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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

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