Wudangshan | - Part 3

November 9, 2011

Yuxugong Temple

I thought I’d post some pics of the temple where we train every day.

This is Yuxugong Temple. It was built in 1413 by the 3rd Ming Emperor. Today it is hard to imagine what it must have looked like then, rich with ornate buildings and lush gardens. It was expanded in the 1500s, and over the following centuries it has burned down, been rebuilt, and burned down again.

Workers are now in the process of renovating it. In 2008, when I first came here, they had just re-roofed the surrounding wall and some of the remaining stone structures. They are now rebuilding the main altars, wood structures of which nothing was left but the footings. In a few more years, it will be a proper tourist trap and we wouldn’t want to train there anymore even if were permitted to. But for now it is beautifully run-down in places, and an inspiring place to train every day.

Keyed locations: 1) Entrance gate 2) Red gate (with inner and outer courtyards where we train) 3) Location of newly rebuilt minor altar 4) Location of newly rebuilt main temple building 5) Former hospital buildings which are now our dormitories.

Red Gate, which divides the two courtyards where we train

View from keyed location 3 toward Red Gate

October 20, 2011

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.

September 28, 2011

Moon Festival 2011

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.

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.

September 8, 2011

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.

August 25, 2011

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.

August 4, 2011

Gulongzhong Trip – Rebuffed by Myth and History

Lately everyone here has been feeling a bit worn down. It has been a long, hot, difficult summer of training. The end, though in sight, still seems dauntingly distant.

So, as a rare treat, Master canceled Wednesday performance and took a group of us to a scenic spot in nearby Xiangyang, a park called Gulongzhong. Gulongzhong is on the map because it was the home, 1900 years ago, of a man who 14th century literature would place right in the heart of the Chinese imagination, a man named Zhugeliang.

Personally, this was an exciting trip for me because I used to live across the street from Gulongzhong, on the campus of Xiangfan University, where I taught English for a year in 2008-2009. I spent a fair amount of time wandering the beautiful grounds of the park, but I never felt that I really knew much about Zhugeliang and the history of the place. I thought that, as well as a chance to visit my old stomping grounds, this trip might teach me some of the history I was missing.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t really the case. We had an endearingly struggling tour guide who managed to translate a few bits of information for us, but these were merely recitations of fairly common knowledge I had picked up just living nearby. Zhugeliang lived on the mountain for 10 years, from the age of 17 through 27. He studied philosophy and military strategy, invented practical devices such as an improved flour mill, and generally stayed in quiet seclusion. His meditations ended when Liu Bei, the leader of one of the three groups consolidating power after the fall of the Han Dynasty, approached him and requested his help. Twice Liu Bei asked, and twice Zhugeliang declined, but on the third invitation, Zhugeliang accepted and took his place in history as the wisest man to shape the Three Kingdoms Period of Chinese history.

Trying to penetrate past this superficial layer of culture has been daunting for me on many subjects, not just Zhugeliang. When I ask friends, or that tour guide, to explain his significance, there seems to be a disconnect in the conversation. Why is he important, why do you like him? Well, he…(see above). Yes, but can you tell me more? Why was he considered so wise? Such a great man? Here the conversation stalls. It is as if his significance is self-evident to everyone but me. I can sense that he resonates deeply in my Chinese friends, but though I agree he is a cool guy, I can’t summon the same emotional reaction I see in them.

My only theory as to why I have this difficulty is that Zhugeliang, even his whole era, exists in the Chinese imagination as a complex of myth, history, cultural and national identity, and modern pop culture. Much of his story comes not from historical record but from a historical novel written more than 1000 years after his death. But this story has been retold so often, most recently in film and television, that legend and fact have blended to make their subjects into cultural giants. As an outsider, someone who has only paddled in the shallows of the deep sea of Chinese culture (And, admittedly, has not read even a translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Zhugeliang’s story might never resonate with me. I imagine it might be like trying to explain George Washington or Abraham Lincoln to a Chinese person. You can tell the story, but the way these men and their stories thread their way through our cultural and national identity, tied into our very system of values, is difficult for a cultural outsider to ever grasp.