wife and mother in law driving back from visiting some relatives in Ohio. I was in the left lane passing a truck. There was a SUV behind the truck.

Just as I was pulling alongside the SUV, he decided to change lanes sharply. I saw him coming and laid on the horn. He kept coming. I move as far to the left as I could without driving into the median.

It wasn't far enough. When he finally saw me, he hit my car and went back to his own lane.

The highway patrolman said the if he had hit me a little further back, my car might have spun and it would have been a very bad thing. If he had hit me much harder at all, I would have ended up in the median and maybe rolled over.

As it was, the damage is superficial. No one was hurt and all's well that ends well.

To Ride the Wind

2011-09-01T08:00:00.007-04:00

A couple of years ago, I posted an article about Chinese Dragons. Both the Tiger and Dragon are elemental figures, but while the Tiger is born a Tiger, the Dragon becomes one by dint of his own effort.

Among the fearsome powers of the Dragon is the ability to ride the wind.

Below is an excerpt from an article about a modern self made Dragon, Ram Charan. I don't know if I would want to adopt his life style, but I can't help but admire him for his expertise, erudition and focus.

The full article may be read here.

...Having uploaded himself into the global
economy, Charan circulates, continuously, with something like the speed and efficiency
of capital. Consider the itinerary he sketched at dinner one night a few months ago in New York. He had just agreed - for the first time in his career -to let a journalist travel with him and watch him work. "I should tell you where I've been the last few weeks," he began in heavily accented English. "I go to India on the Friday of the week before
Thanksgiving. I am Sunday morning in Bombay. Monday morning I am in Delhi.
Wednesday I'm in Bombay. Thursday I'm in Bangalore. Saturday I'm in Trivandrum.
Wednesday I'm in Johannesburg. Friday morning, at seven, I am in New York. I have a
two-hour meeting with a CEO who has flown in to see me. I have two more meetings and I
fly out that night to Dubai. I am in Dubai on Sunday and Monday, then I come back here.
On Thursday night I fly out to Jubail, Saudi Arabia. Then I come back here. Tuesday
morning I have a whole-day schedule in New York. Tuesday night I go to Milwaukee. I
came from Milwaukee last night. They diverted my plane so I had to stay in Pittsburgh. I
had a meeting this morning in Philadelphia. I had three meetings here in the afternoon.
And I'm here tomorrow, with GE. Then an hour-and-a-half phone call. Then I'm going out
tomorrow night to West Palm Beach. Monday morning I have a breakfast meeting in New
York. And then I'm flying out to Perth, Australia." At least he flies first-class.

Have I mentioned that Charan has never married? That he has no children? And still I
haven't come to possibly the most peculiar aspect of his personality. I mean that which
sets him apart from virtually every person he comes in contact with, none more so than
his overachieving CEO clients: Charan has no goals. He never set out to become a
globetrotting consultant, any more than he dreamed of attending Harvard Business
School, or becoming a professor, or even so much as one day earning a living beyond the
small city in India where he was born.

Charan's weird and wonderful life is an unintended byproduct of dedication, he insists.
Dedication to learning and teaching and service, to the whole set of Hindu virtues
embodied by one of Charan's favorite phrases, "Purpose before self." "People used to
ask me, What is your ambition?" says Charan, who turned 67 this past Christmas. "I say
I have none. My dedication is going to take me where I'm going to be."

Who Needs Fiction: Life Will Find a Way

2011-08-29T08:00:00.004-04:00

A friend sent me this.

The catastrophe at the Fukushima Reactor in Japan is very, very bad. But then again ...

"Life will find a way."

- Ian Malcolm, "Jurrasic Park"

Unstoppable

2011-08-26T08:00:00.007-04:00

Remember the Crane Kick from the Karate Kid?

Lyoto Machida in a MMA match: No gap.

Big vs Little

2011-08-23T08:00:00.004-04:00

Here's a clip of some Sumo matches where the (relatively) smaller guy succeeds against a larger opponent.

The 300 Tang Dynasty Poems, #41 A Song of an Autumn Midnight

2011-08-20T08:00:00.001-04:00

The Tang Dynasty was a cultural high point in the Chinese civilization. Poetry was especially esteemed during this period and the best works of that age were compiled into The 300 Tang Dynasty Poems. A free online version of this work may be found here.

For now, please enjoy #41.

Li Bai

A SONG OF AN AUTUMN MIDNIGHT

A slip of the moon hangs over the capital;
Ten thousand washing-mallets are pounding;
And the autumn wind is blowing my heart
For ever and ever toward the Jade Pass....
Oh, when will the Tartar troops be conquered,
And my husband come back from the long campaign!

Capoeira vs Karate

2011-08-17T08:00:00.004-04:00

While looking at some videos on YouTube, I found this video of a Capoeira fighter who engages in full contact karate tournaments. His kicking skills are mind boggling. Enjoy.

The Demise of Cursive Characters

2011-08-14T08:00:00.005-04:00

The noted sinologist Victor Mair contributes to the Language Log. A recent post of his describes how in both China and the West, cursive writing is becoming a thing of the past. An excerpt of his post is below. The whole post may be read here.

In "The Case for Cursive," (NYT [April 28, 2011]), Katie Zezima states that:

For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery.

The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges.

This immediately reminded me of the lamentations that have been widely voiced over the loss of the ability to write Chinese characters by hand that has been occasioned by the same technologies.

...

The difference between the impact of computers and smartphones (also mobile / cell phones) on cursive and on characters is that, in the former case, it is a loss of motor skills and esthetic sensitivity, whereas in the latter case, it is increasingly often the inability to produce many characters at all, whether clumsily or handsomely.

13 Assassins

2011-08-11T08:00:00.002-04:00

Below is an excerpt from a review of the film, 13 Assassins. The full review may be read here.

April 28, 2011

Movie Review | '13 Assassins'

Swords Drip Red With Revenge

By MANOHLA DARGIS

A stirring, unexpectedly moving story of love and blood, the samurai movie “13 Assassins” opens with a dignified man seated alone in a large courtyard. Perfectly centered in the shot, he says nothing, his face a ferocious mask. But words are immaterial given his open shirt and the blade in his hand.

The Japanese director Takashi Miike has no qualms about letting the red run down the screen. Here, though, instead of showing the blade sinking in, he moves in closer, letting the scene play out in the man’s crumbling face, the gray sky framing him as the moist, tearing sounds of the knife doing its terrible work fill the air.

Set at the close of the Edo period, not long before the Meiji restoration, “13 Assassins” is at once a tale of revenge and liberation, though it takes a little while to grasp the stakes. Mr. Miike, a jaw-droppingly prolific director who makes several movies a year and is perhaps best known in America for shockers like “Audition” and “Ichi the Killer,” plunges right into the action in “13 Assassins.” Initially that action is mostly bureaucratic and a question of strategy, one worked out by men plotting in darkened rooms, like the council of elders who convene after the ritual suicide and set the narrative on its course.

The dead man, it emerges, has committed seppuku to protest the baroquely barbaric excesses of Lord Naritsugu (a fantastic Goro Inagaki), the shogun’s half brother, who’s poised to assume even greater power. Pretty, petty and very likely insane, with a lazy walk and small twitchy smile, Naritsugu is the embodiment of outré imperial decadence. He doesn’t just rape the wife of a minion, he also murders her husband in front of her, hacking at the poor man’s (off-screen) body and lopping off the head with so much force it rolls across the floor. Later, during another convulsion of violence, while murdering a family, Naritsugu will kick a ball across a court and still later will boot another severed head in similar fashion. For him it’s all the same.

These cruelties and others serve as the evidence against Naritsugu, justifying the ensuing violence that will wash blood away with blood. This sanguineous deluge comes, but all in good time because first Mr. Miike has to round up his avengers, the 13 warriors of the film’s title. It’s a sign of difficult samurai times that the leader of the group, Shinzaemon Shimada (the great Koji Yakusho), enters perched on a fishing ladder, a pole in his hand. It’s unclear if he’s fishing for food or leisure, but the point is that he’s fishing, not fighting, having resigned himself to a quiet twilight. Like the not especially dirty dozen he assembles, Shinzaemon finds purpose in battle: he becomes a samurai again, with a flashing and wet sword.

Do the Work

2011-08-08T08:00:00.001-04:00

You can't guarantee the results, but you have to do the work. Below is an excerpt from a review of one of Steven Pressfield's books, Do The Work. The whole review may be read here.

The good news is that you can change your life at any point, on any day, regardless of your age, health, financial status, technical ability or experience.

The bad news is you will have to continue to change it—you, pushing that c*cksucking boulder up that motherf*cking hill—every day of your life, regardless of your age, health, financial status, technical ability or experience.

Every day. No exceptions.

Because the way to change—to creating things that never before existed, to fixing things people didn’t realize were broken, to making anything—is not through daydreaming or wishing or fairy dust, but through work. Joyful, tedious, challenging, maddening, daily work.

Steven Pressfield’s newest book, Do the Work, is a sort of high-octane, super-condensed variation on his previous devotional for makers, The War of Art. It’s shorter and tighter and carries a greater sense of urgency—perhaps because Pressfield has weathered the daily battle of getting meaningful things done that much longer, but also perhaps because the change cycle has accelerated in the nine years since he introduced us to Resistance, that bane of all meaningful change.

Who Needs Fiction: The Flying Fists of Kung Fu

2011-08-05T08:00:00.006-04:00

An article in The Economist. The original article may be read here.

Hong Kong Airlines

Kung Fu flight attendant

Apr 21st 2011, 11:32 by A.B.

NEXT time you travel with Hong Kong Airlines, you might want to think a little harder about behaving loutishly. The carrier's cabin crew have been given compulsory training in wing chun, a form of kung fu that is ideal for close-quarter combat.

A spokeswoman for the airline told the Sunday Morning Post about a recent in-flight application of the new skills:

One of the passengers was sick but he was probably drunk and felt unwell. The crew member attended to him and she realised her fitness was helping her, especially because the guy was quite heavy.
Normally, a female cabin crew can't handle a fat guy, especially if he's drunk, but because of the training, she can handle it quite easily.

An article on Wing Chun wouldn't be complete without a video of Bruce Lee, would it?

Two Book Reviews

2011-08-02T08:00:00.005-04:00

Below are excerpts of book reviews for two books I've recently added to my wish list. I think you might like to read them too. With each exceprt I've included a link to the full review.

Character Building

By LESLEY DOWNER

When I used to ask my mother about her family village in China, she always said it was three hours from Canton by bus. A hundred years ago, when my great-grandfather left China for good, that couldn’t have been far, but it was certainly no help in locating it. So I was pleased — though still mystified — to read in Deborah Fallows’s charming and witty little book that in China, “if you ask someone where their hometown is, they’ll say it is seven hours by bus. Or four hours by train. They won’t tell you where it is.”

Fallows spent three years living in China with her husband, the journalist James Fallows. Since she’s a linguist by training, her method of getting under the skin of the country was to immerse herself in its language. In “Dreaming in Chinese,” she uses key phrases and concepts to unlock aspects of the society that interested or surprised her, casting light along the way on many idiosyncrasies of the Chinese view of the world.

Fallows doesn’t arrive with many preconceptions. Instead, she takes the Chinese as they see and present themselves. And she soon discovers that what the Chinese think is important isn’t always what we think is important. One thing they’re interested in is ensuring good luck. This explains why the Beijing Olympics began on Aug. 8, 2008, at 8:08 p.m. Eight, ba, rhymes with fa, “as in fa cai, which means ‘to become wealthy,’ ” making it a very auspicious number. And even though Aug. 8 was well into the rainy season, it didn’t rain.

Auspiciousness also enters into the choosing of names, an art in itself. Most Chinese have three names: surname (there are just 100 common surnames in a population of 1.3 billion people), middle name (to identify your generation and connect you with your cousins) and personal name. Which yields the realization that — in a country where most people are allowed only one child — future generations will have no cousins.

On matters that Westerners make a fuss about, like human rights, Fallows presents the common Chinese viewpoint. At a conference on censorship, technology and commerce, she recalls that “one exasperated Chinese participant finally blurted out that people, the laobaixing, aren’t as preoccupied as Westerners about free speech and an uncensored Internet: what laobaixing really want, he said, is . . . a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a color TV.” For ordinary Chinese, material concerns come first.

Fallows has an endearing affection for these laobaixing, these common folk. Unlike conventional journalists, she’s not very interested in press conferences, in listening to what the politicians say. Little by little, she finds herself becoming more like the laobaixing: learning to deal with the plethora of rules as the Chinese do — by finding ways around them.

The First Chinese Exchange Students

By DEBORAH FALLOWS

To outsiders, China may seem purposefully dynamic. To its own people, the same ceaseless change can seem frighteningly chaotic. During my own recent three years of living there, I was often startled by the dramatic stories told by my Chinese friends — both the terrible parts (famine, split and scattered families, trust betrayed, fortunes lost) and the astonishing rebounds (an against-all-odds admission to a university, a fearless gamble that paid off, a random kindness from a generous stranger).

But China has gone through previous periods of tumultuous change, as Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller’s “Fortunate Sons” makes abundantly clear. Their story begins with Yung Wing, who came to America in the late 1840s. The first Chinese student admitted to Yale, he returned to his homeland in 1854, determined not to be the last. Under his tutelage, 120 Chinese boys crossed the Pacific in the 1870s, intent on learning Western skills that might help their country modernize. Yet mixed fortunes awaited them on their return to a country whose Qing-era imperial rule was crumbling, where their schooling at various colleges in New England made them both influential and, in some cases, rootless and estranged.

The boys arrived in an America that was going through its own post-Civil War transformation, and Leibovitz and Miller use the newcomers’ experiences as pretexts for discourses on extraneous subjects. One such observation — “For the boys,” the story of the transcontinental railroad’s creation “could have contained many lessons about the contrasting outlooks of imperial China and the young American republic” — is followed by a lengthy discussion of the Central Pacific Railroad, ethnic tensions involving its Chinese work crews and how John Deere tractors tamed the prairie.

The Strategy of Yin

2011-07-30T08:00:00.004-04:00

Below is an exceprt from Walter Russel Mead's Stratblog. The full post may be read here.

I’d been thinking a lot about British history this spring; in the Bard grand strategy course, we moved from Machiavelli’s prescriptions for Italy to Elizabeth I, Philip II, and the struggle for England. The text we used was Garrett Mattingly’s delightful The Armada, a triumph of scholarship, strategic analysis and literature all at once.

Even today, when historical knowledge once thought central to an understanding of American society and politics has been largely forgotten, many students still have a vague knowledge that there was once something called the Armada, and that it failed. But the details and the drama of that history have been lost along with much else; one of Garrett Mattingly’s many successes is that he makes that history come alive.

More than that, he recreates the complicated political and strategic environment in which Philip and Elizabeth operated. The complicated story of the three-cornered civil war in France between the fanatically pro-Catholic (and Spanish-supported) Holy League, the weak but crafty Henri III, and the Huguenot armies under Henri King of Navarre (for whom, famously, Paris was well worth a mass) is made clear. The murky struggle between the Protestant Dutch rebels and the redoubtable Duke of Parma is explained, along with Elizabeth’s grudging and half-hearted support for the rebel cause.

Something of the complex calculations of Philip II, ruler of the greatest empire in world history up to that date, as well as the power of the faith that drove him is explained as well. And Mattingly gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of Elizabeth and her realm as he illuminates the twists and turns of her policy.

What he also does, and rather brilliantly, is to show how all the might of England rests on the achievements of a canny and resourceful woman whose greatest asset was her grasp of the powers of the weak.

...

A grand strategy course concentrates mostly on strength: how to acquire it, how to defend it, how to use it. Elizabeth I was never a strong monarch in the classic sense. Her government was always underfunded, and she had to coax any additional revenue from a stingy Parliament. Her realm was religiously divided; the North remained largely Catholic, and English Protestants were increasingly divided between moderate and radical factions.

...

Mattingly makes the case that Elizabeth’s irresolution and dithering reflected her strategic genius, not her character flaws or her ‘unworthy’ gender.

...

Elizabeth’s story illustrates that there is more than one way to succeed. The weak have resources denied to the strong. The party on defense, a Clausewitzian would say, may be weaker in some respects — but the defense is inherently stronger than offense in war and a clever and resourceful defender may well prevail over a stronger opponent. Elizabeth understood this perfectly and her resourceful weakness laid the foundations of Britain’s eventual strength.

On Double Weighting

2011-07-27T08:00:00.003-04:00

One of the mistakes one can make while practicing Taijiquan is to be "double weighted". Below is a guest article my Jim Roach, the senior student of Master Stephen Hwa of the Wu style of Taijiquan. Mr. Roach is the author of a blog, ClassicalTaiChiBlog.

The true cause of "double-weighting"

"The Tai Chi Classics say: “Anyone who has spent years of practice and still cannot neutralize, and is always controlled by his opponent,has not apprehended the fault of double-weightedness. To avoid this fault one must distinguish yin from yang.”

A student recently stated: “You are standing double-weighted”. This is not the first time that a student has said this to me and their observations were incorrect. This bears out the statement by my teacher Master Stephen Hwa: “sometimes the appearance of reality is actually an illusion”.He continues by saying “My students in class often told me that they thought I was moving certain way and try to do the same. Later they found out that their observation was not correct. That was the reason I incorporated different views in my video so you could see my moves at different angles to lessen the chance of wrong impression. Using a fresh eye to review the lesson video could also uncover any misinterpretation of my movements. The other thing to remember is “you perceive that you are moving a certain way, but in fact, you are not moving that way.”

In meeting this student,I watched his Tai Chi form and his standing still. At one point, the student asked me to correct his stance, he then took the opportunity to “correct” mine. I observed from several different angles that he would stand and move with a step size of three foot lengths and more, (this is typically a large frame stance). In addition, I observed that he used a pushing motion to shift his weight and in the “sitback” posture would not work to obtain a “crease” in the front of the trousers at the pelvic area. He actually would sitback in a perfectly perpendicular stance, typical of large frame tai chi.

Typically, I will stand in either a Compact or Tight-compact form with the step size ranging from one and a half foot lengths to two and a half foot lengths. The photo above illustrates this step size. From a view that is looking down at the feet ( the only angle from where the practitioner was looking) it may appear that the feet are double weighted, particularly to a beginner. This however is one of the very important advantages of the Classical Tai Chi footwork. It is indeed hard to determine where the practitioner’s weight is, that is also a very important strategic advantage. From these compact positions I can lift either foot in a split second, a great advantage for speed and fluidity.

In thinking about this article, I decided to research the term “double weighted” in numerous books which I list below. After sifting through all of them, one thing began to stand out and that was their ignorance of their own limitations. In every case the author makes a claim that a student can become aware of their own weight distribution and work to correct double weighting. The common thread in all theses is that “double-weighting” occurs at a moment in time when the weight is equal on two sides of the body.

They ascertain what they think double weighting looks like but what they fail to ascertain however is the root cause of the double weighting. The root cause of double weighting is the “pushing from the back foot” in going forward and “push from the front foot” in going backward in a large frame that the vast majority of practitioner’s engage in while moving. The root cause I speak of is a direct result of this pushing because both feet are literally glued/frozen to the ground until the act of pushing is completed. A foot that is stuck to the ground, cannot be picked up and moved…hence the stance is double weighted.

As I observed in the student’s own stance in performing the Tai Chi form and stance in push hands, the root cause comes from a large frame stance. The act of pushing is also a built in facet of large frame stances, in other words, large frame has to push in order to move…it cannot use the feet to pull. The pull in those stances is ineffectual simply because the larger size of the stance inhibits the act of pulling. To compound the ignorance, practitioner’s of large frame insist that they are doing an “internal” art when what they are really doing is external. It takes no internal movement of the core to push with the back leg, if that were true then the everyday act of walking would intrinsically be an internal martial art. Walking defined by one author as the act of controlled falling because of all the momentum one has to generate in order to keep thrusting one leg in front of another. This done not only to move but to stay erect while moving.

On the contrary, one can make the act of everyday walking into an internal art by adapting the Classical Tai Chi walk with its important characteristics of 1.) Using a “pull” walking motion, 2.) Keeping the body center of gravity under control, not allowing it to fall forward as defined as normal walking (we must eschew the act of controlled “falling”), 3.) Body weight stays back until foot (whether in front or back) is flat on the ground, then one pulls…one does not land the foot either on the heel or toe.

I find it interesting that some really good information on double weighting came from my teacher’s own book: “Uncovering the Treasure” by Stephen Hwa. The information comes from subjects in the book however that large frame practitioner’s would never associate with double weighting…namely the subject of “pushing”. PP., 48, 103 and 122 will find the use of the word “pushing” associated with double weightedness.

P. 122: If you wish to stick to an opponent, you cannot push with the back or front foot and expect to be fluid enough to follow their movement. The act of pushing will always lead to double weight.

P. 103: One can certainly generate (jin or even fa jin) force from a pushing leg in a large frame, but it still leads inevitably to a double weight situation.

P. 48: Back foot pushing as front foot lands on heel is a major contributor to slps and falls and in that situation the stance is double weighted.

Actually, if one wishes to "push" an opponent, it is best done with the front foot off the ground so that the pushing force goes directly into the opponent not to the ground to be double weighted. As my teacher says, "pushing is always strongest in the upward direction, look at what track and field sprinters do before starting...they crouch".

My references include:

Arthur Orawski in : Tai Chi a personal learning experience, pg. 1165, 1996

Ray Pawlett in The Tai Chi Handbook, pg. 83

Lawrence Galante in Tai Chi, The Supreme Ultimate, pg. 83

Additional “double weighted” references:

Black Belt Magazine October 1987 article by Wei Lun Huang

The Essential Movements of Tai Chi”, p. 24, John Kotsias

The Tai Chi Book, p. 36 Robert Chuckrow

Additional references:

Complete Tai Chi, p. 87 Alfred Huang

Hwa yu tai chi, p. 80, Glenn Newth

Gateway to the Miraculous, p.115 by Wolfe Lowenthal

Sunrise Tai Chi, p. 6, Ramel Rones

The Unmovable Mind

2011-07-24T08:00:00.001-04:00

This post marks a milestone of sorts. This is my 1000th post at Cook Ding's Kitchen.

A friend sent me an article from which I've posted an extract below. The full article may be read here.

The calligraphy reads "Fudoushin" which means "Immovable Mind."

When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays

By JOHN TIERNEY

A quick experiment. Before proceeding to the next paragraph, let your mind wander wherever it wants to go. Close your eyes for a few seconds, starting ... now.

And now, welcome back for the hypothesis of our experiment: Wherever your mind went — the South Seas, your job, your lunch, your unpaid bills — that daydreaming is not likely to make you as happy as focusing intensely on the rest of this column will.

I’m not sure I believe this prediction, but I can assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current issue of Science. Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy, unhappy, murderous — went through their partners’ minds when they tried to resume.

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

When asked their thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of concentration: only 10 percent of the time did their thoughts stray from their endeavors. But when people were doing anything else, their minds wandered at least 30 percent of the time, and as much as 65 percent of the time (recorded during moments of personal grooming, clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).

On average throughout all the quarter-million responses, minds were wandering 47 percent of the time. That figure surprised the researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert.

“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize that half the people aren’t really there,” Dr. Gilbert says.

You might suppose that if people’s minds wander while they’re having fun, then those stray thoughts are liable to be about something pleasant — and that was indeed the case with those happy campers having sex. But for the other 99.5 percent of the people, there was no correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.

“Even if you’re doing something that’s really enjoyable,” Mr. Killingsworth says, “that doesn’t seem to protect against negative thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is lower for more enjoyable activities, but when people wander they are just as likely to wander toward negative thoughts.”

Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.

Dao De Jing #39: Support

2011-07-21T08:00:00.001-04:00

One of the world's classics of literature is also one of the foundations of philosophical Daoism, the Dao De Jing.

A free online version of the Dao De Jing may be found here. Below is verse #39, Support

39. Support

In mythical times all things were whole:
All the sky was clear,
All the earth was stable,
All the mountains were firm,
All the riverbeds were full,
All of nature was fertile,
And all the rulers were supported.

But, losing clarity, the sky tore;
Losing stability, the earth split;
Losing strength, the mountains sank;
Losing water, the riverbeds cracked;
Losing fertility, nature disappeared;
And losing support, the rulers fell.

Rulers depend upon their subjects,
The noble depend upon the humble;
So rulers call themselves orphaned, hungry and alone,
To win the people's support.

Old Karate Stories from Okinawa

2011-07-18T08:00:00.000-04:00

From an article that appeared in Classical Fighting Arts, and was reprinted at seinenkai.com, the son of the famous Okinawan Karateka Choki Motobu speaks of his legendary father and karate stories from old Okinawa. An excerpt appears below. The full article may be read here.

A Meeting With Chosei Motobu by Graham Noble
The renewed interest in Choki Motobu has been a feature of the recent study of karate history. Anyone interested in the development of karate was well aware of Choki Motobu's name, but little if anything was known about his life and technique. He seemed to have left few living students, his dojo had long since closed down, and although he had written two books, few people were aware of them, and anyway, they had been out of print for decades. There was even a view -- and I heard this personally from a couple of senior Japanese teachers -- that Motobu was not a true karate master but rather just a fighter who made use of karate techniques.

But, as research into karate history developed, people began to look afresh at Choki Motobu and his legacy. Bit by bit material became available, and gradually it became possible to get some idea of his life and methods. Then just a couple of years ago Kimo Ferreira, a kempo instructor from Hawaii, made contact with Choki Motobu's son Chosei and helped introduce him to American karateka. In July 2002 when Kimo and his wife Kiko accompanied Chosei Sensei and his senior student Takeji Inaba to England for a seminar, they stopped off in London for some sightseeing, and this is where Harry Cook and I were able to meet the group and try and find out a little more about Motobu karate. Chosei Sensei does not speak English, but Keiko did a great job translating.

At the time of the meeting Chosei Motobu was seventy-eight and Takeji Inaba seventy-four, and they were remarkably sprightly for their age. Not long before, they had completed their Tsunami video, on which they personally demonstrate all the techniques. Chosei had spent his working life as a policeman in Osaka, and when he retired he decided to devote his time to the development of Motobu style karate.

He had studied karate with his father, he told us, from the age of fourteen, when Choki Sensei would come down from Tokyo to visit his family in Osaka. The training ceased when Chosei was seventeen and Choki Motobu returned to Okinawa. Chosei did not learn karate from anyone else, though for a time he did train along with a student of the well known Shinpan Gusukuma (Shiroma). He recalled that this karateka (I thought I caught the name Kina, but can't be sure) would walk around the dojo on his toes as training for the front kick.

What did Choki Motobu teach his son? For kata, essentially Naihanchi, which constituted a kind of kihon, or basic training -- Motobu did not teach the modern method of moving up and down the dojo drilling single techniques -- and kumite, mainly the twelve kumite sequences shown in his 1926 book and in Chosei's recent Tsunami video. Choki Motobu also stressed two points: 1. Always irimi (enter): move into your opponent's territory, don't step backwards; 2. Don't stand in neko ashi (cat) stance. This is a defensive position, and Motobu used to say that if you take up this stance, in a way you are telling the opponent you are losing. He may also have found that the neko ashi stance hadn't worked out too well in the numerous close quarters fights he had had back in Okinawa.

Choki Motobu used kicks, but sparingly. He taught that kicking should not be used as a first attack. There are risks in kicking, and Motobu considered that you should only kick when you have a strength advantage over your opponent, (60 to 40, according to Chosei), or when you have first hit him with a punch or a strike. Timing is essential: you have to choose the right moment when you will knock the opponent down with one kick. Also, don't kick higher than the waist.

We mentioned that Choki Motobu's karate was close range, in contrast to Funakoshi's Shotokan, for example, where opponents take up kumite positions a relatively long distance apart. At this, Chosei Motobu stood up to demonstrate with Inaba Sensei. The engagement was from a close distance, forearms in contact ("a basic training form"), and Chosei explained that at this distance it was easier to control the opponent and anticipate his actions. When a punch was thrown Chosei blocked it close in. The non-blocking hand was not pulled back to the hip in the orthodox hikite position, but kept close in front of the body, where it was ready to block a second punch, as Chosei demonstrated. In Motobu karate both hands are often used together, and this is called meotode, or "husband-and-wife hand"; the hands are close and work together to achieve the desired result. We mentioned that Choki Motobu would often use the front hand to strike, and Chosei said yes, a student (maybe it was Hironori Ohtsuka) had once asked Choki which hand should be used to strike, and he had replied, "The hand closest to the opponent."

Who Needs Fiction: Wanna See Tough?

2011-07-15T08:00:00.002-04:00

I am not eloquent enough to comment.

Wanna See Tough? - watch more funny videos

On Zanshin

2011-07-12T08:00:00.004-04:00

I made a post a long time ago on Zanshin, or "remaining mind." You can follow this link to read the post.

What follows are some examples of Zanshin.

Not So Fast

2011-07-09T08:00:00.000-04:00

Some thoughts on doing the taijiquan form correctly, not slowly.

Everyone is familiar with seeing the taijiquan form being practiced slowly. I don’t see that slowness is actually the characteristic that is being refined, but of not being in a hurry. Without paying attention to what we’re really doing, even if you start the form slowly, you’ll find yourself going faster and faster as you get towards the end. The taijiquan form can be practiced fast as well, but mindless rushing is doing you any good either.

Since it’s harder to train oneself to not be in a hurry, that is the characteristic it makes sense to work on that first. Simply pay attention to what you are doing with each movement, give it your full attention and if you add anything on top of it next, keep your mind on maintaining an even pace.

When you pay attention to what you’re doing, you’re naturally slowing down as a result. When you are not in a hurry and pay attention to what you’re doing, you’ll find more and more details to which you should pay attention, which slows you down further. Even in instances where you don’t seem to be doing anything, you’ll likely find that your alignment, weighting and posture could use some attention.

Having the attitude of not being in a hurry is just opposite of having the feeling that you’ve got to get it done; to get to the end. It’s that feeling that you have to get to the conclusion that prods you to rush faster and faster through the form. Placing on artificial deadline on when you’ll finish the form will foster this. Speed has its’ place once the form is correct and you’ve mastered slowness through not being in a hurry.

Once you can keep your mind on what you are doing throughout the form as well as all of the details, you can start to do the form more quickly as long as you can maintain the concentration and the level of detail. Lacking either of those, it’s a sign that maybe you shouldn’t go so quickly; not yet anyway.

The older I get I find the less I find myself in any hurry. Everything unfolds in its’ own time. The Daoist recognizes the rhythm of the moment and paces himself accordingly. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always the appropriate speed.

Finally, you may wonder about the accompanying picture of Audrey Hepburn. What does she have to do with all of this? Nothing. She's just hot.

Who Needs Fiction: Sliced Fruit, a Summertime Treat

2011-07-06T08:00:00.004-04:00

2011-07-04T08:00:00.005-04:00

Happy Fourth of July! I've posted this video before, but I really like the song. Enjoy.

The Mysterious Technique of the Old Cat

2011-07-03T08:00:00.006-04:00

Quite some time ago, I had a post linking to an old Japanese story, the Mysterious Technique of the Old Cat. Over at Ichijoji there is a more recent post on the same topic. An excerpt is below. The whole article may be read here.

Overview
It is a fable, and this is part of its attraction and why it is so accessible. A samurai named Shoken (his name means 'Victorious Sword' or something along those lines) finds a large rat running about his house. His own cat runs away in fright and he has no luck when he tries to kill it himself. the three experienced rat-catching cats in the area have no luck either, so it is left to an old cat in a neighboring part of town to take care of things. That night, the cats have a little celebration, and ask the old cat to explain why he was so successful. He offers critiques of their methods and goes on to explain his own approach. Shoken has been listening in and interjects his own question, which the old cat answers, expanding on his original answer.

What makes it a key text?
The critiques of the old cat are important in that they compare the different methods of the three cats, each one of which uses an approach focused on one aspect of combat. Actually, each one of these approaches is fairly specific, and anyone with a broad background in martial arts that includes some knowledge about different styles and approaches, and the arguments that surround them will probably find this quite familiar. They are particularly apposite in terms of swordsmanship - from this and other writings, it seems there was some dispute about which was the most effective approach to swordsmanship, both in terms of training and tactical usage during the period in which he was writing... and later, too.

The Ten Heavenly Stems

2011-06-30T08:00:00.000-04:00

There is a nice video of Master CS Tang performing the neigong of the Gao Style of Ba Gua Zhang, which is known as Tian Gan, or the Ten Heavenly Stems (which is a Chinese philosophical term) at Be Not Defeated By The Rain. The video may be viewed here. Enjoy.