In those days pain did not hurt as much as it does today.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Man it's nice to have some decent clear weather these few days in Beijing. That's like chancing upon a sweet-smelling skunk! Don't get me wrong (comparing Beijing to a skunk) I don't mean to diss Beijing overall - and actually skunks are very cool aniimals, beautiful and sensitive creatures. But the air quality in their vicinity!
It's easy to feel qi. Nothing easier. In 3 mintues of instruction I can have any new student feeling their first rush of that hydro-electric-tingly flow. No biggie. Unfortunately, the gap between that first baby sensation and actually controlling and using it for anything, is like the gap between a caveman startled by a lightening flash in the summer sky vs. the turbine plant at Hoover dam. Same stuff but...
Actually all the internal arts boil down to the same basic thing, to wit: If we can remove all unnecessary tension from our body and mind, then the ordinary physical/nervous energy that would have been wasted in all that pointless tension naturally sinks and concentrates in the dan tian (Japanese: tanden or hara) lower abdomen point, and there it undergoes some myterious alchemic pressure of gravity which tempers and refines it into a different kind of energy, which can then be re-deployed through the body, under command of the mind, for various purposes.
That's basically all she wrote. However, there are quite a number of ways to stimulate and accelerate the process. The differences between those accelerant methods gives rise to the various school of practice. Plus history, culture, personal preference, accident, emotion, marketing, all jump in the pool and contribute to the general confusion. Fact is there are a zillion ways to do it, but only one thing to do (concentrate and redeploy it). All the different approaches are pretty much workable so its mostly just personal preference as far as I can see. But humans love to squabble over bullshit and nothingness. Two of a trade never agree!
What's weird about Yiquan is that, from my point of view, it's zhan zhuang, mojin, and shili suites are fantastically excellent internal energy cultivation systems, of awesome sophistication and effectiveness, obviously crafted by some genius possessed of extremely deep insight. And yet, I gotta say, in practice here, Yiquan is basically taught and though of by its own senior people not really as an internal art at all, but a kind of sophisticated sport fighting. That's how the teachers and senior people here think of it. So of course they never talk about qi or dan tian or anything like that. Yet their methods are superlative for implementing precisely that process (outlined above). So it's a weird contradiction. I feel that most of the Yiquan teachers and senior people here are like a tribe camping on the site ruins of an older and far more sophisticated civilization, whose structures they use without acknowledging the debt. Not meaning to diss my "boxing brothers" (as they say here). It's just my feeling.
It's probably because of the tricky historical situation from which modern Yiquan emerged. Even though Wang Xiangzhai in later life had already begun the process of rejecting the older Taoist qi/shen/xu progression in favor of a (probably half-digested) cheesy version of Western "scientific" explanations, that rationalization process really got up steam with the Communist crackdown on feudal thought, which seems to have slammed Yao Zongxun particularly hard. And in most recent times, the feral insane hatred of the Communists towards Fa Lun sect probably drove the final coffin nail through the lid of any explicit understanding of Yiquan as an internal method. Now the people here respect sanshou athletic type sparring more than anything. I can play the game but that isn't my interest.
I'm more interested in poking among the shards of the ancient ruined site where the Yiquan people have pitched their camp.
Actually, along those lines, its instructive to compare modern Yiquan (Yao brothers version) with another lineal descendant of the original Xing Yi. A distant cousin could maybe shed some light. For example, I studied some with Master Qian Zhaohong when he used to come teach on the UW west coast. In fact I acted as his Chinese/English interpreter for many full days of such seminars. So I got a good pretty much close up inside look at his world. Qian's method is said to be the older branch of Xing Yi, before Li Nengran took it to the wider world. There are many branches but there's no doubt that if you trace everything back far enough, you'll find that modern Yao brothers Yiquan and Qian's Xing Yi orginate waaaaaay back from the same chromosone line.
They obviously gone in way diffferent directions since then. Yet Qian and Yao are remarkably similar in their physics and attitudes of movement and fighting. They are both absolute wildcats who believe in instantaneous, overwhelming, blitzkrieg annihilation. They feel the same when they beat on you. But the practice methods are way different. Qian has zero use for static standing cultivation. He says it completely pointless. All his work is motion, though sometimes slow motion as with his custom-crafted spiral qi gong and oddball taiji set. But to me the genius in Qian's practice methods, the crown jewels are his xing yi based drills, such as mao xi lian. Ah, that is a pearl of great price! But if you know it, you've already noticed how it differs fundamentallly from anything in Yiquan, particularly in its rhythmicity. Nothing in Yiquan is really rthythmic, or periodic, they way basically everything in Qian's drill set it. And then of course the other big difference is conceptual - Master Qian is absolutely explicit and emphatics about qi and dan tian and other verboten taboo stuff that dare not speak its name in the Yiquan studio.
Hell, not just one single dantian - in Master's Qian's world (and body) there are three dantians! No no, I'm not talking about the usual upper/middle/lower distinction; of course there's that, do you take me for a complete amateur? No, what's amazing about Master Qian is how he talks about and demo's a 3-way partition within the middle (abdominal) dantian - now that is something you don't hear about every day for sure.
Frankly I prefer Master Qian's "you got a problem with that?" openly internal (if that's not a contradiction!) analysis over Yiquan's attempt to hide the greatness of its own internal methods under a cloak of cheesy pseudo-Western scientism and amateur sport fighting. But again tastes differ. All paths can lead to the mountaintop I guess. So they are all equally true. Or, if you prefer Castaneda's formulation that "all paths are the same - they lead nowhere", then I'll say they are equally false.
Hmmm, all this talk about Master Qian has got me going. Maybe I'll pop down to Shanghai for a day or two and drop in on him, get from refresher training. One thing I particularly like here with the Yiquan training is the long staff work. Their pole stuff is such a fantastic energy accelerant method (again, unacknowledged as such). I never learned any weapons work from Master Qian, I don't even know if he does anything like that. Probably he does. If I learn it I'll write it!
Man, look at all the crap I wrote ... holy shit. Good thing I'm a super fast typist but sometimes that works against me, as I can type all that above crap in just a minute or two but maybe if it took me more time and effort I wouldn't end up polluting cyber space with that much nonsense.
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Tabby Cat Special: Excerpts from The Road - This week only!
He'd come to see a message in each such late historoy, a message and a warning, and so this tableau of the slain and the devoured did prove to be. He woke in the morning and turned over in the blanket and looked back down the road through the trees the sway they'd come in time to see the marchers appear four abreast. Dressed in clothing of every description, all wearning red scarves at their necks. Red or orange, as close to red as they could find. He put his hand on the boy's head. Shh, he said.
What is it, Papa?
People on the road. Keep your face down. Don't look.
No smoke from the dead fire. Nothing to be seen of the cart. He wallowed into the ground and lay watching across his forearm. An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with learther wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. Shh, he said. Shh. The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry. The boy lay with his face in his arms, terrified. They passed two hundred feet away, the ground shuddering lightly. Tramping. Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. All passed on. They lay listening.
Are they gone, Papa?
Yes, they're gone.
Did you see them?
Yes.
Were they the bad guys?
Yes, they were the bad guys.
