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5th International Wudang Tai Chi Tournament

Last week was an unusual week for our school. A Taichi and Kungfu forms competition was held here in Wudangshan. Our Master encouraged us to participate, on the grounds that it would be a valuable learning experience. And it was.

First, we learned what it means to prepare for competition. The week before the opening ceremony was jammed with extra practices. Master and the other coaches made time in their own schedules to go over the competitors’ forms with microscopic attention to detail. In regular training, it is okay to feel your way through a form and make mistakes. For competition practice, the bar was set far higher, and it was cool to see people rise to the challenge. Hand technique had to be precise. Stances had to be both low and stable. Body technique had to be powerful and expressive. Eye technique had to be fierce and spirited. Everybody improved a lot. We got a sense of how we might someday prepare our own students for something like this.

It was also spectacular to watch Master teach. One can see him teach basics any day of the week. However, when he is pushing a talented student toward perfection, he becomes truly stunning. He is my master and I am constantly amazed by him, but I have never been more in awe of his skill as a martial artist and a teacher than I was when he was helping my classmates hone their forms.

Second, we learned about what competition is like and how it fits into our lives as traditional martial arts practitioners. Traditional martial arts is still difficult for me to encompass in a succinct definition, but it is nothing if not broad. Forms competition like this narrows our art. Set aside are defensive applications, internal health, mental calm and focus, and all the other parts of our training. A competition like this one is about performance, about showing the art. Judging is faulty and subjective, athleticism and flashiness usurp the place of practicality and discipline, and points and competitiveness replace the humble pursuit of  personal growth. These are truths of modern martial arts competition. But as martial arts evolves to survive in the modern world, it is avenues like this that keep it alive. Those of us who want to preserve our traditions must accept this, and shoulder the responsibility of ensuring that though the outlets for our art may be narrow, our practice always reflects kungfu’s original breadth.

That said, the representatives from our school did very well in the tournament. Almost everyone got a medal, and most people got two or three. I hope that we made our Master proud. Personally I was most proud of the way our school demonstrated our brotherhood across the lines of nationality. International competitions like this one are praised by their promoters as being great meeting places for east and west, but the stark contrast of Chinese culture inevitably creates a line dividing that which is Chinese from that which is not. Nowhere in the competition did I see people cross that line so freely as did the competitors from our school. We are brothers and sisters first. Passports only count after that.

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Moon Festival 2011

Laying the tables for Moon Festival

This post is going up a little later than planned. Sometimes my internet connection is spotty, and it has been getting in the way of my posts.

Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, or Moon Festival, is one of China’s major holidays along with the Spring Festival and Dragon Boat Festival. In the lunar calendar, it falls on the 15th day of the 8th month, which in our calendar fell on September 12th this year.

The food associated with this festival is called a moon cake. Moon cakes come in different sizes but are generally pastry sized, with a very dense pastry outside filled with sweetened, um… anything. Foreigners like myself usually go for fruit filled ones, but there are also sweetened meat, fish, egg, or nut filled cakes. Some of these flavors are pretty novel to my tastes. A savory shrimp pie might sound good, but wouldn’t you find a shrimp doughnut a little odd? That’s what this is like, and I certainly did find it odd.

Class 3's "Matrix Pingpong" inspired act

For such festivals, our school has some traditions. There is a big meal served, followed by a variety show performed by the students, followed by karaoke on the school’s karaoke system. This year, class three (my class), put special effort into our variety show performance. We took our inspiration from the online video “Matrix Pingpong,” and choreographed a fight scene using the same blackout theme. We were very proud of the way it turned out. Other items in the program included choreographed dances, dramatic skits, and a performance on the traditional Guqin (a many-stringed plucked dulcimer-like instrument). It was a really fun evening that bridged all ages and several cultures.

Family

Before I came to this kungfu academy, I celebrated a few lonely, puzzled festivals in China. I was an outsider and had no idea what the festival involved. I searched for some intrinsic significance to the holiday, and found nothing I could grab ahold of. It made me reflect on our western holidays. Maybe they lack intrinsic meaning as well. The power of holidays comes from community, family, memory, nostalgia, and ritual. It’s not something to be understood, it is something to be lived. It is only with my new family here that I have been able to live these traditions.

For that reason, I think I have some advice for anyone seeking, as I have, to understand another culture: Don’t. I mean, read up, do your research, anything you like, but ultimately you need people who will be your bridge. Find something that is important to you, something that means enough to you that you are able to set aside your own cultural assumptions to get closer to it (this was harder for me than it sounds). Find people who are important to you, and give yourself to them. Only by giving up yourself will the culture you seek to grasp finally be opened up to you.

 

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Conscious Conformity

Life here at the Kungfu Academy, by design and by nature, puts a lot of pressure on those who study here. It’s not the same as the pressure of family and a job, but it is the pressure of discipline, of high expectations. Watching myself and others metamorphose under this pressure has got me thinking lately. I feel that the pressure is moderated by our meditation practice, but different people respond to the meditation differently and thus cope with the weight of discipline differently. If you’ve read my earlier post on internal self defense, you’ve been exposed to the idea of the power our choices about our outlook have on our lives. This is another case of the power of choice.

I want you to understand why discipline is necessary here. We all have a concept of our limitations that stops our forward progress. It is very difficult to break past these limits alone. Even harder are the limits we can’t conceive of, the blind spots in our development. Only someone who has walked the path before you can push you past these limits. And the only way a Master’s pushing can have an effect is through discipline, through the willingness to conform to his standards.

The discipline we experience exists on different levels. Showing up to class on time, being accountable for our activity during practice, demanding the most of ourselves when we train: these are all instances. There are many times when one’s individual wants must be subordinated to this discipline. I think for some people, this is difficult. I sense, from their words and actions, that subordinating themselves threatens their sense of identity. They begin to feel like a robot, unthinkingly obeying commands. Their visceral response is to act out, to assert their individualism by rejecting the patterns of the group, ie, cronic tardiness or sullen reception to instruction. By acting out, they convince their teachers only that they are in need of more discipline.

Choice enters at that moment of subordination. There is no freedom in the choice to follow group expectation or not to, because the definition of the group still defines you either way. The empowering choice is the choice to be free of these terms of self-identity. One can choose not to define oneself in terms of the group at all, so following or not is irrelevant.

Once this freedom is found, there is only one worthwhile test for whether to follow expectation or not: happiness. Which choice makes you happy? If respectfully following the group enhances your training and allows peace of mind, you need not fear becoming an unthinking robot. You are following your feelings. You are no longer bound to the group by heavy chains of discipline, but are freely moving in the same direction as like-minded people. It does not matter that you are meeting external demands, because they merely coincide with the demands you make of yourself.

Many people will accuse me of performing a semantic illusion, of covering over reality with empty words. They will assert that if you follow,  you are not free and self-determining. All I can say is that, if you are striving to be free and self-determining but also suffering from anger and depression, maybe it is time to re-examine some of your assumptions about choice. For me, this is the only way forward in my training, in which the expectations of my Master and teachers help me to raise my own.

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Lion Dance Costume

A cool opportunity dropped in my lap yesterday. Daria, a classmate of mine, is doing some work on the internet helping people back home in Russia get practice weapons and training clothes from here in China. She just received a lion dancing costume which she is going to forward to her client, but she asked the client if first she could try it on and take some photos. She just needed someone to be the tail. That’s where I got involved :-).

I am not going to try to write anything informative about lion dancing (I know almost nothing about it) but after thirty minutes of sweating under that thick costume material and straining to hold Daria up in some of the poses we came up with, I have new respect for those who practice this art form. I had thought it to be a dying or dead art, but I learned yesterday that there are kungfu schools in Canada and the U.S. where the dances are still practiced and preserved. In my time in China, I have never seen a lion dance costume or seen a dance performed, so I thought it was not done. But perhaps it is a regional tradition and I have just not been the the right places.

As a guy who likes making things, I find the head of the lion fascinating. By coincidence, I have been working on a project using similar bamboo construction techniques, and seeing the craftsmanship on this head is awesome. The outside of the head is beautiful, but for me, the inside is mesmerizing.

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My Younger Older Brothers

As you may have seen in movies, the Kungfu community here has a family and generational structure. Our master would be the father figure (Shifu), his master is the grandfather figure (Shiye), anyone who studied under our master’s master would be our aunt or uncle (Shushu), and anyone who studies under our master is our brother or sister. Brothers are further divided into older and younger, those who started studying before you (Shixiong), or those who started after (Shidi). Respect flows up this structure, as you might expect. So in my bumbling foreign way, I try to show respect to those above me and do what they say.

I am becoming more and more aware of the strange ways this structure juxtaposes with other issues in my life here, specifically in my interactions with my older kungfu brothers who are younger than me in age. I owe them respect, both because of tradition and because they are very skillful teachers. Further, they are at home in this culture and I look to them for guidance in how I conduct myself. So I frequently find myself imitating them almost unconsciously. Oh, that’s how I should do that stance. Oh, that’s what I do when Shiye visits.

Seeing them as role models in these ways sometimes blinds me as to their actual age, and I find myself imitating pretty immature behavior. Because in addition to kungfu teachers and Chinese natives, they are also 15-18 year old kids going through all the same bewildering stuff I went through not all that long ago. They are learning what professionalism means, what accountability means, learning about relationships, and learning about the world beyond the walls of the kungfu school and beyond the borders of China.

So I find myself in the strange situation of having to sometimes be a role model for my role models. It is difficult, because one frequently forgets if one should be learning or teaching at a given moment. Two people teaching each other at the same instant tends to devolve into an argument, and sometimes two learners becomes a case of the blind leading the blind. In truth, more often than not we all fall down and all behave like children, but I hope that in some ways I am having a good impact on them even as I learn from them.

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Pain and Injury as Part of Training Life

It has been my observation that the practice of martial arts revolves around the question of balancing training with injury. For the most practical, combative training, one probably wants to spar a lot. One adds rules to the sparring, because otherwise people get badly hurt. Even with rules, people get hurt sooner or later, so instead of hitting one another, martial artists often hit targets. This is important because one can not progress if one’s training is constantly interrupted recovering from injury. Safer still would be hitting only air, but I can tell you even Taiji can hurt your joints pretty badly while you are learning to coordinate your movements. So it seems to me that every martial artist confronts this question every time they approach training: How am I going to do this today and still be able to do it tomorrow?

Class two students practicing body hardening

This is on my mind these days, because we have been training pretty hard and I am consequently in a bit of pain. We are expected to train if we are able, and none of my injuries are serious enough to demand that I miss training, but they are all painful and they create mental stress. This in itself is a form of training, of course; maintaining emotional calm when every movement hurts.

The conclusion people come to, I think, is that there are two kinds of pain, good pain and bad pain, and both are valuable sources of information about what is going on in your body.  Specific pains can be a wealth of information about the balance of strength in different tendons and muscles. Good pain tells you that you are going beyond your current limits and improving. Bad pain tells you that if you keep going, you will do such damage that your training will have to be interrupted by recovery. One wants to push the line that divides the two as far as one can, so that though training is difficult, it can remain continuous.

As for the injuries that do inevitably occur when training hard, I am not a doctor but my experience has shown me that rest is not the best cure. Rest is necessary, but attentive light exercise will stimulate circulation, help the metabolism deliver energy and nutrients to the damaged area, and reduce recovery time. At least that is what I hope will happen, because my ribs are really sore…:-)